Before Xu Huo could react to the fish that had suddenly come to his rescue, the middle-aged man who had been trying to kill him changed expression drastically. He stepped back, and a transparent sphere appeared in his hand. A barrier sprang from it and immediately enveloped him. But that wasn't all—he took out a silver tetrahedral pyramid with his other hand!
A tetrahedral pyramid!
This slender tetrahedral pyramid was identical to the one he had obtained from the researchers in District 017. It was called Distant Hometown. Once released, it floated in the air, its tip occasionally shifting to point in different directions. He had judged at the time that it was a special locator. Judging by how the item behaved, the spatial orientation of this place could change, which had to do with spatial alterations at high-level Wormhole Points—or, more likely, with how the people who had first established themselves in the game concealed themselves. So he hadn't gone around asking questions, only gathering bits and pieces of information from Dimension Below. Still, the only way to know where the tetrahedral pyramid pointed was to travel through space to find out. The exact method of using it might only be known to its owner.
Or perhaps it was simply an instrument that required biological verification, and couldn't function in anyone else's hands.
The middle-aged man before him curled his index finger and lightly tapped the tetrahedral pyramid. With a crisp chime, it began to come apart, automatically disassembling into a mass of square fragments. They spread out over a small area, then gathered back together. Just as the tetrahedral pyramid was about to reassemble, the elusive item fish swam over again. A much stronger spatial fluctuation appeared where its head emerged, and a hand reached out from within.