Jean Lucas felt that the beginning of this "magical journey" consisted of one dazzling sequence after another—teleportation, flight, spectacular sights, and an information bombardment. Not a single scene he had imagined for this trip matched reality. He had been deeply skeptical of the "incredible, far beyond imagination, bizarre experiences" Hao Ren had described, believing that with his thousands of years of experience, no encounter with the unknown could possibly frighten him during a mere journey. But he no longer thought that way. He had realized something: if you had spent thousands of years trapped on a small stone sphere only a few thousand kilometers in radius, then no matter how much experience you had accumulated, it would become meaningless the instant you left that stone sphere.
When the ship plunged into the vortex portal at the center of the nebula, he even closed his eyes nervously.
Riding aboard a ship traveling at sublight speed through a nebula storm whose radius was measured in astronomical units, the sight at that instant was impossible to describe. Hao Ren had the Giant Turtle Rock Platform raise its shields and filtration barriers, then kept the external monitors running, projecting every sight outside into the ship without holding anything back. This "exciting little show" nearly made the passengers in the Rest Room, who prided themselves on their experience and credentials, dizzy enough to vomit. But Hao Ren's purpose was not simply to torment these oddities, whose average ages exceeded that of his great-grandfather many times over, or to show off his ship. He wanted them to deeply experience what it meant to "cross a world."
Before he could explain in detail the principles behind world barriers, the Wall of Reality, and traversing the universe, he could only use this method to strengthen their impression. At