It was only after Shilin finished explaining what had happened that I understood the situation. The so-called emergency was that she had nearly fallen into the rift, and the so-called crisis being resolved was that she had pulled herself back out with one hard effort—basically, that was the whole story.
On the surface, it looked like a ridiculous misunderstanding. But after thinking about it for a moment, Sandora and I both frowned deeply: considering the special nature of Shilin and the "rift," this was definitely not as simple as it looked!
The rift was an erroneous network segment within the Spiritual Network. It was a virtual region that could not be mapped one-to-one onto any nodes in the real world—the Shilin Apostles. To those of us in the real world, the rift was meaningless, and so far, this erroneous network segment had not affected the normal operation of the Spiritual Network. The cause of the rift was unknown, but its manifestation was easy enough to understand: some network nodes had lost their termination markers, causing their next-level connections to become empty connections. It was like a computer on the Internet sending a data packet to a network address that did not exist. From our perspective, we would only see a failed-delivery receipt, but from the computer's perspective, it was delivering something into a dark abyss. Once these unending "abnormal nodes" reached a certain scale, they formed an "address black hole" in the Spiritual Network. All data transmission heading toward the rift would be cut off, and if something forcibly crossed the rift, that data would simply vanish. The rift was not fixed. The nodes that lost their termination markers were always changing, which was why we could not map the rift onto any specific Apostles in reality. It was as