The Ultimate Evolution

The pipeline from the Nightmare Realm to the spaceship was very long, and Sheyan was actually already more than three kilometers away from the Realm. He guessed that the spacious entrance he came to after sliding down from his private space was already quite a distance away from the main body of the Nightmare Realm.

But this did not weaken the strong sense of oppression Sheyan felt when he looked back in the slightest!!

Roughly speaking, it would be like if Sheyan was a twelve or thirteen year old boy, standing in the Central Plaza and looking up at the 373-meter-high Central Building. It was that kind of pressure.

(TL: The building: http://images.skyscrapercenter.com/building/centralplaza_ext-main_(c)dennislau-1.jpg )

The dizzying magnitude seemed to occupy all his senses in an instant, making him feel so small, while the object standing majestically in front him like a king felt like it was the entire world!

Sheyan stared at the Nightmare Realm in a daze. He was shocked out of his wits.

In truth, the Nightmare Realm did not fully show itself to him yet. It merely floated in space like a huge floating mountain. Just like a picture of an Apollo rocket, the blue ocean and white clouds of Earth dominated the background.

A dense red mist, which felt rather heavy, wrapped around the Nightmare Realm. The Realm evidently possessed a life of its own. It was even vibrating with a certain rhythm. Sheyan could easily distinguish the rhythm of its breathing.

Occasionally, the dense, drifting red mist would reveal a small hole, through which large masses of flexible-looking red tissue could be seen. On the surface and the inside of the tissue, there were numerous thick, interlocking networks of channels that looked very similar to human blood vessels, except that the channels seemed to have a metallic texture, while still maintaining the flexibility of soft tissue.

Sheyan could vividly see a large amount of unidentified liquids or gases flowing in the channels. He could also clearly see that almost all the channels were in a constant cycle of expansion and contraction, except for some channels which had blackened.

Just as Sheyan was about to move his eyes away from the Nightmare Realm to board the ship, he saw another thing which left a deep impression in him.

On the red fleshy tissue of the Nightmare Realm, some bizarre eyes would show themselves occasionally. They looked around the Realm, while blinking as if they were pressing a shutter, after which they would instantly disappear. When Sheyan was being stared at by those eyes, he had a feeling that everything about him was being clearly recorded, down to the food residue squirming inside his stomach and intestines.

On the surface of the Nightmare Realm, blood-red lightning flashed from time to time. The lightning gave Sheyan a very dangerous feeling. He was sure that as soon as he touched it, he would surely die!

And it would be the kind of death where he would turn to ashes in an instant, like a moth that flew into a fire.

He was no stranger to that kind of feeling. It felt the same as the dimensional turbulence in the Terminator World, but ten times stronger. No, a thousand times stronger!

But he realised that it made sense when he pondered on it. The Nightmare Realm often shuttled through space and time. The biggest threat it faced must be the dimensional turbulence. The red lightning on its surface must be the energy storm that was formed after the neutralisation of the dimensional turbulence.

From what Sheyan had observed so far, there was no doubt that the Nightmare Realm had been created with some highly advanced technology. Perhaps there were some mechanical parts in the interior, but most of the Realm’s body was organic matter.

One of the greatest benefits of this was that it saved 99% of the time required for maintenance, because an organic body’s self-healing capacity was quite strong. In addition, the Nightmare Realm also had a high degree of authority and contained a mysterious power. To be honest, Sheyan could hardly imagine how the humans in the future could produce such a terrifying semi-mechanical organism.

What he did not know was that there was a huge secret behind it which involved the origin of mankind, and how the humans at the time had to drink poison to quench thirst….

From an aesthetic sense, the Nightmare Realm was far from pleasant to the eyes. If a normal person saw it, they would definitely think that it was a scene from a nightmare.(ED: I mean… NIGHTMARE Realm..) But when Sheyan saw it, he inexplicably felt like he was about to leave his hometown and country. There seemed to be a flesh-and-blood relationship between them. It was the same as how no child would think their own mother was ugly.

As Sheyan stepped into the spaceship, the docking module started disconnecting. At this time, Sheyan’s conjecture was confirmed. He could now see that he had previously been sent to the spaceship by a tentacle which extended from the Nightmare Realm’s main body. It was just that the interior of the tentacle looked like the inner passage of a spaceship. The tentacle quickly retracted after the connection was severed.

Under the direction given by the Second Lieutenant, Sheyan changed into a brand new Lieutenant Colonel military uniform which was hanging on the wall next to him. He then sat down and fastened his seat belt.

The spaceship was not manned. Its propeller began to eject an orange flame, and a strong pressure brought about by the rapid acceleration instantly acted on Sheyan’s body. But Sheyan could hardly feel anything from this level of pressure. He really wanted to stand up and walk around if the regulations on the LCD screen on the wall had not forbidden him from doing so.

Sheyan retracted his gaze back from the stars and immediately saw the young Second Lieutenant being pinned to his chair under the pressure while being restrained by the safety belt, his face as white as a sheet of paper. Only then did Sheyan realise that the acceleration of the spaceship was probably quite astonishing, so much so that it had exceeded the load that the Second Lieutenant’s weak body could take. It did not matter how strong the strengthening devices he wore were; they could not strengthen his inner organs.

Sheyan was about to ask if he was alright when the Second Lieutenant simply vomited. He made some incomprehensible gurgling noises in his throat, and his eyes rolled up. At the moment, he was still being pressed to the seat and could not move an inch, so vomiting was actually a very dangerous thing to do. The vomit could possibly be forced back down his throat under the inertia and clog his respiratory tract. It could lead to suffocation.

Seeing this situation, Sheyan immediately wanted to go up to help, but found that his seat belt was locked tight. Well, for him, that was not a problem. He simply tore it apart.

Sheyan went over to the Second Lieutenant’s side without much effort, tore the Second Lieutenant’s seat belt apart, grabbed his arm, and turned the young man over so that he would face the rear of the spaceship. He also took off the Lieutenant Colonel uniform he wore to wrap up as much of the filth as possible. Otherwise, when the acceleration was over, filth would fly around everywhere like dust particles under the effect of low gravity.

In this way, the reaction force of the flight would be in the same direction as the vomit, so the Second Lieutenant would not choke to death. The Second Lieutenant started to cough and vomit violently.

After a while, the acceleration was finally over. The Second Lieutenant half knelt on the floor and gasped for a long time until he felt better. He gulped down a few mouthfuls of fresh water and looked gratefully at Sheyan.

“My body has always been weak, and I’m not feeling too well today, so that made it worse. Thank you very much, Lieutenant Colonel.”

Sheyan flashed him a smile. The Second Lieutenant continued looking at Sheyan for a few moment. He then stared at Sheyan’s body in admiration.

“Your body is so strong. I heard that in your era, all the people on earth can easily break through the barrier of 20 seconds in a 100-meter sprint without any support devices. Is that true?”

(TL: For reference, Usain Bolt’s 100m world record is 9.58 seconds.)

“20 seconds in a 100-meter sprint….” Sheyan was quite speechless and did not know how to answer for a while. He could only vaguely reply, “Well, probably.”

However, Sheyan did notice one thing. When the Second Lieutenant spoke, his eyes were grateful, but he dipped his left finger in water and wrote the Arabic number “3” on the bulkhead next to him. When he realised that Sheyan noticed his action, the Second Lieutenant immediately erased the number.

The rest of the journey was dull and uneventful. The Second Lieutenant did not take the initiative to speak. Sheyan knew that they must be monitored in the spaceship, and maybe there were some restrictions, so the only thing he could do was to wait with his eyes closed.

After two hours of flight, a small dot could be seen ahead. The dot rapidly grew bigger as they got closer, until it revealed itself to be a really large space station. Sheyan estimated its size to be even larger than the usual city. Keep in mind that the space station was three-dimensional, so he had even taken into account a city’s underground foundations and sewers when he made the comparison.

The interior of the space station was probably quite crowded, so there were large-scale tracks of different sizes, shaped like bicycle wheels, on the outside. They functioned like the ring roads or ring rail lines encircling the periphery of a city that were built to ease the traffic pressure inside the city.

Teleportation technology consumed a lot of energy after all, so there was still a long way to go before it could be used in daily life.

A space station of such magnitude was already big enough to be called a spaceship on its own. Air in space is extremely sparse and there was no wind resistances and such, so the spaceship that was built like a city was not affected when it flew in space.

The spaceship Sheyan was in began to decelerate. It hovered in the air, then stopped its engine. Two other spacecrafts clamped the spaceship between them and scanned the spaceship carefully before Sheyan was allowed to leave the cabin and enter one of spacecrafts.

Sheyan noticed that the person receiving him was wearing a spacesuit. When the person saw Sheyan, he gave Sheyan a look of indifference and contempt, as if Sheyan was carrying some infectious bacteria on him. The person was unwilling to talk to Sheyan. He even started to push Sheyan in a rough manner to make Sheyan walk faster, although Sheyan was not walking slowly at all.

Sheyan noticed that the reaction of this man was very similar to that of the Second Lieutenant from before, before the Second Lieutenant saw Sheyan’s military rank. Sheyan’s brows furrowed, but he endured it.

When he was about to walk through the entrance, Sheyan was suddenly called to a halt. The big man who kept pushing him narrowed his eyes and ordered, “There’s one more thing you haven’t done, you retarded barbarian. Take off all your clothes, all of them! Then bend down and separate your legs! Hurry up! Don’t waste Major Ryckley’s precious time!”