143: Antarctic ice wall

When the ion engine of the Fenrir snowmobile let out a final wail and died completely, Jiang Yuan knew he had arrived.

This wasn't due to a lack of fuel, nor was it a mechanical failure.

It was because the chemical reaction known as "combustion" was prohibited here.

The laws of thermodynamics became extremely feeble in this region; electrons no longer jumped, and energy was no longer conserved.

That vehicle, which represented the pinnacle of technology from Eternal Star City, now lay quietly on the non-existent "snow" like a pile of scrap metal.

Yes, it did not exist.

Jiang Yuan dismounted the motorcycle; his boots made no sound as they touched the ground.

Beneath his feet, there were no longer granular "cubic snowflakes," but a pure, smooth, featureless grayish-white plane.

It looked just like the default background color when creating a new canvas in Photoshop.

There was no friction, yet Jiang Yuan stood firmly.

This was because gravity here had turned into a strange vector that possessed only direction, but no acceleration.

"Zero."

Jiang Yuan tried to call out.

Dead silence.

The electronic female voice that had always accompanied him in his mind had vanished.

Not only was communication cut off, but even the bio-chip implanted in his cerebral cortex seemed to have entered a state of dormancy.

This was an absolute silence zone.

Jiang Yuan raised his head and looked forward.

At the end of that grayish-white void stood a wall—one capable of shattering the faith of all humanity.

If not seen with one's own eyes, human imagination, in its poverty, could never conceive of such a thing.

It was an ice wall.

But it was by no means just ice.

Its entire body radiated a heart-stopping, ghostly blue—the color one would see only after compressing the water from the deepest parts of the ocean a billion times over.

Its surface was smooth as a mirror, devoid of any ice ridges, cracks, or flaws, like a single, solid sapphire facet polished by the hands of a god.

It was too high.

Jiang Yuan tilted his head back until his neck reached its limit, yet he still could not see the top.

It pierced through the layer of clouds, which looked somewhat fake, stabbing straight into the firmament, perhaps even extending to the very end of the atmosphere to connect with the invisible void of space.

Estimated height: at least ten thousand meters.

That is, ten kilometers.

This was equivalent to slicing Mount Everest vertically and stretching the cross-section infinitely, laying it out before you.

And in the left and right directions, this ice wall was boundless.

It snaked along the horizon, stretching east and west until the end of one's line of sight, without a single break or gap.

It was like a giant ring, or rather, the rim of a massive bowl, trapping the entire world tightly within.

"Is this… the end of the Antarctic?"

Jiang Yuan stepped forward.

In this region where the laws of physics failed, walking became a strange experience.

There was no need to push off the ground; as long as he had the thought of "moving forward," his body would glide smoothly ahead.

He drifted like a ghost, floating to the foot of this magnificent Wall of Sighs.

Up close, the sense of oppression multiplied geometrically.

Standing before it, a human didn't even qualify as a speck of dust; at best, they were an insignificant bacterium.

Only then did Jiang Yuan see the true face of this "ice wall."

It was not a physical substance.

Although it looked like ice and emitted a chill, when you looked closely, you could see its interior flowing.

It was an extremely slow, viscous flow of energy.

Countless tiny, glowing runes (or perhaps data streams) flickered deep within the ice layer, maintaining the stability of this barrier.

Rather than an ice wall, it was more like a [High-Energy Materialized Barrier].

Jiang Yuan reached out his hand.

His fingertips stopped one centimeter away from the wall's surface.

There was an invisible repulsive field there.

A tingling, stinging sensation came from his fingertips—the feeling of atomic nuclei being forcibly repelled.

"Is this the so-called 'map boundary'?"

Jiang Yuan muttered to himself.

His gaze penetrated this semi-transparent, ghostly blue medium, attempting to see what lay behind the wall.

According to geographical common sense, passing through the South Pole, the other side should be another ocean, or the direction toward South America or Australia.

The Earth is round; it is a closed sphere, and theoretically, one could return to the starting point by walking in a straight line.

But at this moment.

Through this semi-transparent Wall of Sighs.

What Jiang Yuan saw was not the ocean, not land, nor the sky.

It was chaos.

An absolute, despair-inducing gray.

There was no light, no dark, no color, no shape, not even the concept of dimensions.

It was like the unrendered area outside of a game map.

Or the singularity state before the birth of the universe.

It was nothingness.

In that nothingness, erratic lines would occasionally flash by, or clusters of blurry, mosaic-like color blocks, much like the garbled code produced when a system crashes.

No matter could exist there.

If anyone were to break this wall now, they would likely fall instantly into that eternal void of no time or space, being completely deleted.

"Heh…"

"Hahahaha…"

Jiang Yuan suddenly laughed.

At the end of this dead-silent world, his laughter sounded exceptionally abrupt, carrying a sense of sorrow, as well as the arrogance of having expected this all along.

"So that's how it is."

"There is no global village."

"There is no azure planet."

"We have always… been locked inside a cage."

This wall, named "Antarctic," was in fact a "prison."

It was not built to protect humanity from external threats, but to prevent the "samples" inside from escaping and seeing the truth outside.

For thousands of years, countless navigators and explorers had tried to conquer this white continent.

Perhaps some had truly arrived here.

But most likely, they all died in that buffer zone where the laws of physics collapsed, or after seeing this wall of despair, they had their memories wiped by some force, or were even directly "recycled."

Only Jiang Yuan.

This "bug" with power surpassing the current level of civilization had forcefully exploited a system vulnerability to reach the front of this firewall.

He turned around, his back to the ten-thousand-meter-high ice wall.

Looking at the "world" before him—the one he had once lived in, enjoyed, and believed to be real.

At that moment, the world became so fake in his eyes.

The sun in the distance looked like a high-power incandescent bulb hanging in the sky.

The ground beneath his feet was like a flat plate with crude textures.

Even his own breathing felt so superfluous.

A massive, soul-devouring sense of loneliness washed over him.

This was not the loneliness of "being a stranger in a strange land."

This was the desolation one feels when discovering that you are the only conscious being in the entire world, and everyone else is an NPC.

"If this is the boundary…"

Jiang Yuan turned back around, facing the Wall of Sighs.

His eyes changed.

Those eyes, which had always carried a lazy smile, were now burning with two ghostly blue flames.

That was the sign of the Third-Order Gene Lock being pushed to its limit.

"Then let me see, what exactly is outside this cage—man or monster."

He slowly raised his right hand.

In his palm, no conventional thermal weapon appeared, nor did any known energy sphere.

This time.

What he summoned was the highest-clearance weapon from Eternal Star City.

A seemingly ordinary, pyramid-shaped crystal slowly manifested in his palm.

It was entirely transparent, yet inside it seemed to be sealed a miniature black hole, frantically devouring the surrounding light.

[Dimensional Interferometer · Reality Breaker]

"Since there is no door."

Jiang Yuan's voice was as cold as iron, each word striking the ice wall like a heavy hammer.

"Then I will smash one open."

He gripped the crystal, took a sudden step forward, and slammed it fiercely against that arrogant ice wall—the barrier that separated reality from illusion.

Hum—!!!

A low, humming sound, as if coming from the depths of the soul, suddenly erupted.

The surface of the wall, previously calm as a mirror, rippled violently the moment it made contact with the crystal, like the surface of water struck by a stone.

That indestructible, semi-transparent barrier began to shake violently.

In the chaotic nothingness behind the wall, something seemed to sense the intrusion and began to churn frantically.

A storm capable of overturning human cognition was about to erupt.