Changxi's Wine

Before the banquet began, Yang Ning's single remark plunged Li Qi into thought once more.

The fifty thousand years within twisted spacetime had been longer than all of Li Qi's previous life put together, yet he had not found them particularly long. He had even felt they were somewhat short.

If Zhu Fengdan had not pulled him out and pressed his head down to make him face this fantastical, magnificent, exquisitely unparalleled world, he would probably have drowned completely in the beauty of constructing worlds.

During that period, he had "built a cart behind closed doors," constructing countless possible worlds of every kind.

Some were worlds with broken symmetry and alien constants, the kind he had created most often.

Some were static worlds—finite, motionless worlds where starlight could fill the entire night sky.

Some were closed worlds with positive spatial curvature; some were flat worlds with zero spatial curvature; others had altered fine-structure constants—the strength of electromagnetic interactions.

For instance, if the fine-structure constant changed, the force that drew molecular bonds together through electromagnetism would weaken. Electrons would combine into atoms more slowly, and atoms would combine into molecules more slowly as well.

This lowered both melting and boiling points. For example, the most common stars were made of gas and tended toward collapse due to their enormous gravity. Yet thermal fusion reactions in their cores produced heat, ejecting gas and radiation outward, and the pressure of those emissions balanced gravity, allowing stars to remain stable.

But if such a change occurred, that balance would be broken. Gravity would gain the upper hand, stars would become brighter, spin faster, and produce supernova explosions more quickly.

If the speed of light became even slightly faster, hydrogen throughout the universe would be unable to fuse into helium. There would be only hydrogen,