Chapter 500 - 497: Intuition and Intention

Chapter 500: Chapter 497: Intuition and Intention

"The last time I came here, the starlight wasn’t this brilliant... There were plenty of stars in the sky back then, but their light didn’t reach into the forest. Only a little bit shone through the cracks between the ancient trees."

"Tell me," Zhou Chao said, confused, "if the Eye of the Stars had already appeared when humanity first set foot on this Sky Island, then why wasn’t this Starlight Forest here when we installed the beacon?"

"What exactly was it like here back then?" Li Luo pressed.

"Lots of trees, and lots of stars in the sky. That was it. We walked into this forest, installed the beacon, and got attacked by some animated objects along the way. But we defeated them without any trouble..." Zhou Chao recounted the Sky Island Investigation Team’s first foray into the Central Forest, his voice trailing off as he recalled the memory.

After installing the beacon, the team left quickly. Zhou Chao, however, had fled the central region on his own and made his way to the edge of the Sky Island.

"Why do you think they’re fake?" Li Luo asked quietly.

"I..." Zhou Chao hesitated. "I’m afraid you won’t believe me, but I just feel like they’re fake. It’s a gut feeling."

"I haven’t been with the Sky Island Investigation Team for very long, but I’ve been on a lot of adventures with my teammates. We’ve been to many Sky Islands together and faced even more dangerous situations. They’re like family to me."

"But the people standing in front of us now... they don’t feel like family."

"They’re like puppets speaking familiar words, just marionettes playing the part of my family."

"I can feel it. In their ’hearts,’ there’s no place for me."

At this, Zhou Chao paused and sighed.

"I don’t know if I can trust this sixth sense."

Zhou Chao was deeply conflicted. He knew this strange sixth sense came from the Starlight Forest, yet the feeling constantly reminded him that the familiar teammates before him weren’t "real."

"Do you think I should trust this feeling?"

Zhou Chao looked at Li Luo, his voice laced with conflict.

Li Luo didn’t answer directly. Instead, she asked, "What else?"

"What else?"

"Besides this feeling in your heart, what else did you notice? Intentions can be expressed physically. If you can’t trust your sixth sense, then use your eyes to see, your ears to listen, your nose to smell them, your hands to touch them..."

Li Luo’s words brought Zhou Chao to a sudden realization.

"That’s right!"

He looked at the team ahead, and an idea suddenly struck him.

Then, mustering his courage, he walked forward and approached the captain.

"Captain, aren’t you supposed to be walking at the very back?"

"Aren’t I at the back right now?" the captain asked, confused.

Zhou Chao shook his head. "No, I mean behind *everyone*."

Zhou Chao pointed at himself and Li Luo.

The captain stared blankly for a moment. "It’s fine. Didn’t you two have something to discuss? I won’t get in your way."

"All right." Zhou Chao nodded, then stepped back to rejoin Li Luo.

After he returned, he was silent for a long time, as if lost in a memory.

After a while, he finally spoke again.

"That’s not the captain..."

"Why?" Li Luo asked. She had overheard the conversation between Zhou Chao and the captain and hadn’t noticed anything odd.

"Because the captain always said he’d never let anyone fall behind..."

Zhou Chao began to tell Li Luo a story from the past.

...

It had happened shortly after Zhou Chao first joined the Sky Island Investigation Team.

Back then, Zhou Chao was reckless and fearless, always getting into dangerous situations. The captain had ordered him to stay by his side and not run off.

"Stick with me. Don’t go getting curious about everything you see. It’s dangerous!" the captain had warned him gravely.

But the Zhou Chao of back then didn’t understand the captain’s reasoning and felt he was just being held back.

At the time, they were exploring a dangerous new Sky Island where a strange phenomenon occurred—objects would vanish without a trace.

Their mission was to set up a beacon while investigating this bizarre phenomenon.

However, even after they’d finished building the beacon and calibrating the signal, they hadn’t experienced a single disappearance.

But things weren’t that simple. Soon, a team member noticed his pack felt much lighter.

He opened his pack to check and found that many of his things were inexplicably gone.

Even more terrifying, he couldn’t remember what was missing.

"Check your trade manifest and the supply-issue records. See what’s missing," the captain ordered immediately after hearing the news.

At the same time, he ordered the entire team to check their gear for any missing items.

Soon, by cross-referencing their records, the team members identified the items that had vanished.

Canned food, drinks, observation equipment, weapons, ammunition... you name it.

And that wasn’t all. Someone had lost something extremely important.

"My relic is gone!"

He saw a relic listed in the issue records, but it wasn’t in his pack. He couldn’t even remember having it until he saw the record and realized what he had lost.

Upon hearing this, the captain immediately understood. The disappearances didn’t just affect objects; they could even erase the owner’s memory of them.

’It’s like something steals an item and then steals the memory of it, too, so you don’t even notice it’s gone...’

The captain thought for a moment, then began asking the team where they had stored the missing items.

The answers were bizarre: in their packs, in their pockets, even in their shoe inserts...

One team member even answered, "Captain, my underwear is gone..."

"Your underwear? Was it in your pack?"

"No, I was wearing it. I just felt a bit of a draft... I fumbled around for a while before I realized something was wrong," the team member said, scratching his head sheepishly.

Listening to all the bizarre answers, the captain finally found a common thread.

He immediately asked the team, "Did anyone lose anything that was kept out in the open, in your line of sight?"

The team members looked at one another and shook their heads.

And with that, the captain confirmed his suspicion:

"Only things outside your line of sight can disappear!"

Whether in a pack, a pocket, or even someone’s pants, all of it was out of sight.

With this in mind, the captain immediately had the team deploy a monitoring drone, sending it high into the air to keep an eye on the entire group.

A terrible premonition bloomed in his chest.

The captain pulled out his datapad, his hands trembling slightly as he opened the team roster and began a roll call.

"Here!"

"Here!"

"Here!"

With each response, the tension in the captain’s chest eased slightly.

But when he called the last name, there was no reply.

The captain stared at the unfamiliar name, his hand trembling as he opened the man’s file.

"Li Mingfu, age 52, thirty years with the Sky Island Investigation Team, responsible for data recording and organization..."

"Relic: None."

"Special Talents: None."

The file in his hands felt alien. The captain had no memory whatsoever of this person ever being on his team.

"Do any of you know Li Mingfu?" he asked the bewildered team.

"Never heard of him."

"Don’t know him..."

"The name sounds a little familiar... I think it’s my neighbor’s bratty kid..."

The team members all chattered at once, none of them having any memory of a teammate named Li Mingfu.

It was as if he had never existed.