Overlapping Spacetime

Overlapping Spacetime

One way to understand the many faces of society was to conduct an in-depth survey across a hundred different occupations. Another was to personally climb the path to advancement, the narrow bridge crowded with thousands of competitors.

Along the way, one could learn about the young men who made it through the path to advancement, those who did not, the groups who entered the workforce after passing through it, and those who drifted outside it after failing. Naturally, one could also learn how large each of these groups was in society.

The civil service examinations in this world had ended. After checking the public results on the electronic system, the examinees went to their schools to collect their score certificates. Under the protection of plainclothes martial artists, Wei Keng hurried to the school where he was registered, wearing a homespun school uniform and "fake nearsighted glasses." He collected all the documents proving his academic success.

This was a procedural step. Wei Keng did his best to complete his records in this world. Of course, after obtaining his school registration certificate, he quietly observed the other people who had come to apply for similar documents—that is, the students who made up a large proportion of those who had passed the civil service exams.

Following them, Wei Keng was curious about their plans for the future. But as he followed them, they ended up at an arcade.

He watched the middle-school dropouts excitedly rubbing their hands together as they discussed the arcade's discounted game tokens that day. They could get twenty percent more for their money. Wei Keng opened his mouth, then closed it.

The reason they had passed was that they didn't understand how "studying could change your fate," so they had no plans for the future. Trying to imagine how those who had failed would think about the future by using the mindset of those who had passed was wrong from the outset. The boys who had done poorly on their exams were having far too much fun.

Ultimately, the problem lay with the National Examination for Filial and Honest Officials policy. These youngsters had been in this world for less than twenty years; they would never think about the future in terms of a decade. The furthest ahead they could imagine was whether they would make the list in two or three years. If they had given up on academic success, then the furthest they could probably think was whether they'd have enough money to top up their game cards next month, or whether their ranking would drop.

Wei Keng had plenty of experience as a shut-in himself, but seeing so many young people becoming shut-ins in this Target Plane made him uneasy.

Wei Keng sighed. "The world of the older generation has been planned by Gold Power, and they've been steadily wasting away in one gamble after another. So the schools, families, and public morals that should be building 'a great enterprise that will last a hundred years' have all shirked their responsibilities. And we're supposed to rely on the youngsters' meager self-control?

"Ha. At an age when they haven't learned all the basics, their personalities are restless, and their minds are still immature, games can consume all their youthful ambition. But what about when they're twenty? Twenty-five? They'll get sick of games sooner or later, especially when they can use cheat codes and keep crushing the computer. They'll be bored in less than a month. When they finally turn their attention elsewhere and venture into the world to make a living, what will happen?"

Seeing these flippant, frivolous, and aimless youngsters, Wei Keng thought of the idlers and ambitious schemers in the streets. Those restless young adults today must have been the same way ten years ago. And in the next decade, the cycle would continue with another generation.

In the Main World, Wei Keng didn't need to think about this problem. He only needed to know that he should follow his teachers, accept society's supervision, study diligently, and serve as a background figure, putting pressure on people smarter than himself to compete. Those more intelligent people would get better jobs and have more ability than an ordinary person like him to build a better world. But here, Wei Keng suddenly realized there was no one ahead of him. It seemed that the responsibility for building the world had fallen directly on his shoulders. He was at a loss.

The investigation was over. Wei Keng got into the car sent by the group. The youngsters heading into the arcade and flirting with one another gradually disappeared from view behind the car, but Wei Keng's thoughts continued.

Many people believed that it was "better to be the head of a chicken than the tail of an ox."

Wei Keng, however, could happily be a vigorous root beneath a towering tree. But now he had become a rotten root at the top of a tree whose bark was decaying. It didn't make him feel especially honored. If anything, the higher he was, the lonelier he felt.

A nation's prosperity depended on broadly nurturing talent, and that depended on public morals, schools, and family education. That, in turn, was tied to enlightening the people and securing their livelihoods.

Under the rule of this damnable Gold Power ideology, not a single organization in this plane, Shenzhou included, focused on solving the problems of ordinary people's livelihoods or cultivating young talent. Their only concern was how to control a world that was becoming increasingly ignorant and specialized.

Speaking of secure livelihoods, Wei Keng also looked up records of men and women participating in the workforce. After checking, he nodded. As he'd expected, women stayed at home. Still, they could receive social benefits on a per-person basis. This caused the recorded proportion of newborn boys to be high, making the population structure look better, with the proportion of young adults rising steadily over the past twenty-odd years.

"Wait."

Wei Keng backed up on the search page on his tablet, entered the keywords again, and looked at the population curve. He focused on the time axis and the population at different ages, then had the consciousness-link system record it. Next, he opened the curves for the production of resources like grain and cloth and had the Transmigration System record those too. Then he put the two sets of curves together.

Using simple graphs, Wei Keng estimated how the conflict would develop. Gradually, he gained a rough idea of when the "war" would break out.

From a certain deranged perspective, "young fools are just like firearms and ammunition: if you don't use them before they expire, they're wasted."

After his initial social research was over and he had returned to the group's headquarters, Wei Keng began a long-distance call with Ke Feijia.

In Shenzhou, Wei Keng's Luoshui Group was, in name, one of the sponsors of Ke Feijia's project. So it was perfectly normal for the two of them to have a private call.

At the experimental base, Ke Feijia had just come out of the area containing the enclosed high-energy equipment. He was still wearing his radiation-protection power armor.

Leaning back in his chair, Ke Feijia looked at Wei Keng's still-scholarly appearance and asked with some concern, "Your exams are over?"

Sitting at his desk, Wei Keng spun a pen as he chatted. "Uh, sorry. I've been busy with my own things for the past six months or so, so I haven't been able to help you much."

"No, no. You've done very well. It's your first time arriving in a Different Plane. At the beginning, you don't need to help with anything. You just need to learn as much about the world as possible. I'd been wondering how you were doing with your study of the Plane Data."

The formal examination in the imperial prefecture covered astronomy, geography, society, history, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and other subjects. Any body of textbook knowledge that could help select talent was included in the examination system. Having passed such a public exam, Wei Keng had gained a thorough grounding in the world's culture and could understand all kinds of situations.

What Wei Keng and Ke Feijia needed to discuss was how to reassess this plane.

Originally, this plane had been classified as an Adjacent Plane: its history differed from that of the Main World on Earth, but its other Physical rules were the same, making it a parallel world. But now it had been confirmed that this world displayed certain "supernatural" phenomena that couldn't happen in the Main World, so it was suspected to be a Near Plane.

For example, in the 1960s in this plane, Western scientists were said to have scientifically verified the existence of supernatural mental powers produced by meditation. But all over the world, the specific applications of this technology were kept under tight security by the relevant agencies, whether the KGB in Soviet Russia or the European and American Joint Intelligence Bureau. The upper echelons of Shenzhou had little information.

Ordinary people in Shenzhou were now cut off from information, but Wei Keng, Ke Feijia, and other high-ranking Shenzhou officials knew that Eastern Traditional Qigong wasn't a trick in this world.

In 1955 in this plane, the Shinra Research Department in Shōyō discovered a new particle, the Meson-Macro Particle, while studying the Tesla Reactor. They published a brief explanation in a public journal, but after that, the particle vanished from the follow-up research in the technical magazines openly published by various countries.

In the 21st Century Main World, experimental reports on Deuterium Tritium and Lithium-6 Particles under high-energy conditions weren't made public.

Countries now kept research into this area secret because the particle's various energy states resembled phenomena at the physical layer where human consciousness existed in this world. They could be affected and controlled by humans, producing visible macroscopic effects.

To put it simply, the oxidation of carbohydrates and the metabolism of the human body took place at the same energy level. Eating carbohydrates gave people the strength to punch someone. So if people in this world could "consume" the relevant substances with their consciousness, might their minds be able to control some energy and blast it outward?

There were already mysterious practitioners in this plane with qigong and psychic abilities! Although their numbers were extremely small, they hid in the corners of society, so they had never appeared in the official historical record. But Science and Technology in the Industrial Age could take phenomena that had once been extremely rare and make them mass-producible.

Ke Feijia was at the forefront of this technology. In one of the scenes he had demonstrated at the test site, a ball of light appeared in his palm, and he used it to smash a vase.

It made sense. If he couldn't demonstrate the practical use of this technology himself, why would several major Shenzhou groups pour so much money into the project and hand him control of it?

Of course, these superpowers couldn't be brought into the Main World, because the technology relied on the Meson-Macro Particle.

As observers, they often encountered the phenomenon of "viewing a mountain from the side, then seeing peaks from the front."

In other words, the same thing could look different from different angles. In different planes, the observable forms of material particles also differed.

The Meson-Macro Particle could be observed and captured in this plane. But as one's viewpoint gradually shifted dimensionally toward the Main World, the particle shrank in both time and space, until it became zero-dimensional in the Main World!

[When the Meson-Macro Particle was sent back to the Main World through an energy facility, its half-life and spatial fluctuations decreased sharply during the dimensional transition. By the time it reached the Main World, it had become unobservable amid the Main World's vacuum quantum fluctuations.]

The Meson-Macro Particle, a particle that could only be found in trace amounts in the Main World, wasn't the only example the Spacetime Exploration Bureau had discovered while exploring various planes. Humanity had continuously made new discoveries while exploring the surrounding spacetime, and its understanding of matter was gradually expanding into a system far broader than the periodic table of elements and the various Elementary Particles, including quarks.

Spacetime departments across the world had begun preliminary measurements of how these substances changed properties between planes, trying to use them as coordinates for different regions of spacetime. Of course, that was still a long way off for Wei Keng. For now, he only needed to know about it.

But the main topic of Wei Keng's conversation with his teammate wasn't superpowers. It was another phenomenon discovered while studying the Meson-Macro Particle.

"In our latest experiment, we confirmed that information about matter could overlap in time within Energy Zone 14. The data we measured was astonishing—it was astronomical!"

"I've only just arrived in this world. I've only got a high-school education. Give me the main point. Over the next two years, I'll study the subject in depth when I choose my major."

"You know about spacetime travel, right? When people make spacetime crystals on Earth, the process is limited to a tiny microscopic scale, where information can echo repeatedly."

Wei Keng nodded. With the comparison, he understood what Ke Feijia meant.

Reversing time had always involved the factor of space. Reversing your body to the state of an infant was one kind of reversal; reversing the city you lived in to how it was forty years ago was another. The spatial scales were different, so the scope of the reversal was different.

Wei Keng asked Ke Feijia, "How big is the reversal here?"

"I told you. Once it reaches a certain threshold, it's astronomical in scale."

Seeing that Wei Keng still couldn't bring himself to imagine something even greater, he explained plainly. "Once it reaches a certain threshold, the entire planet's timeline will change. Only the observers might retain information from before the reversal."

"Traveling into the past, then changing the world, and changing the present!"

Ke Feijia nodded.

"Then if someone changes the past now, can we tell that the past was suddenly changed?"

"As part of the flow of spacetime in this world, our memories rely on the matter of this world. When the world changes, our memories change too. Our thought processes can't directly sense that history has changed, but the nodes in our consciousness will record it! In theory, every time the world's history changes drastically, the properties of the Meson-Macro Particle across the globe become more active, and the observers continue to record the nodes."

"Oh, no wonder. I was wondering why I hadn't been able to contact them."

The observers were now outside the flow of time. But if they spoke with a Transmigrator who had fully descended into this plane, that would amount to direct observation, and the observers' dimensional phase-state compartments would also be affected by the changes in the flow of time. So they only reviewed the fragments the Transmigrator had left in the flow of spacetime and sent information one way.

"They're fine. What we need to be careful about is this—listen closely, this is important: as we move forward through time, we might encounter people who know the direction of our actions. They could use information from the future to prepare for us."

Wei Keng paused. "You mean—"

"Yeah. Be careful. If we accidentally do something that changes history, some entity from the future might come back to the present and give us..." He drew a hand across his own throat.

A few minutes later, after barely digesting the information, Wei Keng asked another question. "Have the nodes recorded any spacetime overlap during the period since we arrived?"

"So far, the nodes have recorded stable Meson-Macro Particle activity, but that doesn't mean nobody from the future has traveled here. Maybe the key figures who could change history are well protected and haven't appeared in public. So even if people from the future arrive here, they can't contact the key figures or change history on a large scale. That would mean the nodes wouldn't record any major changes in the Meson-Macro Particle."

As he spoke, he looked at Wei Keng and reminded him, "So everything you've taken part in so far—all those exams—must remain classified. Don't ever declassify it, even in the future."

Wei Keng nodded. "Got it. What about your safety?"

Ke Feijia raised his hand. A current of air appeared in his palm. With his superpowers, he didn't need Wei Keng to worry about him.

A Red Alert specialty.