Chapter Fifteen: The Light-Speed Horse

The voices from those NPCs just now, though varying in pitch, were all stiff and hollow.
“Surely only living beings can produce such sounds? Even NPCs should be tied to relevant scenes or serve as important characters for chained quests, right?”
Fang Zheng grew anxious. “How do I find him?”
He longed desperately to find a living person to talk to, rather than being attacked by the golden-armored puppets and white tiger and vermilion bird outside the city, or only being able to watch these vividly appearing NPCs inside the city who merely followed fixed routes.
Fang Zheng hurriedly searched the ship. “Where’s the cockpit? Even in a cultivation world, a fully metal sailing ship should have a cockpit or helm, right?”
After searching for a while, he anxiously arrived at a corner of the cabin and discovered a circular object resembling a steering wheel. The walls here were fully transparent, offering a direct view into the distance from the cabin. “Found it!”
With mounting anxiety, Fang Zheng approached the helm, and suddenly, familiar creative mode screen buttons from the Minecraft player’s perspective appeared on both sides of his view.
It should be noted that although Fang Zheng was in creative mode, his usual perspective did not display these touchscreen movement control buttons; he typically moved by will—ascending, descending, moving forward and backward—which was far more flexible than controlling with buttons.
On the tablet he frequently used, the creative mode buttons on the left controlled forward, backward, left, and right movements; on the right, they controlled jump, crouch, ascend, and descend.
“Can it really be done!” Fang Zheng immediately began to experiment.
Fortunately, operating it was not difficult; it was similar to piloting a boat in Minecraft on water, but with added ascending and descending capabilities.
(The Immortal Realm is sealed off; no path forward…)
In the vast void, occasional frozen meteors and colossal ships were passed by.
However, limited by the framerate of his blocky body, Fang Zheng could barely make out these objects, only vaguely maneuvering the ship through the vacuum, trying to move closer toward the direction of the “voice.”
Flying inward from the city gate for a long time, the ancient, sorrowful voice grew louder and clearer.
Faintly, a vast barren land and a corner of a pitch-black abyss appeared in Fang Zheng’s sight.
“Damn! It’s too late to brake!” Only then did Fang Zheng realize he was no cultivator and lacked the reflexes to control such a ship at this level.
Based on previous observations, surrounding objects exhibited intense redshift and blueshift, all stretched into lines, indicating the ship’s speed had likely reached sub-light levels.
Though the exact fraction of light speed was unknown, even at just 1% of light speed, Fang Zheng’s 120 frames per second reaction rate meant that by the time he saw objects ahead, it was already too late to brake.

In this enormous, absurdly vast city measured in light years, much like descriptions in cultivation novels, lush vegetation and rolling mountains abounded.
Trees of unfathomable size rose like mountains, their branches so high the tops were invisible; a single tree could shelter a massive population.
Majestic god mountains, as if sculpted from entire planets, stood in clusters against the horizon, with immense waterfalls pouring like oceans and supergiant lakes broader than seas, resembling entire planets.
This was a grandiose world reminiscent of exaggerated fantasy cultivation novels, so vast as to feel somewhat archaic.
Yet everything was motionless—frozen and unchanging.
Whether it was the thick mist permeating the heavens or the magnificent waterfalls cascading like oceans, all remained suspended in stillness.
Amid this frozen realm, only a streak of light flew swiftly from afar, tilting toward the ground.
It was too late to brake; before Fang Zheng could react, the ship had already crashed.
Suddenly, chains materialized from thin air, forcibly sealing the space ahead of the ship hurtling at 80% sub-light speed.
Using space itself as a buffer, the kinetic impact energy was extracted layer by layer, pressing the ship to the ground.
This was the city-wide traction formation meant to prevent the ship from losing control and crashing.
Though grounded and having its kinetic energy drained by defensive arrays, after the divine source phantom inside—replicated and filled by the Immortal Realm’s barrier rules—vanished, the ship should have completely lost power.
However, due to the Minecraft lever placed by Fang Zheng, the ship’s power unnaturally remained at full capacity, defying logic, resisting the traction formation’s force, and ultimately detonating into a mushroom cloud spanning thousands of miles.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
Limitless light and heat were unleashed.
It was like millions of nuclear bombs exploding simultaneously…
No! Tens of millions, billions, even trillions of nuclear bombs detonating with overwhelming force!
This was a trivial warship imprinted as a phantom by the Immortal Realm’s barrier during its peak era, guarding the realm’s boundary.
Supported by the laws of the Immortal Realm’s shattered barriers, though its destructive and defensive power was far inferior to a real warship, it still possessed performance close to that of a genuine vessel.

Even just the explosion was enough to kill a Saint or severely wound a Saint King-level cultivator.
Yet, in the instant after, the mushroom cloud, thousands of miles high and continuing to grow without any sign of slowing, was suddenly sealed and erased by a newly appeared array pattern.
The warship phantom, being a law-based illusion, vanished without a trace, leaving only Fang Zheng, the indestructible, immortal block person in creative mode who could neither be harmed nor forcibly displaced.
Gazing at the golden array patterns fading in the sky and at the waterfall within its bounds that had just started flowing then stopped again, Fang Zheng pondered deeply.
(The Immortal Realm is sealed; the immortal path is closed…)
The ancient, sorrowful voice grew even louder.
Fang Zheng murmured, “He must be nearby. Let me look around.”
He recalled the black pit he had seen before falling. “The voice seemed to come from that pit.”
Carefully recalling the scene, Fang Zheng looked again at the towering trees as large as mountains and recalculated the scale.
“Let me estimate: that pit might be as big as Mars. Something that large—how am I supposed to find him?”
Looking at the motionless surroundings, Fang Zheng tilted his head. “Right, there’s no golden-armored interference here. I can try breeding light-speed horses to travel faster.”
So Fang Zheng began breeding light-speed horses.
He first built a large enclosure, then used monster eggs to spawn many block horses from a mob spawner, selecting the fastest and killing the others, repeating the process.
After identifying a batch of the fastest horses, Fang Zheng repeatedly threw agility potions at them, feeding them apples and wheat to force breeding.
He let the foals grow, then threw agility potions again to breed, repeating the process continuously.
Time passed bit by bit, and the horses proliferated through many generations, each generation’s speed increasing the upper limit.
After a while…