Chapter 453: Chapter 453: Old Acquaintance

In front of us, sitting poised and full of presence on a chair directly facing the door of the activity room, was a girl dressed in oversized work clothes tainted with various colors of spray paint. This attire, completely mismatching her age, concealed her slender and soft figure but failed utterly to hide her beautiful and dignified features. Her facial features suggested an Asian appearance, yet she had a head of soft, ponytail-bound golden hair. Although her hair couldn’t compete with Sandora’s magnificent curls that could be admired as if they were a scenic view, it still added a bright touch to the room filled with graffiti and papers. What caught my attention even more were the girl’s eyes, filled with stubbornness–the kind that would never give up on their ideals, not even if hope was lost or their meager strength completely vanished. Those were eyes that would never change.

“Bubbles, I’m sharing my visual data with you; look up this person.”

That stubborn expression was too intriguing. There was once a face that had left a deep impression on me, but that person couldn’t possibly appear in this World Fragment. Therefore, I still decided to have Bubbles help me with the search. However, Lin Xue confirmed my suspicion through a spiritual connection almost immediately, “Don’t doubt it, that girl… has indeed disappeared. Under the monitoring of six special envoys of the Superpower Team, she vanished into thin air from the mortal world. The one in front of you is her.”

I could more or less affirm this myself, but the truth was so bizarre it was hard to accept. That girl’s momentary shock and a tinge of fear upon seeing us, quickly concealed, had not escaped my eyes.

But since she didn’t show any sign of recognition, we were happy to tacitly play along in front of the outsiders, Hu Wen and Ling Yin. As if rehearsed, the golden ponytail girl stood up with excitement and joy, welcoming us, while we feigned “confusion and bewilderment,” directing our gaze towards Hu Wen and Ling Yin.

Look at this acting of ours!

In the tacit poser standoff, the somewhat blunt Hu Wen and the slightly clumsy Ling Yin became the only two in the dark. Knowing his companion’s problem of getting more tongue-tied when nervous, Hu Wen took it upon himself to introduce everyone, pointing to the golden-haired girl and saying to us, “This is our leader, Artemis. Although a girl, she has quite the authority among us!”

Hmm, Artemis… Could it be that’s her real name? Could it be that, as another parallel dimension, although it looks very similar at first glance, there are subtle differences in things like culture after all?

“These newcomers are…” Hu Wen turned his head towards us again, but he froze as he opened his mouth. Clearly, he had been too excited earlier and had forgotten to even ask our names, only realizing this significant oversight now.

Even Artemis’s face showed a helpless expression. Obviously, this tall, straightforward young man wasn’t making this kind of mistake for the first time.

“Chen Jun. This is my girlfriend, Xu Qianqian, my sister Chen Qian, and these two are Passerby A and Passerby B.”

“Passerby my ass!” Lin Xue and Lilina, the two crazy kids, small and large, shouted in unison and lunged at us–but were met with my outstretched hands and thrown right back where they came from.

Geez, what a bunch of brats.

“It looks like you guys are not quite like the ordinary Awakeners.” Watching our lively interaction, Artemis made a pointed remark, to which I responded with an equally suggestive reply, “In fact, we’ve just arrived here and are quite clueless about the bizarre situations here… it looks like we’ll need your help.”

“Of course, as the leader of the Awakeners, it’s my responsibility. However, you better find a place to rest first. You might have been wandering outside for a long time and must quickly find a safe place to rest for a while, or you’ll easily fall asleep. I’ll tell you more about the situation later, and you can also try to discover it on your own~~~ Ling Yin, could you please take these newcomers to the activity room of the Chemistry Department? Hu Wen, go call Ai Hua and the others back; they’ve been outside for too long.”

The doll-faced girl named Ling Yin promptly agreed, while Hu Wen looked up somewhat bewildered, “But… oh…”

When he saw the serious expression on Artemis’s face, Hu Wen immediately swallowed the rest of his words and obediently agreed. It was clear from this that Artemis did hold sway in her little team. It was just unclear whether this was related to her hypnotic ability–wait, her having powers should have already been linked to me… no, that’s not right, her appearing here was impossible to begin with. In this odd world, I better stop using common sense to judge issues.

When I followed Ling Yin to the activity room of the Chemistry Department, Hu Wen happened to be walking with us for a while. Seeing the tall boy’s hesitant expression, I casually nudged him in the side with my elbow and asked as if it didn’t matter, “Just say what you want to say, since there’s no one else to talk to here anyway.”

“It’s nothing, really,” Hu Wen scratched his cheek and said, “Although the captain seems pretty serious, she used to get especially excited whenever there was a new member, organizing a little celebration party for everybody. I was looking forward to it this time, but this time she… well, never mind, the captain must have her reasons. It’s good for you guys to get some rest, especially since it’s been a long time since any new members joined. Some of the older ones have even fallen into a deep sleep… Anyway, I won’t talk about that. I’m off, see you later!”

Hu Wen rambled on, then turned at a corner and disappeared into a dark hallway that extended from an abruptly jutting staircase mid-air, while Ling Yin spoke to us with an apologetic look, “Hu Wen, he just… always has a lot… a lot to say, you guys… don’t… don’t mind it…”

Probably to balance out your stuttering, right?

I thought to myself sarcastically. Ling Yin might be a cute girl, but her slight stutter was a flaw – not insurmountable, perhaps even endearing in its own way. However, listening to her speak was a bit tiring, even more so than communicating with Silvia.

“Is he your boyfriend?” Qianqian, with a strong whiff of gossip, whispered into Ling Yin’s ear, catching her completely off guard with the sudden question.

“Ah… I… I…” Ling Yin’s face immediately turned red, and now she was completely tongue-tied.

The Chemistry Department’s activity room was located on what might be the third floor of this ancient building. The place was such a mess, with twisted space and strangely overlapping layers, it was hard to pinpoint exactly where we were. Eventually, we stopped in front of a double sliding door tilted about thirty degrees to the left. A sign on the doorframe originally read “Data Center” in raised lettering, but it had been crossed out with paint, and there was a cardboard sign underneath scrawling “Chemistry Department.”

“You guys… you should… rest here for a bit, I… I have to go back!” Ling Yin stumbled over the words, her face flushed as she fled from our sight. Big Sister chuckled at the absurdity and flicked Qianqian on the forehead before reaching out to slide the door open.

But the door didn’t budge at all.

“This place is really strange to the extreme.”

Lin Xue shrugged, a glint of light passing through her eyes, then she stepped forward and pushed: the damned sliding door actually swung inward! And it didn’t even have any hinges!

“In this place, don’t judge anything by normal standards,” Lin Xue said as she entered first, continuing, “Well, at least it’s clean inside.”

This large classroom used to be some student organization’s meeting space. Someone else had apparently been here before us. The several large tables in the activity room were haphazardly and messily placed on one side of the room, leaving a considerable open space in the middle. A pile of professional books and several dismantled chairs were scattered about the floor, looking very out of place. At least the room’s interior walls hadn’t been covered in spray paint. Honestly, I was getting tired of the chaotic graffiti outside.

I helped Big Sister move one of the widest tables from the corner to the center of the room, while Lin Xue and Lilina found a few still intact and sturdy chairs in another corner. At least now we had a place to sit and discuss. Meanwhile, Qianqian, filled with curiosity, was wandering around the large classroom. The chaotic array of chemical equipment and reagent bottles intrigued her–I shuddered at the thought and quickly dragged her back.

We absolutely couldn’t let Qianqian touch any of that! Her ‘talent’ in chemistry was truly bizarre. Her awe-inspiring grades in chemistry and her knack for messing up every kind of experiment had been the bane of every chemistry teacher in City Second Middle School. Her incident involving a simple distillation of water that blew up half of the bench was considered legendary, but that was not the worst part–the worst was that Qianqian, this chemistry disaster, actually loved lab classes!

That was the only class the girl was genuinely interested in, and also the only one she’d never passed. I had no doubt that even if there were only half a liter of distilled water left in those bottles and jars, the girl could still manage to create the commotion equivalent to TNT!

“Ugh, I finally thought of a really interesting experiment…”

Qianqian, whom I’d forcibly seated, complained with a look of grievance on her face, “Anyway, I can reverse time, so I could just redo it a few times! Let that old chemistry hag look down on me again!”

Needing to reverse time several times just for a distillation experiment, you don’t think that’s embarrassing?

“Okay, okay, you two stop fooling around and come over to eat!”

Big Sister’s voice, tinged with affection, interrupted Qianqian and my playful scuffle. I turned around to see a table with a hot pot hissing steam, while Lin Xue, holding her chopsticks, drooled idiotically over it with Lilina.

…Sis, you didn’t put a whole kitchen in your Personal Space again, did you? Also, using a Ghost Energy Coil as the heating element for the hot pot, isn’t that a bit of a waste?

“Wood, come over quickly!” Lin Xue waved her chopsticks calling me over, “Or there won’t be any left for you!”

Forget it, it’s not the first time we’ve gone from saving the world to playing tourists in these magical scenarios. If I nitpicked every time, I’d eventually die of dehydration. Speaking of which, I haven’t had Big Sister’s hot pot in a while, and even though Anwina is a bug-level chef, Big Sister’s cooking has a truly unique significance! Lin Xue, don’t you dare fight me for the meat slices! Lilina, are you sure it’s okay to throw the World Tree sprouts in there to cook? Qianqian, could you please mind your manners a bit while eating!

In the end, when Artemis, as we had anticipated, pushed the door open, what she saw was a scene that she had been wary of and even appeared in her nightmares on many a day: a group of mysterious imperial military leaders gathered around a large writing desk, fiercely competing for the hot pot. The sight froze the serious-faced golden-haired girl in place, her jaw nearly hitting the floor.

“Am I opening it wrong?”

Artemis muttered to herself in confusion, then turned around, went out, and re-entered the room.

Lilina was busy cooking leaves… ing

Turned around, went out, came back in.

Lin Xue and I were scrambling for meat slices, chaos ensued… ing

“Hey! Artemis! Come and try my sister’s cooking!” Before the golden ponytailed girl could exit once again, I called out to her, “If you go out a few more times, it’s basically padding the word count!”

Artemis collapsed with a bang.

With a head full of black lines, the girl who once served as the Leader of Olympus sat beside Qianqian somewhat helplessly. The latter immediately handed her a pair of chopsticks. Qianqian was an incurable extrovert, without any hidden agendas, and right now, her most pressing concern was probably just eating.

Artemis hesitated for a moment, her face twitched with indecision as she picked up a freshly cooked piece of green vegetable from the hot pot, dipped it in the sauce, and put it in her mouth. A few seconds later, the golden-haired girl decisively joined the clamorous Imperial Army in their battle for food.

“That’s not right! I didn’t come here to have hot pot with you all, did I?”

It wasn’t until after ten or so minutes that Artemis suddenly realized, her exclamation ending our lunch. Lin Xue leisurely leaned back in her chair, gently patting her slightly distended belly, and gave the other a sidelong glance, “You just noticed?”

“Alright, we’ve eaten our fill, now we can get down to business,” I carelessly threw the table scraps into some unnamed Space Rift, “Artemis, as I recall, we’ve met before at the Moon Base–that was you, right?”

“What do you think?” Artemis said with a slight smile, noncommittally, then accidentally let out a loud burp.

Us: “…”

Artemis: “…”

“That was an accident!” The tragic golden-haired girl was almost on the verge of collapse from a series of absurd events, she said somewhat resignedly, “Alright, the one you saw on Earth was me, this one here is also me, but the process is rather complicated…”

“Just tell us one thing: are you an Earthling, or an original inhabitant of this world?”

When it came to matters of transmigration, we were not unfamiliar. Not to mention the terrible Loli next to us, who had just swallowed half a pound of the World Tree’s tender shoots and was a traveler herself–we were also taking care of thousands of group-travelers in Shadow City. What I was more concerned about was the real identity of Artemis. She was the Leader of Olympus, but in this Death World that had been dead for who knows how many years, she was also the leader of a student survivors organization. Her dual mysterious identities were spread across two worlds, and she seemed to have quite the leader’s charisma. Could this girl be someone who big-eyed Uncle had dispatched to subvert the plot and rewrite the female lead’s story for the Vanguard Army?

“I…to be honest, sometimes I can’t even tell which world I truly belong to. But as of now, it seems I should belong here, to this resting place that has fallen into slumber… Welcome to the Death World, that’s what I wanted to say.”

An original inhabitant of the Death World, one of the few lucid survivors after that Doomsday, that was the identity of Artemis. But at the same time, she was also the leader of the Earth Olympus Organization. According to the analysis jointly conducted by Bubbles and Taville from far away on Earth, we had a rough explanation for this phenomenon, which was an effect that remained inexplicable to us up until now but probably related to the interaction of information between the two worlds. Simply put, it was the ultimate enhanced version of the informational projection focused on a single individual. Under this projection’s influence, Artemis on Earth obtained a projection formed entirely of information. According to the “Information Universe” theory researched by the Xyrin Apostle, information is reality, and both Artemis in the Death World and the projection of Artemis on Earth are real and valid beings. Moreover, because the information projection effects that should have been dispersed among a large amount of matter were all focused on Artemis, the girl had also gained the ability to connect her own clones, and so the “Moon God” controlling the Olympus Organization on Earth was born. As for those abilities akin to hypnosis that the Artemis Shadow Clone possessed (…), preliminary analysis indicates it’s a very primitive form of information interference, simple yet completely irresistible to ordinary people.

This could perhaps explain why, in the school where the real Artemis was, there was a small group of students who claimed to be Awakeners. Despite the informational projection between the two worlds being concentrated on Artemis for unknown reasons, information still radiated out from her presence. It was like water droplets leaking from a pipe that wasn’t tightly sealed, the active information from Earth preserved the free will of Hu Wen and Ling Yin so they didn’t become like a videotape, only capable of replaying past events.

“I always thought it was a dream,” Artemis buried her face deep in her chest, “In these nightmarish days, the illusion spawned by my longing for the happy life I once had made me feel like I was still alive in another world. But not long ago, I suddenly lost contact with ‘that side,’ and the dream also ended. But now you guys… wait! How did you get to this world?”

Only now did she remember to ask this crucial question. Could it be that the years of informational stagnation in the World Fragments had caused Artemis’s mind to rust as well?

(Okay, can’t wait to reveal and put an end to your speculations…)(To be continued, if you wish to know what happens next, please visit www.wuxiaworld.site. More chapters are available, support the author, support genuine reading!)