The Ring

Huang Si was fast asleep under the covers when, all of a sudden, he sensed that something was wrong in his dreams.

But he didn't want to get out of bed, so he rolled over and went back to sleep.

When he woke up that morning, the feeling that something was wrong grew stronger. It seemed something had happened out in the darkness.

Huang Si's senses were very sharp now. If he felt that something was wrong, then something had definitely happened.

He hurried to the computer and checked the surveillance footage.

Sure enough, of the ten symbols representing the robots on the monitor, only one remained. The other nine had vanished without a trace.

The robots sent back data over a Wi-Fi connection. Could the network have been disrupted?

Huang Si checked the location of the one remaining robot and saw that it had strayed far, far from its assigned exploration area. It was almost a kilometer from the house.

Something must have forced it to travel that far—and swallowed the other nine robots in the process.

Huang Si immediately gave it an order through the computer: keep exploring outward, using its current position as the center point.

Following his command, the robot began circling again and again.

Meanwhile, Huang Si stayed inside and continued making little robots to replenish his stock. He didn't send them out just yet.

March 23, 2023.

The little robot in the distance seemed to have bumped into something in the darkness. Since it couldn't see anything, Huang Si ordered it to use touch sensors to explore the object's shape.

A while later, Huang Si rested his chin in his hand and studied the shape sketched in 3D on the screen.

Was this a curved section?

The robot continued crawling over the object, and the 3D model on the screen gradually took shape.

A ring?

No, the robot hadn't finished exploring yet. Huang Si directed it to continue toward the ring's center.

Suddenly, the robot's signal vanished.

Huang Si: "???"

Was this ring a monster? Could it eat his robots?

Huang Si stared at the blank surveillance screen, feeling a little heartbroken. He had assembled this robot by hand, since mass production wasn't possible yet. It was bad enough that he had used up Creation Power; the labor alone was a headache.

He'd lost ten at once. How could he not feel heartbroken?

But, to his surprise, the robot's signal reappeared after a while.

Huang Si hadn't even had time to celebrate before the signal vanished again.

Huang Si: "????"

Good grief, the ring could swallow the robot, spit it out, then swallow it again.

But there seemed to be some kind of pattern to it.

Huang Si waited patiently for another two minutes.

The signal appeared again.

He hurriedly used the computer to tell the robot to stop.

Sure enough, once the robot stopped, its signal didn't disappear again.

Huang Si was itching to go over to the ring and see what was happening.

The next day, Huang Si made two more little robots and sent them flying to the edge of the ring.

It was impossible to see in the Dark Space, but fortunately, they could use the first robot as a reference point to navigate.

Before long, the two new robots cautiously approached the ring. Then Huang Si gave them a new set of instructions:

Explore the ring, but don't transmit any information right away. Store it instead, and send it only when ordered.

The two robots were equipped with storage devices. Huang Si had even installed cameras and video-recording storage.

The little robots were shaped like spiders, with eight legs that could grip any surface. Following their preset instructions, they crawled toward the center of the ring.

They hadn't reached the center. They'd only crawled a short distance when, sure enough, their signals disappeared again.

Huang Si waited patiently. A few minutes later, the two little robots came back. At the computer's command, they sent over the information and footage they had stored.

When the footage came through, Huang Si was stunned.

The video showed a clear, endless blue sky.

There were even white clouds drifting across it.

Since the little robot had been recording while it crawled, the image kept spinning.

But the camera's field of view might have been too narrow. It never turned toward what could have been the ground, so Huang Si still didn't know whether there was any ground there.

For the first time in years, a spark of hope kindled in Huang Si's heart.

"Could this ring be an exit? Or a passage between spaces? Am I free? Can I go home?"

He played the two videos again.

Blue skies, white clouds—how long had it been since he'd seen them? Their beautiful colors were like something out of paradise.

Huang Si's heart had long been as still as an ancient well, but at that moment, he could hardly keep from crying. After years of effort, he had finally seen the possibility of success.

His priority now was to learn more about what lay beyond the ring.

First, he directed one of the little robots to continue exploring beyond the ring and programmed it to automatically find its way back.

After a long while, Huang Si received two new videos.

The first still showed the sky, but this time the robot crawled in a different direction, and he saw the sun.

The other video angled slightly toward the ground. Huang Si saw the horizon, then a patchwork of green and yellow below. It was probably vegetation growing on the ground, filmed from far away.

In other words, the ring was probably high in the air on the other side—and very high up.

After watching the two videos, he tried to direct the little robot to record a third, aimed straight at the ground. But even after a long wait, it didn't come back.

Huang Si guessed that it had probably lost its grip and fallen from high up.

After all, the robot had been designed for exploration, and its grip wasn't very strong.

Sitting in front of the computer, Huang Si considered the problem. If he wanted to watch the video in real time, he would have to develop a wired signal transmitter. The ring seemed to let matter pass through, but electromagnetic waves couldn't get across.

On March 27, Huang Si sent two little robots flying toward the ring, carrying a wired signal transmitter.

The transmitter worked like a Wi-Fi repeater. It could connect to Wi-Fi on both ends, with an Ethernet cable running between them.

As long as he could put one end through the ring and leave it hanging on the other side, he could connect the space beyond the ring to the network.

The other end was secured to the surface of the ring in the Dark Space with a clip.

Once the little robots reached the ring, they quickly set up the signal transmitter, then tossed the other end through into the world inside the ring.

They also sent over a little robot with a 360-degree camera. Like the transmitter, the robot was attached to a safety line, one end of which was connected to the two robots on this side.

The plan worked perfectly. The Ethernet cable could connect across the ring, and after some adjustments, the computer finally received a live video feed from the other side.

The little robot's camera whirred as it rotated, capturing everything around it from every angle.

The world on the other side slowly came into view on the screen.

The sky there was incredibly blue and beautiful. The ground looked like a forest, interspersed with patches of yellow or grayish white, which might have been withered plants, soil, or rocks.

His initial estimate was that the ring was more than five thousand meters above the ground.

The camera turned toward the ring itself, revealing its true appearance to Huang Si.

It was gray and seemed to be made of stone. The stone extended a short way toward the center before giving way to a deep blackness.

That black area must be the gateway.

But what puzzled Huang Si was that no matter how the robot moved, he couldn't see what the ring was mounted on or what was supporting it.

"Could the ring be floating in midair? That's strange..."

It seemed they needed to explore further. The first step would be to develop a stronger wireless signal device.

Huang Si planned to equip the little robot with a parachute and have it descend. But to maintain a connection over a distance of more than five thousand meters, the Wi-Fi transmitters he was using now simply wouldn't do.

He added several new research projects to the list, but before they'd even gotten started, Huang Si witnessed something terrifying.

The afternoon of March 30.

Huang Si was wearing an apron and frying sanzi in a wok. The snack was common in Hubei. It didn't need any special seasoning; all you had to do was pull the dough into thin strands and deep-fry them until crisp. It was something he'd eaten as a child, and it was pretty tasty.

All of a sudden, he sensed that something had happened outside.

It was like a hurricane howling past his ears.

Something seemed to be happening in the Dark Space again!

Huang Si hurriedly turned off the stove, set down the slotted spoon, and went over to the computer to look at the surveillance screen.

The signals from the little robots, the signal transmitter, and the robot on the other side—all of them had vanished!

Huang Si went to the front door and opened it, then spread his consciousness outward, covering a radius of more than ten meters around him.

"Wind?" Huang Si said, puzzled. "No, it's not wind. It's something that feels a lot like wind."

An invisible, intangible energy swept through the Dark Space like wind. It even passed straight through Huang Si's Mental Force Field!

At first, Huang Si only thought the wind was strong. But as it grew stronger, it began battering his mental field and "blowing" it apart.

Huang Si felt something strange as the wind swept through his consciousness. The mental field it scattered hadn't completely slipped out of his control; instead, it continued traveling with the wind for a while before finally dissipating.

In other words, like something carried along by a tailwind, his mental field could spread farther in the wind, though his senses became extremely vague.

Standing at the doorway, Huang Si kept probing the darkness with his consciousness. He could feel the wind passing through it, and the process caused him some pain.

But he endured it.

The wind gave him a strange, fascinating feeling. He thought he might be able to learn something from it.

But before ten minutes had passed, Huang Si "pulled" his consciousness back.

There was no other reason. It just hurt.

This was the first time Huang Si had ever felt pain in his "consciousness." As soon as he had drawn it completely back inside and out of the wind's embrace, the damage he had sustained began to take effect.

Huang Si clutched his head, feeling as if someone had smashed it with a hammer.

"Ow, ow, ow!" He couldn't help rolling around on the sofa.

It seemed his soul had been injured. The knowledge of his soul's condition surfaced in Huang Si's consciousness.

The Creation Book had once filled his mind with a great deal of knowledge. That knowledge had survived two resets, so it was probably tied to his soul. That was why it didn't disappear even when his body was reset.

As for how the soul was connected to knowledge and memory, Huang Si didn't understand.

But some knowledge, almost like an innate instinct, told him that he needed to rest and recover.

All Huang Si could do was clutch his head and lie on the sofa, gasping for breath.

His soul was very strong now. He could move objects with a thought, and his mental power could form a field of its own around him.

Yet this windlike energy could injure his soul directly.

Terrifying.