Chapter 5: Formatting Theory (2/2)
Xie Junping gave Luo Nan a bow and jogged to board the shuttle. Soon the shuttle soared into the air, directly piercing the depths of the sky.
Tranquility was returned to the landing platform. Luo Nan took a few deep breaths, straightened his back, extended his arm forward, and grabbed the performance drink on top of the control panel. But this single action costed nearly all his strength. He leaned back heavily.
He took a deep breath and spoke softly: “Close doors.”
The Phantom’s vertical doors folded and closed, forming a seal on the car’s empty space.
Luo Nan didn’t need to sit in the cockpit, all he needed was to set up the route to the school. The Phantom was a highly intelligent flying car, obviously it could take him to his destination.
But Luo Nan gave an order that had nothing to do with his school:
“Return trip!”
The flying car turned around, entering in a path automatically. Luo Nan continued to use voice control to open the makeup mirrors.
The AI spouted out a fine mist of water in a human-like fashion and the luke-warm steam of water was thrown on Luo Nan’s face. What should have been a comfortable sensation was instead like countless sharp blades scraping across Luo Nan’s face. It was so much that Luo Nan’s entire body began to twitch.
He saw an ashened face that lacked life in the mirror, simply like that of an incurable patient at the terminal stages of his disease.
Luo Nan pulled back the corners of his mouth as he tried to twist open the drink, but his fingers lacked the strength. They ached and they pained. He failed five-to-six times before he succeeded.
He fished out a military energy bar from his pocket and ripped apart the packaging. He swallowed all of the energy bar with the drink down to his belly. His entire self even trembled a few times, yet there was a certain warmth that expanded from his belly to the limbs and bones of his body.
His sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous system worked in tandem following the consumption of the foreign nutrients. His digestive and blood circulation system worked in opposition to maintain harmony, causing energy to rapidly permeate through every organ and muscle tissue of his body.
This was a basic mechanism of the operation of the human body that was ingrained in the foundation of the skeletal and fleshly body. This modern feature was formed from countless generations of hereditary evolution.
However Luo Nan’s operational mechanism’s ingestion and digestion efficiency actually exceeded other people’s efficiency by five to tenfold. The color of his face in the mirror rapidly took for a better turn. His appearance became the same as normal in a short few seconds.
This efficiency came from his five years of following his grandfather’s related theories and painful fruits of research.
The core concept behind his grandfather’s theory was called “Formatting”.
This theory’s system could be described approximately as a primitive notion. Taking heaven and earth, taking the universe, all living beings in the world could be approximately divided into three levels:
The self, society, and heaven and earth.
There was a special ‘format’ at each layer to convey the core content of one’s existence, operation, and birth & death. Complicated effects and interactions happened constantly amidst each layer.
His grandfather’s deep, dense, and profound theory was not something that could be understood by relying on experiments and recordings. It was far from what a person his age was capable of.
He could only concentrate on the basics at this time, on the adjustments and molding of “self-formatting”.
“Self-Formatting” was the core of his grandfather’s theory, a necessary “Permanent Evolution”. This was the cornerstone of Societal Formatting that could bear the weight of heaven and earth.
To realize and awaken the hidden potential of the human body, to possess supernatural strength. This was the basic premise of evolution.
Luo Nan followed his grandfather’s records of experiments over the course of five years for this reason. He utilized the stimulation of drugs to progressively remold his own nervous system. This was the axis which influenced every organ in the body, adjusting their operational mechanisms for the sake of forming fundamental changes.
Luo Nan was still only in the early stages of self-formatting at the moment; this stage was recorded by his grandfather as the Vessel. The main purpose of this stage was to harmonize all the body’s organs and systems for digesting and extracting nutrients from food. The body then stocked and stored the energy, even nurturing the mind…… It allowed for a person’s basic functions to progressively adapt to the new environment and create the appropriate reaction.
Luo Nan gradually began to possess a few abilities after forming the basic structure of the Vessel. For example, his digestive, absorptive, and recovery capabilities was strengthened to be an “Appetite King”. And his mental communication is similar to that of a Hypnosis Master. He had used this ability to order the crow before. Today he had used it on Xie Junping. The results were quite decent.
Of course, these abilities were only the icing on a cake. The true value still lied in the fundamental modifications to his body from self-formating.
And accordingly, any elements that could influence his self-formatting and damage the structure of his existing Vessel can’t be taken lightly.
Luo Nan watched buildings and pedestrians rapidly zoom by outside the car window. His eyebrows were fixed from beginning to end. Finally, a notice popped out from the car’s AI: “The magnetic rail ahead has been damaged. Changing routes now.”
The flying car had arrived at the broken part of the overpass right now. There was still a short distance to the location where Luo Nan and Xie Junping had been in danger. However, the area ahead was blocked off. And there was a pile of media reporters who rushed to get here. It would be very difficult to get any closer.
The earthquake had affected approximately the entire area of the overpass.
Looking from ontop of the bridge to the west, one could see a palpitating dilapidated whether it be through the naked eye or by the rendering of a car’s AI. There were two collapsed hundred-story skyscrapers engraved in ruin with rising dust near the epicenter of the “earthquake”. Swaying flames also invaded the turbid fog. It was simply a missile-cleansing scene reconstructed from a page of a Third War biography.
And to the east of the overpass, one could see the majority of the metropolis displaying it’s flourishing nature.
An extraordinary powerful impact with a limited range…… Luo Nan could only sneer if this was an earthquake.
His upper body erected straight. His vision was cast through the window to the ruins in the distance, combining with the scene of the environment. The order of events flashed back in his mind.
He sent out another order to fish out an image automatically recorded by the car’s AI. He had to sigh a breath in admiration at how high end the Phantom was. All angles were recorded in high definition, conserving the details to the utmost limit.
Luo Nan selected the time when he and Xie Jieping were hanging off the broken overpass, to when they had a moment of reprieve from the crisis and when the sound shockwave exploded over, nearly damning them beyond redemption.
Luo Lan started up the virtual mode function for the sake of understanding that situation more clearly. The car’s windows cut off external vision on the spot and the projection system crammed layers of lights and shadows inside the car.
After the viewpoint was adjusted, Luo Nan found himself seemingly back within that period of crisis.
The angle towards the direction of the epicenter was perfect according to when he was pulling Xie Junping. When the shockwave hit, flames erupted between skyscrapers and the air vibrated like water…… Then, things became like they are now.
Luo Nan’s eyes jumped all over and he sent another order and braced himself. He let the recording rewind backwards. He could see every frame packed with color and interlinked to form a complete chain. He couldn’t find any flaw at all.
Luo Nan replayed the recording node to the time when Xie Junping was standing on top of the car. The result was no different.
He stopped wasting time and opened up his notebook and pondered for a bit. The digital pen dragged on top of the flexible e-ink screen, sketching various shades of exquisite lines.
The lines overlapped to construct an outline very quickly.
It was a vague blob of an image that possessed a slightly humanoid shape, yet there were several inhuman signs to it. Its limbs were bent, stretched, and unrestrained. It seemed to merge into the shadowy background. It was impossible to see its face even though its head was composed of a few dozen or so intertwined drawn lines. It also oozed with a ruthless and sinister flavor.
Luo Nan paused his pen and thought. Then he performed a slight modification. The outer area of the shadow warped more fiercely under a somewhat excessive stroke. It was as if the shadow was burning up.
A demon of hell was simply drawn in this manner. Its body was wrapped in dark and poisonous flames as it arrived on earth.
Luo Nan personally looked over the slightly illuminated flexible screen. His heart actually faintly palpitated. It was as if the burning wraith was about to leap forth from the flexible e-ink screen at the next moment.