Volume One, Chapter Forty-Two: Barriers

“Wow, so many Spatial Stones… Just how wealthy is this guy?” Opening a room inside the villa, Mu Qing was utterly stunned by the sight of all kinds of Spatial Stones before her. No fewer than a hundred stones of various sizes were displayed on racks like exhibits in a museum, the plain wooden shelves below setting off the stones above as if they were radiating dazzling brilliance.

There were about a hundred Spatial Stones in the room, the smallest barely the size of a grain of rice, the largest being the stone bar just brought in by the middle-aged man and placed on the far right of the display rack. Mu Qing immediately tiptoed closer, eager to examine this stone bar carefully.

“Don’t touch anything. If that guy notices something’s amiss, we’ll be in trouble. He’s probably gone out to fetch a newly arrived Spatial Stone, so hurry up and search for any suspicious clues.”

“Could it be he’s a collector? What an extravagant hobby,” Mu Qing placed her hands behind her back, afraid she might lose control and pick up the stone bar to examine it. But as she scrutinized it, something seemed off. Was there a hollow on one end of the stone bar?

“After you’ve looked, get out and search the other rooms for clues.” Mo De reminded Mu Qing before systematically opening each room in the villa to search for leads.

“My god! What a waste, this is…!” Mu Qing’s exclamation brought Mo De over; she was hopping mad, pointing at the stone bar and lamenting, “Who was the fool who turned such a huge Spatial Stone into a knife sheath? They must be burning money…” Mo De was left speechless. Splitting a whole Spatial Stone was already outrageously lavish, not to mention hollowing it out to make a sheath.

“It’s not yours, so it’s not your money being burned. No need for heartbreak. Don’t linger, help me search the rooms. That guy could be back any moment, we need to speed up.”

So Mu Qing muttered under her breath, trailing Mo De through the rooms, clearly unable to let go of her grievance over the knife sheath made from Spatial Stone.

As expected, in one of the rooms, Mo De and Mu Qing found evidence that the villa’s owner, the middle-aged man, was not just a wealthy collector of Spatial Stones. Mo De discovered ritual garb used during Doomsday Cult ceremonies in a basement room: a gray-brown robe and a pitch-black crow-beak mask emanated a sinister and venomous aura, as if chilling the whole room.

As they opened the underground rooms one by one, they found Doomsday Cult scriptures, ritual implements, and everything necessary for their ceremonies. At the end of the underground corridor, opening the final iron door revealed a scene that left both of them deeply shocked.

It wasn’t the bloody private altar or a dungeon for sacrificial captives as they had imagined. Instead, all sorts of laboratory equipment were scattered across the room, with fragments of Spatial Stones freshly cut on the experiment table. In the corner, chests were piled high with grayish-white stone powder, filling them to the brim. Mo De glanced at Mu Qing, who understood and walked over to pinch a bit of the powder for examination.

“It’s all Spatial Stone powder, but the Spatial Energy within has already been almost completely extracted and dissipated,” Mu Qing concluded after testing. “What on earth is this lunatic doing? How could he drain so much energy from these stones? Such a colossal waste!”

“He’s running an experiment—a dangerous experiment using Spatial Stones as raw materials,” Mo De narrowed his eyes, scanning the room until his gaze fixed on a computer deep inside.

Walking over and sitting down at the computer chair, Mo De wondered if this Doomsday Cult researcher was in the habit of shutting down his machine. Unfortunately, as usual with scientific types regardless of their allegiances, confidentiality was paramount. A password lock hovered on the screen, barring Mo De from investigating what the middle-aged man was planning.

To be safe, Mo De refrained from entering random passwords, avoiding triggering any alert mode. But after the password field stayed idle for a minute, the system seemed to initiate the next protocol, and an ear-splitting alarm blared throughout the villa.

“Damn it, shouldn’t the alarm only sound after the wrong password is entered? Why isn’t it following the rules…?” Clearly caught off guard by the villa owner’s setup, Mo De was startled by the alarm.

Rushed footsteps from upstairs confirmed that the villa’s owner, who had just returned, was also shaken by the sudden alarm.

“Since he’s back, just ask him directly if you have any questions!” Mu Qing shouted loudly at Mo De, plugging her ears against the shrill alarm. The noise, compounded by her yell, left Mo De’s head buzzing.

Shaking his head, Mo De dashed out and raced upstairs.

A sharp sound of shattering glass was mixed in with the alarm. Mo De and Mu Qing rushed to the source of the noise, only to see a figure rapidly escaping into the distance through the broken window.

It was the very room where Mo De and Mu Qing had earlier found the trove of Spatial Stones, and now every stone, large or small, had been taken. The middle-aged man must have rushed here upon hearing the alarm, grabbed all the stones, and fled through the window.

“After him!” Mo De leapt onto the windowsill and gave chase, sprinting toward the fleeing silhouette. Mu Qing continued plugging her ears, leisurely hopping onto the balcony, then down from the villa, never quite matching Mo De’s speed.

As for the alarm drawing military and police attention, dispatching patrols to investigate—it was left aside for now. The focus was on Mo De and the middle-aged man, whose chase was bringing them ever closer to the boundary of the Security Barrier.

“The Security Barrier! His target is the barrier itself!” A sudden flash of insight struck Mo De. He realized why this man was using such enormous quantities of Spatial Stones for experiments, and why, when exposed, he was fleeing toward the Security Barrier—a dead end. His goal was precisely the Security Barrier, ever closer to them.

If the heart of a city is its residents, then the Security Barrier is its foundation and shield. Without it, no matter how many people gather in one place, it cannot be called a city. The Security Barrier is the outermost shield for every city, enveloping it in a massive force field, protecting its inhabitants from extreme weather and waves of mutant beasts. The scale to which a city can grow is limited by the size of its Security Barrier. Outside the barrier, prosperity is fleeting, liable to vanish in the next disaster. Only inside the barrier is there lasting safety—a true sanctuary.

Spatial Stones cannot store living beings, so the Security Barrier built from them does not encompass the entire city within a Spatial domain. By combining other precious materials with Spatial Stones, humanity discovered a way to make the Spatial Energy spread evenly as a shell structure.

Large Spatial Stones, once processed and amplified, release their abundant Spatial Energy, forming a thin shell. Inside and outside the shell is the regular physical world, but within, the shape is modified—a domain transformed into a “barrier.” The original “domain” that could store objects is solidified and strengthened into a “barrier,” akin to a sealed “extra space” stretched flat into thin sheets to make walls. Ordinary attacks cannot shake the “extra space barrier”; even high-level spatial mutants struggle to inflict real damage. Moreover, the barrier attracts spatial particles, which continually repair and reinforce it, preserving the Security Barrier’s strength.

At the beginning of construction, nodes are left on the Spatial Stones, projected onto the barrier as “gateways” for the city. The city’s interaction with the outside world occurs through these gateways; besides them, everywhere—visible or hidden deep underground—is guarded by the Security Barrier, without gaps.

So long as the Security Barrier stands, the city is safe. For ordinary citizens, it is the strongest line of defense in their hearts.

“Who goes there? You are approaching the Security Barrier’s perimeter—unauthorized personnel must leave at once!” A soldier on the barrier’s perimeter spotted the rapidly approaching middle-aged man, firing a warning shot and shouting. But before he finished, the man, carrying a huge bag, raised his hand from afar and waved it lightly; the soldier felt as if struck by a charging bull, flung far away before hitting the ground.

“A spatial mutant of the Transcendent Realm,” Mu Qing’s figure flickered, then reappeared behind Mo De, speaking: “The soldier just fainted—no real harm done. But this guy’s strength is beyond your ability to handle.”

“I know,” Mo De replied. He understood that upon awakening abilities, each realm was separated by vast differences. Someone at his Insight Realm could, at best, rely on physical prowess to tangle with someone from the Gatekeeper Realm; truly facing a Transcendent Realm opponent, survival alone was already a stretch. Still, he had to chase after this man, for it was too late to call reinforcements from the nearby military base.

Seeing the middle-aged man wield spatial abilities, Mo De was all the more certain that his target was the Security Barrier. He trusted the barrier’s formidable defense, but he couldn’t let a Doomsday Cult scientist, already at the Transcendent Realm and in possession of so many Spatial Stones, conduct experiments at will. Should anything happen to the barrier, every resident of Qin City would be affected.

Especially now, in these extraordinary times, beyond the Security Barrier, the Lunar Tides had arrived.

Outside the barrier, the “abnormal” eyed the “normal” within, separated by a single world, with hungry anticipation.