A Sick Heart, a Restless Tide

1.02 A Sick Heart, a Restless Tide

In Pu Hai, the apartment where Wei Keng lived was a standard bachelor's pad, with a total area of twenty square meters.

It was socially subsidized housing, costing only one hundred United Coins a month, with rent reductions based on students' grades. Wei Keng had paid three years' rent in one go.

The city also had four-hundred-square-meter homes, but those were considered a prerequisite for marriage. For now, Wei Keng had no plans to save up for one.

In this city, crisscrossed by waterways, Wei Keng left his apartment dormitory and headed to the small dock outside. He used the card on his watch to unlock one of the five shared speedboats at the public charging dock.

He pulled the power lever and raced along the canal toward a large supermarket three kilometers away.

Shopping in person was essential.

There was, of course, an online shopping service in the apartment complex, and vacuum tubes could quickly deliver supplies. But purchases made that way left a record online.

The schoolteachers were already plenty naggy. Whenever he made mistakes on a test, they'd go through all sorts of records. They'd see that he'd downed six bottles of Happy Water in a week, along with all those meatballs, Ham Sausages, and Seaweed Potato Chips. Tsk, tsk. They might lecture him like an old mom: "Eat, eat, all you ever do is eat! If you put half that effort into studying, you'd already be getting perfect scores in every subject."

But if he went to the supermarket and bought everything himself, well, there'd be no online purchase records.

After docking the speedboat,

Wei Keng vaulted over the railing and cut through an alley. In the 27th Century, even the city's cramped, twisting corners had a distinct design style, if not much high technology. Grid Bricks covered both walls of the alley, filled with Artificial Soil where all kinds of plants grew. The long passage felt like a path through a forest, putting him in a good mood.

Uh, but the rowdy children at the intersection by the alley's entrance made Wei Keng stop in his leisurely stroll.

"Hey! Stop right there!"

Wei Keng spotted four little boys chasing and scaring a White Cat that had darted out of a shrub in a square flowerbed. He stepped in and shouted at them to stop.

At the same time, he tossed his backpack onto a branch sticking out of a flowerbed along the wall and caught one of the little rascals in three strides.

He showed them the Social Reporting System on his watch and tapped the boy's profile. The system immediately displayed the school he attended. As a citizen, all Wei Keng had to do was submit photo or video evidence, and the school would give the child extra assignments.

Two minutes later, the boy shuffled off with his head bowed. Wei Keng lectured him smugly, "Next time, use your head. Don't pick on someone weaker than you."

"Bleh!" The child pulled a face and ran off.

Wei Keng continued his threat. "Don't let me catch you doing that again."

A few minutes later, watching the direction the child had gone, he let out a bored sigh. "Does that count as acting like a normal person?" As he spoke, he canceled the photo and video evidence he'd been about to send through the "tattletale" system.

"Being active and destructive" was simply in a boy's nature before he grew into a man. What they needed was guidance, not one-sided condemnation of their "evil" nature.

If they were constantly scolded and successfully suppressed, the boys would become timid, spineless "powder-faced boys" who didn't know how to fight back. Of course, they might also give in to the conflict, accept that they were evil, and become bad people who carried that evil all the way through. In the process, society would reject them even more, pushing them toward extremes.

A minute later, even though there was no one around,

Wei Keng suddenly grew a little agitated (emphasis): "Kicking cats and dogs at this age isn't evil. They mustn't be branded evil! They're just boys who haven't yet formed their values!"

His voice turned a little sad, but only for a moment. He quickly calmed down, as if nothing had happened. The supermarket was right ahead; he needed to get straight to his destination.

He collected his items from the supermarket shelves and took them to the self-checkout platform. At last, the automatic doors opened, and the electronic sales clerk said, "Thank you for shopping with us. Please come again."

With his purchases complete, Wei Keng slung on his backpack, picked up a bag of Oden and Sweet Fish Cake skewers, and set off home with a spring in his step.

Just then, the street's advertising screens broke into an urgent announcement.

"The energy in Asia No. 2344 Gravity Well has exceeded its peak and is being urgently released. People in the city, please avoid areas without safety facilities and seek temporary shelter to prevent accidents. The high-magnetic-field and high-electricity warning is expected to be lifted in ten minutes."

The "accidents" mentioned in the warning were unlikely to happen.

The Gravity Well Mouth discharged powerful electricity into the atmosphere, which could produce Ball Lightning. But most ball lightning was channeled underground by the facilities around the Gravity Well. The chance that one of the few that slipped through would happen to hit someone was about the same as being struck by lightning during a summer thunderstorm.

Most buildings in the city were designed to withstand lightning and Nuclear Magnetic Pulse, but the alley Wei Keng had just come from had no protection at all. The automatic positioning system on his personal electronic device clearly warned him not to enter the danger zone. Now, though, there was no retreat.

Wei Keng looked up at the sky. Between the high-rises, he could see a Twisted Lens.

The whole lens looked like the concentric circles on an eyeglass lens during an eye exam, except that even the innermost circle in the sky was hundreds of kilometers across. Now the lens was spreading rapidly.

Directly below the center of those rippling circles in the sky stood the Gravity Well Mouth facility in central Pu Hai.

At this facility, Earth's Space-time exploration department accelerated High-Energy Particles vertically toward the planet's core to probe regions of external physics.

Since the basic principle of Plane Travel involved using Earth's energy facilities to create a Micro Wormhole at the center, the heavy use of Electromagnetic Fields above the Gravity Well Mouth caused strange Optical Distortion.

When the distorted rings of the lens above a Gravity Well shrank, it meant something was traveling through. If the lens expanded, it meant information carried by High-Energy Particles was returning from within the Gravity Well.

This was clearly the latter, and the information was being released at a rate that had exceeded its peak. As the distorted lens rings expanded, they emitted flashes of white light like lightning.

Wei Keng covered his head and looked for somewhere to hide.

Just then, the Information Communicator on his wrist rang. A message appeared: "Wei Keng, what are you doing in Zone 833? Didn't you say the school was too noisy and you were going to study in the dormitory?"

Wei Keng opened his mouth and spat out one word: "Damn!"

But when it rains, it pours. The plastic bag in his hand suddenly dropped to the ground, spilling the Sweet Fish Cake skewers everywhere.

Yes, the White Cat outside the supermarket had been eyeing Wei Keng for a while. When it saw him standing there distracted, it darted over, knocked over his plastic bag, grabbed one of its spoils, and ran off.

He hadn't gotten to eat his snacks, and now his teacher had caught him, too? Sigh. It looked like he'd get another mediocre evaluation in his annual assessment.

Forty kilometers away,

A Capsule Pod four meters long and two meters wide rose from the Dark Gravity Well.

Inside the energy pod, the human body that had been electromagnetically energized gradually lost its Energy Level. At last, it was no longer in a high-energy state, and its vital functions could resume.

It was a young woman, well, a Earth Maiden in her twenties in terms of physiology. Her consciousness and thoughts, however, had been in a Different Plane for a long time.

The Capsule Pod's bed rose and pushed her out.

A Mechanical Arm in the base wrapped her naked body in a white Detection Suit.

The many electronic devices in the suit used more than six thousand contact points across her body to examine her condition, ensuring that her physiology was normal after returning from the Gravity Well's high-energy state.

The Detection Suit wrapped her up snugly. Even her head was covered by a delicate white helmet, leaving only her face exposed. She looked dashing.

Well, to be honest, she did need a helmet. During the process of electromagnetic energization, all parts of the body that weren't involved in neural signaling went unprotected.

To put it plainly, she had no hair. Those keratinized parts without bioelectricity had all been burned off during the energization.

Even her eyebrows had just been drawn on. If someone played back the footage of her climbing out of the energy pod, her skin would have looked as white as jade.

This woman was a Supervisor, not a Transmigrator.

Throughout the entire transmigration process, Supervisors remained in a high-energy state. Once their Anchoring Particles reached a Sub-dimension, they didn't revert to ordinary human form. Instead, they remained in a special state that was difficult to observe in the Sub-dimension, separated from the Transmigrators.

After their consciousness and thoughts had traveled across, Transmigrators found a normal physical form in the Sub-dimension and fully descended into it, becoming ordinary people in that world. They could walk across it and touch its plants, soil, and rocks.

Supervisors, meanwhile, had no bodies. That made it easier for them to manipulate energy and perform calculations and analyses impossible for mortal bodies.

Every Transmigrator in the present era carried a system, and the Supervisor was its administrator. Supervisors weren't merely secretaries to Transmigrators; they were also responsible for overseeing their morality, intellect, and physical condition during Plane Travel.

Now the Supervisor had returned, but there was no sign that the Transmigrator had. Clearly, something important had happened in the plane.

In the lobby of the East Asia Space-Time Department, the Supervisor entered a Communication Pod and contacted her superiors to report what had happened.

Nine minutes later,

At the New Pearl Tower in Pu Hai, a landmark building that had been destroyed in the Third World War and completely rebuilt afterward, lights shone from the windows of the conference room at its summit.

The head of the Time-Space Management Department contacted the heads of all the relevant departments.

One holographic projection after another appeared. Not a single seat in the conference hall was empty.

After the returning Supervisor explained the situation at the meeting, the attendees couldn't help but grow deeply concerned about the current state of affairs in space-time.

In the present era, although the global economy was interconnected, nations and ethnic groups still held influence.

The space-time departments on the Asian side and those of the Atlantic Union were in competition across space-time.

Now, their Transmigrators had collided.

The conflict arose because the two sides clashed over who would guide the cultural development of certain planes.

The idea of a plane's dominant influence was broad, encompassing many different aspects.

This situation had already appeared in films as early as the 21st Century: every alien in the entire universe of Western films spoke English. In the first half of the century, Japanese was the official language in Asian animation; in the second half, Chinese became its official language. If the world of a film were a plane, then whether its people spoke Chinese or English would represent which power guided that plane's development.

At present, some of the planes Earth had explored were still at a pre-Industrial Age level of development, so Transmigrators sent by Earth Civilization could "export" many concepts to them.

It mattered a great deal which side of Earth's civilization the cultural development of those worlds leaned toward.

This was like the significance of deploying rovers to Mars and the Moon in the 21st Century to declare sovereignty.

Comrade Yuan Yue, the current chairman of the Space-Time Exploration Committee and a High Minister Rank Transmigrator, looked deeply indignant.

At the meeting, he made the rare and somewhat excessive gesture of rapping the table. "We cannot yield! The right to guide the Known Sub-Civilizations of Sub-Dimensions is sovereignty across space-time!"

Another Supervisor, Bai Hengqian, glanced at him but agreed. She also explained the gravity of the situation. "Time flows differently in Sub-dimensions. In those few conflicting Space-Time Regions, if we or they initiate a change in the target time-space today, we can pinpoint it decades later and reap the benefits after a thousand years of history have passed downstream. So if we retreat today, the consequences will appear decades from now."

Most of the Transmigration Team leaders in the hall gradually understood the situation.

"So this is war!" one Transmigration Team leader declared.

"That's right," Yuan Yue confirmed. "This concerns our future development. We mustn't forget the spirit that drove us to fight for the Moon and Mars two centuries ago. We mustn't fear a clash with them over space-time today."

Over the past few centuries, the East and West had developed rifts over everything from ideology and cultural systems to racial differences. Those divisions couldn't be healed in just a hundred years.

As the discussion in the New Pearl Tower's conference room turned to competition and sovereignty, no one wavered in their opinion.

The leader of a Transmigration Team assigned to an Interstellar Development Plane realized that the conflict would affect a very broad range of areas, so he raised some practical questions. "If a full-scale conflict breaks out across space-time, can we expand our forces? What kind of Cooperation System should different teams follow? One thing is certain: the personnel of the Atlantic Space-Time Transmigration Department are no less capable than ours."

Bai Hengqian of the Supervisory Committee presented the information she had gathered and proposed a response. "Tian Ji's Horse Racing: use our lower-ranked horses against their top horses, our top horses against their middle-ranked ones, and our middle-ranked horses against their lower-ranked ones."

She brought up a file on the hall's screen.

The Stereoscopic Icon System listed our current forces across the four major categories of planes, marked with red, orange, yellow, and blue Warning Levels. It also indicated the different Confrontation Risk Levels.

The Supervisor began explaining the strategy to everyone in her clear, knowledgeable voice. "We can reassign the Main Force Transmigrators from space-time regions with little chance of confrontation, replacing them with newcomers who have only just begun transmigrating. Then we can concentrate our main forces in the conflict zones."