This Thing Is Actually Real?

Buzz—

The vortex closed.

The hall once again fell into deathly silence.

Only the lead brick remained, lying quietly on the table, mocking everything they thought they knew.

Even the faintest trace of...

the aroma of Orleans roast chicken wings still lingered in the air.

A full minute passed.

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

An academician specializing in optical research slammed his hand on the table, his face turning red as if he had suffered a great insult.

"It's definitely a holographic projection! Or some kind of visual trick we haven't discovered! Lei, is that chef you hired a magician? That portal just now was a holographic effect too, right? It was pretty convincing. I was almost fooled!"

"Exactly! How could matter just disappear out of thin air? That's not scientific!"

"We want data! Observations with the naked eye, without data to support them, are pseudoscience!"

Even after seeing it with their own eyes, these scientists, steadfast believers in materialism, instinctively refused to accept something so mythical.

Hearing the noisy objections around him, Lei Zhan rubbed his throbbing temples and sighed helplessly.

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

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

Lei Zhan gave a low command into his headset.

"Bring in the Spatial Gravitational Wave Detection Array and the Ghost Ultra-High-Speed Camera we prepared! Point them at the test bench!"

Soon, several bulky, precision instruments worth a fortune were quickly set up.

Every sensor was fixed firmly on the tray.

Lei Zhan pressed the communicator again, his tone carrying a hint of apology.

"Su Yun, sorry to trouble you again. Take it slower this time. These old men only trust instruments."

"...Captain Lei, give me a break! I'm frying chicken legs right now! The oil's already hot!"

Su Yun's desperate howl came through the headset.

But a few seconds later, he still reluctantly replied,

"Fine, fine, this is the last time! Hurry up!"

"Buzz—!!!"

Space shuddered violently once more.

Even though they had braced themselves after seeing it once before, the scientists present still instinctively recoiled, their faces pale, as the blue-violet vortex tore through the air out of nowhere again.

The oppressive sensation of staring into an abyss couldn't be faked.

"Quick, quick! What are we testing this time? This?"

Su Yun was still holding a half-fried chicken leg.

He strode up to the precision instruments and, before Lei Zhan could even call out "Start," picked up the lead brick and touched it to the ring.

"Watch this! In it goes!"

The ring flashed faintly.

The lead brick vanished in an instant.

"Out!"

The light flashed again.

The lead brick slammed down onto the table.

"Done, right? I'm off! The chicken legs are going to burn!"

Cursing under his breath, Su Yun turned and darted back through the portal like a gust of wind.

With a buzz, the vortex closed, as if he had never been there at all.

Only a drop of hot oil on an expensive optical lens proved that what had just happened wasn't an illusion.

"The data! Look at the data!!"

Qian Lao was the first to react, lunging toward the monitor like a madman.

The next second,

a piercing alarm blared through the laboratory!

"Beep—! Warning! High-intensity regional gravitational wave collapse detected!"

"Warning! Space curvature has undergone a precipitous drop! Values off the charts!"

"Playback! Hurry, replay the high-speed camera footage! Slow it down ten thousand times!"

The footage on the Large Screen froze frame by frame.

In that extreme slow motion, everyone saw a sight that shattered their worldview.

The hard lead brick didn't vanish the instant it came within a centimeter of the ring. Instead, it warped strangely, like a noodle.

An invisible, terrifying force field forcibly stretched and folded it, twisting it into a shape that defied the laws of geometry, before sucking it into a black point invisible to the naked eye!

"It wasn't magic... There was no optical projection..."

"Space... really was folded..."

Lei Zhan saw the old scholars still staring blankly at the data. Without thinking, he reached out with his callused hand, intending to pick up the ring from the tray and pass it to them for further study.

"Now that the data has confirmed it, you can take it and—"

"Stop!!!"

A shrill scream rang through the laboratory.

Qian Lao sounded like a cat whose tail had been stepped on. With agility utterly at odds with his eighty years, he lunged forward and smacked Lei Zhan's hand away.

"You big oaf! Don't touch it!!"

The academicians' eyes instantly turned red. Like mother hens protecting their chicks, they crowded Lei Zhan back three meters, spittle spraying all over his face.

"That's a treasure worth hundreds of billions! It's a vessel of universal truth! How can hands that hold guns touch it?!"

"What if you scratch it? What if fingerprints make it oxidize? Who told you to put it on an ordinary tray like that? A waste of a treasure! What a waste!"

Lei Zhan froze with both hands raised, bewildered. Wait... weren't you just calling it a cheap trinket?

These old men, who usually got winded just walking, now showed the kind of efficiency you'd expect from special forces.

With trembling hands, they put on the highest-grade cleanroom gloves. Some even held their breath, afraid the carbon dioxide they exhaled would corrode the ring.

Several leading figures in the field carefully carried the tray as if it held a bomb that could explode at any moment, inching their way to the operating chamber of a vacuum electron microscope.

Dozens of pairs of eyes stared fixedly at the tiny silver ring, as if it would sprout wings and fly away if they blinked.

As the electron microscope powered up, the image was projected onto the Large Screen.

The men who usually ruled the academic world now looked like a class of first-graders. Their mouths hung open as they stared at the screen, trembling all over.

The screen showed an enlarged view of the ring's surface.

"My God..."

Qian Lao, chief physicist at the Huaxia Academy of Sciences, gripped the edge of the console so tightly that his knuckles turned white. His cloudy old eyes were bloodshot.

"Do you see these patterns? They're not flat! They're three-dimensional! At the microscopic level, they form a perfect, closed Möbius loop!"

"This is a concrete manifestation of multidimensional space theory! This tiny ring has an entire pocket of vacuum space sealed inside it!"

The laboratory erupted in commotion, with gasps of amazement rising one after another.

Everyone was awestruck by this miraculous magic.

However, as the examination continued, Qian Lao's brow gradually furrowed.

He adjusted the focus and froze the image on the edge of one of the patterns.

On the electron microscope's ultra-high-definition screen, the silver ring that had looked smooth to the naked eye now appeared crisscrossed with ravine-like grooves.

"Rough... It's far too rough."

Holding a laser pointer, Qian Lao indicated the winding grooves of varying depths on the screen, his voice tinged with a sense of absurd disbelief.