Chapter 524 - 521: Floating Objects

Chapter 524: Chapter 521: Floating Objects

The fog outside the airship completely blocked everyone else’s view, but Mo Ling could see everything with perfect clarity.

The objects floating in the current were not rocks or anything of the sort.

Mo Ling had to observe for a long time before he could be certain they were some kind of soft, jelly-like substance.

The interiors of these soft masses were even stranger, containing some exceptionally bizarre items.

None of these items were whole. They were pieced together in fragments, like objects clipping through each other in a video game:

A leaf growing on gravel.

A tongue encased in a seashell.

A burning green droplet of water.

Multi-colored clouds.

...

Mo Ling froze the moment he saw these objects, almost thinking there was something wrong with his vision.

’Giant jellies, burning green water, rainbow clouds... What the hell is all this stuff?’

These bizarre objects looked as if they had been forcibly mashed together, utterly discordant. Moreover, Mo Ling discovered that the objects would occasionally vanish, only for new ones to appear shortly after.

The new objects were just as discordant. These abstract things, impossible in nature, just kept appearing and disappearing in a repeating cycle, as if something were creating them intentionally.

As time went on, Mo Ling noticed more and more of these giant, soft masses appearing around the airship. Some even came close to impact, but they were repelled by a powerful force at the last second, as if the airship and the masses repelled each other.

The airship was nudged slightly, but there was barely any turbulence.

The investigation team members inside the airship also saw the massive soft object as it flashed by, but they acted as if it were a common sight, seemingly very familiar with it.

"Looks like we’ve entered a turbulence zone..."

"Yeah, that was quick. Looks like we’re close to the gyre’s node. We’ll probably be detected by the monitoring station within a day."

"Those things are appearing more and more frequently. I wonder what kind of risks that poses..." a team member said with concern.

"Don’t dwell on it. They never make contact with physical objects, and they dissipate after a while anyway."

"I just feel like the Abyss is getting more and more chaotic lately. It’s like the original balance is being broken."

"It’s just your imagination. You’ve definitely been through too much lately..."

...

Inside the cabin, the team members who had yet to rest were conversing in low voices. Their discussion drifted from the soft objects that periodically appeared outside to the recent turmoil on the fourth layer of the Abyss.

Mo Ling also slowly began to understand just what those soft, jelly-like things were.

The team members had all sorts of names for the jellies. Some called them "Abyssal Precipitates," others called them "Synchronization Remnants," and some just called them "Void Sea Trash."

These suddenly appearing jellies and the bizarre objects within them were anomalous composites caused by synchronization errors.

Within the Abyss, spontaneous synchronizations happen constantly. Objects fall from upper layers to lower ones, while others float up from below. Like sediment in an ocean, these objects aggregate as the synchronization density changes, eventually forming these polymers in the fourth layer’s Void Sea.

Due to their synchronization rate, a special repulsive force exists between them and physical objects, like the north and south poles of a magnet, making direct contact impossible.

These precipitates are like trash floating on the Void Sea. They appear suddenly, then vanish when their synchronization rate collapses, falling into a synchronization fissure.

Normally, these objects with faulty synchronization rates cannot be perceived by humans, as the light they emit is impossible for the human eye to capture.

At different velocities and frequencies, humans would presumably see only a blurry mirage of light and shadow, or perhaps nothing at all.

Thus, some speculate that these remnants do not actually exist in reality but within the fissures. It’s just that the unstable synchronization rate of the Void Sea’s fault lines causes their projections to appear briefly. What is seen is not their true form, but some kind of erroneous refraction. However, this theory has never been confirmed.

What was certain, however, was that these remnants posed no threat to the airship.

After entering the turbulence zone, these strange objects appeared with increasing frequency. Massive shadows flickered past the windows, and the team members in the cabin grew increasingly tense.

Mo Ling also discovered something even more bizarre within the precipitates.

’Is that... a living creature?’

Inside the huge, soft jellies, there were several long, strip-like objects squirming slowly. All sorts of biological limbs were spliced onto their bodies.

The jointed legs of insects, the wings of birds, the scales of fish... and even parts that resembled human limbs.

These long creatures wriggled aimlessly within the jelly, constantly touching every object as if they were searching for something.

After careful observation, looking past an exterior so pieced-together it had lost all original form, Mo Ling was finally certain... they were some kind of vine.

’What are they looking for?’

The vines, which seemed to extend from nowhere, appeared to have some method of identifying objects. After a light touch, they would move on to something else.

Their search was highly inefficient; some objects vanished before the vines even had a chance to touch them.

But even with such a passive search, they still managed to find suitable objects.

One vine squirmed forward and touched a pair of ox horns dripping with a yellow slime.

Upon touching the horns, the vine swiftly coiled around them, enveloping them with its bizarre body.

Before long, the yellow slime on the horns slowly faded away, and their base adhered tightly to the vine. Just like the other spliced objects in the jelly, the fragmented pair of horns was directly grafted onto the vine, fusing with it completely.

Just like that, the ox horns became a part of the vine’s body.

When the vine began to squirm again, the horns showed no sign of disappearing, as if the vine had completely stabilized them.

Now wearing the horns, the vine began a new round of searching for "parts" among the ever-appearing precipitates.

Watching the squirming vines, Mo Ling was reminded of a certain creature: the hermit crab.

What the vines seemed to be searching for were always limbs left behind by other creatures.

They would clean the limbs and then attach them to their own bodies, just as a hermit crab collects a shell, cleans it, and then crawls inside...

’Is this a creature unique to the fourth layer of the Abyss?’

Mo Ling had never imagined that a creature could actually make use of the remnants left behind by synchronization.

Mo Ling found traces of these vines in almost all the jellies. They weren’t numerous, but they were very evenly distributed, each with its own "territory," responsible for the remnants within a specific area.

The vines themselves were bizarrely formed. Some had so many grafted objects that their original shape was unrecognizable. The slender vines were encased in a hodgepodge of spliced parts, making even squirming difficult as they swayed clumsily within the jelly.

Mo Ling listened intently to the investigation team’s conversation, hoping to glean some information about these vine creatures from them.

However, they never brought it up. It seemed they hadn’t noticed the creatures’ existence at all, their conversation limited to the bizarre, spliced objects.

And so, a bold speculation formed in Mo Ling’s mind:

’Could it be that they haven’t noticed these vines?’