Chapter 53: Chapter 53
“Ron, how did Dimi disappear?”
Someone started questioning Ron, but the majority were still relatively rational, immediately speaking up to stop them: “How is Ron supposed to answer that question for you? The other two who disappeared, did the members of their own squads know where they went?”
“The issue right now is that Dimi has vanished. Who can navigate for us? Ron, this is a question you can answer!”
“Yeah, Dimi’s gone, who’s going to navigate for us? Ron, what do you say?”
…
Seeing everyone throwing the question at him, Ron felt somewhat irritated, but he still strove to control his emotions, neither letting them spiral out of control nor forcefully suppressing them.
It felt like gripping the reins tightly while letting the horse of his mind gallop wild.
“I can take over for Dimi. I remember most of the markers you left behind, but our time is running out! Three people vanishing in succession is a reminder. I think it’s necessary to switch to a more direct method.”
“What method? What other method could you possibly have?”
“If you trust me, I will lead you to the location of this mission’s objective!”
Ron’s words left himself almost no retreat. In reality, he didn’t have much confidence, but everyone, including himself, had no way out. He could barely muster this one method, so they could only make a desperate attempt.
The method he spoke of was actually observing the changing state of the Pollution Secret Patterns within the black qi canopy. Based on what he had observed from the outside earlier, the black qi canopy they were currently in all originated from those few Wastelander elders.
From this, it could be deduced that the Pollution Secret Patterns he was observing, which permeated every corner of the space, might share a common source. And that source was the objective of their current mission:
those few Wastelander elders left behind after the Knights’ slaughter.
“Tell us about this method?” Someone wanted to get an accurate answer from Ron, or at least a reason convincing enough to persuade them.
But Ron shook his head. He couldn’t possibly tell anyone about Pollution Secret Patterns. He pinned everything on intuition, telling the group:
“It’s intuition. I have a kind of intuition that lets me faintly sense the target’s bearing. If you trust me, then follow our squad.”
“…”
Hearing this answer, quite a few people immediately revealed impatient expressions. “Ron, can you be serious!”
“I am speaking to you about this matter very seriously. It’s you who thinks I’m joking. I’ll say it again: intuition! Before we came, didn’t your instructors tell you to trust your intuition? I believed it. Have you?”
Ron wasn’t sure if the instructors’ advice about trusting intuition was meant to be applied here, but that didn’t stop him from defending himself this way. Though by doing so, he also worried that the others would go their separate ways.
“Fine! We trust you! Then tell us, where are those Wastelanders right now?” a captain demanded again, almost in a fit of pique.
“The black qi canopy has warped my perception, and their direction is constantly changing, but I’m confident I can catch up to them. Stop wasting time and follow me!”
Seeing that the majority had temporarily accepted his reasoning, Ron immediately struck while the iron was hot, planning to get the others on board first before figuring out the rest. In this current situation, having a unified voice, even if it was wrong, was better than everyone fighting their own battles.
As for whether they could actually catch those Wastelanders in the end, that would depend on how accurate his “intuition” really was.
…
“Shift right, close in a bit!”
Ron changed direction once more, but this time someone couldn’t hold back anymore. “Turning again! Do you actually know where the target is or not!”
“Two more of our companions just disappeared. Are you going to wait until every single one of us has vanished before you can find those Wastelanders?”
“…”
Hearing the increasingly irritable voices coming from behind, Ron looked back and met several pairs of bloodshot eyes that looked as if they hadn’t slept for days. The tone he had originally prepared to be forceful immediately softened considerably:
“We’re almost there, the feeling is getting stronger and stronger! Don’t forget, when we were outside earlier, one of the reward conditions Young Master Waynes mentioned was that only those still standing would get Ignition Potions. What does this mean!
“This means that most of us probably won’t be able to hold out until the end. We’ve only lost five or six people so far. Rather than wasting your energy interrogating me, you’d be better off relaxing your minds to prepare for the upcoming battle.”
Ron’s words, though a bit cruel, were likely also the truth. The territory truly had no reason to make them carry out a mission entirely beyond their capabilities. Those who had disappeared most likely hadn’t died, but were probably subjected to some form of elimination or protective measure.
As for what he said about the feeling getting stronger and stronger, that was by no means a brush-off. It was because he had finally found a thread of pattern within the Pollution Secret Patterns swimming throughout the space.
It was like a person who knew a little math but not much looking at advanced mathematics; they would be more frustrated than someone who knew nothing at all. But precisely because they knew that little bit, they would also find the correct thing more easily than someone who knew nothing.
Ron’s understanding of Secret Patterns was limited, especially when it came to Pollution Secret Patterns, which he could barely comprehend at all. But he still had Body Secret Patterns and Transcendent Secret Patterns.
Through studying Body Secret Patterns and Transcendent Secret Patterns, he was roughly able to formulate a simple definition for Secret Patterns, namely:
the projection of all things in the world onto an unknown dimension.
But at the same time, all things in the world could also be viewed as the projection of Secret Patterns onto the real world.
The two were equivalent to a certain extent; it just depended on the perspective from which one viewed these things. From the standpoint of a certain unknown dimension, everything in the world was simply a collection of Secret Patterns.
Viewed from this angle, Ron was actually obtaining a perspective of another dimension of this world through his Light Orb true form.
…
Leveraging his understanding of Body Secret Patterns, Transcendent Secret Patterns, and Secret Patterns as a whole, Ron found the direction of the “source” amidst the constantly roaming Pollution Secret Patterns within the area covered by the black qi canopy.
But unlike a water source or a wind source, where the direction could be determined at a glance, the source of the Pollution Secret Patterns seemed to change almost constantly within his perception.
If the trajectories of wind and water movement were treated as continuous, differentiable functions, then the movement trajectory of Pollution Secret Patterns was a continuous, non-differentiable function.
The former meant predictability, while the latter was almost impossible to predict.
Therefore, Ron couldn’t lock onto “one” fixed direction and track straight to it. He could only stop and start, changing directions from time to time. However, this did happen to align with his earlier excuse about his “perception being warped.”
…
During the subsequent pursuit, people vanished from time to time. Even Ron’s own squad was eventually reduced to just him and Karel. Out of the original six squads, only eight people remained in total, including Ron!
But fortunately, Ron’s judgment wasn’t wrong. After continuously tracking for nearly half an hour, the eight men, with their bloodshot eyes, spotted four blurry humanoid figures gathered together not far ahead.