"Nothing else matters during exploration. Returning safely must be your first guiding principle!"
Meeting the staff member's gaze, Wen Jing nodded earnestly and reached out in her consciousness to the passage between reality and illusion.
The next moment, Wen Jing's expression changed despite herself.
Whoosh!
But before the staff member recording the time could even begin to wonder, her figure vanished from the platform.
In the daytime Ancient Wilderness, on the branch of a gigantic tree.
An inconspicuous silver-gray bug appeared out of thin air, the bristles beside her mouthparts trembling slightly with extreme excitement.
Just now, while making the crossing and connecting her consciousness to the Ancient Wilderness passage, Wen Jing had sensed the lingering Gravity Silk fluctuations coming from the Ancient Wilderness.
She instinctively felt that, if she wanted, she could use the Gravity Silk to retrace those gravitational fluctuations and return to that area.
So Gravity Silk could do more than help her return to reality. Conversely, when entering the Ancient Wilderness, it could serve the same purpose as a positioning stone! That was an item that cost at least 500 points, and now she had it for free!
With this ability, how would her future explorations of the Ancient Wilderness be any different from strolling through her own backyard?
Chapter 20
Discovering this new ability of Gravity Silk delighted Wen Jing. She felt that those three hundred-plus skill points were becoming even better value, though this time she had chosen a free crossing rather than returning to her previous location.
Because through the Gravity Silk, she had obtained not just a spatial anchor, but a temporal anchor as well.
Unlike the material universe, where day and night occupied the same space, that nighttime Ancient Wilderness was a separate layer of space that could only be entered at night.
Wen Jing felt that, if she insisted on retracing the Gravity Silk's connection, she might still succeed, but she was unsure what would happen.
To make a bold guess, if she traveled through time as well, then to the outside world, the time between her entering the Ancient Wilderness and returning would far exceed three hours. People would probably think she had met with disaster.
Not to mention that the Ancient Wilderness at night was very dangerous. Naturally, she abandoned that attempt and chose a normal crossing.
At the same time, however, she made a note of this. Perhaps it could prove useful in a crisis.
As she thought, the silver-gray bug had already begun checking her surroundings. If her movements were recorded, the route she took would turn out to resemble a mosquito coil.
To Wen Jing's senses, the daytime Ancient Wilderness differed greatly from the nighttime Ancient Wilderness. Most obviously, the temperature had risen considerably, and the world presented by the heat-sensitive pits on her head had suddenly brightened a great deal, advancing from shades of black and white to shades of red and white compared with last time.
The air was filled with complex, unknown pheromones, instinctively making her feel active and alert.
But compared with the nighttime Ancient Wilderness of her previous visit, the daytime Ancient Wilderness was indeed much safer. After sweeping the area with her biological radar, she only faintly sensed two distant sources of danger.
Retreating until she could no longer sense them, Wen Jing connected to the attribute panel in her consciousness.
[Please provide an evolution direction]
"Evolve eyes, with consumption limited to one skill point!"
Having experienced all her points being deducted last time, Wen Jing cautiously added a consumption limit this time, deciding to first evolve a one-point set of eyes and see how things went.
If the limit failed to work, she could still accept spending seven skill points on eyes. But if she could only go all in every time, she would have to plan her skill point allocation before evolving in the future.
[Evolution direction determined...] [Consuming points to evolve...] [7 → 6]
I can specify the cost!
Wen Jing relaxed, then saw the panel flicker almost imperceptibly.
Immediately afterward, she felt an itch on her head.
The indentations on the silver-gray bug's head suddenly swelled, then two round, pure-black eyes popped out.
[Evolution complete] [Compound Eyes I] [Trait acquired: dynamic vision]
That fast? Wen Jing was surprised.
This evolution was worlds apart from her previous evolution of the Gravity Silk Gland, in both sensation and speed.
When evolving the Gravity Silk Gland, she had had no time to register it, but calculating from the time she later returned from the Ancient Wilderness, it certainly had not happened in an instant.
Yet this time, evolving eyes really had been over in a flash.
But the next moment, as her new vision connected, the silver-gray bug's six legs shuffled chaotically from side to side.
"Ugh... this feels so weird..."
Wen Jing stared at the world with her newly grown eyes-though without eyelids, she could not actually "stare."
She had instinctively adapted to the original eyeless Wilderness Body's senses, yet now, evolution had left both her Wilderness Body and her original body feeling unaccustomed to them.
The world before her was divided into countless hexagonal, honeycomb-like cells, somewhat like looking through a kaleidoscope.
The image quality was poor, too, like grainy old surveillance footage, and footage shot on an overcast, rainy day at that.
Because the sunlight she now saw was not the warm color perceived by human eyes, but an overexposed bluish-white.
In complete contrast to the extremely low definition of static images, everything moving was exceptionally clear, especially things close to her.
For instance, she could clearly see the trajectories of dust drifting through the air, like snowflakes in a slow-motion film shot.
Still, strange as this perspective was, growing eyes had brought a qualitative increase in the information she could receive from the outside world, a world apart from her previous radar sensing.
Drawing on the advantage of human understanding, Wen Jing identified things through this extremely low-definition vision and mentally pieced together her current surroundings.
She was on an enormous tree branch. Its size was not just relative to her current body; even a human would have had more than enough room to walk on it.
She could not see clearly farther away. There seemed to be lush leaves and interlacing branches, and she could see shafts of bluish-white sunlight filtering through the leaves overhead onto the nearest cluster of leaves, bathing them in a layer of fluorescent, dazzling ultraviolet patterns.
"Rustle, rustle..."
Just then, a breeze passed in front of Wen Jing. The leaves she was watching stirred, trailing dozens of afterimages.
Anything goes for static vision, but take moving images seriously. Is this the vision some ordinary insects have?
For the cost of one skill point, it was good value.
After some thought, Wen Jing connected to the panel again.
[Please select an evolution direction]
"Evolve to level-two compound eyes. Let me make this clear beforehand: only evolve if my remaining skill points are enough. Otherwise, don't!"
[Evolution direction determined...] [Consuming points to evolve...] [6 → 1]
Again, it happened in an instant. Wen Jing felt her newly grown eyes begin to itch.
[Evolution complete] [Compound Eyes II] [Traits acquired: millisecond-level dynamic vision, wide field of view]
"Wow!"
The world before Wen Jing's eyes instantly jumped from blurry 480p to ultra-clear 4K.
Those prism-like honeycomb cells remained, but they were now much smaller, faint patterns. Compared with the initial kaleidoscope, she adapted to them rapidly.
Another more obvious difference was her field of view. Compared with humans' two hundred degrees, many insects had a broader field of view.
Now Wen Jing felt that the view before her was extraordinarily expansive. Though it was not quite 360 degrees, it should have reached over 270 degrees. Combined with movement, that practically meant vision without blind spots.
At the same time, her Wilderness Body's base attributes finally changed as well. Spirit rose from 0.01 to 0.5, becoming the first attribute of her Wilderness Body to improve.
"Worth it, so worth it!"
Not only were her newly grown eyes useful, but more importantly, this attempt had helped her figure out another rule of allocating points.
When she had evolved Gravity Silk last time, she had clearly asked for too much, and her requests could even be described as contrary to the laws and sequence of evolution.
This time was different. She had only asked for eyes and evolved compound eyes, then only asked to upgrade those compound eyes, so it had cost just five points.
Clearly, the fewer her requirements, the fewer points it consumed.
Wen Jing suspected she could also evolve a pair of eyes with the same functions as human eyes on her Wilderness Body if she wanted, but the point cost would probably increase. That would have a different cost from letting the panel decide for itself.
Having grown eyes and also figured out more of the panel's rules, Wen Jing had achieved most of her objectives for this Ancient Wilderness exploration. Even if she returned now, the trip would not have been in vain.
But of course, she would not leave just yet. She certainly needed to explore her surroundings and search for valuable resources. With something like Gravity Silk, she could explore methodically and obtain all the valuable items in this area.
The first thing Wen Jing looked at was the tree trunk beneath her feet.
The bark underfoot was light brown, with an uneven texture. She lowered her head, found an angle, and tried to bite off a mouthful.
It did not budge.
If she used any more force, she would break her own mouthparts instead.
It seemed she would have to evolve her teeth before evolving her digestive organs.
"Better go try something else."
And so, the silver-gray bug with her newly grown pair of large eyes began crawling along the tree trunk toward what was probably the closest branch tip, probably a little over a meter away.
Invisible Gravity Silk emerged from her abdomen, extending and moving eerily through the air like jellyfish tentacles, constantly changing its points of contact. It served as both a means of reconnaissance and a means of defense.
Before she had gone even half a meter, the bristles beside Wen Jing's mouthparts detected "danger"-level pheromones nearby.
She remembered that this was one of the sources of danger she had faintly sensed while exploring before her evolution.
Unlike last time, when she could only hide, Wen Jing now attached a strand of Gravity Silk to a branch diagonally above her and silently took the initiative to climb toward the source of danger.
The cylindrical tree trunk formed a visual "horizon," and the instant she crossed that horizon.