Honestly speaking, Lu Zhou felt like he was on a roller coaster.
It was like the roller coaster was at its highest point, about to fall downward.
Lu Zhou floated in the endless darkness for a long time. Suddenly, he felt a sensation of gravity and saw a faint light source.
He gradually approached the light source.
He was able to touch the light source.
Lu Zhou was wondering what the system was trying to tell him when he was suddenly pulled toward the light source.
Suddenly, everything became clear.
Touch, smell, taste…
All of his senses were turned to 11.
The strong sense of wind made Lu Zhou squint, and he desperately tried to open his eyes…
He was shocked by what he saw.
“Where is this?!”
Every inch of Lu Zhou’s body was shocked, he had no idea where he was.
This was a strange place.
An endless land, a concrete jungle.
The minimalist black towers looked evil, every inch of the ground was covered in metal skyscrapers, and the streets were straight as a ruler.
From the outside, this looked like a city.
However, Lu Zhou couldn’t sense a single sign of life out here.
It seemed like no one had ever lived here before.
If he had to live here, he would go insane in a week.
There was only one reason.
This place was like a grave.
It was like the skyscrapers were individual tombstones.
For some reason, this reminded Lu Zhou of the novel “Foundation” by Asimov. The vast majority of people lived underground and worked in cubicles, the surface was covered in industrial facilities, and the Earth was no longer a planet, but rather a giant factory…
It wasn’t clear if Asimov’s world was as minimalistic and structured, but the scene in front of Lu Zhou looked like something out of an apocalypse movie…
Lu Zhou didn’t have a lot of time to think.
The gravitational force dragging him from the sky threw him on the surface.
Lu Zhou closed his eyes and prepared himself to be squashed.
However, a gentle force caused him to decelerate as he reached the ground.
Lu Zhou’s pupils expanded as he spoke with excitement.
“Anti-gravity?”
“Wait, no… This is not reality, what am I saying.”
This was the world of his consciousness.
Even though Lu Zhou didn’t know why the system was doing this, that didn’t change the fact that his real body was on a soft bed at the Corinthia Hotel in St. Petersburg.
Therefore, nothing here was real.
It was like those VR games in science fiction movies. A VR game that followed the law of physics would feel weird.
His feet finally touched the ground.
Lu Zhou calmed down a little and looked around him.
This was the first time he really felt the scale of this man-made object.
He didn’t know what material the buildings were made of; they were reflective and smooth, without a single trace of flaw.
“What a strange design…”
Lu Zhou reached out and touched the black walls, and he suddenly looked shocked.
Even though he shouldn’t judge a material just by the feeling of touch alone, his intuition told him that this level of polish was impossible to achieve with modern industrial technology.
This technology was centuries ahead of the current technology.
Of course, that wasn’t the most shocking part.
Inside a gravitational environment, this metal structure was able to keep its shape, even though it extended several kilometers into the sky… This kind of engineering structure would never be able to exist on Earth.
Now Lu Zhou began to feel like maybe this wasn’t entirely in his consciousness. Maybe this was a real place.
After all, the thing in his inventory was called “Void Memory”, not a “Void Game” or “Void Movie”. Even though the system sometimes screwed with him, the system never manipulated him…
His hands glided on the smooth mirror-like surface. Suddenly, it seemed like he had touched an invisible switch as a large metal wall soon moved, giving way to a passageway.
Lu Zhou paused for a second.
He then remembered that none of this would hurt his physical body, so he took a deep breath and bravely walked in.
The building was spacious.
Black metal stripes in the shape of a blade were connected from the ceiling to the floor.
There were flashing blue dots shining on the metal blade strips.
That was the only source of light in this dark building.
The scene in front of him reminded him of a computer server, and suddenly, a thought appeared in his mind.
Maybe…
This building is a huge computer, filled with chips.
Maybe this “city” is actually an integrated circuit with countless processors, a “planet” computer…
When he was flying out of the sky, he couldn’t see the boundary of the city.
“… I can’t imagine what kind of data would take this big of a computer to process.”
Lu Zhou carefully walked through the rows of blades.
Soon after, he walked into the central room of the building.
This circular room had a much lower ceiling than the entrance, only a few meters high. Sitting in the middle of the room was a shining blue pool of water.
Lu Zhou walked up and looked down, and he saw that the blue light was projected from under the pool.
A wave of smoke spilled out from the edge of the pool. He could tell the pool was very shallow, but the deep layer of mist gave him a chilling feeling.
His intuition told him that the pool might be filled with extremely low-temperature liquid helium.
As for its use…
It was probably used to cool down the thousands of “blades” in the building.
Lu Zhou stood around the edge of the pool and walked around. He wanted to take notice of the engineering design when he suddenly noticed something under the pool.
“… Is there something hidden underneath?”
Lu Zhou frowned and crouched down.
He saw cubes sitting in the pool.
Suddenly, he had a crazy thought.
Should I grab one?
His curiosity got the better of him.
This is all in my head.
Even if it hurts, it won’t affect my real body.
Lu Zhou took a deep breath and made up his mind. He used all of his courage and placed his hands in the chilling liquid helium.
The second his hand touched the liquid.
It was like the pool of water came to life, it began to move wildly.
“This is a super liquid!”
The instantaneously vaporized liquid helium formed a vapor layer due to the Leidenfrost effect, protecting him from the cold.
However, this effect didn’t last for long.
Lu Zhou used all of his energy to endure the freezing pain as he reached out and took a cube from the pool.
“Ouch!!!”
The cube was out of the liquid.
Lu Zhou sat down on the ground.
He looked at the rumbling water and the cube in his frozen hand.
Using the faint light from the ceiling, he could barely see that the cube was gold-colored with a smooth, mirror-like surface.
He could hear a buzzing sound from the cube.
Lu Zhou finally remembered where he had seen this thing before.
However, last time, it wasn’t gold, it was black…
He suddenly felt a huge sensation of gravitational force.
It felt like everything around him was being sucked into a black hole…
“Is it time to leave?”
The gold cube shattered into a million pieces as his body was sucked away by the abyss.
