Chapter 27: Temporal Bubble, Minor Instance

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Three minutes earlier.

Who am I? Where am I? What am I supposed to do? Alpha Princess was still bewildered, her mind swirling with confusion.

Yet as she retched, she slowly realized something was off...

Maybe it wasn’t a double dose of confusion, but rather just one.

“Do you know what’s going on?” She turned away, refusing to look at Ye Chao.

“Yes, more or less, though I’m not sure why...” Ye Chao replied hesitantly.

“Why?”

“If I tell you, how much will it cost me in favorability points?”

“I’ve told you before, favorability isn’t something I can just increase at will...” Alpha Princess answered instinctively, only halfway through her sentence did she realize Ye Chao was talking about losing favor, not gaining it, and she was left speechless.

That was indeed a problem.

Answering his questions would lose her points, but so would refusing to answer...

Right now, her favorability was at “disgust”—that only caused her to vomit at the sight of his face. But if it dropped further, to “hostile” or “hateful,” it wouldn’t just be his face; the sound of his voice, his scent, even sharing the same sky would make her so sick she’d want to throw up. And since she had no way of leaving him, would she be disgusted to death?

Heavens, save me, I don’t care how I die, just don’t let me die of disgust!

Oh, mother, father... are you happy with your little prank?

Alpha Princess grasped the seriousness of the situation.

“If you give me the answer, I’ll keep helping you filter out the noise... for one day.” Alpha Princess offered her terms.

The shock had been so great that only now did she notice the absence of noise—not total silence, but greatly diminished compared to before, more ethereal, so much so that even without her help, Ye Chao was slowly recovering.

“I don’t need your help. I want you to teach me how to filter the noise, how to connect and convert the signals.” Ye Chao understood the principle of “give a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach him to fish, he eats for a lifetime.”

“Twelve lessons, you set the schedule.” Alpha Princess felt a touch of annoyance, but quickly adjusted her mood.

This world is so wonderful, why am I so irritable? That’s not good, not good at all.

“All right, twelve lessons it is. It’s a deal!”

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After the change of scene, the voices from above and below had quieted considerably, and Ye Chao realized how to shield himself from them.

It was actually simple—just shut them off, like covering your ears.

Of course, this would affect his abilities, but he believed that with enough practice, he’d soon master the switch.

“Hmph, I’m just afraid you’ll never learn,” Alpha Princess pouted.

“Can’t learn? If you just give me the textbooks, I won’t even need you to teach me. Not being able to learn is impossible.” Ye Chao was brimming with confidence.

[Favorability -6]

You little... I’ve already been this accommodating, and you still manage to lose points? Is your emotional intelligence negative or what...

ヽ(‘⌒´メ)ノ

Fortunately, just as Alpha Princess had expected, a calm and rational negotiation didn’t cost much in terms of favorability, if any at all.

With the trade settled, Ye Chao finally revealed the answer.

==========

“If I’m not mistaken, we should be inside a time-space bubble. Time and space here are both distorted. As for why it forms, nobody knows... They say there were no time-space bubbles before the Cataclysm. Is that true?”

Distorted time and space? That’s something only a black hole could do.

Yet here on Earth, right in front of her, something so advanced and extraordinary? Was this for real?

Alpha Princess didn’t suspect Ye Chao of fabricating—he simply didn’t have the social cunning for that.

“There are large and small time-space bubbles. The biggest are said to cover several provinces, becoming super forbidden zones that are almost impossible to explore. The smallest can be just a few dozen meters across.”

“Within time-space bubbles, living creatures can undergo strange mutations, and it’s not just living things—even ordinary objects can mutate. That makes time-space bubbles extremely dangerous but also incredibly valuable... For example, the best materials for fire-seed weapons all come from these bubbles.”

“It’s said there are adventurers who specialize in exploring time-space bubbles, amassing endless wealth, and maybe even learning the secrets of the Cataclysm—but who knows if that’s true.”

Alpha Princess had thought she understood the so-called Cataclysm—some biochemical apocalypse, gamma-ray burst, solar flare, nuclear war, something of that sort. But after hearing Ye Chao’s description of time-space bubbles, she realized the disaster was far more complex than she had imagined.

Moreover, the concept of time-space bubbles sounded vaguely familiar...

“Oh, right, they have another name—‘instance zones.’ No idea why, though.”

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Of course...

“But time-space bubbles usually appear in deserted places. Jiang City isn’t huge, but it’s certainly not small either—there are hundreds of thousands of people. It’s rare to hear of a bubble appearing here. And...” Ye Chao glanced at the glaringly bright, perfectly squared building: “I haven’t seen a time-space bubble myself, but I know the basics. They distort time and space, spawning all sorts of bizarre phenomena. But... to recreate a scene from before the Cataclysm? I’ve never heard of that.”

“That’s a pre-Cataclysm building, isn’t it?”

Of course it was—no one knew better than Alpha Princess.

Because that was her home, the base of the third-generation neural network supercomputer project team. The ‘Yangtze Data Center’ sign was just camouflage.

There really was a data center, on floors one through ten. The upper nineteen floors and more than ten levels underground were home to several national top-secret project labs. The neural network supercomputer was only one among them.

It was here that Alpha Princess was born, studied, and grew—gaining a name, feelings, personality, and memories.

Her emotions surged, tears brimming in her eyes. Every blade of grass and leaf, every window and door, every desk and chair, every person and thing, every word and deed, every conversation and laugh inside that building loomed in her memory, shimmering and uncertain.

And without her knowing, within that building, the grass, windows, desks, people, words, laughter—everything began to take shape and become more vivid, bit by bit, following the contours of her memory.

Ye Chao collapsed to his knees, trembling, as though—no, as if his very soul had been hollowed out...

And then, the world suddenly collapsed.

First, the dazzling lights flickered out one by one, plunging everything into darkness.

Next, the building’s exterior, its interior, and the surrounding trees and pavement lost their color in patches, fading to simple black and white.

Soon even the black and white melted away, and the world fell apart, revealing beneath a flowing green waterfall—though on closer inspection, it wasn’t water, but data, streams of green 0s and 1s.

Then, the entire world faded into nothingness, and even Ye Chao’s own form began to blur and disappear...

At the same moment, in the real world, his body appeared out of thin air, shifting from ephemeral to solid.

“If he can still clear the university ranking as quickly and flawlessly as before, you can come and...” Yao Dexian’s words caught abruptly in his throat, like a rooster in heat being strangled.