Chapter Seventy-Two: Speculations on the Alternate Dimension

Holding onto the genetic serum was pointless for Gu Sha, so he decided to maximize its value. After a round of bargaining with Han Ze, he ultimately sold it in bulk to the Transcendent Association for thirty thousand corpse cores. Of course, Han Ze could only buy on credit for now. The bastion didn’t have many corpse cores left in reserve; most had already been given to Gu Sha, leaving only a few hundred. Gu Sha wasn’t worried that Han Ze would renege on the debt—after all, no one could get away with that when it came to his accounts; the price for such a betrayal was steep.

Besides, the frontlines outside the bastion were already ablaze with battle. All the heavy weapons from inside had been sent out; the defense was fierce, and with the intellect of those zombies and mutant beasts, there was no chance they’d simply retreat if they lost. Thirty thousand corpse cores could certainly be gathered in the course of such a war.

Han Ze actually wanted to ask Gu Sha about the mysterious staff with supernatural powers, but in the end, he didn’t. Nor did he press about whether Gu Sha knew how to harness genetic energy.

After discussing the current crisis facing the bastion with Han Ze for a while, Gu Sha left the Transcendent Association.

However, returning to Tianhu Community was no longer an option. The Association arranged new accommodations for him, but the circumstances were urgent, and there were no villas available—only a large flat in a high-rise building. It was bustling there; the whole block was packed with people, all family members of the bastion’s upper echelons, temporarily housed for safety.

Carrying a bone nearly a meter and a half long on his back, Gu Sha made his way upstairs, drawing many curious glances. His appearance was indeed bizarre: his clothes were scorched and tattered, his backpack was filthy, and a bone as thick as an arm protruded from it—a most eccentric spectacle.

Ignoring the stares, Gu Sha entered his room and quickly took a shower before turning his attention to the bone. He’d been running since morning into the dead of night, and these were his only two gains: learning of the secrets in Taihang Mountain and acquiring the beast king’s bone.

Gu Sha examined the bone. It was heavy—by rough estimate, no less than a hundred pounds, a burden for any ordinary person. Yet it still felt light in his hand, though perhaps just about manageable as a weapon.

What satisfied Gu Sha most was its material: the bone of a king beast, incomparably hard, far surpassing anything human technology could currently produce. Even chromium, the hardest known metal, couldn’t compare to the toughness of this bone. As for the residual inscription power it held, it wasn’t of much significance to Gu Sha, but it could serve as a hidden trump card.

Yet, gazing at the bone, a heaviness settled over Gu Sha’s heart. Its existence meant that king-level creatures already walked the earth. The apocalypse had only descended a little over a month ago, and even with his foresight, Gu Sha himself had only reached the ninth tier as a warrior. Among the mutant beasts, there was already a king-level creature—and crucially, this one was dead. That meant Bai Ziyu’s account of encountering a talking lion in Taihang Mountain must have been true.

King-level beings, save for others of their rank, were nearly impossible to kill with the world’s current power—unless one used nuclear weapons, which was clearly unrealistic.

“Nine-headed Lion!” Gu Sha recalled what Bai Ziyu had said, and a memory surfaced. In his previous life, a nine-headed lion had indeed appeared in Taihang Mountain, but that was nearly a decade into the apocalypse—a sovereign-level mutant beast whose rampage caused a great stir.

Gu Xiao, C City Bastion’s top expert, and the city’s sole Domain Lord, all participated in the campaign against the nine-headed lion. However, the battle escalated; many powerful mutant beasts joined the fray, sparking an unprecedented war. Domain Lords clashed for days, but in the end, the matter was left unresolved.

“Wait… something’s not right!” Suddenly, Gu Sha thought of Bai Ziyu’s words. Bai Ziyu described the divine realm he saw as a mountain range ten or even a hundred times larger than Taihang Mountain, hundreds or thousands of majestic peaks rising out of nowhere, an awe-inspiring sight, some soaring over a thousand zhang, like divine swords piercing the heavens!

At the time, Gu Sha merely admired Bai Ziyu’s eloquence, but now a realization struck him: this was still the early days of the apocalypse! Later, the earth continued to mutate and expand; before Gu Sha’s rebirth, official statistics showed that the planet’s surface area had increased dozens of times. In those years of mutation, towering mountains higher than Everest became commonplace. The Taihang Mountains, too, swelled, with many peaks soaring above ten thousand meters, and waterfalls thousands of meters high were common sights—but that was in the future.

At present, Taihang Mountain was still just Taihang Mountain.

Gu Sha’s pupils contracted in shock. “Could it be that the earth’s expansion in future years wasn’t a natural phenomenon caused by the so-called ‘world mutation,’ as the authorities claimed, but actually… something that existed all along?”

“Spatial overlap?”

Having survived twenty years of apocalypse and witnessed the era of great strife, Gu Sha believed nothing was impossible. According to Bai Ziyu, he had entered a divine realm. Linking this with the future changes in Taihang Mountain, Gu Sha felt Bai Ziyu hadn’t lied. It was just that what he entered wasn’t a divine realm, but another dimension connected to Taihang Mountain.

“If that’s so… then the so-called earth expansion in the future might actually be another dimension merging with earth, which makes more sense. But why didn’t the authorities make this public? What are they hiding?”

“If my suspicions about another dimension are correct, then if there’s a nine-headed lion there, there could naturally be people in other such dimensions as well.”

Gu Sha furrowed his brow, feeling as though he was close to the truth.

Meng Qingping and Gu Xiao—these two became legends of C City Bastion in the later days, their biographies well documented. But Meng Qingping arrived at C City a year later, and Gu Xiao five years later. Yet Han Ze didn’t know either of them now!

“Could it be… that they’re not from earth at all, but from another dimension? Then what does that make earth?”

Gu Sha’s brows knitted tighter. If his theory about other dimensions was correct, it would explain how king-level creatures had already appeared so early in the apocalypse.

But if so, then too many things were beyond control—like the early arrival of the corrosive rain, the disappearance of the third day of the second Crimson Descent, and Bai Ziyu and his organization, who should have emerged only years later.

“It seems my rebirth is more like a glimpse of the future seen at the moment of awakening my powers—but with far too many variables!”

(End of this chapter)