This Thing Is Actually Real?

Whoosh--

The vortex closed.

The hall fell once again into a deathly silence.

Only that lead brick remained, lying quietly on the table, mocking everyone's understanding.

In the air, there still lingered a faint, elusive...

scent of Orleans-style grilled wings.

A full minute passed.

"Magic... this is close-up magic!"

An academician specializing in optics slammed the table, his face flushed red as if deeply humiliated.

"It must be a holographic projection! Or some kind of visual trick we haven't discovered! Lei, is that cook a magician you hired? Was that portal just a holographic effect too? It looked pretty realistic—almost fooled me!"

"Exactly! How could matter just vanish into thin air? That's not scientific!"

"We want data! Visual observation without data support is pseudoscience!"

Even though they had seen it with their own eyes, these staunchly materialist scientists instinctively refused to believe in such mythology.

Lei Zhan listened to the clamor of doubts around him, rubbed his throbbing temples, and let out a helpless sigh.

These old scholars wouldn't cry until they saw the coffin.

"Fine. You want data? I'll give you data."

Lei Zhan spoke into his earpiece with a stern command.

"Bring up the prepared Spatial Gravitational Wave Detection Array and the Ghost Ultra-High-Speed Camera! Aim them at the experimental table!"

Soon, several precision-crafted, expensive, and bulky instruments were swiftly deployed into position.

All probes locked firmly onto the tray.

Lei Zhan pressed the comms button again, a hint of apology in his tone.

"Su Yun, I need you to come again. This time, go slow. These old men only trust instruments."

"...Captain Lei, give me a break! I'm in the middle of frying chicken legs! The oil's already hot!"

Su Yun's exasperated roar came through the earpiece.

But a few seconds later, he reluctantly replied, "Alright, alright, last time! Hurry up!"

"Whoosh--!!!"

Space trembled violently once more.

Even though they had mentally prepared for it, when the azure vortex tore through the air again out of nowhere, the scientists instinctively flinched back, faces pale.

That oppressive feeling of staring into an abyss couldn't be faked.

"Hurry up, hurry up! What are we testing this time? This?"

Su Yun still had a half-fried chicken leg in his hand.

He strode over to the precision instruments in one step, didn't even wait for Lei Zhan to say "start," grabbed the lead brick, and touched it to his ring.

"Watch this! In!"

The ring glowed faintly.

The lead brick vanished instantly.

"Out!"

Another faint glow.

The lead brick slammed heavily onto the table.

"Done, right? I'm out! The chicken leg's gonna burn!"

Su Yun grumbled as he turned, darting back through the portal like a gust of wind.

With a whoosh, the vortex closed, as if he had never been there.

Only a single drop of hot oil on the expensive optical lens proved that none of it was an illusion.

"Data! Look at the data!!"

Qian Lao was the first to react, lunging madly toward the monitor.

The next second.

A piercing alarm blared through the lab!

"Beep! Warning! Detected high-intensity regional gravitational wave collapse!"

"Warning! Space curvature experiencing a cliff-like drop! Values off the charts!"

"Replay! Play back the high-speed camera footage! Slow it down ten thousand times!"

On the large screen, the footage was frozen frame by frame.

Under that extreme slow motion, everyone witnessed a scene that shattered their worldview.

That hard lead brick, the instant it touched a centimeter above the ring, didn't vanish—instead, like a noodle, it underwent a bizarre distortion.

It was forcibly stretched and folded by an invisible, terrifying force field, taking on a shape that defied geometric logic, before being sucked into a black dot imperceptible to the naked eye!

"Not a trick... no optical projection..."

"Space... really got folded..."

Lei Zhan, watching this bunch of old scholars still staring blankly at the data, didn't think much of it. Without a second thought, he instinctively reached out his calloused hand to pick up the ring from the tray and hand it to them for further study.

"Since the data checks out, you all can take it and..."

"Stop!!!"

A shrill scream tore through the lab.

Qian Lao's reaction was like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. With an agility completely unbecoming of an eighty-year-old, he lunged over and slapped Lei Zhan's hand away.

"You brute! Don't touch it!!"

A swarm of academicians instantly went red-eyed, like mother hens protecting their chicks, shoving Lei Zhan three meters back, spittle flying all over his face.

"That's a hundred-billion-level treasure! A vessel of cosmic truth! Is it something your gun-handling paws can touch?!"

"What if you scratch it? What if fingerprints oxidize it?! Who let you put it on this ordinary tray just now? Wasting heaven's gifts! Absolute desecration!"

Lei Zhan held his hands frozen in midair, utterly dumbfounded: Wait... weren't you all just cursing it as a street-stall knockoff?

These old men, who usually wheezed just walking, now erupted with the execution speed of special forces.

Trembling, they donned the highest-grade dust-free gloves; some even held their breath, afraid their exhaled carbon dioxide would corrode the ring.

Several titans of the field carefully cradled that tray as if it were a bomb ready to detonate at any moment, shuffling step by step to load it into the vacuum electron microscope's operating chamber.

Dozens of eyes stared dead at that tiny silver band, as if blinking might make it sprout wings and fly away.

As the electron microscope powered up, the image projected onto the large screen.

These big shots, who normally commanded the academic world, now acted like a bunch of elementary school freshmen, mouths agape, trembling as they stared at the screen.

On the screen was a magnified view of the ring's surface.

"My God..."

Qian Lao, the chief physicist of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, gripped the edge of the operating console, his knuckles white from the strain, bloodshot veins standing out in his murky old eyes.

"See that? These patterns... they're not flat! They're three-dimensional! At the microscopic level, they've constructed a perfect Möbius strip closed-loop structure!"

"This is the materialization of multi-dimensional space theory! Inside this tiny ring, a vacuum space has been locked!"

The lab erupted in uproar, gasps of awe rising one after another.

Everyone was in awe of this miraculous sorcery.

Yet, as the observation deepened, Qian Lao's brow gradually furrowed.

He adjusted the focus, freezing the image on the edge of one pattern.

On the ultra-high-definition screen of the electron microscope, the silver ring—smooth and flawless to the naked eye—now revealed a landscape crisscrossed with ravines and trenches.

"Rough... too rough."

Qian Lao, holding a laser pointer, gestured at the screen's winding, uneven, massive grooves, his tone carrying an absurd disbelief.