106: Chapter 106 Subspace is Not a No-Man's Land

The group walked for another stretch, and suddenly, Knife Cheng felt his shoulder lighten; the person behind him seemed to have taken their hand away.

Immediately after, his arm felt heavy, and the person in front of him had disappeared.

"Are we there yet?" Knife Cheng asked with a trembling voice.

However, no one responded. There was only the sound of whistling wind and a smell similar to soil actinomycetes.

Knife Cheng maintained his zombie-hopping posture for a long time. When no one responded to him, he finally dared to lift the satellite dish on his head slightly to peek through a gap.

His companions were all gone, leaving only him alone. Surrounded by an endless wheat field, the wheat ears were heavy and plump, but because he couldn't see the end of it or even a single furrow, it felt extremely eerie.

"Woe is me!" Knife Cheng collapsed to the ground. He knew he was lost in Warp, even though the surrounding environment seemed relatively safe and stable.

But there wouldn't be any gold, and no one would come to save him. He would stay here until he died of old age or went insane.

Holding onto a one-in-ten-million chance, Knife Cheng took out his dark. There shouldn't be any signal in Warp, but he had heard that the water replenishment military base had a base station. Warp didn't have real physical laws, so maybe he could connect.

By some stroke of luck amidst misfortune, he actually had one bar of signal. While making a call would be difficult, it was enough to send a text message.

Knife Cheng thought about it and decided to send it to his ex-wife, Eight-Eyes. Although their feelings were long gone, he hoped she would help him out, considering he was still paying child support every month.

"I was the one who bought you your phone. If you don't save me, do you even have a conscience?"

Heaven be praised, Eight-Eyes still cherished some old feelings and sent him a voice message.

"The gold has been found. That crazy old man has lost his mind; he killed everyone else and is now going to find you!"

"Never mind him, come and pick me up!"

Knife Cheng's own life was uncertain now; how could he care about the gold?

"Where are you?"

"I am under a strange cloud."

Then there was no reply. He didn't know if Eight-Eyes was speechless at him or was looking for that strange cloud.

...

What Knife Cheng didn't know was that his phone had a signal because the Empire had just established a secret outpost here, preparing to make contact with another faction within Warp.

Even this entire relatively stable region of Warp was created by that entity as a gesture of sincerity.

Although it was a relatively stable space, it was still Warp, and there was no lack of various bizarre effects.

When two soldiers wearing thick protective suits found Knife Cheng, he was holding a Nurgling and using it as a phone. One moment he was tapping away as if typing on a keyboard, and the next, he was holding the Nurgling to his ear as if making a call.

In just that short time, half of Knife Cheng's face had been corroded away. Fortunately, the outpost had special medicine, and one injection temporarily brought it under control.

The Imperial counter-intelligence personnel responsible for screening directly accessed Knife Cheng's actual identity from the shared consciousness. They found that while he appeared to be a social drifter, he was actually... no, he was an informant working for the "Yucai" Hive City Security Force.

"Execute," the screening officer ordered.

Perhaps Knife Cheng was a bit wronged, but it was also unlikely that he was truly innocent.

Even with his status as an informant, he shouldn't have appeared here. To protect the Empire's secrets, he had to be sacrificed.

Knife Cheng was still under the hallucinations of Warp's disorientation effect when he was dragged by two clone soldiers into an execution room. This sealed room was lined with psychic-breaking alloy on both the inside and outside to prevent the executed from turning into some unspeakable entity of Warp after death.

"Woe is me!"

Not until a cold gun barrel pressed against the back of his head did he wake up.

"One minute. You have one minute to leave your last words," said the executioner clone wearing a black mask.

"Once, there was a sincere love placed before me, but I did not cherish it... If I were given another chance, I would choose to install a cognitive filter on myself."

The executioner clone didn't know what he was talking about, but still chose to record Knife Cheng's last words and upload them to the shared consciousness.

"According to the Imperial Military Secrecy Act, you are hereby sentenced to death by firing squad until life is extinguished. Execute!"

The executioner clone pulled the trigger.

Click.

The bullet jammed. This wasn't surprising; this was Warp, and guns might have ideas of their own.

The executioner clone rotated the drum and pulled the trigger again.

Click.

The bullet jammed again.

Click, click, click.

"May the Omniscient and Almighty Entity above grant this child's soul ascension to the heavens, to return to the Throne of Thorns, where he may forever enjoy abundance, peace, and endless butter beer."

The chaplain praying for the death row inmate was still reciting his own improvised final rites, completely unaware that the executioner had jammed several times in a row.

"Something is wrong." The executioner clone had worked in Warp for quite a while, so he wasn't too surprised by such strange occurrences. Instead, he directly picked up the hand-cranked telephone nearby... Although Warp had wireless signals, they were easily hijacked by evil gods. Old-fashioned wired telephones were more reliable; at least when hijacked, you could hear very obvious, sharp static.

Cranking, cranking, cranking, ding-ding-ding; this was the hand-cranked power supply and rotary dialing.

"This is the Father's Forward Outpost Execution Room. Connect me to the Water Replenishment Position Aerial Transport Command Post."