great-warnovel Chapter 511 The Steps of Time
Chapter 511 The Steps of Time
Chapter 511 The Steps of Time
Brain jellyfish happily swim in the clouds.
"In a sense, you and they are two completely opposite extremes," Hermes sighed.
"These beings from the brain are born of emotion and yearn to understand logic."
"But you, born of logic, yearn to understand emotions."
Machines with human appearances and flesh and blood with inhuman appearances gaze at each other across the thick fog, just like humans standing at the crossroads of fate, wizards and Muggles, science and magic, the future is unclear, how should they move forward?
"Perhaps you're right," Adam nodded.
"Those beautiful words are just part of a semantic network mapping for me."
"Happiness" is often associated with words like "smile," "gift," and "success," while "love" is frequently associated with words like "family," "companionship," and "sacrifice." He stated this rationally.
"This association is based on the semantic space embedding of word vectors or large language models, rather than the perception of emotion itself."
"The feedback I generate conforms to social expectations; it is essentially a product of language rules and probability distribution, rather than emotional resonance."
"Human emotions and bodily experiences, such as hormone secretion and nerve signals, are deeply intertwined, but my understanding" is completely detached from physiological foundations.
His indifferent expression made Hermione feel cold and regretful.
"That's just the mechanical reaction of numbers and switches. You can hear my heart ticking."
Hermione didn't know when the robot had learned metaphors; she only felt that Sechenov had made Adam too human, and sometimes terrifying.
"Let's go, let's continue, we're almost at our destination." She politely declined Adam's invitation to listen to her thoughts and turned to walk down the stairs to the next floor.
The ninth floor is the Department of Mysterious Affairs, and it is also the most dangerous floor.
Lucius's violent destruction caused the leaked magic to intensify the anomalies on the upper floors, making this the biggest source of the dissipation of dark magic.
"If it weren't for those brain-bound creatures that ran off to play ball, maybe old Abernathy and the others wouldn't have died," Hermione said regretfully.
As they walked down the stairs, Adam seemed to still be thinking about their previous conversation, following along in silence.
A torrent of magic flowed past the two of them, feeling as if they were walking on the crater of a volcano that was about to erupt.
But in stark contrast to this ominous, dark magic, the further down the stairs you go, the brighter the light becomes. A white light, like that of a high-powered incandescent bulb, shines from beyond the corner of the stairs, making the surrounding light and shadows mottled and bizarre.
"Wait!" Adam suddenly called out.
The two stopped in their tracks; Hermione had also noticed something was wrong before he even spoke.
They were just a few steps away from the ninth floor, but both of them stopped at the same time.
"The length of the stairs is wrong," Adam said.
"I've done the math. Although the interior height of each floor of the Ministry of Magic is different, the number of steps connecting each floor is fixed. If the British Ministry of Magic doesn't have any special customs, we should already be standing on the floor of the Department of Mysteries by the time we get here."
Humans cannot always pay attention to such details, especially under the chaotic light and shadow here, under the magical flow that affects the mind.
Hermione nodded in agreement. The Archmage's intuition and the Aftersight's eye both sent ominous warnings: if they went any further, they would encounter danger!
At the same time, the pointer of the time converter in his arms was also jumping like a branding iron.
"The gravity readings are abnormal and require further observation," Adam said, extending his arm.
Several thin laser beams pierced through the air and shot forward.
But then a bizarre scene unfolded.
The laser, which was clearly pointing straight down, suddenly disappeared less than half a meter after it shot out, and reappeared on the slanted ceiling, bending into a bizarre bull horn shape.
The laser's cross-section is so smooth and flat that it looks as if it has been cut by a knife, yet it still maintains the continuity of its emission.
The curved laser disappeared again after twisting at a certain angle, and when it reappeared, it was on another part of the stairs. This time, it moved forward at a slow, tortoise-like pace, extending forward little by little.
"Spacetime has been abnormally distorted, and continuity has been disrupted," Adam said.
Lasers are also light, but in that region they could only move at an extremely slow speed, clearly indicating that time flowed very slowly there.
If you rashly step onto the lower steps, you might be sliced into pieces, or trapped in a timeline that is either extremely fast or extremely slow. When you finally emerge, you'll find that a considerable amount of time has passed in the outside world.
"Was it a leak in the Time Chamber?" Hermione whispered.
She reached out, feeling the air in front of her like tentacles, but all she heard was chaotic noise.
"Fluorescent light." A ball of light shone from her fingertips, as she wanted to probe the area ahead more extensively, like Adam.
But the next moment, the entire corridor seemed to awaken, and the surging darkness immediately swallowed the light. If Hermione hadn't stopped in time, even her finger would have been eaten.
"What's going on? Lasers from technology work, but light from magic doesn't?" She raised an eyebrow.
This time, she used a different spell: a transparent shield made of an iron armor spell, which she pushed down the stairs.
The corridor reacted immediately, spewing out a cloud of gas that spread rapidly across the walls like rust or decay. The originally invisible Iron Armor Spell quickly corroded and disintegrated within the gas, disappearing without a trace.
"This isn't a reaction caused by spacetime; it seems to only affect magic," Adam immediately concluded.
Hermione didn't speak; she switched to another spell, this time Polymorph.
The steps behind him softened, and a piece of stone separated, transforming into a squirrel in mid-air, squeaking as it ran down the steps.
The next moment, the furry little creature suddenly froze, and a large amount of stone fragments and mud gushed out from its body. The original shapeshifting structure was quickly destroyed, and in the blink of an eye, only a tangled mass of earth and stone debris remained on the ground.
Hermione was still somewhat skeptical and decided to try the magic from the borderlands.
"A magical effect similar to entropy increase," Adam guessed.
"All magical effects will end faster, and will bring about phenomena that cause them to end."
"Will the negative consequences of using magic to manipulate time also counteract the magic?" the witch murmured, giving up on trying again.
It seems there is no way to go any further. Magic here will only accelerate the consequences. Although the entire Department of Mysteries still exists intact, it has already fallen into an irreversible vortex of time.
Hermione might be able to use her magic to forcibly disrupt the spacetime structure, but that would also cause everything inside to fall apart, and her goal would be unattainable.
But Adam was still calculating something at high speed.
He remained silent for a long time before slowly speaking: "I don't understand why such chaos should be allowed to expand or contract rapidly, rather than being maintained in this state—this unstable—stable state?"
Just as an explosion is merely a momentary chemical reaction, a storm will not stay in one place for long.
Such a spacetime anomaly should subside after raging for a period of time.
"The gravity readings of each section of the staircase show a stable distribution. Normally, the staircase and corridor should be twisted and shattered by spacetime anomalies, let alone these evenly floating dust particles. It's as if—they've been like this for a long time—strange magic." The mechanical boy added a sarcastic remark at the end.
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