Chapter 1 (1/2)

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

Zhang Heng looked and stared at the irregularly shaped cube hovering and slowly spinning in midair. It had at least twenty sides that blended and twisted into one another in bizarre patterns his eye couldn’t follow. Zhang Heng’s first reaction was to look around his small apartment. The next thing he did was walk up to the cube and poke it cautiously.

The cube remained unresponsive.

Zhang Heng then took the cube in his hand and traced the patterns on the cube, twisting it with both hands. He heard mechanical clicks and clangs from inside the cube.

It didn’t make a metallic or plasticky sound; it was some kind of special, in-between sound that Zhang Heng had never heard before.

The sound that was coming from the cube wasn’t crisp and clear, nor was it thick and bass-like, yet the sound that he heard struck something within his soul nonetheless.

“Just what the hell is this thing?”

Zhang Heng was baffled. The irregularly-shaped cube had no markings, labels, or shading. The entire construct was a uniform, metallic silver color, and had countless cracks crisscrossing the facets, dividing the cube into all manner of irregular chunks.

Despite the shapes being irregular, there was something odd about their distribution. There was definitely some pattern to it, something natural and soothing about the pieces of the strange cube. There was an inexplicable harmony between the pieces, no single piece wrong or out of place.

But none of that unexplained harmony was as weird as the fact that it was actually able to hover in midair.

The first thing Zhang Heng did when he saw the strange cube was look around at his surroundings. He was still in his rented apartment, with just a bed, a study table, and a fabric wardrobe crammed into a dozen square meters. There wasn’t enough space for someone to set up a prank on him.

As such, Zhang Heng ruled out the possibility of someone playing tricks on him.

But then again, he wondered just how the cube was able to appear out of nowhere, and if that didn’t count as a prank in the first place.

Zhang Heng became even more troubled, yet his hands kept moving all the same. He kept probing around as he twisted the cube again and again, until he heard a slight click from inside the cube.

He narrowed his gaze right away.

He realized that the cube actually revealed a special pattern as he twisted it around without a clue, and that pattern gave way to a hole, about the width of a finger, on the otherwise seemingly airtight cube.

There’s a flaw in the cube’s design!

His eyebrows twitched. It wasn’t that he had never played with a Rubik’s cube before, but this thing, with its twenty-plus irregular faces, was a far cry from a regular Rubik’s cube.

That cube he held in his hand was hundreds, even thousands of times more complex than the usual three-dimensional cubes commonly seen. Conventional logic dictated that such irregular shapes could never be used to form such a three-dimensional puzzle, as the first requirement for such a puzzle was uniformity. No one would have been able to solve a puzzle that had no inherent uniformity in it after all.

That was something that no designer could pull off.

As such, it only took him several twists to reveal a loophole.

Hold on, this isn’t a loophole…

His eyes narrowed to a slit and he suddenly found that the edges of the hole were very neat and precise, making him think that, instead of being a flaw, the hole was intended to appear when he twisted the cube just right.

If that wasn’t enough, then there was also the fact that the inside of the hole was pitch-black, so much so that, Zheng Heng couldn’t see the inside of the cube, even when he held it up to the light. That was what made the discovery so stunning.

He instinctively put the hole up to his eye, peering into it with his right while shutting his left.

“Just what the hell is this thing…” he asked again, puzzled. He saw some vast something in the darkness in the hole.

Vast something?

He was stunned. He knew for sure that this was the first time seeing this cube or the thing inside it, yet whatever it was, it gave him a sense of familiarity that he couldn’t quite place—a huge, seemingly endless bubble, but it wasn’t just one bubble; it was countless bubbles cobbled together, forming a vast, endless world.

He couldn’t describe what he saw any other way. Each bubble was infinitely huge, but he quickly wondered just how was it possible for something infinitely huge to cross and stack with another bubble that was also infinitely huge.

Conventional logic dictated that it made no sense.

More importantly, those bubbles felt very, very familiar. It felt instinctively familiar, like something common to the human race.

The bubbles. They’re universes. Every single one of them.

That thought came to his mind all at once. A flash of light burst in the nerves of his right at the very next instant, and it felt like the Big Bang itself.

At the same time, an indescribable pain came with that flash of light, shooting all the way to the depths of his mind through his optical nerves. It felt like a comet plummeting into the ocean, and that flash washed over every corner of his brain.

Zhang Heng was only able to shout in pain for a brief moment before passing out.

…

Cold, sterile electronic beeps hung in the air, which reeked of Formalin.

Zhang Heng remembered everything in the very second he opened his eyes, coming to realize the situation he found himself in within 0.1 seconds.

He was lying on a bed of some ward in some hospital. A monitor, an electrocardiogram, a defibrillator, and some other hardware were placed beside his bed. The electronic beeps came from the electrocardiogram.

The north of the room had double glass doors made of frosted glass placed against the wall. He was able to make out the letters ‘ICU’ stuck on the other side of that glass door.