Chapter 850 - 35: The Key to Changing History
A strange, marvelous sensation...
Gu Mo quietly savored everything in his heart.
At this moment, time to him seemed more like a spatial concept; he was unilaterally observing the world, when in fact what he was looking at were already fragments of past history.
He had precisely returned to the time point more than ten minutes ago, watching all of this, while at the same time having a very subtle feeling—that he knew he could not only watch this segment of history, but also directly experience it, and make changes and corrections to it...
—So it really is an Infinity Gem, huh?
—Its Power is indeed strong enough; it feels like its very reason for existence is to reign over the river of order.
Only, this kind of Power that truly alters history, alters a single timeline...
What will the price be?
With a slight movement of thought, Gu Mo decided to be more cautious. Although according to the description, as long as the Power of the Time Gem was used properly, the user should be able to completely manipulate time and causality. But this required the user to possess extremely rich related knowledge, and also demanded a certain level of mastery and development in using the Gemstone Power.
Although right now it all seemed to come very naturally, that was because his own Power was already strong enough, and he had dabbled to a certain extent in the Time Domain. Moreover, the span he was rewinding now was only ten to twenty minutes at most—things that had just happened...
This did not mean he had already fully understood and mastered the Power of the Time Gem; rather, this really was just a very preliminary test and a very crude use, touching only the most superficial layer of the Time Domain.
If he couldn’t even handle something of this level, or needed to strain himself greatly just to complete the operation—
Then the only thing one could say was that between the Power he possessed and the Power of the Time Gem, one of them must be full of water; clearly something would be off.
Like a seasoned fisherman who, based on his own experience, had found a suitable fishing spot along a stretch of river, Gu Mo gently moved his thoughts, spreading the Power of Time outward and deftly covering Yakumo Zi and Hiri in reality, directly pulling them into it.
It went extremely smoothly; neither of them showed any resistance, not even an instinctive, subconscious reaction, so they were simply pulled in just like that.
"Is this... rewinding a specific piece of history?"
A strange light flashed through her beautiful eyes as Yakumo Zi took in the scene before her.
The three of them were still seated around the round table outside the cold drink shop, but they were no longer on the small town street, no longer under the summer parasol and sunlight. Instead, it felt as if they were drifting in a void of time; the river of history rippled beneath their feet, and the surrounding scene was precisely what had happened a dozen minutes earlier.
It was as if they had come into the past history...
Yet also as if they did not fit in at all, as though the surrounding background was just a texture layer pasted on, and they themselves were in an entirely different dimension...
Withdrawing her gaze from her survey of their surroundings, Yakumo Zi felt she more or less understood the situation, and she turned her eyes back, giving a deep look at a certain someone across the table.
This guy... actually has Time System abilities as well? Since when?
Although she had seen it before, as far as she remembered, the only Skill Gu Mo had shown related to time was the time-stopping Bright Mirror Spell. This kind of more refined and freeform display of related abilities, however, seemed absent. And whenever he needed to make use of the characteristics of time, he would still ask for help from her or from Kaguya...
In other words, it was highly possible that this was a Power he had somehow mastered only recently?
Her thinking was swift and sharp; the Demon Sage practically immediately inferred this result, ruling out the possibility that this guy had simply been hiding his fangs all along. The most likely explanation really was just this. She also came to an even deeper realization of what sort of infinite possibilities it meant, that this man wandered between different worlds.
"This is it!"
Hiri was also stunned for a moment by this development, but since it concerned the crucial problem of her road home, she quickly reacted, and then hurriedly focused all her Spirit, scrutinizing the images unfolding in the river of history.
The next instant, her Spirit stirred; she pointed at that image, nodding repeatedly, and reminded them urgently in a tense voice: "This is it! What should we do?!"
This is it!
She watched with her own eyes as the events that had occurred not long ago were replayed before her, history restaging itself; she could not help but feel a bit like she was being publicly executed—was everyone about to see her embarrassing performance again? In that moment, her feelings toward the Wild Hunt shifted from subconscious fear to a mix that included a streak of flustered anger.
...
Deep within the Moon Base...
Inside the safety observation room...
The Demon Hunter Girl, like a mirror image of herself, was staring at the observation screen before her. She took a deep breath and decisively activated her own ability once more.
Thus, in that spacious and vast test field on the other side, an area tightly sealed with silver-white metal, beams of light from Teleportation Gates lit up one after another at the designated positions.
They opened with absolute precision within the restraint devices, isolation facilities, and anti-evil talisman arrays, quietly unfolding and stabilizing the portals leading to the Otherworld. Like a string of light bulbs being powered on, in almost the blink of an eye, from here to there, several hundred Teleportation Gates all flared open at once...
This scene fully showcased how much Hiri had progressed after her upgrade, in terms of her own Mana and Control Power.
It was by relying on this kind of efficiency that she managed to greatly speed up her own Otherworld exploration process—one batch could scan through a three-digit number of Dungeon Worlds... of course, only in a very rough, very cursory way, capable of gathering some relatively simple and straightforward intel.
The main idea was to get some preliminary information that could help make a rough judgment about the situation behind each gate, and selectively filter them.
That already counted as a huge help——
Even though, facing infinite worlds, what she was doing was still basically searching for a needle in a haystack, at least the efficiency had undeniably been raised.
Inside the huge enclosed test field, along the glowing edges of each opened Teleportation Gate, there was a neat line of probe robots. They moved forward in perfect order, each advancing one grid at the same time, and then stepping into the worlds beyond the gates, their mechanical shells swallowed by the light.
These were probe robots mass-produced by the Moon Base, originally designed as autonomous machines for exploring unknown, uninhabited planets.
Equipped with anti-gravity drive units, they were suited to traverse practically any terrain.
They also possessed long-range, wide-area full-image detection devices, making them highly suitable for carrying out exploration missions in unfamiliar environments and regions.
And although they only carried light armaments and low-level intelligence, that was merely relative. These cold-blooded machines designed for exploration still packed firepower that should not be underestimated... which made them very suitable for exploring unregistered Dungeon Worlds and conducting an initial survey of what lay beyond each Teleportation Gate.
After they all went in, the Teleportation Gates shrank in unison, eventually seeming to vanish from the field entirely.
In reality, they were not shut down; every swirling vortex of light had, under extremely fine-grained Control Power, contracted to the size of a tiny dot... This was yet another strictly regulated procedure, mainly to reduce consumption while also lowering the risk of the gates being discovered from the other side.
Of course it couldn’t guarantee everything, but at least it could reduce the probability of certain problems arising to some extent.
Receiving the feedback data from the probe robots through the Teleportation Gates, they made preliminary assessments and judgments about the situations beyond. This step went relatively smoothly as well. After all, the Time Flow Speed in Dungeon Worlds was always faster than in the real world, so they didn’t have to wait long on this side to gather sufficient information.
The Demon Hunter Girl, who had looked perfectly calm at first, suddenly became somewhat puzzled as she checked the logs, then excited, uneasy, her expression shifting through a whole spectrum of emotions.
...
"I was too excited at the time, but I was also afraid that, like the previous few times, it would turn out to be a false alarm, wasting your time and energy..."
Seeing this part, Hiri felt rather embarrassed, explaining in a low voice. Then she picked up the drink on the table and nervously bit the straw.
It was with that mindset that she personally went over to explore the world that had once again been automatically flagged by the AI and tagged as ’highly suspected’ on the other side.
...
The historical imagery continued to play forward. Shortly after the Demon Hunter Girl went over, she came charging back out of the Teleportation Gate, looking almost a bit disheveled——
At the same time, she closed the Teleportation Gate almost on reflex, standing in the test field still shaken, gasping for breath.
A few seconds later, the Demon Hunter Girl seemed to notice something; her expression changed slightly at once. After trying to reopen the Teleportation Gate over ten times and failing, she grit her teeth, stamped her foot, turned, and hurriedly left the test field.
...
"This is the node..."
As if in another dimension, Gu Mo pointed with his hand and spoke.
At that same moment, the history before everyone’s eyes froze again, then rewound slightly, and under precise control returned to the instant when Hiri had just fled back in that flustered state.
"Since this is something that has already happened, it’s best if we don’t alter the timeline itself. We should use a clever workaround to obtain our result without disrupting the completeness of the causal chain... This is the time point: Hiri from ten-plus minutes ago has just come back from over there. The Hiri of now can take advantage of this moment and go in through that gate again."
He said this while pointing at the frozen scene——
The glow of the Teleportation Gate that was just about to be closed.
"Because the you from ten-plus minutes ago doesn’t know any of this, what happens afterward won’t change. You’ll still come to find me, which leads to the subsequent actions... And the you acting now can open a gate from that world at any time and return here. That way, we naturally won’t lose the coordinates of that world."
It was just like the move the protagonist took in Gate of Destiny Stone in the end.
Deceiving his past self as observer, keeping the phenomena observed by that past self unchanged to ensure the completeness of the ensuing causal chain, while at the same time definitively interfering with the event that had occurred in the past, thereby changing the established facts.
Gu Mo could feel the immense Power of Time contained in the Time Gem, but... he still intended to use that power a bit more cautiously.