Master of the Stars

Chapter 5: Formatting Theory

The noise’s volume was simply unfathomable. The soundwaves clumped together and smashed fiercely on their eardrums like the fists of a boxing champion. It was as if a ferocious beast had opened its bloody mouth wide to its cheeks and howled in rage.

Xie Junping swore that he had never heard such a fearsome sound in his life. The seismic wave permeated through his entire body, causing his eyes to bulge out. All his internal organs with rolling, jittering, and shaking. Amidst his stupor, he felt that the husk of his skin and flesh was like a penetrated water sack that could fall apart at any time.

This feeling of unprecedented fear was like a storm that swept through his mind. It washed his entire body from the inside out and took all the details out for him to see incomparably clearly.

Xie Junping didn’t know how this feeling came about. His mental defenses had collapsed, and he couldn’t hold back from screaming yet again. Though this time there was no one to stop him.

Xie Junping screamed for an unknown amount of time; he only stopped when he exhausted all his emotions and energy down to zerk. Only then did he discover that he was still hanging in the air. His situation had not gotten better nor worse.

The vibrational assault came and went suddenly. A cold wind blew before him, but Xie Junping had already fainted from exhaustion. Only his fingers remained striving to grasp Luo Nan’s wrist. All sense of feeling was indistinct amidst his trembling; it was as if he had fallen entirely into a nightmare.

Most fearsome of all was the state of the person who decides his fate, Luo Nan. Luo Nan was lying face down with an ugly expression on his face. His eyes maintained an extremely cool-headed and resolute gaze to them; he refused to let them go out of focused. His hand’s palm was dripping wet and also appeared to be shaking.

Xie Junping was on the verge of crying for reals: “Hey! Hey! It’s no problem for you right!?”

Luo Nan didn’t respond, instead closing his eyes. Sweat slipped out from the distant edges and dripped down.

Xie Junping finally confirmed that Luo Nan’s present state was extremely extremely bad. It would be hard for him to make additional actions.

He would die a violent death if things continued this way!

It’s all that damned....... Wait. What had happened? An explosion? Xie Junping could not figure out what the cause of the violent shock and impact was. He also didn’t have the time to think about this. He forced himself to raise his voice:

“Stay firm. Stay firm. I’ll sound an SOS asap......”

Luo Nan’s eyes trembled, then opened with great difficulty. Luo Nan swept a look at Xie Junping and squeezed out a few words through gritted teeth: “Look at your car!”

“Uh, let’s focus first on......”

“Look down!”

Xie Junping hesitated for a moment. Finally he fought against his dizziness and fears, his eyeballs rotating down. Then he saw the silhouette of his Phantom in all its magnificent glory located diagonally 10 meters down from him.

The flying car Phantom valued at 500 million held an extraordinary standing. Aside from having capabilities of an ordinary flying car, it could also speed up on the magnetic rails’ superconductive roadway. And it even has an air suspension braking mechanism in case of emergencies.

So the Phantom didn’t just fall to the ground and smash into pieces when it fell off the overpass. Instead it had automatically activated its suspension mechanism. It rose up slowly, searching for a magnetic rail to dock with. There wasn’t any damage asides from some dents caused by fallen rubble.

His life was saved!

Xie Junping was completely awake now. He issued a command in a hurry to make the flying car come over to act as a foothold.

They were freed from danger a minute later.

Xie Junping didn’t have the strength to speak having just escaped from mortal danger. He simply tended to his wound while sitting in the cockpit of the flying car. His entire body was weak.

It took a while before Luo Nan returned inside the car. He had tossed his loose-leaf notebook to the ground to free his hands before saving someone. Naturally he had to pick it back up.

Luo Nan closed his eyes as soon as he returned to his sitting spot. His body sweated a great amount of sweat. He had exhausted far too much physical energy just then. He only felt at ease when he recovered his notebook, only then did some life return to him.

Xie Junping was stupefied for a while before he finally thought of a few things he ought to do. The situation appeared to be at an anticlimax. But Luo Nan had maintained a level head and rescued him in the most critical moment. Otherwise, Xie Junping would have probably become the saddest dead member of Acumen College’s Honor Society.

This was without a doubt a life-saving grace.

Xie Junping twisted his head around with the intention of displaying his gratitude when a crackling sound rushed forth. The micro earbuds embedded in his ear rebooted. Ying Ying shouted:

“Hey hey sucker. You’re fine right.”

The corner of Xie Junping’s mouth twitched. An intense state of mind spurred him into roaring without caring what Luo Nan would think of him:

“SUCK YOUR SISTER! SUCK YOUR MOTHER!”

Ying Ying was silent for some time. The voice proceeded to transmit over. This time the voice wasn’t brash, yet it didn’t necessarily lack anger: “Okay then Young Xie. I don’t care what your situation is right now, but you must leave that place at once. According to my surveillance, an intense impact went off approximately 2 kilometers to the northwest of you and 1 kilometer underground. The energy of the impact is equivalent to that of a small nuclear warhead. It had created an electromagnetic storm. As for if the ionization radiation has exceeded safe limits, well it’s hard to explain.”

“Nuclear warhead?” Xie Junping’s mood was pressed dead. He finally understood why all the electronics on his body had totally malfunctioned.

He checked flustered if he could lock the door to his car, and he turned on the detection system. A few seconds past and nothing at all happened.

“Nope, nothing shows up here.”

Then you need to hurry up and leave. Can it be you want to stay there and help the police do a write up?” Ying Ying gave him a new set of coordinates after speaking.

Xie Junping cursed as he started up his flying car: “It wasn’t an earthquake? It wasn’t an earthquake?”

“Terribly sorry. We can’t discover anything within a 12 square kilometer range about a case of an earthquake that actually exceeded a magnitude of 9. So, I’m inclined to believe that this was due to an accident...... an accident of disastrous levels.”

Ying Ying analyzed the situation some more and put forth a suggestion: “Furthermore, its best for you to return to Mangzhong immediately. An earthquake of magnitude 4.5 happened there a minute ago, honest to god. Those colleagues of yours are probably running all over the place searching for people.”

“......”

Xie Junping lost even the strength the curse.

Ying Ying continued speaking: “I’ve already gone above and beyond for you. I’ve asked for a high-altitude shuttle to come over from your father’s company. It’ll arrive in 90 second and will basically guarantee that you’ll arrive back in Mangzhong within twenty minutes.”

Ying Ying’s calculations were proven to be extremely accurate. The Phantom flying car had just arrived at the coordinates given by Ying Ying when their call had just terminated, a landing platform atop of joint skyscrapers. This place was relatively peaceful since it was outside the 12 square kilometer range. There were only shattered glass that were being cleaned up by janitor bots in some places.

A Hummingbird model shuttle had just arrived, landing on the platform with a rumble.

Xie Junping stared at the shuttle. He was somewhat muddle-headed so he slapped his face as an effort to raise his spirits. He got out of the car and walked a few steps. Then he suddenly turned his head:

“I have no words to thank with for your great grace Junior. I’ll remember this favor. Your current state is also not that great, so I’ll leave this car for you to ride. Go get yourself checked at the hospital. I’ll get in touch with you later.”

Having said this, he transferred the control privileges of the Phantom flying car over to Luo Nan. This way Luo Nan could use his own wristband to execute basic controls.

Luo Nan knew that Xie Junping had just walked out through the gates of hell. Xie Junping’s state of mind was in complete disorder at the time, yet he was able to think of this. This morality was very hard to come by, so Luo Nan did not speak any further. He nodded to continue on.

Xie Junping gave Luo Nan a bow and jogged to board the shuttle. Soon the shuttle soared into the air, directly piercing the depths of the sky.

Tranquility was returned to the landing platform. Luo Nan took a few deep breaths, straightened his back, extended his arm forward, and grabbed the performance drink on top of the control panel. But this single action costed nearly all his strength. He leaned back heavily.

He took a deep breath and spoke softly: “Close doors.”

The Phantom’s vertical doors folded and closed, forming a seal on the car’s empty space.

Luo Nan didn’t need to sit in the cockpit, all he needed was to set up the route to the school. The Phantom was a highly intelligent flying car, obviously it could take him to his destination.

But Luo Nan gave an order that had nothing to do with his school:

“Return trip!”

The flying car turned around, entering in a path automatically. Luo Nan continued to use voice control to open the makeup mirrors.

The AI spouted out a fine mist of water in a human-like fashion and the luke-warm steam of water was thrown on Luo Nan’s face. What should have been a comfortable sensation was instead like countless sharp blades scraping across Luo Nan’s face. It was so much that Luo Nan’s entire body began to twitch.

He saw an ashened face that lacked life in the mirror, simply like that of an incurable patient at the terminal stages of his disease.

Luo Nan pulled back the corners of his mouth as he tried to twist open the drink, but his fingers lacked the strength. They ached and they pained. He failed five-to-six times before he succeeded.

He fished out a military energy bar from his pocket and ripped apart the packaging. He swallowed all of the energy bar with the drink down to his belly. His entire self even trembled a few times, yet there was a certain warmth that expanded from his belly to the limbs and bones of his body.

His sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system worked in tandem following the consumption of the foreign nutrients. His digestive and blood circulation system worked in opposition to maintain harmony, causing energy to rapidly permeate through every organ and muscle tissue of his body.

This was a basic mechanism of the operation of the human body that was ingrained in the foundation of the skeletal and fleshly body. This modern feature was formed from countless generations of hereditary evolution.

However Luo Nan’s operational mechanism’s ingestion and digestion efficiency actually exceeded other people’s efficiency by five to tenfold. The color of his face in the mirror rapidly took for a better turn. His appearance became the same as normal in a short few seconds.

This efficiency came from his five years of following his grandfather’s related theories and painful fruits of research.

The core concept behind his grandfather’s theory was called “Formatting”.

This theory’s system could be described approximately as a primitive notion. Taking heaven and earth, taking the universe, all living beings in the world could be approximately divided into three levels:

The self, society, and heaven and earth.

There was a special ‘format’ at each layer to convey the core content of one’s existence, operation, and birth & death. Complicated effects and interactions happened constantly amidst each layer.

His grandfather’s deep, dense, and profound theory was not something that could be understood by relying on experiments and recordings. It was far from what a person his age was capable of.

He could only concentrate on the basics at this time, on the adjustments and molding of “self-formatting”.

“Self-Formatting” was the core of his grandfather’s theory, a necessary “Permanent Evolution”. This was the cornerstone of Societal Formatting that could bear the weight of heaven and earth.

To realize and awaken the hidden potential of the human body, to possess supernatural strength. This was the basic premise of evolution.

Luo Nan followed his grandfather’s records of experiments over the course of five years for this reason. He utilized the stimulation of drugs to progressively remold his own nervous system. This was the axis which influenced every organ in the body, adjusting their operational mechanisms for the sake of forming fundamental changes.

Luo Nan was still only in the early stages of self-formatting at the moment; this stage was recorded by his grandfather as the Vessel. The main purpose of this stage was to harmonize all the body’s organs and systems for digesting and extracting nutrients from food. The body then stocked and stored the energy, even nurturing the mind...... It allowed for a person’s basic functions to progressively adapt to the new environment and create the appropriate reaction.

Luo Nan gradually began to possess a few abilities after forming the basic structure of the Vessel. For example, his digestive, absorptive, and recovery capabilities was strengthened to be an “Appetite King”. And his mental communication is similar to that of a Hypnosis Master. He had used this ability to order the crow before. Today he had used it on Xie Junping. The results were quite decent.

Of course, these abilities were only the icing on a cake. The true value still lied in the fundamental modifications to his body from self-formating.

And accordingly, any elements that could influence his self-formatting and damage the structure of his existing Vessel can’t be taken lightly.

Luo Nan watched buildings and pedestrians rapidly zoom by outside the car window. His eyebrows were fixed from beginning to end. Finally, a notice popped out from the car’s AI: “The magnetic rail ahead has been damaged. Changing routes now.”

The flying car had arrived at the broken part of the overpass right now. There was still a short distance to the location where Luo Nan and Xie Junping had been in danger. However, the area ahead was blocked off. And there was a pile of media reporters who rushed to get here. It would be very difficult to get any closer.

The earthquake had affected approximately the entire area of the overpass.

Looking from ontop of the bridge to the west, one could see a palpitating dilapidated whether it be through the naked eye or by the rendering of a car’s AI. There were two collapsed hundred-story skyscrapers engraved in ruin with rising dust near the epicenter of the “earthquake”. Swaying flames also invaded the turbid fog. It was simply a missile-cleansing scene reconstructed from a page of a Third War biography.

And to the east of the overpass, one could see the majority of the metropolis displaying it’s flourishing nature.

An extraordinary powerful impact with a limited range...... Luo Nan could only sneer if this was an earthquake.

His upper body erected straight. His vision was cast through the window to the ruins in the distance, combining with the scene of the environment. The order of events flashed back in his mind.

He sent out another order to fish out an image automatically recorded by the car’s AI. He had to sigh a breath in admiration at how high end the Phantom was. All angles were recorded in high definition, conserving the details to the utmost limit.

Luo Nan selected the time when he and Xie Jieping were hanging off the broken overpass, to when they had a moment of reprieve from the crisis and when the sound shockwave exploded over, nearly damning them beyond redemption.

Luo Lan started up the virtual mode function for the sake of understanding that situation more clearly. The car’s windows cut off external vision on the spot and the projection system crammed layers of lights and shadows inside the car.

After the viewpoint was adjusted, Luo Nan found himself seemingly back within that period of crisis.

The angle towards the direction of the epicenter was perfect according to when he was pulling Xie Junping. When the shockwave hit, flames erupted between skyscrapers and the air vibrated like water...... Then, things became like they are now.

Luo Nan’s eyes jumped all over and he sent another order and braced himself. He let the recording rewind backwards. He could see every frame packed with color and interlinked to form a complete chain. He couldn’t find any flaw at all.

Luo Nan replayed the recording node to the time when Xie Junping was standing on top of the car. The result was no different.

He stopped wasting time and opened up his notebook and pondered for a bit. The digital pen dragged on top of the flexible e-ink screen, sketching various shades of exquisite lines.

The lines overlapped to construct an outline very quickly.

It was a vague blob of an image that possessed a slightly humanoid shape, yet there were several inhuman signs to it. Its limbs were bent, stretched, and unrestrained. It seemed to merge into the shadowy background. It was impossible to see its face even though its head was composed of a few dozen or so intertwined drawn lines. It also oozed with a ruthless and sinister flavor.

Luo Nan paused his pen and thought. Then he performed a slight modification. The outer area of the shadow warped more fiercely under a somewhat excessive stroke. It was as if the shadow was burning up.

A demon of hell was simply drawn in this manner. Its body was wrapped in dark and poisonous flames as it arrived on earth.

Luo Nan personally looked over the slightly illuminated flexible screen. His heart actually faintly palpitated. It was as if the burning wraith was about to leap forth from the flexible e-ink screen at the next moment.

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