Chapter 688: Chapter 655: Breaking Through the Limits of the Virtual World
This player named Stanley didn’t initially combine these two things.
As a full-armoured fighter enthusiast, he entered the game and tried out all the cold weapons that had appeared.
The [Lance] has a characteristic that determines damage based on speed, which quite matches the properties of a real-life lance.
By chance, he built a long, long stone platform in the sky to fight the BOSS, and had a unicorn that could speed up and run faster when ridden.
So naturally, he rode the unicorn, holding the lance and sprinting with all his might on the stone platform, accelerating to the limit before leaping off, and then stacking up the falling speed.
–After all, there is no fall damage for mounts in this game.
The zombies blocking his way were instantly shattered by his piercing lance, and a huge [1083] damage popped out, which was the highest damage figure he had seen in the game so far, far surpassing the life limit of zombies.
The zombies that were shattered instantly did not slow him down at all, and the unicorn continued to gallop, with ordinary monsters on the surface crumbling at the slightest touch!
Although the damage wasn’t stable, it was still above 600 without a critical hit, and a critical hit would be 1000+.
However, seemingly invincible, a deeper dip in the ground could easily bring his speed to a crawl.
Moreover, once he encountered a high-HP monster that couldn’t be killed instantly, it would be hard to turn the horse around and launch a second attack.
So what can he do?
Is there a way to accelerate really fast while being able to quickly turn around, and without losing speed, make a second or third repetitive attack?
Of course!
Get on the minecart!
The minecart tracks in Terraria can change direction without losing speed through the direction changing device; the only cost is if the turning is too intense, you will feel like your brain has been shaken up.
But no problem!
No matter how fast you go, you won’t be thrown off.
Soon, Stanley had completed the circular track, and to make sure there were targets, he even placed dummies along the track.
When he reached full speed, almost every lance attack dealt over a thousand damage, quite stable.
However, he soon realized that the minecart’s speed also had a limit. Once it reached its maximum, it wouldn’t accelerate anymore, so this damage was close to the limit.
This disappointed him.
Moreover, this effect wasn’t very practical, as circular track strategies for skipping class and fighting the BOSS were discovered several days ago.
Skippjng class guides even advised not to make the minecart too fast, otherwise, their lance would be inaccurate, and the damage would suffer a great loss.
This made him put aside his curiosity for a while.
But yesterday, he fished out a treasure chest while doing a fishing task, and got a [Floating Ring] from it.
The red swim ring looked ordinary, but its buoyancy speed was incredibly fast!
And the deeper the water, the faster the floating speed.
When floating up from the deepest part of the sea, the speed was so fast that it even made him soar out of the water!
This scene, which defied the laws of physics, was obviously not something a real-life swim ring could achieve.
Thus, an idea was born in his mind–
If he dug through the entire world, from the surface all the way down to hell, and filled it with water, then after sinking to the bottom, equipped the swim ring, how fast would his floating speed be?
At such speed, how much damage could a single strike deal?
Action!
Stanley worked hard, digging from the surface all the way down to hell, patching up any places in the middle that might leak water, and then tried to fill the tunnel with an infinite water source.
But soon he found out: water evaporated in the hell environment.
He then helplessly mended the tunnel, sealing off the hell part and refilled it with water.
After completing all this, he used a [Depth Gauge] item to count that the whole water-filled tunnel was a total of 3198 blocks.
Driven by his perfectionism, he added two more blocks to make it 3200.
Finally, at the edge of the tunnel exit, he placed a damage-absorbing dummy, and all the preparations were complete.
After drinking an Underwater Breathing Potion, Stanley jumped into the narrow, water-filled tunnel.
After slowly sinking to the bottom, he held up the lance, opened the item bar, and equipped the [Floating Ring].
The next second, the ascent began!
The starting speed wasn’t fast, but soon, he felt strong water pressure as if every inch of his face was bearing great pressure, and at the edge of his vision at the player’s movement speed display, the number was rising rapidly from a single digit!
2m/s
4m/s
13m/s
47m/s
122m/s
346m/s!
…
When the exit was in sight, Stanley could no longer keep his eyes open.
His sensation at this point was like smashing concrete with his face!
Thanks to the system’s protection, his indestructible face could easily shatter this incredibly strong “concrete water” like tofu!
Completely by instinct, his lance passed through the dummy’s body at the edge.
Then, he saw the stars in the sky.
The [Depth Gauge] showed his current “depth” as: [Space 1002]
—-
This is a little Easter Egg set by Lincoln as a tribute to “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
However, this was just his own little personal quirk, and no one was meant to understand it.
Because this movie didn’t exist in this world.
In the last instant, Stanley felt a heavy hit on his head, and it was only due to the system’s protection that his skull didn’t burst.
He realized that he had reached the very top of space, the edge of the map, the limit of the Terraria world.
And his maximum speed was —
[415 meters/second]
That’s right, he had just surpassed the speed of sound with his flesh!
He quickly teleported home, opened the video, and checked the damage of that strike, seeing —
[9405]!
It was just short of breaking ten thousand; adjusting the equipment a bit could easily achieve it!
In this game, he had never seen such an outrageous single-time damage!
The only issue was: end-game bosses had tens of thousands of health points, and this strike wouldn’t kill them instantly…
Moreover, there was only one opportunity to strike, and it would be tough to hit a boss.
But to simply give up?
Stanley wouldn’t accept it.
He began to rack his brain for a way to break through this limit further.
However, he couldn’t come up with a good solution for a long time.
Finally, in order to gather more ideas, he shared his thoughts and video in a small game group chat he frequently participated in, asking if anyone had any good ideas.
The discussion was fruitful, and the group members were quite creative:
“Featherfall Potions can eliminate gravity, and you should be able to float up faster, right?”
“Use bubbles as pipes to prevent water from evaporating in Hell, making the pipe longer.”
“How about placing multiple dummies at the exit to deal multiple damage? That would increase the damage and even double it.”
…
All sorts of ideas came one after another.
But none of them could solve the “only one chance” problem.
Until a familiar Redstone Expert suddenly said in the group, “Have you ever considered teleportation gates?”
“Teleportation gates? How do you use those?” Stanley knew NPCs sold circuitry, wires, switches, teleportation gates, logic gates, and other items.
But he couldn’t understand these complex things.
The expert explained to him, “You can set up a teleportation gate at the end of the exit, connected to the bottom of the pipe. When you reach the exit at full speed, the mechanism will be automatically triggered, teleporting you back to the bottom of the pipe to accelerate again, cycling over and over.”
“With this method, in theory, you can accelerate indefinitely and have unlimited opportunities to leave the mobile phone.”
“The only two problems are: firstly, can you withstand such a terrifying acceleration? It’s more than just a few times the speed of sound, I suspect it might even be dozens of times.”
A few dozen times the speed of sound!
Just hearing it sounds terrifying!
But Stanley thought, since he had smashed “concrete water” with his face, he should be able to challenge this too.
He asked further, “So what’s the second issue?”
“The second issue is: does Cloud Dream’s construction of the virtual world, especially Terraria’s underlying rules, have any limits?”
“I guess there probably are. I can’t imagine how a world without a speed limit could exist.”
“But if there is a limit, I also can’t imagine what would happen if it were broken.”
“Huh?” Stanley was puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“Put simply: The most minor issue would be with the numerical system, but that’s not a big deal.”
Stanley swallowed, “What about the worst-case scenario?”
“The underlying rules fail, the game crashes and even further affects the entire virtual world.”
The Circuit Master added, “Of course, I might be overthinking it.”
“Uh… ” Stanley hesitated unconsciously, feeling like things were getting out of control.
But the group friends instantly got excited!
“You have to try it! Help Cloud Dream test for system loopholes; it’s a player’s duty!”
“Exactly, try it! Practice is the only way to gain real knowledge!”
The Redstone Expert was also eager, “Give it a shot, just in case?”
Stanley really wanted to ask: your “just in case” – is it the one where nothing goes wrong, or the one where there’s a huge mess?
Before Stanley could hesitate further, a flood of requests to join the world started coming in.
The group was in an uproar!
When had Stanley ever been so popular?
He softened up and let people in.
Then, the Redstone Expert [Vincent] entered the world with several groups of wires, teleportation gates, and circuit components. He wasted no time getting down to work.
Several active group friends also went deep into Hell to increase the length of the pipe.
The group was bustling with activity.
But all this time, Lincoln was clueless.