2.07 Return

2.07 Return

On October 21, 138 Pandora Era, when the wormhole opened, Wei Keng didn't leave immediately. Instead, he postponed his departure by another two hundred days.

Through telepathy, all the Wei Kengs in the cluster held a long discussion about their "impulse" to stay for another two hundred days.

"Work can transform a person's state of mind." Standing atop a dam, the Wei Keng work group watched the surging river water being contained by the reinforced-concrete dam and reflected on what they had learned from this particular journey.

"Constantly working with my hands to change the world, watching my efforts accumulate day by day—it leaves me feeling as if I'm basking in the morning sun. That's something you don't get from lounging comfortably in a school apartment." In the farmland, Wei Keng was recording the growth of each crop in a table and comparing the two kinds of life.

"So, was I living in decadence before?" At the steelworks, Wei Keng watched the heavy hammer strike the red-hot steel again and again, flicked the sweat from his hand, and asked himself.

"Maybe it was decadence, maybe it wasn't. I'm not sure. But one thing I know for certain is that other people don't get to decide!" In the north, an iron crossbow bolt skewered a Jumping Wolf trying to flee. The Wei Keng group that had fired it answered as they carried their steel guns on their backs.

"I could have many different futures, but circumstances only allow me to choose one. That one path can't define all of me." On a concrete fishing boat in the harbor, Wei Keng watched as the net he had cast was reeled in by a wheel driven by a steam engine. Looking at the sea, which grew more and more "boiling" within the netted area, he couldn't help but sigh.

On the Pandora Plane, after the wormhole through which Wei Keng had first returned disappeared, it flickered several times in the same area. Each time, it was because Wei Keng had gathered Life Energy. He was signaling to Sun Xiangyang and the other crew members that he wouldn't leave today, but he would leave tomorrow, giving those around him some advance warning.

The physicists on the Desperate Plane issued instructions regarding the intermittent flickering of the wormhole on the Pandora Plane: the local cadres were to be understanding of Comrade Wei Keng's longing for home and promptly complete the handover of his duties.

Of course, it would be difficult for the comrades here who weren't Wei Keng to carry out this instruction from the Desperate Plane.

Many of Wei Keng's positions in the Zhujiang Region were crucial, and his abilities in many areas were unmatched. If he left outright, the work of numerous departments would slow to a halt.

[But as for this situation, Luo Hongxing, a senior official in the Time-Space Administration Bureau, had already made discreet arrangements.]

Once Wei Keng left, the Timeline would split into Groups A and B. On the Group A Timeline, Wei Keng would return, while Luo Hongxing would leave a backup copy of himself in this world.

On the Group B Timeline, Wei Keng would be gone for good. Luo Hongxing would then take over the world completely and develop this plane more extensively.

He would fully open the passage to the Desperate Plane. Once people there discovered that the wormhole's properties had changed slightly, they would be able to cross over. However, every person who came through would cause the wormhole to contract a little. After six thousand people crossed, the wormhole would contract completely. When it expanded again, it would return to its former state, no longer allowing humans to pass through.

Would sending six thousand people one way be worthwhile for the Desperate Plane? Of course it would!

Although the Pandora Plane was dangerous and its living conditions harsh and primitive, its Life Radiation offered humanity a new chance to improve its vitality.

The Zhonglian on the Desperate Plane had only recently achieved Independent Autonomy. The Great Unification had happened just thirty years ago, and many people who had made sacrifices during the development of nuclear weapons had been left with chronic illnesses.

So, rather than die in a hospital bed while medical care on the Desperate Plane was still underdeveloped, they might as well go to the Pandora Plane. There, cancer and other physical ailments could be cured through the radiation effects of the colony.

For the Decision-making Body on the Desperate Plane, changing the outcome for some high-value talents from death by terminal illness to simply leaving this world was worth the investment in the Pandora Plane all by itself.

Some things, viewed from a purely objective standpoint, had no meaning at all. But society still recognized their meaning! Take memorial services and other funeral expenses, for example: people were willing to spend time and wealth on them.

Now, sending a person away from this world created no objective value for the Desperate Plane.

But the people there believed it was valuable. They were willing to bring their Subjective Initiative to bear, work hard, and donate everything they had to some organization in exchange for a spot!

And for the human colony on the Pandora Plane, now missing Wei Keng, the arrival of a large number of scientists and technical experts from the Desperate Plane would more than fill the vacancies left by his departure.

It was April again. Wei Keng had now spent a full six years here, and that year, the reservoir upstream on the Zhujiang was completed.

Infrastructure projects on this scale were few and far between on the entire plane after the Pandora Era ended.

Chongqing's massive Smelting Pyramid counted as one, as did the Taihang Mountain Tunnel Cluster built by the Yellow River Alliance in northern East Asia and Ice-Steam City on Greenland Island in the North Atlantic.

Completing a facility like this required enormous mobilization. A Wonder Facility of this scale represented the return of human power to the Zhū Shuǐjiǎo Region. Meanwhile, the Yangtze River Delta Region, which had stood alongside the Zhū Shuǐjiǎo Region before the Great Cataclysm, had now become the core of the Southern State in southern East Asia.

The reservoir had been built entirely to suit the requirements of this plane. Its most notable feature was that a Concrete Pillar had been installed every four hundred meters inside the reservoir. Each pillar had a Groove Slide Rail, intended for mounting nets. Once the net cables were lowered into the reservoir along the grooves, they would create a complete interception barrier across the Water Area. This would give humans the ability to sweep large creatures from the water.

Once the Pandora Field had spread across the world, the thing that terrified humans most was Gene Pollution.

That meant the genes of one species could suddenly appear in the body of another. For example, an alligator might grow shark teeth, or a bear might make a monkey's calls. Naturally, this kind of spread was more common when the organisms were "similar in size" and had "similar diets."

As mentioned earlier, bacterial reproduction couldn't affect higher organisms like humans. Microorganisms reproduced too simply and produced only very simple proteins and sugars, so they didn't greatly interfere with the process by which human DNA built proteins.

Herbivorous Animals also had little chance of interfering with carnivores. Many proteins in a carnivore's body were built from amino acids absorbed directly from prey and broken down in the intestines. The intestines of a Herbivorous Animal couldn't supply those substances and nutrients. So even if some tissue cells were affected, they would stop functioning for lack of nutrients.

For this reason, modern humans needed to adjust their attitude toward ecology a little.

Old Master Wei Keng: Since genes could now pass between species throughout the Biological World, humanity had to play "Battle Royale" in the current version of Blue Star Online!

As long as I was the only Dominant Species in the area, what other species could give me radiation sickness?

Monopolize my own Ecological Niche! Take control of every niche that overlapped with my food supply.

Take this reservoir, for instance. All the fish had to be harvested regularly. If we didn't, some other large species might feed on them, survive, and pass on its genes.

Forget Biodiversity in this day and age! You could be diversified out of existence at any moment. Even if humans couldn't eat all the food they took from the Natural World, they still had to capture and kill it all, then send it to the Biogas Pool for decomposers to process!

Battle Royale, Battle Royale. Even supplies you found had to be destroyed if you didn't take them. Never aid the enemy.

April 15.

When the glistening river water flowed into the reservoir, the water level gradually rose to two-thirds of the way up the pillars. Looking at the clear water from atop one of them, well, there weren't many fish.

At the same time, a visitor from the north emerged from the Mountain Forest.

Long Ximin walked south on foot. When she reached the Zhujiang Region, her first impression was that the once-natural landscape had been abruptly chopped into fragments by all these buildings. Her brows furrowed with concern.

Then she saw the river, cut off by a reinforced-concrete dam across its main channel, and her expression grew solemn.

As she continued from north to south, crossing vast stretches of land before reaching this reservoir, her Life Radiation Perception revealed that life was scattered across huge areas, lacking any gathering or cohesion. It was all "broken into pieces," everywhere forcibly destroyed and carved apart.

Finally, when she reached the largest reservoir, the Life Field she sensed had been swept down to the bare essentials.

To describe her perception in terms humans could understand: in a normal ecosystem, energy flowed from the plants that formed the base, gathered in insects and herbivores, and was then concentrated by carnivores, reaching the top of the energy pyramid. Within the Pandora Field, the top of the food chain was often where Life Radiation energy ultimately converged. The energy from all living things formed a distinct web, anchored by the species at the top of the food chain.

Node Creatures felt a sense of beauty in this clearly tiered flow of ecological energy.

But now? The vegetation was still flourishing, and all sorts of bacteria and decomposers were still present, but what had happened to the flow of energy? It was ugly. Everything was broken and carved apart.

Wei Keng had set fires and caused floods years ago, then carried out large-scale sweeps and hunts. The large species in this region had long since disappeared. Now that the human colony was flourishing in the Zhū Shuǐjiǎo Region, people had begun using the area's resources, but they couldn't use them all. Vast amounts of energy went straight to the decomposers when vegetation was cut down and small fish and shrimp were caught.

This domineering occupation of the Natural World made Long Ximin feel that the life system in this region had withered!

She turned her gaze toward several towers outside the cities of the Zhujiang Region—the Biochemical Reactor sites—and took a deep breath. "So powerful, yet so barren." In Chongqing's body of knowledge, the Life Radiation of producers was the force of "vitality," while the Life Radiation of decomposers carried an aura of "decay."

April 30.

Wei Keng completed the final handover of his duties and prepared to return.

Sun Xiangyang wanted to hold a farewell ceremony for the Wei Kengs, but Wei Keng refused.

Wei Keng said, "Leaving is just leaving. If I come back, there'll have to be another welcoming ceremony. Making one event so complicated would defeat the whole point of being able to come and go freely. And if I can't come back, I hope you won't dwell on me. I don't represent anything special. The future you need is something you can make for yourselves."

After a brief farewell, the Wei Keng Group began gathering in the empty houses prepared at their various outposts.

The place where Wei Keng had first arrived had originally been an empty lot. Later, a mud-brick house had been built there. After the Yuanhua Giant Ship arrived, the building was demolished and rebuilt. Now it was a warehouse enclosed by red-brick walls.

At 9:30 that morning, the wormhole appeared. The one hundred and twenty-five Wei Kengs who had been sitting on little stools in the hall watched it flicker into existence, then rose together. Five of them set out toward the wormhole from five different directions.

With each step they took, Wei Keng's body at every outpost throughout the Zhujiang Region grew fainter. Once they had all passed through, the Wei Kengs vanished from this plane.

Back to Wei Keng's point of view,

As each individual entered the Time-Space Gate, the cluster was no more, and Wei Keng became one again in time and space.

The sensation of unification left Wei Keng completely dazed. The memories of more than fifteen hundred people were simply too vast. His consciousness had to organize them and condense them, simplifying the memories from all the different perspectives of one self.

Wei Keng could faintly hear the system prompting him over and over: "Memories are being uploaded and stored. Please select the important memories of each day and arrange them into a linear sequence."

Meanwhile, the newly unified Wei Keng kept shouting at himself to calm down, focus, and get serious, because countless individual selves had been thinking about other things before merging! Those jumbled thoughts weren't enough to cause any fundamental conflict, but they left his mind in disarray for a while, making it hard to concentrate.

For example, as they entered the wormhole just now, all the Wei Kengs had appeared silent on the surface. But one of those idiot selves had been thinking, "I really want to stay another five hundred years." And there wasn't just one self like that. The sensation of those thoughts in progress had carried over as distractions in his unified mind. Wei Keng thought, "Pulling a stunt like that when I'm busy—damn, that really is me."

Wei Keng ultimately spent several hours calming his mind, then began sorting the linear memories from the Pandora Mission.

That meant recording the important things he had done each day. All the unimportant memories and impressions from traveling, pulling weeds, eating, and so on were simply uploaded and stored in the Personal System. Those would serve as a "diary" of the Transmigrator's stay on a plane.

After who knew how long, Wei Keng finally pulled his consciousness out of his memories. The stars formed by the Shuttlers behind him had passed by, and they were now falling toward the region of the Shenzhou Plane in time and space. And~~ they were about to reach the station!

"Station" here referred to the "Space-Time Rift Space Station," where information was stored within the area of space affected by the Shenzhou Plane's Space-Time Rift technology.

Under Director Ke Feijia's leadership, Shenzhou's time-space research department had devoted everything it had to the project, yet it could only get certain people with special Meson-Macro Particles, along with some intelligent devices, into this Space-Time Rift Space Station.

And those people with special Meson-Macro Particles were none other than Ke Feijia, who had already left this plane, and Wei Keng! In fact, anyone who hadn't come from the Main World couldn't jump onto the platform of the Space-Time Rift Space Station.

The various native forces on the Shenzhou Plane didn't know that the space-time coordinates of their Rift Space Station had been quietly established with the tacit approval of a civilization from another plane.

By the time Wei Keng entered the Space-Time Rift Space Station, he had regained normal human senses of sight, hearing, and touch. He could see his hands and feet, and of course, other things.

Wei Keng felt himself over. His hands and feet were all there, his skin was still pretty soft, and he hadn't lost the two catties of flesh below his waist. Feeling reassured, he relaxed and looked at the system Ke Feijia had left behind at the station.

The Artificial Intelligence "Luofu" was an android with a perfect figure and lovely face. Well, a robot—she looked human, but was made of steel and iron. She was as hard as a plastic mannequin in a clothing store. (Wei Keng had touched her all over and confirmed she was just a machine.) She had been made by the Shenzhou Immortal Crafting Workshop and sent into the Space-Time Rift. Ke Feijia had then reprogrammed her service software, giving the Main World the highest access level.

Luofu said, "My lord, welcome back. The Time-Space Gate has 9,843 units of energy remaining. You can return safely."

Wei Keng asked, "After I go back, what time will it be over there—in Shenzhou?"

Luofu replied, "There is no absolute time or absolute space in the universe. Strictly speaking, the two sides of a Time-Space Gate are not located along a time river in the general sense, but are fixed at a particular physical state. That state could develop into various patterns..."

By the third sentence, Wei Keng had stopped listening and started looking through the files himself.

By the Main World's reckoning, the original Timeline of the Shenzhou Plane that Wei Keng had traveled to had already passed. Ke Feijia and the others had completed their mission and left that plane.

But by the Shenzhou Plane's reckoning, Wei Keng had returned to the moment he had just left.

On Wei Keng's Timeline, Ke Feijia had disappeared midway after Wei Keng left! He had left this Timeline as a backup for Wei Keng.

Wei Keng was surprised. "So when I go back there—to the Shenzhou Plane—I'll be all alone?" After receiving confirmation, Wei Keng felt a little forlorn, as if he'd been abandoned and left behind.

Wei Keng sighed, feeling a little unsure of himself. "I'm still a rookie. Someone, please take me along."