"This is..."
As he looked down at the bustling port city below,
Lin Chen suddenly felt a chill down his back.
The scene before his eyes seemed genuinely familiar.
In that strange, ancient book,
beside the brief sailor's fable,
hadn't those rough, abstract lines depicted this very scene?
Stopping halfway up the mountain,
the observant Lin Chen noticed something.
A ship full of sailors first sailed beyond the horizon.
The next moment, an identical ship
appeared on the horizon, returning to the port, which remained as prosperous as ever.
Only this time,
all that remained aboard were corpses covered in white sheets, dripping with filthy blood.
After the ship returned to port with tattered flags and a rotting hull,
another brand-new ship set sail once more.
Everything unfolding before his eyes
repeated in cycles, over and over.
There seemed to be no end...
Sometimes, the voyaging ship returned safely.
It brought back a hold full of gold and jewels.
Yet the story that followed was no different.
The moment the ship returned to port, a new journey began.
"The starting point and the endpoint have overlapped."
"A spiral without end..."
"An irresistible force has already determined the fate of this entire world..."
Lin Chen took a deep breath, his brow tightly furrowed.
His presence in this strange dream
was certainly no coincidence.
Although the world within the dream
contained nothing overtly horrifying,
this eternally repeating spiral
grew more terrifying the longer he thought about it.
If the script of fate had already been written,
then when he had first boarded Herta Space Station,
had he been just like the sailors aboard those ships?
Had his ending already been decided?
"Right now, I need to find a way out of this strange dream."
"Something may have already happened on Herta Space Station!"
An intense sense of danger washed over him.
Having made his decision, Lin Chen
climbed straight toward the summit and leaped off the high cliff.
Destruction and death might be the best way to escape the dream.
Yet in the next instant,
the expected agony of being smashed to pieces never came.
After a dizzying whirl,
Lin Chen's vision cleared,
and he found himself standing before the original fruit stall again.
"You're from the distant East, aren't you, sir?"
"Would you like some fresh apples?"
The bushy-bearded vendor by the street
beckoned to Lin Chen with the exact same gestures and expression.
"Fuck... I can't even die?"
"Did everything just reset again?"
"Where the hell did things go wrong?"
Leaning against a wall at the street corner,
Lin Chen calmed himself and began to think.
[A bell rang in the distance, its sound moving and melodious.] [With fair skies and a gentle breeze, today was a fine day to weigh anchor and sail far away...] [When the melodious bell rang once again.] [Back at the original port, flowers, applause, and glory awaited those returning from their voyage...] [When the melodious bell rang once again.] [The ship returning to port brought back the sailors' long-mutilated remains...]
"The bell..."
"Have I misunderstood the key to this whole thing from the start?"
A faint spark flashed through his mind.
Recalling the rooms in Cabin 0018 and Cabin 0276,
and the fables recorded in those ancient books,
Lin Chen suddenly understood.
It seemed he had misunderstood the crux of the problem from the very beginning.
The [Deep-Sea Nightmare]'s song had never been the source of everything.
The tolling bell that ran throughout the tale was the beginning and end of every story!
Lin Chen suddenly remembered.
In the original illustration accompanying the fable, surrounding the lighthouse's bell tower,
there had been those twisted, chaotic lines.
Originally, he had merely taken them for a sketch of the wind.
Now it seemed he had been wildly mistaken.
"Central Control Tower command: assemble all Conqueror Legion soldiers!"
With a preliminary idea already in mind,
Lin Chen issued a system command with a thought.
Although he wasn't sure
whether the Conqueror Legion could successfully reach this dream world,
he had to try regardless.
"Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh..."
The next instant, a vast array of dazzling lights flashed into existence.
A large contingent of Space Marines clad in blue power armor
appeared beside Lin Chen.
They packed the narrow alley so tightly that there was no room to move.
"Tychus, concentrate all firepower on that bell tower!"
Looking at the fierce, burly man before him with his helmet visor raised
and a scar across his face, Lin Chen gave the order without hesitation.
"You got it, Commander!"
"Boys, get those boomsticks out and blast that building apart with everything you've got!"
The moment Tychus finished speaking,
dozens of Gauss machine guns began to play a savage overture of war.
A storm of metal streaked through the air like crimson meteors.
They blasted the white bell tower several kilometers away into fragments.
Yet the very next instant, twisted black lines spread outward.
The white bell tower, already reduced to rubble, miraculously restored itself.
"What the fuck? Has this bell tower come alive?"
"Fire! Keep fucking firing!"
"I've got all the ammo in the world! Let's see how long this freak can hold out!"
After only a brief moment of stunned hesitation, Tychus resumed his frenzied shooting.
Soon, under the sustained assault of twenty-six Space Marines,
the white bell tower was shattered dozens of times, only to return to its original state each time.
"Commander, this damn thing doesn't seem to die."
"I think we need heavier firepower to destroy it."
"Got any Apocalypse-class fusion warheads?"
"I guarantee one of those would blow it sky-high!"
With a cigar clenched between his teeth, Tychus
seemed to have discovered his inner chatterbox even as he kept firing.
Tychus's words left Lin Chen utterly exasperated.
An Apocalypse-class fusion warhead? How did he even come up with that?
Apparently, as a junior officer, Tychus
had absolutely no idea of his own legion's actual strength.
Lin Chen figured that if he told Tychus
all the Conqueror Legion's fighting strength was right here before his eyes,
the look on Tychus's face would be priceless.
Besides, if they really fired an Apocalypse-class fusion warhead,
at a distance of less than ten kilometers, every last one of them would be blown straight to heaven.
After all, that was a genuine planet-killing heavy weapon.
"Ahem... there's absolutely no need for that."
"Just continue the attack using our current tactics."
"By my assessment, it should be nearing its critical point."
Standing back and watching with his hands clasped behind him, Lin Chen
spoke with a show of composure.
It seemed that as the Space Marines continued their assault,
the bell tower that kept restoring itself
had black lines extending around its exterior
whose spread was steadily shrinking.
After the test he had just conducted,
Lin Chen no longer believed
the world before him was merely a dream.
After all, the fact that the Conqueror Legion's soldiers
could arrive at precise coordinates already told him a great deal.
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