The Administration's Arrangements

In the spring of 2435, the Third Conflict had effectively ended.

Wei Keng's collective had also withdrawn south. With the war over, it was time to relax. But after getting used to war, people developed a taste for excitement.

The cold northern winds had finally begun to ease, and large numbers of migratory birds were gathering. Then they ran into Wei Keng, who had broken free of the rules. That was a little... like a doctor "privately" drinking glucose water—perhaps it had caught someone's eye.

Under the pretext of replenishing his protein, Wei Keng put four layers of safety lines on certain individuals, then went straight down the cliff to gather eggs. In the twenty-first century, his peers would have called this illegal. A court would have sentenced him to five years in prison and fined him hundreds of thousands. The "kind and righteous" nature-protection volunteers would have condemned him as utterly depraved and said he should be thrown into the sea.

Wei Keng had already mapped out the collection targets for each square on the grid marked across the cliff. It wasn't realistic to take everything, but missing more than three nests would count as a work error.

The Wei Kengs climbed down on ropes, then sent basket after basket back up. Once they had cleared one section, they moved on to the next.

The baskets were full of protein, rich in amino acids not found in soybeans and other plant-based protein crops. Plenty of birds tried to stop them, spitting acidic vomit or pecking at them with their beaks. But Wei Keng had planned carefully—even preparing for the possibility of encountering pterosaurs on the cliff.

After driving in the stakes, they went down in groups of three, bringing iron wire with them. If a bird spat filth at them or tried to peck them, the two people beside them would use a large net to hook its wings and lift it by the feet, just like a hen. They would tie it up and send it up on a rope. After five days of hard work, the birds had vanished from this stretch of cliff, and Wei Keng moved on to another.

Wei Keng felt perfectly normal about it. "I don't want to go to all this trouble either, but chickens, ducks, and geese went extinct in this era. Otherwise, wouldn't domesticated poultry and livestock be so much better?"

[If you aren't using modern civilization to solve a group's problems with meat, eggs, and milk, then don't use concepts created by modern civilization to restrict how they survive in that regard.]

Up north, Wei Keng had already modified the cages. All the birds had their feathers clipped and were stuffed into cages according to the assumption that any birds caught together might be family. Wei Keng said, "A family should stay together."

The females had their wings clipped and were kept for their eggs; the males had their throats cut. Their blood was caught in a bowl of salt water, then they were scalded and plucked. Beside the stream, white feathers floated over green water, red feet stirred the clear stream. Oil slicked the iron griddle, and the fragrance of cumin and chili filled the air.

The birds' upturned bottoms were cut off and fed to the cat. The rest was salted and prepared. Once the meat had been coated with oil and chili and fried, it went onto Wei Keng's dinner table that very evening. Most of it, of course, went to the laborers. Wei Keng always kept an eye out for potential resentment when distributing the portions evenly.

As for how the bird meat tasted—

Picking at his teeth, Wei Keng clicked his tongue and commented, "The meat's too tough, not tender at all. The only way to eat it is sliced and fried on a griddle. In soup, it's like rubber; roast it, and it turns to dry firewood. I'll never eat wild game again. Hmm, though the eggs are pretty good."

While Wei Keng was judging whether the bird meat tasted good, figuring out how to keep the cat's instincts sharp so it would catch more rats and venomous snakes, and wondering whether he could work out the pattern of salt crystallizing naturally from the brine on the beach during the temperature drop at night so he could collect more—

In the space bubble corresponding to Wei Keng, Observer Bai Linglu was in an extremely foul mood as she studied the reorganization plan handed down from above.

After changing the background of the deep-sea coral in the space bubble to withered vines, old trees, and dim crows, Bai Linglu said, "Why? I was the first to develop this area!"

Chief Observer Bai Hengqian said coldly, "No reason. During a Plane War, the central command has the authority to requisition all resources and manpower."

"But, Au—" Bai Linglu was cut off before she could finish.

"There are no buts, Bai Linglu. Are you going to obey or not?"

Bai Linglu mulled it over for a long while in the space, then raised her head and stubbornly stuck out her chin. "Fine, I'll accept it. But I want to state my opinion."

"Fine. Go ahead. I'll take notes." Bai Hengqian's icy expression was strictly business, as if to say, "Say what you like. I'll pass it on, but they might not listen."

Bai Linglu said, "This Transmigrator's arrival was hugely coincidental. The nature of his transmigration was a matter of chance, and so was his exploration as a complete novice, with no understanding of the situation at the beginning. These coincidences can't be replicated. If we abandon this transmigration halfway through, it'll be very difficult to find another Transmigrator like him!

"I'm not denying that the Time-Space center can send a High Minister to test out this approach. But can they sustain Consciousness Proliferation with this method? And would that growth be sustainable in the long run?

"According to my records, when he first arrived, he was only Civilian Rank—the most ordinary, lowest-level Civilian Rank. Now, every individual here is at the rank of a corporal, and their total number is impossible to estimate. Even at the minimum fusion rate of ten percent, the outpouring of Wei Keng's will this time is no small thing."

"And he's still growing. Whether it's his missions or his development, we should strike while the iron is hot." Bai Linglu stressed her point.

Bai Hengqian was unmoved. "He hasn't shown that he needs to continue his missions. Besides, as far as I know, he still hasn't redeemed the Proliferation Equipment you recommended."

"He never announces what he's going to do in advance. He doesn't want the equipment now, but I'm confident I can get him to accept my proposal."

"How will you get him to accept it? By deceiving him? If a Civilian Rank Transmigrator isn't satisfied with a high-risk mission, all you can do is provide support. We'll bring in someone else to continue it. You have to follow the assignment."

Bai Hengqian was so exasperated by the girl that she nearly laughed. She wanted to spell it out for her: The reason they're replacing you is that your methods and your attitude are both wrong.

Why couldn't Bai Hengqian say so directly? Because she represented the authorities, and every conversation between Observers during work had to be recorded. If she spelled it out, that would amount to putting Bai Linglu on trial in the official records. That was exactly why her superiors had assigned her to take over. If it had been someone else, Bai Linglu's words in this conversation would have left plenty of concrete evidence against her.

"If it's someone else, we might as well not do it at all. Seal off this Plane and this Space-Time Node instead of sending someone else to replace him. If you want to develop this Plane now, you should open a new Timeline rather than use the one he hasn't completed."

Bai Linglu meant that they should leave the current starting point waiting for Wei Keng to return, rather than keep things moving along this Timeline while he was away. That was impossible, however. The Plane War was growing more and more intense, and a high-flow-rate arrival point had to be preserved. The Time-Space Department would use Wei Keng's experience to reopen this Plane, but it wouldn't abandon the stretch of history he had already opened up.

After all, Wei Keng had secured fifty thousand square kilometers of land in this Plane, becoming the first Transmigrator to establish a stable foothold there. This Timeline could now produce steadily, allowing the effects of the large Time-Space Gap to work to their full potential. But the Federation would never give up this "safe" foothold in time and space. After Wei Keng left, they would send in new Transmigrators and branch off multiple Timelines.

Besides, High Ministers and High Sergeants were in short supply during the war. The Time-Space Administration Bureau could only send Transmigrators of noncommissioned-officer rank to reopen a Timeline in this Plane. And even with the experience Wei Keng had provided, the data only covered a little over two years. That was far too little. What if they failed to reopen it?

So, to maintain a stable arrival point in the Plane, they had to continue building on Wei Keng's exploration. They were planning a large-scale development, too, using the point in time after Wei Keng's departure as the starting point for new Transmigrators and opening up a large number of Timelines. That would let them make full use of this high-flow-rate world during wartime.

But in Bai Linglu's eyes, the higher-ups at the Time-Space Administration Bureau might have overlooked something: none of the other Transmigrators on the new Timelines branched off from Wei Keng's would find a way to keep growing in this world! In the end, they would still have to bring the original Wei Keng back to open it up.

Bai Linglu had gotten to know Wei Keng's character quite well over the past few days.

She knew that if Wei Keng left halfway through, it would be very difficult to get him to return to this Plane.

"This guy keeps everything bottled up inside. Starting over? His method looks strong now, but have you considered how, in the early stages of exploration, it requires a Civilian Rank Transmigrator to expend three or four thousand times his own Information Enthalpy? And his equipment is scarce at first, so he'll probably have to accept a certain rate of casualties. Once the casualty rate exceeds ten percent, most people will break down! You won't be able to start over. In the end, you'll still have to use the Timeline he opened up to continue the exploration."

According to the rules of the Planes discovered so far in the Main World, if the subsequent history of a Space-Time Node was extensively altered, it would cause Space-Time Inflation, slowing the flow of that entire region of space-time relative to the Main World.

This inflation wasn't uniform. Its effect on Parallel Space-Time was weakest. For example, after large numbers of Transmigrators traveled along the Timeline next to the Shenzhou Plane, the time ratio between the Shenzhou Plane and the Main World only dropped from 10:1 to 9.8:1.

But the upstream origin of many branching Timelines suffered the most severe inflation. If someone wanted to return to the original point in time of a Plane, its flow rate relative to the Main World would no longer be only a few hundred to one.

If the Time-Space Administration Bureau reopened multiple Parallel Timelines in the Pandora Plane based on Wei Keng's experience, and every Timeline could continue on its own, Bai Linglu wouldn't have said anything. But she knew that the Time-Space Administration Bureau above would most likely fail on the other Timelines. They could only develop the one Wei Keng had already opened. In that case, the point in time when Wei Keng left would suffer enormous Time-Space Inflation.

If that happened, the entire process of returning Wei Keng to this point in time could take ten years or more by Main World time. The journey would be extremely circuitous, having to wind around all the proliferating space-time.

In other words, if Wei Keng left this Timeline now and the Transmigrators newly assigned by the bureau failed to unleash the full potential for change in this Plane, they would have to bring the original Wei Keng back to open it up. That would come at a great cost.

Returning Wei Keng to this original point in time would take more than ten years in the Main World.

After two years of working alongside Wei Keng, Bai Linglu had developed a gut feeling. She didn't trust any Transmigrator other than Wei Keng to keep developing this Plane sustainably. That was why she stubbornly refused to let Wei Keng go, unless the future of the Timeline she shared with him was kept closed to other Transmigrators.

As an Observer, Bai Linglu cared deeply about the long-term prospects of safely developing her first High-Risk Plane.

But she couldn't fight the powers that be. Her aunt and superior forced her to sign an acknowledgment form.

By the sea, Wei Keng had already built a lighthouse, and one of his collectives had climbed up with a fat cat.

The lighthouse had been built because of a message from the System: support for the Plane had arrived, and once it did, the time until he left this world would be short.

Back at the rear, while Wei Keng had been busy with industrial production in this Plane, the System—Bai Linglu—had once asked him, "Do you feel at all attached to this world?"

"Hah, attached my ass," Wei Keng had immediately denied to himself. Out loud, he gave a slightly gentler explanation: "This Plane's full of mushrooms, flies, and all kinds of ugly monsters. There's something I have to do every minute of every day. It's exhausting."

Wei Keng really did want to go back.

Back to the Main World, where he could lean back in his Otaku Room, open a bottle of Happy Water, tear open a bag of crab sticks, put on his Immersive Goggles, and sit in his Movie Shaking Chair to rest for two days. No, no—for a whole week.

Ding-dong. Just as Wei Keng was imagining how he'd enjoy himself after returning, the System Interface flashed again. It displayed an introduction to the Plane Knowledge System.

These days, while Wei Keng had downtime in this Plane, the System had been popping up this kind of information every day, filling him in on some common knowledge about Plane Exploration.

The reason was that the Time-Space Administration Bureau was desperately short-staffed during the Plane War, so it was doing everything it could to mobilize people and find opportunities to educate potential recruits.

As the two major Technology Groups on Earth clashed across the Planes, they had also learned more about the various space-time worlds beyond Earth.

Wei Keng had nothing else to do, so he opened the discoveries and took a look.

<The Main World of Earth: the only True Realm in the multiverse!> The exaggerated title made Wei Keng feel as if he'd been transported back to the twenty-first century, seeing a Mobile News Push. But there were standards for testing how well he learned, so he still had to open it.

Compared with Different Planes, the observable Elementary Particles in the Main World were the simplest and most stable among all the Planes observed so far.

The Main World's Material Framework was so stable it was like a house built from tightly packed bricks, with almost no gaps! That was its greatest defining feature. The phenomenon of consciousness emerged through the gaps in this Plane's particle-physics rules.

The physical phenomena underlying human consciousness in the Main World existed at an energy level so tiny compared with other phenomena that people throughout human history could safely dismiss the vague information they occasionally encountered in dreams as "supernatural nonsense," without ever needing to worry that it was real.

Even the foundation of idealism, the "thought" in the ancient philosophers' familiar saying "I think, therefore I am," was electron transmission. The energy of consciousness, by comparison, was like a fish swimming in the ocean.

Most people's consciousness couldn't even stir up a whirlpool in their own sea of thought. Procrastination, bursts of effort that came and went, getting complacent after learning a little, trying to ignore difficulties, and searching for some possible "innovative" shortcut—all of these showed that ordinary people's consciousness couldn't control their thoughts.

The physical phenomenon of "consciousness" in the Main World was so insignificant compared with macroscopic phenomena that it had taken Earth's Will of Life billions of years of evolution to develop nerves, hands, tools, and other means of affecting the world.

In other Planes, however, the Physical rules left much more room between the bricks for the Will of Life. Consciousness could directly shake those "bricks," allowing consciousness linked to thought to affect macroscopic phenomena on a large scale. That was the effect described by "I think this mountain will collapse, and the mountain collapses according to my heart."

Relatively speaking, life in those Planes evolved much faster than life in the Main World. Some major changes in life that took hundreds of millions of years in the Main World could happen in just tens of thousands of years there.

But loose bricks might let life crawl out; they couldn't let it stand firm. Through forty billion years of difficult evolution, Earth's intelligence had formed a civilization in the Main World and gained an excellent Material Accumulation Basis.

"Materials" whose properties didn't change for hundreds of millions of years were everywhere in the Main World! When materials weren't casually shaken by the whims of consciousness, consciousness could make use of the objective material conditions of this world to accumulate things for ages.

Supercomputers used common materials found on Earth to perform Vast and Precise Calculations. That was a victory for the Materialist System. No one's prayers, curses, or consecrations could affect the energy processes inside them or change the Calculation Result.

But in some Planes, even a Difference Engine could be unconsciously affected by the people around it, causing its gears to skip unpredictably and produce a different result.

Humans on Earth could be materialists! Almost everything that required idealism showed up only in long-term planning. If the fantasies of a few people could change the results of other people's long-term, practical efforts in the short term, then, as people on Earth would say, "Something's fucking haunted."

Because of Earth's nature, it could reliably preserve the results it had already achieved and keep accumulating experience. And because people on Earth lived under physical rules, their consciousness tended to be more resilient as it developed than the consciousness of beings with similarly complex minds on other Planes. So—people of Earth, have confidence in yourselves.

That was the end of today's System lesson.

Wei Keng, holding the fat cat to warm his hands, stared blankly at the somewhat choppy sea. "Why do I feel like this is trying to teach me something?"

Volume One was finally over.