...It was hard to put that feeling into words.
The instant he entered the Time Wormhole, his consciousness seemed to plunge into the depths of a ten-thousand-meter sea.
Cold, deathly still, suffocating.
The pressure was simply too terrifying. When Shu Limiao opened his eyes, he found himself half-kneeling on the freezing deck, gasping for air uncontrollably.
It took him nearly half a minute before he barely managed to recover.
"Well, that was an inauspicious start..."
Supporting himself against the wall, Shu Limiao got to his feet.
Only then did he have the time to look around and inspect his surroundings.
"...A cargo hold?"
Frowning slightly at the clutter piled up around him, Shu Limiao turned to look outside the porthole.
Before his eyes lay a Star Sea shimmering with a pale blue radiance.
—He was aboard a spaceship.
"The location is right. So this must be the ship where the incident happened..."
Letting out a quiet breath, Shu Limiao shifted his gaze toward the cargo hold door.
To eliminate the influence of the Law of Causality as much as possible, Pi had carefully considered and selected the point in the past where they would arrive.
First, the chosen time could not be one in which Pi had already been born. Second, the fewer people around their destination, the better.
Lastly—and most crucially, the factor determining whether this mission could succeed—was that, while fulfilling the first two conditions, they needed the authority to access the Machine Realm without being discovered.
The first two conditions had been manageable enough, but the third was truly difficult to fulfill.
After all, the Machine Realm was the greatest technological creation of Pi's civilization. It was not something one could casually access, let alone without anyone noticing.
Even with the special authorization channel Pi had provided,