106 Desert: Three People's Turn
113.
On this day, all the ninjas gained a new understanding of the breadth of their leader's heart.
However, before Aria's days of domineering in the base had even passed the next day, Mr. Qi's test came.
"Find me an altar..." Lei Xiaogu changed into his luxurious robes again. He looked paler than when they met this morning. Perhaps Mr. Qi, unknown to the farmer, was also suffering from insomnia. "Ancient books record such a place. As long as you offer a gemstone imbued with rainbow power to it, you can summon a weapon..."
"Isn't that where you get the Galaxy Sword?" The farmer was now truly puzzled. "Mr. Qi, although you usually like to post useless tasks, isn't this one too easy?"
This is what every farmer has to do.
However, this time it was Red Robin who stopped her, shaking his head to signal Aria that she didn't need to continue - so that they could leave here without having to fight a group of ninjas.
"But it feels really weird, giving me a mission I'm supposed to do anyway," Aria poked Red Robin as she stepped out of the ninja's apparent supervision. "It's like Batman giving you the task of eating every day."
As his footprints rustled in the desert, the farmer said weakly, "I really hope the altar will find us on its own, just like the mine did last time. That way, we won't have to go through so much trouble looking for it."
She had only meant to complain, but she hadn't expected Red Robin to suddenly smile with an ambiguous smile, which she quickly suppressed.
Aria blinked, vaguely sensing something was wrong: "...Huh?"
Red Robin looked at her calmly and said in a calm tone, "You're right."
Aria: “?”
Red Robin: "It really came to you."
Almost at the same time he finished speaking, the sand beneath his feet suddenly shook. Aria looked up instantly and saw that the yellow sand in front of her was flowing rapidly as if attracted by something. In the center of the vortex, three ancient pillars slowly emerged, and in the middle was a perfect hexagon made of stones.
Aria: "..."
Farmer: “Great!”
She took out the colorful fragments she had put in her backpack and rushed forward in a rather heroic manner, but was stopped by Red Robin: "Wait."
Tim Drake turned his head slowly, as if trying to come up with a reason that would convince the other party.
After brewing for a long time, it finally came out: "Have you seen Harry Potter?"
Aria:?
…
Although he didn't know what Red Robin was trying to do, out of trust in him - and some growing suspicion of Mr. Qi, the farmer agreed to give him the colorful fragments so that he could perform the sacrificial ceremony.
"I think it should work. If you can't, I'll try again." The farmer also demonstrated the action of holding it above his head: "Just hold it like this and walk in. You don't have to do anything else, and then the sword will fall into your hand... Don't look at me like that, it's really like this."
Red Robin: "Okay, sure, no problem."
Tim Drake stuffed something into Kara's hand and whispered a few words to her before cautiously lifting the strange stone and carefully approaching the center of the altar.
A huge suction force suddenly enveloped him, and Lei Xiaogu's face suddenly appeared the moment the colorful fragments left Drake's palm!
He felt as if his soul was being pulled, floating weightlessly—the world was spinning, and he and Lei Xiaogu felt like they were being thrown into the same washing machine, their entire figures being stretched longer and longer...
Seeing that the situation was not good, Aria tried to pull him up, but she was also sucked up and started spinning with him as if she had lost her gravity!
Kara was almost stunned by this unprecedented scene, but she reacted in the next microsecond and pushed away the ninjas who appeared like ghosts and tried to stop her. The Kryptonian girl was actually confident that she could knock this group of people into the stone wall and they would never get down, but considering that she had just seen these people not long ago, she still showed mercy.
The ninjas reacted quickly. They reorganized their formation and planned to surround the woman again like a receding tide, but before that, she found a way to knock everyone down at once.
…There was only a little space, but that was enough.
Kara-El held her breath and threw out the packet of powder Tim Drake had given her earlier.
The powder scattered in the air. Even though the ninjas covered their mouths and noses, they still couldn't resist the power of this unknown powder. Seeing them fall one after another, Kara quickly drew the hidden blade worn by the people nearby and threw it out with an astonishing initial velocity.
The hidden dagger struck the ominously glowing purple hilt with unerring precision, creating sparks in the air. Like a washing machine suddenly pressing the emergency brake, the three madly spinning people were spit out like garbage, each with stars in their eyes and dizziness.
——Among them, Aria was vomited the farthest. In her haste, Kara didn't even have time to check the extent of the threat posed by Regulus, and rushed straight towards the farmer.
"Aria!"
…
In what form does memory exist in the human body?
Are these things stored in the grooves on the surface of the brain, or are they attached to the soul in a more metaphysical sense?
Before this accident, even the world's top brain scientists could not give a definite answer to this question - after all, human beings' understanding of the body is far from enough to be able to use it freely.
But now, Tim Drake felt as if he had touched a corner of the unknown.
He trembled his fingers, trying to regain control of his body, but fragments of memories flooded into his mind as if they were forced into his head.
When people encounter unexpected shocks, they may experience short-term amnesia. The most important thing now is to organize these memories and quickly recover...
This time, Drake didn't fight the consciousness. He lay there, watching the water gradually spread up and the screen unfold.
A fairly simple combination lock.
Drake: ...
Perhaps he really had damaged his brain in that horrific accident just now, completely simulating his brain into a computer.
Fortunately, cracking the code wasn't a difficult task; he simply glanced at the clues and quickly typed in the code.
…
"What are you looking at?"
The image spread out like ripples, creating a momentary trance. When the water calmed down again, Tim Drake came to his senses and found himself sitting in front of a huge fish tank. The question he had just asked was so light that it seemed like an illusion.
The oxygen concentrator quietly emitted bubbles. Through the nearly transparent glass fish tank, light refracted into the water, illuminating everything inside like sunlight.
Neon fish and their companions frolic among the aquatic plants and forests. The light and shadows sway slightly with the waves, and it looks like they are slowly breathing as if they have life.
This should have been a scene that would gradually calm one's heart, but... why did he feel so cold?
Red Robin looked away, and the bright blue-green bands on the fish and the blood-burning tail left a momentary visual impression in his eyes. When that little impression faded, Tim Drake realized that the things in this fish tank were the additional colors he could see - except for the fish tank, almost everything here was white.
The walls, floors, tables, chairs, and even the ceiling maintain an absolutely uniform color. It is a holy and solemnity that makes one's breath stop. It is also a pure, inorganic white that is completely stripped of temperature.
...To put it more seriously, Red Robin even had the illusion that he was on an operating table - an unknown, silent dissection that would begin at any time was hanging over his head like the sword of Damocles.
The sound of blood flowing suddenly became unusually clear, and his heartbeat was amplified a bit. When Tim Drake realized this, he immediately subconsciously adjusted his breathing and forced himself to focus on more detailed issues in order to divert this uncomfortable pressure.
This place is particularly suffocating. Perhaps the designer of this room should take some psychology classes – the use of large areas of white can make people feel insecure, and staying in a completely white room for a long time may even cause claustrophobia and anxiety.
To combat the discomfort brought on by the vast expanse of white, Tim Drake returned his gaze to the fish tank. This time, his observation was more detailed than before. Apart from the algae swaying with the water flow, Tim Drake paid more attention to the fish that seemed to have no problems.
To be honest, their swimming is too regular.
Almost identical rhythm, mechanically precise steering, always maintaining a fixed spacing, and even the occasional pauses are strictly controlled at the same position.
Although he knew that small fish often moved in groups due to their inherent weakness, when he saw them swimming back and forth in a cycle every minute, Tim Drake still felt a strange feeling crawling up his spine.
One of the hallmarks of life is unpredictability, but these fish were anything but random; they moved in and out as if on a set routine—he'd better touch the tank and see if his actions would scatter the fish.
With that thought in mind, Red Robin did just that. He reached out and knocked on the fish tank, sending ripples across the surface. But even as the world before them trembled ever so slightly, the fish maintained their rigid, programmed order, unmoved, continuing their unwavering pace of one minute back and forth from one end of the tank to the other.
Tim Drake: ...Okay, now he's sure the fish is fake too.
Maybe this was also part of Lei Xiaogu's trick. This time he was one step behind, and no one expected that he had such a backup plan... Maybe he was right this time - why do his words always come true in strange places, and now it has become a children's movie - that Galaxy Sword might really be something like a door key, and he has now been teleported to this terrible room by the Demon Head.
But the most urgent thing now is to find a way out of here. I don't know what's going on with Aria and Kara. I hope Kara used the things I gave her earlier... He should have added some head protection to that suit, otherwise he almost broke the most useful part of his body.
Tim Drake's thoughts were a bit chaotic, and he was merciless in his self-criticism. However, despite his complaints, he remained extremely rigorous when drawing up his plans, and the all-white walls around him just served as his draft paper.
Lei Xiaogu must have installed surveillance cameras here to monitor his every word and action. If Talia hadn't been discovered and secretly helped them, perhaps he could have made another deal with her through the surveillance.
Lei Xiaogu's purpose is now very clear - he wants the farmer, not to recruit him, but to covet Aria's immortality.
The energy of the Lazarus Pool will eventually be exhausted. In fact, based on his observations and the intelligence he has collected in the past few days, most of the springs will dry up within the next two hundred years.
It is absolutely impossible for a person who has held power for hundreds of years to restrain his ambitions and minions in the next two hundred years. The most terrifying thing that Tim Drake can imagine and that Lars can do is probably to exchange bodies with Aria.
Although it is unknown where he stole the power of the system that part of the farmer relied on, it is obvious that this power will last longer than the pool water. When he occupied the farmer's body, this power would be completely at his disposal.
...So the solution to all problems came to one end - he had to get out of this room first.
Tim Drake reached for his tool belt, but not surprisingly, he couldn't find it. Furthermore, his mask had been removed, and his suit had been changed. Red Robin searched the room for any tools he could use, but still found nothing.
Red Robin: "..."
Just as he was brainstorming about how to disassemble the items at the scene so that they could be used as tools, the female voice came again, but this time the voice was extremely clear, so clear that he could no longer convince himself that it was an illusion.
"What are you looking at?"
A gentle, motherly question rang out from a corner of the house, almost making people want to answer it subconsciously.
But Tim Drake pursed his lips and remained silent in response to this strange and sudden question.
…That wasn't his mother, and even her voice didn't sound like any woman he knew.
However, even if he chose not to answer the woman, a voice still popped out of his body, with a familiar hint of joy and pleasure: "I'm looking at the fish in the fish tank. Do you think they are delicious?"
Tim Drake's already nervous mood plummeted after he recognized who it was.
——It was Aria’s voice, but she sounded younger.
The good news is that perhaps Lei Xiaogu hasn't had time to perform the body-swapping ceremony with the farmer.
The bad news is that his consciousness now seems to be trapped in the other person's consciousness.
The voice undoubtedly laughed, and it was precisely because of this laugh that broke the rules that Tim Drake realized the other party's non-human identity - although the person who created her had made her voice close to that of a human, he still caught a hint of the abrupt turn of artificial intelligence in the laughter.
"Haha, those are mechanical ornamental fish. I'm afraid they won't satisfy your imagination of fish food, but I recommend you try the cafeteria's supply today. After checking, I found that some of the food today has been added with imitation fish seasonings."
She read out a string of numbers, perhaps the number representing Aria, and then a rectangular shape of light was faintly outlined in a corner of the white room.
"Please come this way," the AI said gently. "You are the 10,001st candidate for the Pioneer Program. In human culture, drawing a specific number often carries special meaning. Perhaps this means you are one in a million..."
After realizing that his body did not belong to him, Tim Drake found that he was losing control of this body. Under the influence of another will, it was walking towards the door at a faster speed: "I guess you said the same thing to the 10,000th one..."
Bang!
As Red Robin stepped inside, a flash of white light appeared, and he plummeted downwards as if being thrown into a bungee jumping device. His consciousness was pulled by an unprecedented gravity, and after reaching a certain point...
He woke up in reality.
"Are you awake?" There were two heads touching each other above his head, one of them was Kara, and the other... why did the other face look so familiar.
Oh, it turned out to be his own face.
Tim Drake closed his eyes. Although he didn't feel any pain, his head was indeed broken.
"Red Robin!" Seeing that he closed his eyes again, "he" reached out and grabbed Red Robin's collar quite rudely, shaking him repeatedly as if he wanted to shake his brains out.
"Hurry up, get up! Don't close your eyes, my body doesn't feel any pain at all!" Tim Drake's very handsome face turned a little ferocious at this moment: "If you don't run away and get caught by the old man, you will have to use his body!"
Aria's angry voice quickly brought Red Robin back to reality. He quickly turned over and jumped up, but because he was not in sync with his body, he almost failed to complete the action.
…He swapped bodies with the farmer.
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