Chapter 691: Chapter 658: It’s Time to Think of a Way to Reach the Sky
Lincoln was extremely shocked.
Before watching this video, he had thought he had seen it all.
But after watching Stanley and his friends’ operation, he had only one thought in his mind: [I really have never seen this before.jpg]
After being shocked, his first thought was relief: Thankfully, Terraria and the entire virtual world, were actually separated.
In fact, all the worlds that can be reached through Teleportation Gate, such as the Candy Track after the Candy Portal, the “Light Encounter” World after the Light Wing Portal, and “My World” after the Mosaic Portal, are separated from the entire virtual world by a layer.
Terraria, which is even separated from the outer layer of “My World”, is even separated from the virtual world by two layers.
This prevented the main part of the virtual world from having problems.
If this happened in the public map of the virtual world, like in the Metropolis and Night City, it would be a super chaos.
—An entire city instantly evaporated, and the entire virtual world might collapse and go offline.
However, having said that, Metropolis and Night City are closer to the real world, and the underlying rules are more solid.
It shouldn’t be possible for someone to accelerate themselves to near the speed of light in these two places, right?
After this incident, Lincoln was somewhat unconfident and planned to check it carefully afterwards.
As for now, Lincoln had to worry about a more urgent matter:
Was this person named Stanley okay?
The virtual world is indeed different from reality—if a person’s physical body reached a thousandth of the speed of light in reality, they would have evaporated long ago.
The virtual world won’t be that bad, let alone life-threatening, and there shouldn’t be any direct physical injury by reason.
But this person had already broken the system’s rules, and whether the system’s protection was still perfect in that situation, Lincoln couldn’t be sure.
After all, he had never seen anything like this before.
*
On the other side, in Stanley’s small group, the group friends were a bit panicked.
When they were all kicked offline, they didn’t care too much at first.
Game crashes and forced exits were indeed the first time they experienced them in the virtual world, but they had seen a lot in PC games before.
Just restart the game, a small problem.
But soon they found out: not only did their game crash, but also the games of all Terraria players around the world.
Now things have escalated!
They immediately realized: they might have caused the trouble.
But they couldn’t really tell what was going on, as they were just bystanders, only witnessing the collapse of the world.
For the specifics, they had to ask Stanley.
But the problem was: they couldn’t get in touch with Stanley.
No matter how they @Stanley in the group, there was no response. The friends who had his phone number called him, but there was no answer as well.
This made them anxious as well, and they couldn’t help but come up with a terrible idea:
Did Stanley “die” along with the game?
…
…
Of course, Stanley didn’t “die” along with the game. He returned to the real world as Mirage restarted.
But now he was lying in bed, feeling terrible.
It was hard for him to describe how he felt at the moment, just feeling extremely exhausted. This exhaustion was not physical, but seemed to come from the deepest part of his heart, spreading out endlessly.
This made him lie in bed, too weak to move.
Let alone to get up and answer the phone, he didn’t even want to move a finger.
In fact, this feeling of exhaustion did not only appear when he returned to reality.
Previously, while still in the game, the exhaustion seemed to have appeared every time he entered “supersonic” mode.
It was just very faint and vague, difficult to perceive, like a distant itch.
But even this far-away feeling, when accumulated, was no small matter, which was why he felt slightly unable to bear it before the last “dive down”.
The final, extreme experience was beyond words.
If the previous experiences could be described as “being thrown out violently”, the last one was like “the whole person being melted at high speed…”
All of his senses were dissolved, and any concepts of “self” and “existence” vanished – because he had entered the blind spot of the Cloud Dream Sensory Database, and the neural modulator-demodulator didn’t know what signals to send him.
He took a detour through the power of technology and experienced the state of “selflessness.”
The price he paid was – completely draining himself.
It wasn’t clear exactly what was drained, was it “energy”, “spirit”, “concentration”? Or some other messy things?
Stanley didn’t know.
But it didn’t matter.
He was now too tired even to think and just wanted to sleep.
But what bothered him was the constant noise around his ears.
At first, his mobile phone kept ringing non-stop, but later even the outside window began to “whimper” with high-pitched honking.
And then –
“Bang!”
With a loud noise, Stanley’s door was smashed open, and a bunch of people rushed in.
Firefighters who broke down the door, medical staff carrying stretchers and emergency equipment, all hurried to his bed.
An at least 60-year-old doctor with white hair and beard opened Stanley’s sleepy eyelids with one hand while shining a flashlight into his pupils with the other.
“Holy crap…” Stanley couldn’t even speak, and his inner resentment was so weak and powerless.
Lincoln found his detailed address information in his Cloud Dream account, made a few hurried phone calls for an ambulance, and called the fire department to make it easier for them to get in.
Since it wasn’t certain what would happen, it was better to prepare for the worst case scenario.
If it wasn’t for the fact that this person wasn’t in Xiajing City, Lincoln would probably be there by now.
However, even if he couldn’t personally get to the scene, Lincoln was able to view the live footage sent back by the firefighters through security team communication.
The bad news is: the person really had a problem.
But the good news is: the doctor said it wasn’t a big problem, and with proper rest and recuperation for a few days, everything should be fine.
So Lincoln breathed a sigh of relief.
As long as the person was okay, the specifics could be put off for now. When he regained his strength, they could discuss the bizarre achievements of this kind of person – Lincoln thought it was necessary to have a good conversation about it.
With this most crucial issue resolved, he could finally focus on dealing with the game issue.
It wasn’t difficult at all.
The simplest solution was to make Floating Rings rise at a constant speed and become uniformly rising.
Problem solved.
But this meant that the gameplay they researched would be completely abolished.
And Lincoln didn’t want that.
So he preferred a more fundamental solution: Regardless of the gameplay, set an upper limit on the speed of the players. Once the limit was reached, the speed would not continue to rise.
In this way, not only was the problem solved, but the gameplay they researched wouldn’t be completely wasted. With some adjustments, it would still be an interesting way to play.
However, this limitation was only applied to Terraria and not to the entire virtual world, nor was it tied to the player himself – even though this could eliminate all related risks once and for all.
Lincoln opted to bear the future risks rather than choose the most worry-free solution, mainly due to the following concerns:
In future games set in the universe, players must experience some ridiculously fast speeds on a cosmic scale, and not just use wormholes to deceive them.
Speaking of which, the most extreme speed he had experienced before was found by inviting the top domestic racers to experience a terrifying race car competition.
The kind that made him vomit and pass out when he got out of the car.
But now, Lincoln felt that this was not enough.
Players were approaching the speed of light, so he had to try harder.
So –
It was time to find ways to get to the sky.
