288: Chapter 288 Containing Mount Sumeru in a Mustard Seed

Su Mingyuan placed the crystal on the experimental table and reached his hand inside again.

This time, he touched a bottle.

Porcelain, with an ice-cold feel, and the mouth of the bottle was sealed with a wooden cork.

He pulled the bottle out.

A white porcelain bottle, the height of a palm, exquisitely crafted, with a glaze as smooth as a mirror. Two small characters were carved on its body—Foundation Establishment.

Tao Zhe leaned over to sniff the mouth of the bottle, his brows suddenly furrowing as he hurriedly took a step back.

"A Medicinal Pill, and the concentration of spiritual energy it contains is extremely high."

Su Mingyuan placed the porcelain bottle next to the crystal and reached inside for the third time.

This time, he touched a rolled-up object.

It was soft, somewhat like paper yet not quite, with a texture closer to thin animal hide.

Pulling it out to take a look, it was a scroll.

After unrolling it, it was densely packed with writing. Su Mingyuan took a deep breath, forcefully suppressing the urge to open it up completely, and placed it on the other side of the Medicinal Pill first.

The fourth time.

He touched a heavy object, with a metallic texture and distinct edges.

Pulling it out—a metal ingot.

Silver-white, much heavier than steel of the same volume, with a faint luster on the surface.

The fifth time.

The sixth time.

...

The experimental table could no longer hold everything.

Su Mingyuan began placing the items on the open ground beside him.

The seventh, eighth, and ninth times—

His movements grew faster and faster.

With each item pulled out, the people in the laboratory fell a fraction more silent.

By the tenth-plus item, no one was exclaiming anymore—not because they did not want to, but because there was no time.

The shock from the previous item had not been digested yet before the next one came out.

The expressions of everyone turned into a numb blankness. Their cognitive framework was being dismantled piece by piece, but a new framework had yet to be built, and their minds remained blank.

Zhao Cheng sat in his chair, his glasses pushed up onto his forehead, holding his head with both hands as he stared blankly at the increasing number of items on the floor.

Zhang Dabiao had already walked in from the door, squatting on the ground. He reached out to touch a crystal, but pulled his hand back halfway.

Su Mingyuan dug around for about fifteen minutes.

His arm had reached its limit—his entire arm was submerged into the pouch, his shoulder almost touching the mouth of the pouch, and he could not reach any further inside.

But his fingertips could still touch things.

There were more deeper inside, but he could no longer reach them.

Su Mingyuan withdrew his hand and looked at the ground.

A large area of the experimental table and the floor was already covered.

He did not count the exact number of items, but by visual estimation, at least fifty or sixty things were scattered there.

Su Mingyuan looked down at the pouch in his hand.

It looked only about the size of a palm.

However, fifty or sixty items had just been pulled out, and several of those metal ingots together weighed at least tens of kilograms, yet the sense of weight of the pouch in his hand had not changed at all.

It was still thirty-seven grams.

Furthermore, there were even more things inside that had not been taken out.

Su Mingyuan thought for a moment.

Then he did an action that no one expected.

He turned the mouth of the pouch downwards and flipped it over.

Pouring it directly.

"Group Leader Su—"

Zhao Cheng subconsciously wanted to stop him.

But it was too late.

The items poured out in a torrent from the mouth of the pouch.

Swish-swish—

They did not fall out one by one; they surged out like pouring water.

Crystals, porcelain bottles, scrolls, metal ingots, fabrics, jars and cans, swords, jade boxes, pieces of Ore of various shapes—

Clattering and crashing onto the experimental table and the floor, colliding with each other to make crisp sounds.

When the crystal landed, it bounced twice and rolled to the feet of Zhao Cheng.

A scroll fell from mid-air, smashing onto a pile of crystals, unrolling a corner to reveal the densely packed text inside.

A long sword slid out from the mouth of the pouch—a sword body over three feet long, three times wider than the opening of the pouch, yet it slid out of the palm-width opening without any obstruction, smashing onto the ground with a clatter, the vibration of the sword body humming for several seconds.

Things were still pouring out.

More crystals—dozens of them, big and small, clattering onto the ground like a hailstorm.

More porcelain bottles—white, cyan, black, red, rolling all over the floor.

More scrolls—stacked together when falling from the mouth of the pouch, scattering into a pile on the floor.

A few Jade Slips—translucent white jade pieces, long and strip-shaped, engraved with extremely fine text and lines.

A jade pot—emerald green throughout, with liquid still sloshing inside when shaken.

A token—black, with the two characters "Yuling" engraved on the front and a set of unfamiliar runes on the back.

The more things were poured out, the more there were.

The floor could no longer hold them, and they began to spread outward.

The chair legs of Zhao Cheng were jammed by a few crystals that had rolled over. He stood up and took two steps back, stepping on a scroll and almost slipping.

Zhang Dabiao stood in place without moving, the items piled up to the edge of his boots. He lowered his head to look at a short knife by his feet; the scabbard of the short knife was inlaid with a thumb-sized red gem that flashed under the light.

Finally, when the very last item fell out from the mouth of the pouch.

Then, the laboratory became completely quiet.

The pouch was empty.

Su Mingyuan flipped the empty pouch over to look—with the mouth of the pouch facing down, nothing else fell out.

He placed the pouch on the only small vacant spot left on the experimental table.

Then he looked around.

The floor of the laboratory had disappeared.

To be precise, it was covered by things.

Crystals, porcelain bottles, scrolls, metal ingots, fabrics, swords, armor, bronze mirrors, wooden boxes, Jade Slips, jade pots, tokens, Ore, and some nameless things—covered the entire floor of the laboratory, extending all the way from the experimental table to the door, with some items even rolling out into the hallway outside the door.

A rough estimate—tens of thousands of items, or perhaps over ten thousand things.

All of these things had been poured out from a palm-sized pouch.

The laboratory fell into a silence for a moment, and after a long time, Zhang Dabiao was the first to speak.

"What the hell kind of pouch is this?"

This sentence voiced the inner thoughts of everyone present.

Tao Zhe ignored him and instead turned to look at Su Mingyuan.

"Group Leader Su."

"Speak."

The voice of Tao Zhe was steady, but the words he spoke were not.

"This pouch—within the cultivation system, it should be called a Storage Pouch."

The three words "Storage Pouch".

Su Mingyuan had seen it countless times in web novels.

Encompassing Mount Sumeru within a mustard seed.

A palm-sized space holding tens or hundreds of cubic meters of items.

Previously, he thought that was a setting made up by authors.

Just like Nascent Soul, Restriction, and spiritual energy—he used to think those were all made up too.

But Nascent Soul was real; he had seen the thirty-centimeter light spot on the instrument with his own eyes.

Restriction was also real; he had seen the nanoscale spiritual energy circuits being destroyed with his own eyes.

Now the Storage Pouch was real too, and he had personally poured over ten thousand items out of a palm-sized pouch.

Su Mingyuan stood amidst the "treasures" covering the floor, lowering his head to look at the lightweight empty pouch in his hand.

When it was holding hundreds of items earlier, it was thirty-seven grams; now that it was empty, it was still thirty-seven grams.

The weight had never changed.

What did this mean?

It meant that the internal space of this pouch and the physical rules of the external world were isolated.

The things inside did not produce any mass impact on the external world.

Spatial folding.

Mass shielding.

Internal and external isolation.

Pull out any one of these three items at random, and it would be enough to shake the physics community of the Main World for a decade.

All three combined—

Su Mingyuan did not think any further down.

He carefully placed the pouch on the experimental table and turned to look at Tao Zhe.

"Register and catalog all items, and test them one by one. Do not open the porcelain bottles first; wait for Sun Liang to come and identify them. Take high-definition photographs of the scrolls and Jade Slips and transmit them back to the Main World, having the Deep Blue Group and Tianheng find a way to decipher all the texts."

His speech speed returned to normal, no different from arranging work on ordinary days.

"This pouch—" He pointed to the grey-brown Storage Pouch on the experimental table, "is to be kept separately. SSS-level confidentiality. Before figuring out its spatial principles, do not mention its existence to anyone."