A Sick Heart, Today's Waves

Chapter 2 1.02 A Sick Heart, Today a Wave

In Pu Hai, the apartment Wei Keng lived in was a standard otaku suite, with a total area of twenty square meters.

This was a subsidized housing unit according to social standards, costing only one hundred United Coins per month, with reductions based on student performance. Wei Keng paid three years' rent upfront.

The city also had 400-square-meter residential housing, which was a prerequisite for marriage. Wei Keng currently had no plans to save for that.

In the city crisscrossed by waterways, after leaving the apartment dormitory, Wei Keng arrived at the small dock by the entrance. He used his watch to swipe his card, unlocking one of the five shared motorboats at the public charging dock.

He pulled down the throttle and sped along the river towards the large supermarket three kilometers away.

Personal shopping was necessary.

In fact, the apartment had online purchasing channels, and vacuum pipes would quickly deliver supplies there. But, such purchases would leave a record online.

The school teachers were already nagging him. Whenever there was a mistake in an exam, they would review all sorts of records. For instance, they might see that you chugged six bottles of Happy Water in a week, along with various meatballs, ham sausages, and seaweed potato chips. Tsk, tsk, they might scold you like an old mother, "Eat, eat, all you do is eat. If you put half your energy into studying, you would have gotten full marks in everything long ago."

However, if you went to the supermarket to buy things, well, there would be no online consumption data.

After the motorboat was parked at the dock.

Wei Keng climbed over the railing and walked through a small alley. In the 27th Century, even in the nooks and crannies of the city, although there wasn't much high technology, the design style was very unique. The walls on both sides of the alley were covered with grid bricks, filled with artificial soil, and overgrown with various plants. The long alley felt like a jungle path, bringing joy to one's heart.

Uh, at the intersection of the alley, some rowdy children made Wei Keng stop his stroll.

"Hey, you stop right there!"

Wei Keng saw four little boys chasing a white cat that had darted out from the bushes in a square flowerbed in the city. He couldn't help but step out and shout to stop them.

At the same time, he tossed his backpack onto a branch extending from a wall flowerbed and, in three steps, caught one of the naughty kids.

He displayed his Social Reporting System on his watch and clicked on the child's avatar. It immediately showed his school. As a citizen, as long as photographic or video evidence was submitted, the school could give this child extra assignments.

Two minutes later, seeing the dejected boy leave, Wei Keng lectured him with a hint of pride, "Next time, be more sensible. Don't bully the weak."

"Pfft~" The child made a face and ran off.

Wei Keng continued to issue threats, "Don't let me see you again."

A few minutes later, watching the direction the child had left, he sighed with boredom and said, "Is this what normal people do?" -- As he spoke, he canceled the photo and video content that was about to be sent on the "Little Report" system.

"Active and destructive" was the nature of boys before they grew into men. Therefore, what was needed was guidance, not a one-sided condemnation of their "evil" nature.

If one only scolds and successfully suppresses it, then the boy will become a timid, spineless "Powdered Boy" who doesn't know how to resist. Of course, it's also possible that in the process of confrontation, he admits his evil nature, thus becoming a bad person who carries out evil to the end, and in this process, he will be further ostracized by society and go to extremes.

One minute later, although there was no one around.

Wei Keng suddenly became a little excited (emphasis): "Kicking cats and dogs at this age is by no means evil, it must not be labeled as evil, they are just boys who have not yet successfully shaped their values!"

As he said this, his tone became a little sad, but it was only for a moment before he managed to calm down, as if nothing had happened. The supermarket was ahead, and he needed to head straight for his target.

From taking goods off the supermarket shelf to the automatic payment platform, the automatic door finally opened, and the electronic salesperson said: "Welcome to visit again."

Wei Keng, who had finished shopping, carried his backpack and a bag of Oden and Sweet Fish Cake skewers, and prepared to return home with a sense of harvest.

At this moment, on the street, an advertising screen suddenly interrupted with an urgent message.

"The energy in Asia No. 2344 Gravity Well has exceeded its peak and is being urgently released. Personnel in the city are requested not to move in areas lacking safety facilities and to take temporary shelter to avoid accidents. It is expected that the city will lift the high magnetic and high electrical warning in ten minutes."

The probability of an accident occurring in the forecast "to avoid accidents" was very small.

The Gravity Well Mouth would diffuse strong electricity into the atmosphere, with a probability of generating ball lightning. However, most of the ball lightning would be guided underground by facilities near the gravity well. The probability of a few escaping and happening to be encountered by someone was the same as the probability of being struck by lightning during a summer thunderstorm.

Most buildings in the city had structures that were resistant to lightning and nuclear magnetic pulses. However, the alley Wei Keng had just come from was an area without any protection. The automatic positioning system on his personal electronic device clearly indicated that entering the danger zone was not allowed. Now, there was no turning back.

Wei Keng looked up at the sky. In the sky, revealed between the tall buildings, there was a twisted lens.

The entire lens was like the concentric circles on a pair of glasses when adjusting for myopia, but in this sky, even the innermost ring had a diameter of hundreds of kilometers. Now, this lens was rapidly expanding.

At the center of these wavy circles in the sky, directly below was the gravity well facility on the ground in the center of Pu Hai.

It was at this facility that the Space-time exploration department of Earth accelerated high-energy particles vertically towards the Earth's core to conduct exploration in outer physical regions.

Because the basic principle of traversal was to use Earth's energy facilities to create a micro wormhole in the center, the large-scale use of electromagnetic fields above the gravity well mouth would cause strange optical distortions.

When the concentric circles of the twisted lens in the atmospheric area above the gravity well continuously contracted, it indicated that something was traversing through. If the lens expanded outwards, it indicated that information from the high-energy particles within the gravity well was returning.

This was clearly the latter, and the speed of information release had exceeded a peak. The atmospheric twisted lens rings above emitted lightning-like white light as they expanded.

Wei Keng covered his head, preparing to find a place to hide.

At this moment, the Information Communicator on Wei Keng's wrist rang, displaying a message: "Student Wei Keng, what are you doing in Zone 833? Weren't you complaining that school wasn't quiet enough and you were studying in your dorm?"

Wei Keng opened his mouth and uttered a single word: "Shit!"

However, misfortune did not come alone. The plastic bag in his hand suddenly fell to the ground, scattering the Sweet Fish Cake skewers.

Yes, the white cat outside the supermarket had been staring at Wei Keng for a long time. Seeing Wei Keng spacing out, it quickly knocked over Wei Keng's plastic bag and ran off with a prize.

He didn't get to eat his snacks, and he was caught by his teacher? Alas, it seemed his academic assessment would have another mediocre comment this year.

Forty kilometers away.

From the Dark Gravity Well, a capsule pod, four meters long and two meters wide, ascended.

Within this energy pod, the human body, originally electrified, had its energy level continuously lowered, ultimately releasing the high energy state, allowing life activities to continue.

This was a young girl, well, physiologically speaking, an Earth Maiden in her twenties, but her consciousness and thoughts had already lingered in a different plane for a very long time.

The bed board of the capsule pod lifted, pushing her out of the pod naked.

The mechanical arms in the base wrapped her bare body in a white detection suit.

The numerous electronic devices on this detection suit, through over six thousand contact points across the body, detected the body's condition, ensuring that when Earth humans returned from the high-energy state of the gravity well, their physiology was normal.

The detection suit was wrapped very tightly, even covering her head with an exquisite white helmet, revealing only her face, making her look heroic and spirited.

Well, to be honest, a helmet was indeed necessary, because during the process of electromagnetic high-energy conversion, all non-neuro-sensitive parts of the body were unprotected.

To put it crudely, she had no hair. Uh, during high-energy conversion, these keratinized parts without bio-electricity were burned off.

Her eyebrows were just drawn on. If one were to replay the scene of her crawling out of the energy pod just now, her skin would be like snow-white jade.

This Lady belonged to the Observers, not the Transmigrators.

During the entire traversal process, Observers maintained a high-energy state. After their anchoring particles reached the sub-dimension, they did not revert to a normal human state. Instead, they maintained a special phase state, imperceptible to ordinary humans, separated from the Transmigrators within the sub-dimension.

As for the Transmigrators, after their consciousness and thoughts completed the traversal, they found a normal physical structure in the sub-dimension, fully descended, becoming ordinary people in the normal state of that plane, walking in that world, touching flowers, grass, and trees, soil, and rocks.

Observers, lacking a physical body, could more conveniently manipulate energy and perform calculations and analyses that mortal bodies found difficult.

Every contemporary Transmigrator carried a system, and the administrator of this system was an Observer. They were not just the secretaries of the Transmigrators, but were also responsible for monitoring the Transmigrators' virtue, intelligence, and physical fitness during their plane traversal.

Now that the Observer had returned, and there was no sign of the Transmigrator returning, it was evident that something important had occurred on the plane.

In the lobby of the East Asia Space-time exploration department, this Observer entered a communication pod to contact her superior and report the situation.

Nine minutes later.

In Pu Hai, the New Pearl Tower, a landmark building that was destroyed in the Third World War and then completely rebuilt, light emanated from the windows of the top-floor meeting room.

The Minister of the Time-Space Management Department contacted the supervisors of various relevant departments.

Holographic projections appeared one by one, and the meeting hall was full.

After the returned Observer explained the situation at the meeting, the attendees became highly concerned about the current development of the space-time situation.

Currently, although the economy on Earth was globalized, the influence of Nation and Ethnicity still remained.

The Space-Time Department in Asia and the Space-Time Department of the Atlantic Union were in competition with each other in terms of space-time.

Now, the Transmigrators from both sides had clashed.

Because both sides have conflicts over the dominance of certain planes' cultural development.

The dominance of a plane is a concept that exists in various aspects and is quite extensive.

As early as the 21st century, movies presented such a situation: in Western movies, aliens from all over the universe spoke English. In Asian anime, Japanese was the official language in the first half of the century, and in the latter half of the 21st century, Chinese became the official language in anime. If a movie world were a plane, then speaking Chinese or English would represent which force dominated the direction of that plane.

Currently, the planes explored by Earth have a developmental level before the Industrial Age, so many concepts are "dumped" by the transmigrators sent from Earth civilization.

The humanistic development of some worlds leans towards the form of civilization on Earth's side, and this is very important!

This is similar to the significance of deploying probes on Mars and the Moon in the 21st century to declare sovereignty.

Comrade Yuan Yue, the chairman of the Space-Time Exploration Committee at that time, who was also a High Minister Rank transmigrator, was full of indignation.

He made a rare, somewhat extreme gesture at the meeting, banging the table and saying, "We cannot yield! (Our) guidance over the Known Sub-Civilizations of Sub-Dimensions is our sovereignty in space-time!"

Another Observer, Bai Hengqian, glanced at him lightly but expressed her agreement and explained the seriousness of the issue: "The time flow in sub-dimensions is special. In those few conflict plane space-time regions, if we or they initiate changes in the target space-time today, decades later, it could lead to a thousand years of history downstream where we can reap the benefits. Therefore, if we retreat today, the negative consequences will appear decades later."

In the meeting hall, most transmigration teams gradually understood the situation.

"This is war!" the Leader of a certain transmigration team defined it.

"Yes," Yuan Yue confirmed again, "This concerns future development. We cannot forget the spirit of fighting a war on Mars and the Moon in the century before last. Today, we cannot fear confronting them in space-time."

The East and the West, over these centuries, from ideology to cultural systems, to racial differences. The past rifts cannot be healed in just a hundred years.

In the meeting room of the New Pearl Tower, there were no longer any wavering opinions regarding discussions on 'competition' and 'sovereignty'.

The Leader of a transmigration team from an Interstellar Development Plane realized that the scope of this conflict was very broad and raised some objective questions: "If a full-scale conflict occurs in space-time, can our troops be expanded? What kind of cooperation system should different teams follow? It must be determined that the personnel of the Atlantic Space-Time Transmigration Department are no less capable than us."

Bai Hengqian, an Observer of the Supervisory Committee, presented the data she had and offered a countermeasure: "Tian Ji's Horse Racing. Use inferior horses to compete against their superior horses, use superior horses to compete against their medium horses, and use medium horses to confront their inferior horses."

She displayed the data on the hall's screen.

This Stereoscopic Icon System listed the existing forces in the four major categories of planes currently divided, according to the four warning levels of red, orange, yellow, and blue, and marked different Confrontation Risk Levels.

The Observer's intelligent voice began to explain the strategy to everyone: "We can withdraw the Main Force Transmigrators from space-time regions with low confrontational intensity and replace them with newcomers who have just joined transmigration to garrison, and gather the main force within the conflict zones."