A New Beginning

Chapter 1: 1.01 A New Beginning

"Some people always emphasize certain labels to justify their actions, using them to disguise how they undermine the importance of our essential rights."

The flames before him grew fiercer, but he was gradually losing the ability to feel pain.

The fire engine's siren outside the building seemed to be getting quieter. Of course, he'd apparently vented the resentment he'd carried into this life, too. Oh well, maybe this was how it was meant to be.

This life... Sigh, how had things gone so wrong? Heh.

The last sounds he heard were the bells ringing in a distant city and the time announcement: it was 10:00 p.m. in the Eastern 8th Time Zone.

It was over. 201—

"Cicadas, cicadas..."

Wei Keng was only five, and had just gained the ability to sort through his memories from his previous life.

Right now, he was a tiny little bundle crouched on the ground, picking up a black cicada with his chopsticks. He reached out a small finger, prodding around for the cicada's vibrating tympanum, and growled angrily, "It's been hundreds of damn years, and you're still so noisy."

Young people don't know sorrow's taste. Wei Keng was a reincarnator who'd gone through some bad things in his previous life. Reborn six hundred years later, he hoped he could start over.

For Wei Keng, everything was new.

In the garden attached to this public hospital, hovering drones sprayed a fine mist over every flower and plant, clearing the dust from their leaves. The water droplets caught the sunlight and formed a rainbow.

At Wei Keng's call, one of the drones flew down and took the cicada he'd placed on it with his little hand. Then it returned the cicada to the shade of a tree.

A few minutes later, when he heard the cicada singing again, five-year-old Wei Keng wiped his runny nose with his sleeve and let out a breath. "Back to normal."

Looking back through history, five hundred years ago, an unmanned spacecraft from the East scooped up a cup of lunar soil and brought it back. That period was now known as the Near Ancient Period.

At the end of the Second Millennium on the Azure Planet, the first Industrial Hot War had paved the way for the transformation of the internal combustion engine, while the second had ushered in the Nuclear Age. Then came a hundred and fifty years of peace. The demands of science had spurred the maturation of technologies such as Artificial Organic Synthesis and Fusion Space Travel, which in turn changed the way humanity lived in Surface Cities.

After the Second Century of the Second Millennium, the world continued to undergo a series of unprecedented transformations that would have been unimaginable to people of earlier eras. Technologies perfected during wartime were repurposed as tools of competition between civilizations in the Peaceful Era. Drone systems began constructing human settlements across the planets of the Solar System, while the field of medical technology had, in theory, achieved immortality.

[In theory, that was. For the human brain to grow new nerve cells, the adjustments to various hormones involved in the process made memories and thoughts extremely unstable. A powerful will was needed to maintain one's old memories and thoughts. During such an operation, patients could easily lose their sense of self.]

Even so, contradictions and conflicts in human production and exchange persisted. New technologies opened up new fields, and those newly discovered fields represented wealth for competing civilizations.

And so humanity's conflicts erupted.

The conflict took place in 2400 and lasted 223 days. This enormous war, fought primarily across the Five Continents of the Human Mother Planet, with the Moon, Mars, and Venus as secondary battlegrounds, claimed as many as 93.3 million human lives.

The deadliest attack took place on August 6, 2400.

The Alliance, seeking to strategically destroy the war potential of its opponent across the sea, launched a planet-scale surface destruction plan in the West Pacific War Zone, targeting the fragile plate beneath the Northeast Asian Island Nation. The delicate balance between the Pacific Plate and the Mongolian-Asian Plate in the area was shattered. Although the Zhonglian Government had already evacuated the elderly and infirm from this Old Industrial Zone and maintained various damage-control facilities in such a front-line area, six million people still died or went missing.

Unlike the previous conflict, after which wartime technological leaps gave all humanity the benefits of progress, this war brought no such gains.

Behind every cause of conflict lay economic problems. Whoever could use technological advances brought about by war to solve civilian economic problems could usher in the next era. But this time, the cause was the disconnect between the actual consumption habits of the world's industrial nations and cutting-edge technology.

So when the fighting in the Solar System finally ended and the dust settled, the world was still much the same.

The most advanced Quantum Technology and Aerospace Technology still had room to develop. But their practical application in civilian life was still some way off! Ordinary people's homes, rice, and mobile phone industries had nothing to do with space drone systems.

And don't talk about the age of interstellar colonization! In the Second Millennium, every piece of science fiction that depicted life aboard a spaceship with any degree of realism carried echoes of the Great Voyage in the eighteenth century: cramped, claustrophobic cabins, foul air, and crew members who distrusted one another! Ordinary people on Earth supported technological progress so they could have better lives, not so they could relive hardship.

As technology and the economy grew increasingly disconnected in this era, unfair distribution pushed many people to the margins and destabilized society. Contradictions multiplied, and it seemed that only an outbreak of war could resolve them and save the survival of their ethnic groups and religious communities. Then they could rise again, unite their civilizations, and push technology to greater heights. But just before that dark future arrived, the crisis was suddenly averted.

Because Fundamental Physics had made a breakthrough!

In 2533, scientists used a Neutrino Signal Emitter to send a signal through the center of the planet and discovered a strange response. After five years of research, they found that within Earth's Core, in the Gravity Core Region, the Wormhole Effect could be produced through High-Energy Physics.

And even earlier, the field of Life Science had happened to accumulate relevant technologies.

In 2455, a major team in the medical field identified a microscopic physical phenomenon linked to the Human Consciousness Phenomenon in the human brain.

In 2478, using a specialized Physics Test Field, they temporarily preserved the consciousness of a volunteer with a terminal illness during the three minutes after their brain stopped functioning, implanting it in a Carbon-based Chip and maintaining their thought processes for five months.

So in 2545, scientific organizations from across humanity made this a key research priority. They successfully reconstructed the self-awareness of a human consciousness preserved in a physical field and chip inside a newborn brain.

The foundations of Plane Travel were now in place. Humanity could explore the possible physical worlds on the other side of microscopic wormholes in the form of an Information State.

In 2587, human spacecraft surveyed the cores of the Moon, Mars, Venus, and even Jupiter and Saturn, confirming that the technology could be widely applied to celestial bodies.

The Eternal Night had ended.

From the first century of the Second Millennium to its sixth, after countless conflicts, humanity of this era suddenly realized that the future might not lie among the stars, but in the exploration of multiple planes. People also discovered that civilization in the Main World was not so alone: across countless Parallel Universes, signs of human activity existed like reflections.

Wei Keng was born in 2590.

Time: 2608. Location: Pu Hai Area 4.

After the Solar System War, the area had been rebuilt with high-rises, but between them ran canals of deep blue water—much like Venice had once been.

The war had shaken the plates beneath the Solar System's main populated regions, releasing vast quantities of Submarine Methane into the atmosphere and causing rapid global warming. The Antarctic Glacier had melted. Once-thriving metropolises had become Waterlogged Lands with an average water depth of two meters. But that was all right. Rising sea levels didn't mean Marine Life could simply run wild here; humanity's Engineering Infrastructure had turned the tables.

Humans built dam after dam, dividing areas of the continental shelf into separate sections. Across these Freshwater Areas, they constructed boat cities modeled on Suzhou Water Town.

This construction hadn't reduced the range of human activity. The Grid Systems spreading across the land extended Freshwater Areas far beyond the old continental shelf. The new metropolises that had sprung up in the former Yellow Sea after the twenty-fifth century were the cities now bordering the ocean. Pu Hai, by contrast, had become an inland city.

Private boats passed through the city's narrow canals, while Ten-thousand-ton ships traveled along its main waterways, all guided by signal stations within the city. Driverless? That wasn't much of a gimmick anymore. In the age of smartphones, WeChat, QQ, and video calls, a videophone wasn't anything special either.

Naturally, this prosperity included plenty of busy industrial zones.

After the Industrial Revolution, information technology had made factories completely automated and intelligent.

Factories had changed much like steam locomotives with their many manual control levers had given way to cars with smart-screen dashboards. Factories that once needed to set aside large office spaces for staff had become compact Integrated production parks controlled by Electronic modules.

During the Second Industrial Revolution, an industrial zone covered hundreds of hectares, including roads, parks, and water and power facilities. Now, on a plot of land covering three hectares, a dense high-rise extended four hundred meters upward and six hundred meters underground, crammed with all kinds of machinery. Mechanical centipedes equipped with cameras crawled through pipes, controlled remotely as substitutes for workers carrying out inspections inside.

Well, there were also batches of Floating little bee robots zipping in and out of the factory. These were full-sensor robotic substitutes controlled by the interns.

When a small drone darted into the factory,

the view shifted to a school residential area fifteen kilometers away.

"Welcome to Tenglong No. 12 Factory. The industrial projects here produce internal combustion engine equipment numbered 1 through 123 and Industrial foundation categories 234. Software engineers, press 1. Professional workers, press 2..."

"Six, six, six. I'm six..."

Several kilometers away, Wei Keng lay in a cockpit inside an apartment in a skyscraper, frantically jabbing at the screen with his fingers.

As an engineering graduate student, Wei Keng studied in a thoroughly shut-in fashion.

Ten days earlier, the instructor had personally led the students through the process of logging into the factory to study. But since they could choose to log in remotely whenever they wanted, most of them had skipped it. After all, tomorrow would always come, and there'd always be more tomorrows.

On the final day, Wei Keng had finally woken up from his long nap and logged on, cramming nervously in preparation for the exam.

"Welcome, student Wei Keng. Your mentor left you a message."

Wei Keng tapped the screen, and the mentor's face appeared, looking like a newspaper. "You're the last student to log into the review system. I'm sorry, but I'll be paying close attention to your score. If you don't get at least 80, you'll fail this course."

Wei Keng: "Damn it, why didn't you tell me earlier? You had to wait until the last minute to set a trap for me?"

As he muttered to himself, he swept the scraps of paper off the desk.

Whatever his previous life had been like, Wei Keng was fairly satisfied with this one. His only regret was that he'd barely had a chance to get to know his parents before becoming an orphan.

Wei Keng's parents had been among the last group of people conscripted by the Zhonglian Government's Space-time exploration department to explore sub-dimensions.

In the Space fantasy of the twenty-first century, people often imagined alien life on some distant planet. In reality, however, most planets in the universe that might harbor life were full of losers who hadn't even evolved Multicellular life.

But in sub-dimensions, there were all kinds of worlds that seemed to be reflections of civilization in the Main World. Those planets with life, intelligence, and even civilizations were extremely dangerous.

Just as early space exploration had relied on conscripted military pilots, Wei Keng's father had been specially selected as a Consciousness activator, tasked with exploring dangerous planes. His mother had been the accompanying Monitoring pod operator, responsible for checking the stability of the physical phenomena at the Traversal node.

Then, three years ago, for reasons no one knew, they lost contact in space. It was said that his father had been ambushed in the target plane by locals with advanced intelligence technology, and his mother, who was in the Relay monitoring information pod, had perished along with him.

Of course, the Main World side wasn't one to sit back and take it. Once it confirmed that the plane posed a threat to the Main World's exploration efforts, the Time-Space Shuttle Department quickly assembled a large force and carried out a sweeping operation against it.

That was one way to give the family an answer.

As the family member of a fallen member of the Official exploration team, Wei Keng naturally received access to a higher level of education. He'd also managed to get into graduate school in the engineering sciences, a popular field in his era.

In this age of peace and prosperity, compulsory education lasted an average of eighteen years—right through university. Graduate students, meanwhile, were also quite ordinary by modern standards, like frogs with four legs.

Although modern high technology required very few people to operate, leaving everyone else to live on welfare, relying solely on welfare would leave young people lacking knowledge and growing less intelligent. They might obsess over celebrities in the Fan circle or spend their time arguing pointlessly online, neither of which helped civilizations compete with one another. So everyone was sent to school.

With eighteen years of compulsory education to get through, and grades to keep an eye on every day, people had little time to shout nonsense on Communication platforms. They were even less likely to parrot brainless opinions alongside the "Living dolls" manufactured by idol factories.

With the wisdom of a past life, young Wei Keng had once been clever. But as time passed, he gradually became an average person.

Wei Keng: "I don't have much ambition. This is fine. Just like this is fine."

Wei Keng's fingers tapped the exam questions on the Holographic projection, and he began memorizing them.

He still had to earn his academic credits.