Star Empire

…

Lista Eskett woke up from her nightmare.

It seems that a few months ago, he received an order from Operation Archon Vesrifan to join the advance team to explore the border outpost of the Third Trigram that had lost contact. During the flight, the spacecraft encountered an unknown force. Interference, the system misjudged that the spacecraft had been captured by a super gravitational focus and ended the high-dimensional property transition prematurely——

The spaceship that hurriedly escaped happened to be hit by an explosion from the golden vortex. All systems on the ship were completely burned in an instant. A strange golden crystal ignored all shields and isolation gates and spread throughout the ship. Many people were inside. He died instantly in that disaster, but he and a small group of people luckily boarded the escape cabin of the spacecraft, and... seemed to be rescued by the front-line base that was later set up.

However, I am afraid that no one thought that for them, surviving was not luck, but the beginning of a nightmare.

When they entered the emergency medical module of the frontline base, they initially had a glimmer of hope for survival when they were still barely conscious. However, they soon discovered something was wrong with them, and their bodies began to behave strangely. Crystallization symptoms spread extremely quickly, and their nature even made them choose to actively shut down their consciousness because they dared not imagine what happened to them - they tried it themselves, but failed.

This strange mutation can not only infect organic and inorganic substances, but even invisible force fields will turn into crystal wires in the radiation released by those crystals and then be smashed to pieces when they fall to the ground. The autonomous system of the medical cabin is completely Unable to analyze what happened to them, these medical cabins soon began to sound alarms and malfunction one after another.

In the coma and trance, it seemed that a team had made some artificial treatment attempts on them...for example, trying to remove the mutated parts of their bodies? But it seems like whatever they did, it didn't actually work. After removing part of the body tissue, their life activities and soul reactions will rapidly decline to an extremely dangerous value. Both the soul and the body seem to become twisted, entangled and very fragile in an unknown state - the disease has damaged the body, and at the same time, it has Rooted in the soul.

Soon, the medical team gave up rescuing, because even their own bodies and clothes began to appear crystals. The emergency exile process had begun. Everyone here knew that death was coming soon.

However, everything seemed to have stopped again.

For federal soldiers, when needed, they can unhesitatingly sacrifice everything they have, including their lives, to prevent all external dangerous factors from affecting federal security, but this does not mean that they ignore life, on the contrary. , life is the most precious thing.

Everyone in the Federation, including the governors and ordinary citizens, recognize this principle. Except for a very small number of people who are willing to burn all their remaining energy in order to realize the lofty beliefs they pursue, no one will waste their lives - —However, the mission dictates.

However, in the following few months, all those who survived suffered pain that may exceed the sum of pain suffered by an ordinary person who has lived for tens or even hundreds of millions of years. If there really is a hell in this world, In hell, you have to endure the burning fire that devours your life and soul and various cruel punishments every day. Compared with what you experience here, it is simply heaven.

Eskett vaguely remembers that in the earliest days, he was still awake. Although the pain from his crystallized arms and legs was very intense, he could barely hold on by relying on the reinforced plug-in to resist and suppress it. But later, As the crystallization range spread, he felt that his connection with the world became weaker and weaker. At the same time, he felt that there seemed to be an unknown karmic fire in his body that was burning his soul, and soon, this feeling It changes from the soul being burned to the soul itself burning.

Biochemical plug-ins can resist physiological problems, but they cannot play any role at the soul level: all biochemical plug-ins are coordinated with the soul when implanted, and a large part of the reason why they can work stably in the living body is that they all Contains a special data segment, which is similar to a small piece of information about the soul, so that the soul can accept these foreign items without rejecting them.

If you just forcibly connect the brain to the core of logical thinking without doing this processing, then the soul will gradually be damaged, and the external manifestations are the continuous dissipation of personality, emotional indifference, loss of ambiguity and partial agility in thinking, etc. After these transformations, these plug-ins themselves have an unbreakable connection with the soul. How can they prevent this almost indescribable mutation?

As the crystallization spread, Eskett gradually lost consciousness, and he began to feel nothing in the outside world. If it weren't for the heartbreaking burning sensation and the shattering pain that reminded him, he might have disappeared from consciousness. You will think you are dead.

However, although he could not feel the outside world, he could clearly feel every part of his body in a strange way, including limbs that theoretically should have lost their activity due to crystallization. These feelings exceeded any language ability. To describe the senses, the words that usually describe the extreme pain are so feeble here.

During this period of time, he thought about committing suicide countless times, but although he could feel every detail of his body, he could not move an inch, as if his consciousness was no longer the software driving the activity of the body's "hardware", but It's like being trapped in this body.

As time goes by, this unbearable pain becomes more and more clear, as if the soul and body are torn apart and merged countless times every day, but pain is no longer the main theme, although the pain is as if swallowing an entire species. The tearing and burning sensation of the astral body was still raging in her body, but Eskett gradually began to feel that some changes seemed to be taking place in her soul:

Some sense of vastness that he had never noticed at all gradually appeared. He seemed to be standing at a high place, enough to look down on himself, the mountains and rivers, the surging corona, the stars and everything, and the entire universe.

Time, space, the movement and stillness of all things seem to be panoramic. Before, no matter how powerful the equipment was, no matter how sophisticated the plug-in was, he could only see a small part of the universe that could be displayed in the current environment. But now, he had a vague feeling that he no longer seemed to be limited to The ordinary existence in the material universe is separating from the world. In such a new position, the universe is like an unfolding picture, showing all its details in front of him.

But one day, all his feelings disappeared. He lost the burning sensation and the sense of looking down at everything. At the same time, he couldn't feel his own body. In the endless darkness, he felt that something suddenly began to emerge in his soul, and his originally empty senses began to slowly fill with the influx of clear spring.

"It's a little cold... It seems like something is lifting my back... Wait! Is this... the touch from my body?" Eskett suddenly opened her eyes and struggled to sit up from the lifting field. Getting up, he roughly took a look at the surrounding situation:

Beside him, there were some people like him who were lifted up in the force field. They were the comrades who had escaped from the spaceship with him before. Some of them still looked in pain, as if they were being burned by fire. It was as if they were being burned, and there were still large pieces of pale yellow crystals attached to their bodies. Some people seemed to be in slightly better condition, but they were still unconscious.

He quickly looked at himself again.

Under the lifting force field, he saw a large number of needle-shaped golden crystals and a gurgling pale golden "light cloud". These crystals were arranged in a certain field, as if someone had trapped a magnetic line in the into the crystal, and then smashed the crystal to the ground. He originally thought that the crystals were peeled off from his body, but he soon discovered the fallacy of his idea:

Before losing his vision, he remembered that his limbs had obvious crystallization symptoms, but his torso did not. However, the needle-like fragments on the ground were evenly distributed, and based on his observation of a small amount of those crystals The conclusion that can be drawn is that the cleavage of those crystals is not needle-shaped. If the crystals from one's own body are peeled off, then they should appear in a block shape.

…

"What's going on?" After her long-paralyzed senses gradually recovered, Eskett, who originally thought she would die, found that not only did she survive, but her original crystallized limbs were also restored, no different from before. , and at the same time, a kind of fluctuation from the depths of his soul gave him an inexplicable feeling. If he had to find a word, it would be sublimation.

Also awakening with him was Albert Torres, the leader of the medical and research team who was on standby and was willing to give up his life to save these survivors.

During the rescue at that time, he was the first to be exposed to a large dose of unknown radiation. However, even so, his symptoms were much milder than those of those who were directly rescued, so he was not in the same difficult condition as those people. In the midst of expressive pain and uncontrollable coma. In the most severe cases, he still retained a slight sense of self-awareness, but other than that, he also completely lost his ability to move and respond to the outside world.

After Eskelt became familiar with the surrounding environment again, she began to slowly experience the strange feeling in her body. The fluctuations in her soul were unprecedentedly strong, and there seemed to be a strange power flowing in her body, hot and powerful.

After comparison, Eskett confirmed that this feeling of gain cannot be brought about by any modification plug-in or potion. Even the charging reactor equipped with the individual mobile armor used by soldiers in combat has no such effect.

Driven by a certain sense of resonance, he lay down and reached out to the golden needle-shaped crystals under the lifting force field. Some pale golden light and shadow precipitated from those shining crystals as if responding to the call, but originally The shining crystal gradually dimmed.

"What... is this?" The awakened man looked at the pale golden light mist that was constantly floating towards his palm. In the resonance, this group of energy was getting closer to him. When his hand came into contact with the light mist, Instantly, a burning pain made him startle, cutting off the resonance.

After the resonance was cut off, these pale golden hazes of light remained stationary in mid-air, neither affected by gravity nor disturbed by airflow. However, soon, some strange phenomena began to appear, and the haze of light slowly began to appear. Slowly dimming, some fine crystal powder scattered on the ground, like precipitated smoke.

"...What happened..." Eskett looked at his fingers in confusion. He remembered clearly - before he fell into coma, he had extensive and severe crystallization lesions all over his body, but now, these strange crystals Structures seemed to disappear overnight.

"These crystal fragments... are like fog... they are what caused the destruction of the spacecraft! But now what exactly is this?"

Hesitating again and again, in the messy thinking and the bottom line of what he still remembered, he weighed his own experience and the perception experiment he had just conducted in an unconscious instinctive state many times - he was very sure that between the two scenes, The beings in were definitely the same thing - but this time, he wasn't affected in any way.

Torres on the other side also discovered his own strange state. As the first person to suffer from crystallization symptoms due to rescuing the injured, he knew that those crystal clear golden crystals had the power to solidify life under their beautiful appearance. , let alone contact, there is a possibility of infection even if the distance is close, but he was surprised to find that he could now touch those crystals without feeling anything!

Just when the two of them were surprised by their own changes, a rumble spread from all directions in the emergency medical cabin. In the cabin, the non-absolutely rigid materials were pushed by the chromatic core armor, causing friction and previous tossing. The crystallized structure deformed and made a tooth-staining noise.

Just by feeling, the two people who woke up first felt that different space debris appeared in the only external communication cabin outside the isolation door, and the four-dimensional space generator had activated and completed the two cabins at the high-dimensional level. As they connected, a somewhat urgent voice sounded in the ears of the two people:

"I'm glad you can wake up, my comrades." The eager voice paused, seeming to be preparing for what he was going to say next.

"But the situation is urgent now. You may not be able to rest yet and you may not be able to leave here yet. You are the zero contact of the abnormal material. The Federation is currently conducting vital research on the anomaly, and you are very precious samples. Please cooperate with the scientific officer as much as possible and complete the tests he needs to do..."

"...?"