Chapter 1244 - 1241: W-Axis

"Master Fuli, you're blowing bubbles again!"

After her Spiritualization, Lin Ying saw the video playing on the screen and very confidently said to Master Fuli:

"The whole building is like foam under the night sky, colorful like a瞬间的firework..."

In the video, the wooden cabin in the forest kept shrinking, until in the end it vanished like a dream, like an illusionary bubble.

"You could've just said it, why'd you start singing too." Ansheng glanced sideways at Lin Ying and complained.

The moment when the cabin in the forest turned into bubbles looked especially gorgeous and beautiful from the video, just like a CG animation.

However, this was her late-blooming power from proving the Way as a Nine-tailed Fox, so it clearly had a lot more going on—just that for now they couldn't see the trick behind it.

"Old Sun, where are you!"

After watching the video Lin Ying had recorded, Ansheng looked toward the Fox Immortal Palace villa and called out.

As soon as Master Fuli spoke, milky-white ripples spread across the sky above the Fox Immortal Palace.

And Sun Xingyao, who had been sitting upright in the villa, was instantly stunned on the sofa.

Right then, a few seat belts suddenly spread out from the originally soft sofa; the four legs of the sofa turned into horse legs that went "tick-tock, tick-tock," and carried Sun Xingyao flying off from the villa's fourth-floor terrace, landing on the ground and galloping madly.

"The hell, what are you doing this late at night?!"

Holding down her nightdress with one hand and clutching her NS console in her arms, Sun Xingyao, with a face full of dark lines, slapped the sofa.

But the sofa gave no explanation, just buried its "head" and sprinted; in an instant it crossed several hundred meters and stopped at the forest edge before the Fox Immortal Palace.

"......."

Sun Xingyao sat up straight, wrapped the little blanket from the sofa around herself, face full of dark lines, saying nothing as she stared straight at Master Fuli, cheeks puffed out with anger.

"If I'm calling you here, obviously something urgent's up. I need you to help appraise something."

Seeing Sun Xingyao arrive, Ansheng didn't stand on ceremony with Old Sun; he pulled Lin Ying along, plopped down on the sofa, and handed the camcorder to Sun Xingyao.

"Couldn't this wait till tomorrow?!" Sun Xingyao grumbled as she took the camcorder, complaining:

"Lucky we're in Xia Dong; if we pulled this in the Imperial Capital, by the time I wake up tomorrow I'd have a raging cold."

Complaints aside, Sun Xingyao still opened the video on the camcorder to take a look.

"Oh? You actually got a handle on the spatial axis?" After seeing what was in the video, Sun Xingyao immediately showed a surprised expression and looked at Master Fuli:

"The ability of a spatial axis is considered extremely hard to master even among us Dragon People. Anyone who's got this is basically on par with a current double-first-tier undergrad-master-PhD straight-through track."

"With something like this, once you graduate, salaries and benefits are calculated straight in annual packages."

Sun Xingyao looked skeptical, giving Master Fuli a top-to-bottom once-over before continuing to ask:

"Spill it. How many people did you lock up to push your Power of Will to this level? Rough estimate, if you didn't imprison at least two hundred thousand living beings as your power source, this shouldn't be possible."

To manipulate the spatial axis ability, even in the Dragon-man Civilization, aside from a scant hundred or so monstrously gifted freaks—

99.999% of Dragon People can't even touch [spatial axis ability] without being hooked into the network.

Master Fuli's Physique was beyond doubt, but once it came to her own specialist track, Sun Xingyao could see at a glance that something was probably off in the way Master Fuli awakened this ability.

But she couldn't figure out the reason; the only possibility she could think of was that Master Fuli had been secretly imprisoning people and dragging them into the [Fuli Network] to serve as will-energy.

"What kind of fox do you take me for? I, Ansheng, have billions of will-cells in my Physique. Borrow? My Power of Will is not some inconvenient loaner item."

With a look of utter disdain, Ansheng flicked his fox paw, and with a few "bang bang bang," knocked on Sun Xingyao's crown, almost knocking her wig-cap askew.

"Tss..."

Sun Xingyao clutched the spot where she'd been smacked, sucking in a sharp breath from the pain; with a slightly unconvinced expression, she pouted.

"If you didn't, you didn't—why're you hitting me..." Sun Xingyao muttered. Once she understood Master Fuli's purpose, she rubbed her head and said:

"You know the concept of the X, Y, Z coordinate axes, right?"

As she spoke, Sun Xingyao casually used her console as a prop and started explaining the XYZ axes.

"Yeah. X is the horizontal axis, Y is the vertical axis, Z is the height axis—together they make up the three-dimensional coordinates." Ansheng shrugged.

The XYZ axes Sun Xingyao mentioned are usually seen in scientific research or mechanical engineering fields; in everyday life, regular people usually just call them: length, width, and height.

"Good, you've got the basics, no remedial lessons needed..." Sun Xingyao nodded in satisfaction, lifting the console with one hand and laying her other hand flat on top of it as she said:

"Humans can currently only understand three axes. But the ability you awakened, in human physics, has a more intuitive term: the W-axis, also called the spatial axis..."

In front of Master Fuli, Sun Xingyao lightly twisted the hand resting on the console, like she was turning a valve.

After finishing that motion, she jerked her chin at Master Fuli, signaling him to give it a try himself.

A living being's imagination is limited; some conceptual knowledge, no matter how detailed you explain it, can't compare to seeing it with your own eyes.

If you run into someone with no spatial imagination, all the concepts in the world are pointless—they just can't picture it.

"Hmm..."

Ansheng showed a pensive look, focusing all his attention on that red console, and stirred his Power of Thought.

As thought moved with intent, from Master Fuli's perspective, everything in the world once again turned into abstract shapes.

However, when the Power of Will reached a certain peak, the scene before his eyes changed again, and all the abstract shapes gradually pieced together into three-dimensional figures.

People were people, objects were objects; only now they'd all lost their colors, like simple pencil sketches.

With a flick of Master Fuli's mind, his Power of Thought turned into an invisible giant hand that grabbed the console.

At the birth of the intent to [twist], nothing else around them changed; only the space where the console sat began to gradually flatten, its volume expanding at an exponential rate.

Meanwhile, in Sun Xingyao and Lin Ying's eyes, the NS console directly shattered, breaking down from device to components, then to fragments, and finally into individual plastic granules, peeling apart layer by layer.

In the end, it became a transparent membrane that could cover over a thousand acres, floating in the sky.

"Don't keep 'twisting' it. One careless move and you might drag a bunch of unrelated people in with it."

Seeing the membrane appear, Sun Xingyao didn't look surprised at all; she just reminded Master Fuli not to keep unfolding the console.

That thing that looked like a flimsy membrane was anything but harmless.

Once it fell, anything within its coverage would all be [drawn into] the membrane.

Humans would have no way to escape the collapse brought by dimensional reduction.

"And then?" Ansheng glanced at the membrane, then turned his gaze back to Sun Xingyao.

"Either piece it back together where it is, or blast it somewhere else and reassemble it there—whatever. Try out the firepower." Sun Xingyao signaled for Master Fuli to test the effect.

With her there to guide him, it was still better than Master Fuli experimenting alone with no one to supervise.

"Go!"

At her words, Ansheng didn't hold back. With a thought, he shrank the membrane's coverage, then guided it down onto a distant forest, lifting his constraints on the abstract shapes.

The membrane fell in utter silence.

There was no rumbling in the forest, no roaring either; everything remained that same quiet.

But the entire forest sank as if falling into quicksand; the trees and the soil in the forest all collapsed and flowed like a stream onto that transparent membrane.

The green trees, the yellow earth, the grayish treetops in the woods—streaks of color all flowed into the membrane, staining that transparent sheet like a painting.

The colors surged back upward, dyeing even the still-falling sections of the membrane with the forest's hues.

"!?"

The whole forest was rapidly draining away, forming a magnificent spectacle. Ansheng's face showed surprise, while Lin Ying and Lin Bingyun both stared, dumbfounded.

"And you didn't teach me this skill earlier?" Ansheng shot Sun Xingyao a suspicious look and said:

"Tell me, were you planning to roll out some SVIP class and make me renew my tutoring package?"