Right now, it seemed like only Jing Shu had the ability and the means to find the answer hidden deep beneath the withered tree roots. No one else could possibly dig through the dense, gnarled layers barehanded. Even the powerful Titan Python couldn't eat through those roots.
She normally didn't sweat in the cold mountain air, but now, huge drops were rolling down her forehead. The deeper the path went, the slower the man-eating bugs gnawed at the branches. The further down they chewed, the tougher and more flexible the wood became, forcing her to command every single bug to bite with all their strength until her mind throbbed from the effort.
The bright crimson sap grew thicker and thicker as they descended, darkening to a nearly black hue. It was stretching like threads of sticky syrup until it almost crystallized in the darkness of the root tunnels. Jing Shu didn't waste a single drop of the substance.
Every bit of that thick, stringy liquid was collected into her Cube Space as she pulled it through the silk. When the crystallization finally appeared, it marked the hard-won result of her entire night's struggle, and she practically collapsed from exhaustion against the cold bark.
Then came a sharp ding! that made her entire soul tremble in the silence. The man-eating bugs continued chewing through a thick, bark-like layer. After half an hour of relentless work, they finally managed to open a small crack. When the lead bug carrying its silken thread squeezed through and reached the glowing space beyond, Jing Shu finally saw what was hidden in the center of the mountain.
It looked like a vast starry sky, yet it was also like a black hole devouring everything around it. Several red-and-black crystals embedded in its core shone so brightly that her eyes hurt from the intensity of the light. The whole thing resembled a heart beating at the center of the dead tree, and she had a gut feeling that if she touched that black hole, she would be transported to another world entirely.
But at that very moment, everything near it began to disintegrate into fine dust. The man-eating bugs swelled, aged, and withered at a speed visible to the naked eye, as if they had lived for centuries in mere seconds of time. Then they decayed and turned into drifting ash, vanishing completely into the void. Even the bugs that had been raised with diluted Spirit Spring water couldn't resist the corruption of time. Within a single breath, they shriveled up and died. Their bodies became dust that was sucked into the black hole.
Even the silken thread that had remained intact for a century began to yellow and fray under the temporal pressure. Jing Shu didn't know how fast time flowed inside that black hole, but she knew one thing for sure: the red-and-black crystal, roughly the size of a fist, had to be hers.
Without hesitation, she sent a command through the silk thread and pulled the crystal straight into her Cube Space. She was fast, but she wasn't faster than time itself. The instant she touched it, she triggered the taboo. Though she was far away on the surface, her mind was still linked to the bugs through the silk, which became the medium of the backlash.
"Pfft—!"
A mouthful of blood burst out from her lips, staining her chin. At the same time, blood streamed from her ears, her nose, and her eyes. Her body was on the verge of exploding from the internal pressure. In the chaos of her mind, she heard furious roars echoing in her head—sounds filled with wrath and ancient resentment. Human ears could only perceive frequencies between 20 Hz and 20,000 Hz, but what she heard didn't belong to that range at all. The impact made her lose consciousness instantly as violent energy clashed inside her body.
Sensing the life-or-death crisis, the Cube Space finally reacted, breaking the ancient seal that had long been buried in dust.
Jing Shu fell into a deep coma, yet her consciousness returned to the place where the bugs had reached—the heart of the dead tree where the black hole pulsed with light. She couldn't see her own hands or feel her body. It was like she was dreaming, yet everything around her was crystal clear. Staring into that tiny black hole, countless bits of knowledge poured into her mind. She realized she had just brushed against the very edge between life and death.
Why? Because she had touched a taboo. She had touched the gate of the fourth dimension. She had nearly entered it and almost died for the attempt.
Everyone knew two-dimensional space was made of length and width, a flat plane. Three-dimensional space—the one humans lived in—added height. Everything we see has length, width, and height. So what was the fourth dimension? It was time: the dimension built atop three-dimensional space.
Every creature could sense the existence of the lower dimension but not control it. Take ants, for example. They live in what is essentially a two-dimensional plane, only moving forward, backward, left, or right. Even when one climbs up your leg, that height is just another flat plane to them. Humans, however, see it all as part of a three-dimensional world.
From the viewpoint of a four-dimensional being, a human life from birth to death would appear as a single line on the timeline. They could move forward or backward freely along it, while humans could only feel time passing without ever walking through it.
So why would touching the fourth dimension make Jing Shu's body explode? It's simple. Imagine a paper figure from a two-dimensional world suddenly pulled into the third dimension; it would collapse instantly. Without structural support from the missing dimension, its insides would be exposed and destroyed.
Jing Shu, a human from the third dimension, had recklessly touched the gate of the fourth. Lacking that extra-dimensional support, her body began to collapse, just like the man-eating bugs devoured by time.
But at the last second, the Cube Space upgraded and saved her life. Why could it save her? Because the Cube Space wasn't just a three-dimensional construct. It came from a sixth dimension or even higher. It gave her a point of support within the fourth dimension, the same way giving an ant awareness of height would let it perceive our world. For her, that meant being granted support in time. That must be why all that new knowledge flooded into her mind.
"So there really are fourth-dimensional beings," she murmured in her mind. "They are absorbing the time of every living thing on this mountain. But because of the difference in dimensions, they can only steal it indirectly. Just like humans can only perceive time passing but cannot move within it, they can only take time away from us this way."
All the knowledge Jing Shu received came from that higher being, but her three-dimensional mind could only comprehend part of it. Still, she understood one thing: at the moment she almost died, the Cube Space had saved her, repairing her body from within. When she later noticed that the crimson crystal she had collected had shrunk significantly, she figured it out. That crystal essence must have been used to provide the fourth-dimensional support she needed for the upgrade.
"If that's true," she thought, "then if I go back to that gate again, I won't die this time, right? I wonder what that red crystal really is. I only took the biggest one, and it sure sounded angry about it."
Her head throbbed painfully. Unable to stay awake any longer, she slipped back into unconsciousness. Meanwhile, the Cube Space began reshaping itself completely. After half a year of effort, it finally leveled up again.