A single glance was all it took. Shen Feng was instantly drenched in a cold sweat, his clothes soaked through.
To be precise, what he saw wasn’t just anything—it was a mass of blue light.
A Quantum Ghost.
An irregular mass of blue light, roughly five to six thousand kilometers in diameter—almost half the size of Earth. It was an unprecedented, colossal Quantum Ghost, currently drifting in space, orbiting the planet!
This Quantum Ghost didn’t look like a single living creature at all, but rather a collective formed by the aggregation of countless other Quantum Ghosts.
And yet, it paradoxically behaved like a living thing, extending countless tentacles that writhed and danced in the void.
Like a vibrant cloud of blue, fluorescent dust.
The Moon was completely gone. In its place, this gargantuan Quantum Ghost, like a living planet, drifted aimlessly through space, yet never left Earth’s gravitational pull.
Shen Feng was absolutely certain that if he had a head-on encounter with this thing, it wouldn’t matter even if his entire body was covered in Quantum Force Field Cores.
The main issue was its sheer size. At this scale, it simply couldn’t be destroyed by conventional means.
Besides, the larger it was, the more energy the Quantum Ghost contained. It could crush him through sheer mass alone.
Its colossal form, and the aura of nothingness and chaos it exuded, was enough to make even a mentally resilient person like Shen Feng feel his spirit falter with just a single look.
A RUSTLING sound came from beside him. It was Jingwei, once again using the Gray Tide to condense a nanomechanical body for herself.
The newly formed girlish avatar stared intently at Shen Feng, her face etched with worry. She said:
"Xiaofeng, this thing is way too big... What are we going to do... How about we get a spaceship, load it with ten thousand people as bait, and lure this giant Quantum Ghost away... I finally get why this Reverse Dyson Sphere exists now..."
Shen Feng nodded, his expression equally grave.
"If I’m not mistaken, this so-called Reverse Dyson Sphere was likely built to block the thought waves of intelligent life on Earth, preventing them from being detected by the giant Quantum Ghost. The outer layer is made of a unique graphene superconductor material that can continuously absorb solar wind. This forms a powerful magnetic circulatory field, similar to the Geomagnetic Field, which was probably also meant to obstruct the giant Quantum Ghost..."
Then he shook his head and said:
"No, this thing, like the Master of the Void and the Whisperers, should have its own name. I think we should call it... Myriad Will."
Hearing this, Jingwei couldn’t help but nod as well.
One as myriad, and myriad as one. The being itself was an agglomeration of countless consciousnesses that had turned into a chaotic state. The name "Myriad Will" was indeed fitting.
"What’s next? Are we supposed to build a Quantum Force Field Cannon? With our current technology, we can’t build that thing at all. And even if we could, it probably wouldn’t do any damage to it. Quantum State Life Forms are just too absurd; they completely exceed all the information and data I have." For once, Jingwei was showing signs of wanting to back down.
After all, even when facing the World Beast Ancestor, there were ways to solve the problem. But the existence of a Quantum State Life Form was completely beyond their current capabilities, creating a real sense of powerlessness and despair.
"In any case, this mission’s objectives don’t seem that difficult. We just need to complete them stealthily and make sure this Myriad Will doesn’t discover us," Jingwei continued, clearly terrified of the Myriad Will outside.
Hearing this, Shen Feng’s expression grew solemn. He returned to the window and cautiously peered outside again.
Immediately, a sense of madness and chaos rose from the depths of his consciousness. While fighting to resist it, he continued to carefully observe the Myriad Will’s constantly shifting, colloid-like form.
1. Investigate the cause of the Dark Apocalypse.
2. Find human survivors (at least 10,000).
3. Save this world and restore light to it.
4. Revive human civilization.
These were the objectives for the current mission.
With this massive Reverse Dyson Sphere, completing the mission stealthily right under the nose of Myriad Will wasn’t an impossible task.
The cause of the Dark Apocalypse had been mostly figured out. It was likely that this world’s Salvation Army had discovered the impending arrival of Myriad Will and built the Reverse Dyson Sphere to envelop Earth and protect human civilization.
For some unknown reason, however, this world’s Shen Feng and the Salvation Army had all disappeared. The Reverse Dyson Sphere failed to function as intended; the solar and cosmic radiation it absorbed was not directly converted into light energy and channeled to the surface, which is what plunged the world into darkness.
Fortunately, Shen Feng was gradually gaining control over the Reverse Dyson Sphere. He would soon be able to restore its operations and begin converting energy into light for Earth.
As for finding human survivors, that wasn’t a difficult task either for a Shen Feng who controlled both the Reverse Dyson Sphere and the Gray Tide.
As long as he could end the darkness and find the survivors, reviving human civilization was only a matter of time.
However, this would mean that this world’s human civilization would forever live inside a sealed dome, forever living in fear of Myriad Will, unable to truly develop.
For a civilization that had just begun to look to the stars, preparing to venture into the cosmos, this was tantamount to castration—a slow suicide.
No one knew when Myriad Will might finally notice Earth and destroy the Reverse Dyson Sphere.
It could be a million years from now, tomorrow, or even this very moment.
For Shen Feng, this was intolerable.
After all, his own original world could very well face the same situation. When that time came, would he have to impose a technological lockdown on his own world, turning everyone into caged birds?
’The question is, where did this thing come from?’
As Shen Feng was thinking, his eyes suddenly narrowed. He said to Jingwei:
"Jingwei, check if there are any space telescope facilities on this thing."
Jingwei replied instantly:
"The outer edge of the Reverse Dyson Sphere has numerous mobile structures, including several radio and optical telescopes."
"Bring an optical telescope over. Have it cover my current area immediately. Just basic optical functions will do," Shen Feng said quickly.
Soon, a massive optical telescope enveloped his location, its viewport positioned exactly over the space he occupied.
Shen Feng immediately looked out the window. Under the control of his Silicon-Based Brain, the huge telescopic instrument constantly adjusted its angle and zoom, magnifying the internal structure of the distant Myriad Will.
Shen Feng observed it carefully and continuously, finally rediscovering the strange detail he had glimpsed earlier.
Right behind the giant Quantum Ghost, Myriad Will, stood a Space Wormhole several hundred meters in diameter!
The Space Wormhole seemed to blend seamlessly with space itself. If not for a distortion of light and shadow, Shen Feng would have almost missed its existence, hidden as it was behind the colossal body of Myriad Will.
Furthermore, the body of the giant Quantum Ghost, Myriad Will, looked like a Lamp God emerging from Aladdin’s Lamp. A stream of Quantum Ghost matter still connected it to the Space Wormhole, as if it were still emerging, maintaining a tenuous link!
’What on earth is going on?’
’Is Myriad Will’s true body not here?’
’Or is it incapable of manifesting its complete body in this universe?’
Doubts filled Shen Feng’s mind as he used the telescope to carefully examine the giant Quantum Ghost’s body.
He saw that within Myriad Will’s body, the vast majority of the agglomerated Quantum Ghosts still retained a vague human form, like food swallowed by a giant beast that had yet to be digested.
These ordinary Quantum Ghosts that made up Myriad Will all had their eyes closed. They even had the faint shapes of clothes on their surfaces. They appeared to be men and women, old and young, but all were in a semi-molten state, stuck together.
Shen Feng was completely baffled by this manifested quantum state. Instead, following a sudden thought, he began to rapidly observe the individual human figures, while his Silicon-Based Brain started running swift comparisons against his memories.
With the powerful computational ability of his Silicon-Based Brain, Shen Feng was performing tens of thousands of comparisons per second, followed by new sets of data comparisons.
Minutes ticked by. Just as Shen Feng was about to give up, mocking himself for his wild idea, his entire body suddenly jolted.
A figure in a white lab coat, fused within Myriad Will, caught his eye.
It was the faint figure of an elderly man in his fifties. He had a kind face and wore a white lab coat, on which the indistinct words "Director of the National Academy of Sciences, Li Yuanshan" were written.
It was one of the very statues Shen Feng had seen in the laboratory of the National Academy of Sciences’ virus research center during the Stone Statue Apocalypse mission.