Jing Shu had no idea why she always blacked out whenever her Cube Space underwent an upgrade. Was it truly necessary to knock her unconscious every single time? It felt like a flawed system. Why couldn't it just update online while she remained active? This forced shutdown was a massive waste of her time. She could have collected a significantly larger volume of black liquid if the space hadn't kicked her offline right at the peak of the harvest.
But then again, after reflecting on the sensation for a moment, the process did possess a certain internal logic. The upgrade of the Cube Space was likely akin to anesthesia before a major surgery. It had to knock her out before cracking her skull open to install the new parameters, only allowing her to wake up once the operation was complete.
If there were no anesthesia, the sheer intensity of the pain would probably kill her.
Her thoughts blurred as the dizziness deepened into a dark, swirling vortex. Her head throbbed with a rhythmic heat. Sweat poured down her face, stinging her eyes, and she felt as if thousands of microscopic bugs were gnawing on the very fibers of her brain.
This pain was more visceral than anything she had ever experienced before.
"It hurts so bad!" she groaned, her voice barely a whisper against the mud.
Still, before her consciousness flickered out completely, she managed to catch one last glimpse of the Cube Space. Nearly a full cubic meter of the black liquid was already stored within the shimmering grid. She allowed a small, satisfied smile to touch her lips. Then, her eyes rolled back into her head and she passed out cold, her body collapsing into the damp, receptive earth of the muddy pit. Within minutes, the slow churn of the mud swallowed her whole.
What she didn't know was that a massive, world-shaking event was unfolding at that very moment.
The army of bugs tied to her silk threads was still plunging nonstop into the black liquid. They had completely lost contact with her, so naturally, they were no longer sending any more liquid into the Cube Space through her direct will.
Under normal circumstances, nothing could enter the Cube Space without her explicit command. But now, the entire space was humming and thrumming with an autonomous excitement, releasing bursts of pure, predatory joy. The silk threads that sank deep into the black liquid began to dissolve into shimmering particles. The liquid itself began to vanish at a speed visible to the naked eye, drawn in by a vacuum that didn't require her conscious permission.
Just a moment ago, Jing Shu had tried to collect that same liquid and failed repeatedly. Now, while she lay unconscious, the Cube Space was absorbing it on its own.
At the same time, the black hole let out a furious, ear-piercing roar that vibrated through the crust of the earth. Every living creature in the Tianshan Mountains trembled in terror. Even Xiao Wei's gastropods huddled together in their dark tunnels, shaking uncontrollably as their instincts screamed of a predator they couldn't see. Xiao Wei herself felt a deep unease, though she couldn't identify the source. A voice full of rage and fear echoed in her mind, sounding like a tortured soul crying out in terminal pain.
The sound was so strange that it instantly killed almost all the nearby bugs that had just finished feeding. Humans couldn't hear it. It wasn't a frequency within the range of human hearing, so the villagers had no idea that something this terrifying was happening right beneath their feet.
In truth, when a person plucks an eggplant from its stem, it screams thirty-seven times. It's just that its cries vibrate at a frequency human ears can't detect. Humans are simply not tuned to the same channel.
This was a war between dimensions.
Just as a two-dimensional ant could never hope to fight against a three-dimensional human, beings from lower dimensions could not possibly resist those from higher ones. Normally, different dimensions didn't interfere with one another. But ever since the apocalypse began, everything had gone haywire. Dimensions had started colliding and overlapping in a chaotic mess of physics.
The crimson liquid Jing Shu had encountered before was a product of the fourth dimension. No one knew how many dimensions the black liquid had originated from. Inside the black hole, they were like fat sheep, being devoured by the starving wolf that was her Cube Space.
Only when the Cube Space finally let out a satisfied, metaphysical burp did the screaming fall quiet again.
The ground began to shake with renewed violence. The black hole roared, furious that half of what it had spent months collecting had been suddenly stolen by an unseen force.
The entire Tianshan range began to tremble. The rolling peaks twisted and turned, the rock faces grinding against each other as the earth swallowed every living thing nearby. The movement of the crust intensified, shaking loose the narrow valley where Jing Shu had been hiding. The area was now on the verge of collapsing completely, about to be devoured by the shifting earth itself.
And through it all, she remained unconscious, completely unaware of the global chaos she had caused.
Normally, the upgrades of her Cube Space only took a few hours before she woke up.
But this time, she had absorbed far too much of the black liquid. Even in her unconscious state, her head throbbed with an unbearable pressure, as if someone were hammering a spike into her skull without pause. The Cube Space kept running wildly, its internal energy churning and restructuring. She lay there in the freezing mud for two full days, completely out cold.
She didn't wake up until Xiao Dou led Li Dayou's team to find her and carry her back to the boat.
"My head hurts..." Jing Shu groaned as she finally drifted back to consciousness. Her eyelids felt as heavy as lead. She struggled to open her eyes just enough to see the familiar fabric of her tent on the ship. At least she was safe.
Outside the tent, Xiao Dou clucked loudly to alert the others that she was awake.
Normally, Jing Shu loved keeping clean, but now her cotton jacket and inner clothes were caked with layers of dried, grey mud. She felt a wave of disgust wash over her. Even the floor of the tent was filthy, looking as if she had dragged the entire mud pit in with her.
"So sleepy... it feels like I haven't slept in days," she mumbled to the empty air. Somehow, she forced herself into a sitting position and grabbed her phone. The time on the display made her blink in disbelief. She had been out for two whole days. No wonder she felt so exhausted. The drowsiness weighed on her like a heavy blanket. If it weren't for her intense curiosity about the upgraded Cube Space, she would have passed out again immediately.
Wang Dan rushed over with a cup of hot water. He began to scold her as soon as he entered. "Seriously, how could you just faint in such a dangerous place? If we hadn't found you in time, you would have been swept away before the rescue team even got here! You have no idea how crazy it got. Out of nowhere, that whole area went berserk. The waves expanded, and now our safe zone is only a few hundred meters wide. It's shrinking by the hour. I don't even know if rescue is still coming."
Jing Shu took a slow sip of the water, but the fatigue hit her too hard to respond. She dozed off again almost immediately.
Xiao Dou stayed faithfully by her side, acting as a loyal guard chicken and keeping watch day and night.
Even in her half-conscious state, she knew something was fundamentally different with her body. She had never been this tired before. It had to be a side effect of the upgrade—perhaps even a sign of a new ability awakening within her.
That sleep lasted another three or four days. When she finally woke up again, she realized the environment had changed; she was lying inside the plush interior of a luxury minibus. Still, she felt unbelievably sleepy.
"What is wrong with me?" she muttered, a flicker of panic rising in her chest. She wasn't hungry at all. In fact, she felt remarkably full, as if she had just finished a heavy meal. For someone like her, who was always starving and could eat endlessly, that wasn't definitely normal.
Fighting to stay awake, she opened her upgraded Cube Space.
The moment the mental map appeared, her breath caught in her throat. It was like stepping into another world entirely. The Cube Space had changed completely.
"This is... the third form of the Cube Space! The new ninth-tier Rubik's Cube! It's a full 9×9×9 grid. That's 729 cubic meters—217 cubic meters more than before!"
Overwhelmed by the rush of excitement, she promptly fainted again.
When she woke up three days later, she swore that this time, no matter what, she would properly explore her new Cube.