Chapter 104 — A Stranger Meets a Strange Sphere

The sphere seemed to freeze for a moment at Gao Song's words—though there was really no way to tell, since it was just a bare, smooth metal ball with no face, no expressions, not even any bodily movement; when it hovered motionless in midair, you could not even tell whether it was listening. But it did wait a full two seconds of silence before answering: "Isn't that obvious? I was hauled here from somewhere else, so of course I'm not from your planet!"

"You know that's not what I mean," Gao Yang said, utterly unmoved. "You must have come from somewhere much farther away—so far, in fact, that mere distance hardly does justice to a thinking, talking metal sphere that can emit strange energy fluctuations and control both magic and metal. I've never heard of any such bizarre race existing in this world."

"That's because you haven't seen enough of the world," the sphere said, its tone seemingly mocking. "These past two days I've learned about you people from that human who calls himself a druid. It seems you've been through a great decline and are now incredibly backward. So how much can you possibly see in a single lifetime? With only those human eyes and word-of-mouth as your means of passing on information, there's so little you could ever witness in a whole lifetime..."

Hearing this, Gao Yang felt three parts more certain in his heart.

The sphere was right. In this era, in this world, the vast majority of people were indeed "blindfolded." The scarcity and chaos of information channels, combined with a fragmented feudal order, made it hard for anyone to encounter or gather new information. Only a handful of high nobles, great mages, and great knights took any interest in the world outside. Everyone else—including landed nobles like Viscount Andrew of Tamsan Township—kept themselves sealed off and closed in. As for a peasant who toiled facing the earth and turning his back to the sky, the sum total of new things he might encounter in his entire life amounted to no more than the information in a few newspapers. So if Gao Yang had been one of those "blindfolded" men, then judging a sphere to be a visitor from beyond the heavens solely on the basis of "I've never seen anything like it" would indeed have looked ridiculous.

But the real Gao Heng was not blindfolded—he had, in fact, watched this world evolve with his eyes wide open for countless years. He had been watching since before the monkeys on this continent could even walk upright. He could not see the other continents, true, but no matter how isolated or bizarre the lifeforms of those other continents might be, they would not evolve an alloy sphere out of a pile of carbon-based creatures!

Unless there really was some cheat-like race outside Gao Yang's field of vision that had rapidly teched up to some kind of superluminal-tier technology, built an alloy-shelled, anti-gravity-hovering, strong-AI contraption, and then that contraption had somehow drifted into the Loren Continent a thousand years ago and been captured by those Gondorian mages... Rather than believe such a thing, Gao Yang would sooner believe that Amber would return the pocket watch she'd stolen from the neighboring Viscount Andrew's steward.

So he smiled, walked up to the sphere, and pressed his hand against its surface.

The sphere immediately shrieked: "Hey, hey, what are you doing!? Don't go flying into a rage and taking it out on me! Otherwise I'll—"

The sphere got stuck halfway through its sentence, because Gao Yang had used magical resonance to send a sentence directly into its mind (did a sphere really have such a thing?): "Don't you think you're a little too different in style from every living thing in this world?"

The sphere fell silent for a few seconds, then answered in the same magical-resonance way: "...If you want to talk, just talk. Why the mystery?"

"Because I know there are some things you might not want others to know," Gao Yi said with a smile. "So you can tell just me."

"But I don't want you to know either!"

Gao Heng was unmoved: "Where exactly do you come from? How did you end up in this world? And how long have you been here?"

The sphere feigned ignorance on purpose: "I don't even understand what you're saying. Isn't your imagination a little too overactive?"

"Alas, I appreciate your effort, but I have to say, that fresh and refined look of yours makes it impossible for you to hide. Besides, you've underestimated the body of knowledge I command. Did that druid named Pi Yun ever mention to you that although most people in this territory were born after the decline of civilization, the lord here—that is, me—actually came back to life from the golden age of civilization seven hundred years ago? And that I'm also a naturalist."

The sphere went completely silent this time. Clearly, that druid with as little a filter as Amber had mentioned it.

Relying on a transmigrator's broad outlook and the intelligence currently at his disposal, Gao Yang could almost assert that this sphere was a visitor from another realm. He merely could not determine whether it had crossed worlds the way he had, or had simply come from another planet. Either way, this unlucky fellow was definitely the unluckiest kind of transmigrator: its style was just too different from everyone else's...

Which was awkward—at least two hundred times more awkward than the cliché of transmigrating with black hair and black eyes and being taken for a demon's child: how do you keep a straight face while wearing the august visage of an alien creature and convincing people you hail from some mysterious, distant eastern kingdom?

For his own safety, and because he still did not know the sphere's true background, Gao Heng could not tell it outright that he too was a transmigrator. But he had plenty of other identities to bluff with: a naturalist from the advanced society of seven hundred years ago. That identity should make it much easier to deal with this sphere than acting like one of those "closed-minded, ignorant natives."

"Think it over. Your secret may not be as important as you imagine," Gao Yang said, softening his tone. "I'm not some fanatical religious zealot, nor one of those mages who studied you a thousand years ago, so I don't care whether you're a visitor from another realm. I won't invoke the name of some god to purify you, and I won't take a pile of metalworking tools and start drilling holes in you. I only want to have a proper talk with you—partly to satisfy my own curiosity, and partly to find a way to help you.

"You must realize you have almost nowhere to go. Beyond the mountains lies a wasteland, and the wasteland is full of the kind of monsters you saw a couple of days ago. To the north is a feudal kingdom in the wake of civilizational decline, where ninety-nine percent of the people are more stubborn, extreme, superstitious, and unreasonable than I am. You can only stay here—so why not become friends with us?

"Of course, if you're still suspicious, I can let you leave. You're welcome to go see the human kingdoms or the country south of the mountains. But I can hardly guarantee you'll come back alive, and besides..."

"I can't remember either." Amid the magical resonance, the sphere suddenly cut Gao Song off with a voice that carried a metallic tremolo.

Gao Yang blinked, and only then realized that the other party was cooperating with him. He quickly reined in his excitement and asked with curiosity, "You can't remember?"