Chapter 27

Translator: Nyoi-Bo Studio Editor: Nyoi-Bo Studio

Zhang Heng felt relief after that. He kept feeling that something was off as soon as the two of them had met. However, due to the influence of the Marker, some details in his mind were sealed away. As such, he was only able to sense, by instinct, that something wasn’t right, yet he was utterly unable to figure out what was wrong when he was trying to figure things out.

What felt wrong was that… Angelina was speaking Chinese the whole time.

That was what made him feel something was off, to begin with. She was a westerner, yet she was able to speak fluent Mandarin as if he was born in Huaxia. Furthermore, while she had impeccable command of Chinese, he realized that it shouldn’t also mean that the four behind her should be able to speak Chinese as well.

However, it was Angelina who was communicating with Zhang Heng the whole time, while the four behind them never found anything out of place, as if they were puppets, to begin with. That itself was absurd.

That was the greatest flaw in the trick the Marker played on him.

That flaw became even more glaring afterward, as Zhang Heng found himself unable to remember anything about those four at all, as if they had been some background characters of no importance in the first place. More importantly, he never realized that the behaviors of those four were out of place, as if the four of them were never there, to begin with. It was only when he recalled that there were four more of them around, and then turn his head around, that he would find the four standing behind him without making a sound.

However, while such flaws should have been easily detectable, Zhang Heng could only feel that something was vaguely off due to the Marker’s influence. It felt as if he was in a dream, keeping him from figuring out and discovering things with logic like how normal people would.

It was just like how people could barely realize they were dreaming, while they were dreaming.

What snapped Zhang Heng out of the trance was the greatest oversight from the Marker—it didn’t realize that his right eye had been modified by the Dimensional Star, that he had long had the ability to see in complete darkness. When he stared into the training ground for simulating space combat, he saw only darkness through the glass and nothing else. It was then that he truly realized something.

He had been put under the Marker’s spell right after he arrived at the plane.

He felt himself going limp at that thought. The Marker had laid two traps for him, with the first trap being his initial encounter with Angelina, where she told him that there was still a safe haven to be found in the base. Regular folks would have most likely agreed to stay behind. They were in a terrifying world filled with necromorphs after all, and a place devoid of danger and filled with an endless supply of food would feel like heaven.

It was too bad that the Marker couldn’t recognize that Zhang Heng wasn’t a human from that plane, and, as such, that trap didn’t work.

The second trap came in the form of Angelina’s seduction, later. It was fortunate that Zhang Heng was able to resist and keep his guard up against her the whole time, or he would have only fallen deeper and deeper into the illusion of the Marker, eventually leading to the collapse of his mental defense, going crazy and killing himself.

In that case, the peculiar phenomenon of him running into a huge number of necromorphs when he first came to the plane, yet seeing none of the necromorphs around as soon as he met Angelina, could be easily and completely explained.

Zhang Heng was only in a dream the whole time. Be it that particular necromorph from before or the octopus that was able to squeeze itself into the ventilation ducts, everything had been a dream and none of them existed.

The necromorphs had all been absorbed by the Blood Moon, and the entire planet had long been rendered a dead piece of rock devoid of life.

It was fortunate that, while the Marker had the ability to induce hallucinations and even make people kill themselves, its intelligence was nowhere near that of humans. While it could enthrall humans with illusory traps, said traps couldn’t be made completely flawless.

That fact was made very clear with Angelina’s example. While her design looked strikingly real, the Marker was unable to enhance her effect on him after designing her, and make the other four men just as lifelike as well. As such, the four western men simply behaved like puppets, devoid of any sense of presence.

Zhang Heng peered into the training ground after clearing his mind out. He then found the space beyond the glass to be bright as day, instead of being pitch-black.

A huge spherical plaza sprawled before his eyes outside the glass, yet the top of the training ground had been opened by some unknown entity, making it lose its weightless state completely.

Sunlight shone into the deepest depths of that training ground through that opening at the top. The bottom was in ruins and there were even weed-like plants found around the place. If there was anything that stood out, it was the huge artificial construct about five meters in diameter that remained standing in the ruins.

The design of that construct was very eerie, as it seemed to be formed by two very thick and long strands twisted around one another in a helical shape. Zhang Heng could see some weird runes that he had never seen on the strands, and those were definitely not scripts that originated from Earth.

Zhang Heng couldn’t help but burst out laughing when he saw that eerie construct, for that construct was the thing where the story of Dead Space unfolded.

That construct was none other than the Black Marker.

It was no wonder why he saw the training ground as pitch-black when he was in a trance before. That was because it was where the Black Marker lied, and it definitely couldn’t afford to have Zhang Heng find out that that was where it was, for its own safety. However, the Black Marker had probably never anticipated that the very protective measures it put in place to avoid having Zhang Heng find it, were precisely what enabled him to see through the illusions and shake off its mental control.

Zhang Heng became completely at ease as soon as he figured everything out. While the Black Marker had a measure of intellectual capacity, it wasn’t fully intelligent, not on the level of a human being. The Black Marker was simply too naïve when compared to the very complicated humans. The illusions that it designed relied completely on suppressing the intellectual thoughts of its victims. Such illusions, devoid of logic would have probably caused common people to go crazy or kill themselves, due to not being able to handle the strain of the illusions, yet those of stronger will would be able to resist such illusions.

That was why the main characters both in the games and the animations were able to maintain their sanity and eventually destroy the Black Marker single-handedly.

However, Zhang Heng’s initial plan to reach the bottom of the military base through the training ground was no doubt ruined. With the top side of the place opened, there was no way the training ground could still be weightless, despite the fact that the base’s energy supply was still intact. As such, Zhang Heng would have either needed to take the elevator or the stairs, to get to the bottom.

As such, Zhang Heng had to give up that initial plan and return to where that elevator was. However, he frowned all of a sudden when he located the elevator that could get him to the bottom. While he had located the elevator, he wasn’t given access to floors below the 100th floor.

He had no choice but to press the bottom saying 100th floor below ground, as he needed special access to go further below the 100th floor.

An English announcement was heard as the doors of the elevator gradually closed, with the message mostly asking the occupants to steady themselves and so on. A sense of freefall came all of a sudden, as the elevator descended at a breakneck speed of 45 meters per second.

Every single floor of the base was above four or five meters in height, which meant that 100 floors were over 500 meters tall. It would still take the elevator about two minutes to reach the 100th floor below ground, despite its speed.

Zhang Heng took the time to figure out his mission in the meantime and felt something was still off, nonetheless. While the mission appeared rather perilous, it actually seemed rather straightforward and simple. He wondered if the quest issued by the Dimensional Star that time around was only dangerous because of the illusions.

However, Zhang Heng quickly learned just how impossibly wrong he had been about things.

A thunderous rumble was heard coming from under his feet all of a sudden, as soon as he stepped out of the elevator. At the same time, a ringing sound came from somewhere far away, though the noise seemed somewhat off, somehow.

The ringing noise got increasingly close and the quake felt increasingly intense. Zhang Heng couldn’t help but pick his ears for a bit, feeling as if his ears had been stuffed with something that he was unable to see, making him feel very uncomfortable.

“The atmospheric pressure is rising?” Zhang Heng narrowed his gaze and thought for several seconds. He then jerked his head upwards, having realized something.

Right above his head was a ceiling made of alloys, which naturally meant that he was unable to see anything else. However, his expression was extremely troubled. He cursed under his breath and dropped the cautious attitude he had before, making a run for the stairway like there was no tomorrow.

He was still dressed in the security suit at the moment, which meant that his mobility far exceeded what it would have been otherwise, enabling him to leap over a dozen steps in a single leap. Furthermore, due to the cushioning provided by the suit, he was leaping over a dozen steps every second, enabling him to reach the next floor in just two seconds.

However, before he was able to get more than a few dozen floors further down, an earth-shattering rumble was heard somewhere. The entire base began to shake violently, as if a huge earthquake, more than a Level 12 on the Richter scale, just erupted.

The Blood Moon. It had to be the Blood Moon!

The entity referred to as the Blood Moon was a congregate formed out of countless creatures, formerly humans, from throughout the entire planet, brought about by the Markers. It had a diameter that measured hundreds of kilometers, making it at least the size of a dwarf planet. It was due to its unbelievable mass that it was able to affect the tides of Earth, which then triggered a mass extinction event throughout the entire planet.

But, then again, the Blood Moon, which was as huge as the moon of the Earth itself, would definitely not come to Earth on its own. The Blood Moon would only stay around in the Earth’s orbit like a satellite. One could also learn of the Blood Moon’s attacks from ‘Dead Space 3’—throwing down tentacles from space, which swept at everything on the ground like mountains.

Due to its sheer mass, the pressure from such an attack alone would be more than enough to slice through the Earth’s atmosphere, causing even entire continents to shake.

It became obvious that his attempt at approaching the Black Marker through the elevator triggered retaliation from the construct, so much so that it was willing to assume command of the Blood Moon to kill the intruder even if it meant destroying itself in the process, in an ironic attempt to protect itself.