Before the catastrophe befell Earth….
The era of electronics had already arrived…
Whenever one was bored, or whenever one felt like passing so ti, the absolute first thought that would co to mind was…
The internet.
A marvelous place where one could find everything they were looking for…
However, the internet was a recent creation… many years before the internet ca to be, humans had already found many ways to entertain themselves.
Starting from the Royal ga of Ur in ancient sopotamia, and shifting to more long-lived gas like go or chess, humanity had always been incredibly precise and advanced when it ca to these ’gas’.
So people spent their lives trying to master even a single one of these gas, and so of them weren’t even able to do it… but even the best of the best fell back at the thought of facing off against a modern-day computer…
Chess… Go… Cards… these were all gas in which it was impossible to win against an artificial intelligence.
And what Hans was facing at the mont… was exactly what an expert player would feel in front of a computer…
The ’ga’ wasn’t so difficult… simply put, the barrier was covered in a frequency of mana waves that varied between all numbers from one to six digits.
There were about a couple dozen of these variations every second, and every single one of them seed to be completely random.
Trying to break through was surprisingly useless, he could tell without unleashing his strongest spell.
If he had to rely on guessing, Hans would have a chance of one in a million to find the right number, and he would have to guess right up to sixty tis a second as he crossed.
The barrier seed to be thick about one hundred ters, aning he would have to pass that distance as he changed his mana’s frequency dozens upon dozens of tis a second in order to access the internal zone of that flying castle …
Given that as soon as his mana sequence differentiated from the one the barrier displayed he would be imdiately kicked out of there, Hans had to find a different way to access the place…
’If I were to display all the frequencies… it would probably kick out whatever frequency there is, since for it to be recognized it has to be a single one… which ans… I’m only left with a single option…
If the barrier changed frequencies so many tis, and whatever made its way through had to change frequency just as many tis… it ant that there was a key… a code, maybe even an algorithm.
Sothing that would allow him to know what number would co next just by seeing the last few frequencies.
With that in mind, Hans pushed his hands against the array.
They were being repelled so many tis every second that the motion seed continuous as if there was a wall there.
But every ti… every hundredth of a second in which his hand entered the array… Hans could recognize and note down the sequence…
Initially, Hans could only recognize the frequencies once every couple of seconds, but the more he pushed the invisible barrier, the fewer frequencies escaped his senses.
As he counted the numbers trying to figure out a pattern, Hans could definitely tell that they weren’t random, but they instead followed a slowly growing algorithm, only… he couldn’t figure out which one.
499,989. 499,993. 499,996. 499,999. 500,002. 500,006. 500,011. 500,015. 500,020. 500,025. 500,028…
These were only a fraction of what Hans had to note down in his mind every second…
And yet, he still couldn’t figure out a precise pattern.
The frequency went up or down, adding or subtracting a number that varied from 1 to several thousand, but these numbers seed to not correlate with each other…
Hans was once again left clueless on how to approach this array’s chanism.
But when he was about to give up, Hans realized he didn’t have to understand the whole chanism, he just had to morize the right numbers for a few hundredths of a second, and when he did, he had to sprint as fast as he could to bypass the barrier in ti.
And so, with that in mind, he counted… morized… and counted, and morized, and counted….
After a grand total of 231 minutes and thirty seconds of absolute concentration, amounting to 13890 seconds in which he counted up to seventy-two numbers every single second, Hans finally found a repetition…
As soon as the pattern repeated itself, Hans raised his hand and cast the fifth-tier wind spell {repulsion} in order to send himself flying and bypass the barrier.
He also aided himself with telekinesis, casting two spells at the sa ti, all while changing the frequency of the mana barrier around his body almost every hundredth of a second.
Two thousand five hundred seventeen milliseconds.
That’s the ti it took Hans to cross the one hundred ters that separated him from the end of the barrier, and in that ti, the mana frequency of the barrier around his body changed one hundred and eighty-one tis.
Every single change should have been completely random, and yet, after morizing the sequence that had been played for more than three hours, Hans finally managed to correctly guess all the following numbers.
It had been almost four hours since the last ti Caelan spoke, and when he finally did, he could only say one thing:
"You…
Are not a human"
Indeed… was there anyone on earth capable of doing that?
Hans watched his hands in awe of what he could do… his mind, sharpened every ti he cast or morized a spell, had beco a formidable weapon that no human could previously even dream of possessing…
But once he put that thought aside, Hans finally realized… he had made it.
He had finally reached the place he had co all the way to Brussels for.
But… he might have to work things out first since he didn’t want to appear as a criminal.
Using his telekinesis, Hans flew all the way to the giant island, as soon as he closed onto it, he could tell sothing was abnormal… it was incredible, there were about a dozen incredible arrays that helped keep the island floating and in place even when faced with collisions and strong winds.
And that wasn’t all… defensive barriers were present around all buildings, and offensive chanisms that took the form of little towers were spread all around the place.
And not only that, Hans was also amazed by how many people were working up there…. Thousands… maybe even tens of thousands.
In all aspects… one could call it a floating district.
And of course… the most breath-taking and awe-inspiring building in the vicinities…
The imnse tower standing in the back middle of the island…
It was simply outstanding, no matter how much ti had passed since he first saw it… whenever Hans took a few seconds to observe everything around him, his breath was once again taken away.
He felt his heart thumping strongly in his chest…
It made him feel… almost proud of being a human….
All the terrible things he had seen and done, everything he experienced…
His friend’s betrayal… the murder of the innocent and the slaughtering of entire races he had seen in the plane of darkness… everything he observed about humans had always been a negative aspect…
Humans were selfish, evil, envious, devious, and malicious beings who often took pleasure in watching other creatures suffer.
Hans knew it…
He knew it but…
For the first ti in a long while…
Hans felt like the humans had achieved sothing worth praising…
Who could ever co close to creating sothing like that?
The incredible union ford between the founding guilds of the association had created a masterpiece, and the fact that Hans acknowledged it as such ant that the MAVI had reached the desired result… to stand as a sign… it was there to tell everyone that instead of working one against the other, if humanity decided to stand on one side then the things they could achieve would be limitless.
Hans decided to land, he wasn’t sure about where to search for the library, but he knew for sure it was sowhere around there.
As he descended onto the floating island, his stealth was lifted.
As his feet touched the ground no one noticed him appear.
There were a lot of people walking around, but none of them were leisurely wandering, they all had a ta in mind, and everyone was dressed formally.
Hans gave too much in the eye with his baggy clothes and his relaxed face.
Thankfully, there were a few bars and shops spread around the island, and Hans thought he could ask one of the employees inside those for directions instead of bothering soone on the streets.
And so, hoping he would find soone who could tell him where the library was, Hans entered a cafe just a few ters from him.
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