Green World

Huang Si's mental field spread out, battered and swept along by the wind as it moved constantly.

Because Huang Si's soul was stronger than before, his mental field reached farther this time.

Huang Si held on in the wind for fifteen minutes, but still couldn't take it and retreated. As expected, his soul was injured again.

But Huang Si could tell that this kind of injury was like a ligament strain after intense exercise. It wasn't harmful. Once he recovered, his mind would be more resilient.

After the wind passed, Huang Si took out more than a dozen new little robots and an extremely long network cable.

"Charge, little robots! The Ring world is waiting for you to explore and settle it!"

He charged them up, then sent them outside.

In the days that followed, Huang Si figured out the patterns of the vortex storms in Dark Space, allowing him to make preparations in advance.

Thanks to the little robots' tireless exploration and heroic sacrifices—several had accidentally lost their footing and fallen—Huang Si finally learned a great deal about the world on the other side of the Ring.

First, the other side didn't seem to be Earth—or at least, it wasn't the Earth of the twenty-first century that he remembered. Even when he took his phone over there, it couldn't pick up any signal.

This might have been because the Ring was 5,000 meters above the ground. But even at that altitude, there should have been at least a faint signal. Commercial airplanes could still receive signals above the clouds, so why couldn't a phone work at just 5,000 meters?

Huang Si could only conclude helplessly that the world on the other side probably wasn't Earth, or at least not Earth in his era.

The Ring might well have been a passage through time and space.

Another thing he figured out was that, on the other side of the Ring's exit, it floated upright in the air. That meant he could hang things from its top.

The Ring also wasn't smooth. It had plenty of uneven spots, and as long as he kept the clips balanced, he could hang all sorts of things from it.

And although the Ring was a passageway, when a hurricane arose, it only swept objects through Dark Space and dropped them out of the Ring, where they fell to the ground.

But there were no storms on the other side of the Ring.

That gave Huang Si the idea of building a communications base with the Ring at its center.

Two months later.

People could achieve anything if they dared to dream big. By June 2023, the communications base outside the Ring had finally been built.

Huang Si firmly secured a set of clips to the Ring, then placed a support frame above them. Inside the frame, he installed a high-powered signal transmitter, much like the ones used at telecommunications base stations.

Around the transmitter, eight black panels extended outward like flower petals. These were the solar cells.

He still didn't know whether this was Earth, or exactly when and where it was. But as long as there was sunlight, he could use solar power. So Huang Si began making solar cells on his side of the house, then gradually moved them over until he had finished building the Sunflower Solar Array.

After several generations of development, the solar cells Huang Si made had become very efficient, with a photoelectric conversion rate of 20%.

The base station needed a lot of electricity to run, but all those solar cells connected together could provide enough.

While building the base station, Huang Si discovered something that astonished him.

This might really not be Earth—or, at the very least, it was an extremely unusual spacetime.

Time here passed more than three hundred times faster than it did for Huang Si.

After testing with a clock and a camera, Huang Si found that the exact ratio was 323 to one.

This made processing the video signal difficult. If he wanted to watch the feed live, the image would inevitably "drop frames," making the real-time video on the other side look like time-lapse footage.

If he treated it as a recording instead, the video from the other side couldn't play in real time. For every minute he waited on his side, he would have to watch 323 minutes of footage.

In the end, Huang Si chose the first option. He couldn't monitor things in detail, but at least the picture was live.

After discovering this, Huang Si felt deeply unsettled.

He had originally thought he could return to Earth through the Ring, but he hadn't expected it to lead to another world.

Even time flowed at a different rate in this world.

That either meant the planet was near the edge of the universe, since the Big Bang theory suggested that galaxies there experienced faster time, or else it was an entirely different spacetime system.

Either way, there was no hope of returning to Earth from here.

After going from despair to hope and back to despair, Huang Si was dejected for a while, but soon returned to normal.

Very few things could shake him now.

After the base station was complete, Huang Si began arranging to send a new generation of little robots down to the ground. These redesigned robots walked on four mechanical legs and were powered by high-capacity batteries, letting them travel for more than twenty hours without recharging.

The delivery method was, of course, by parachute.

Huang Si sent six little robots, but four were smashed when they landed. Only two survived.

After all, they were falling from 5,000 meters up, so Huang Si had expected as much.

The two surviving robots contacted the base station to confirm their directions, then raced off in opposite directions.

Because time flowed three hundred times faster on the other side, the little robots could travel for twenty hours while only a few minutes passed for Huang Si.

Soon, the little robots stopped, set up their own solar panels, and began charging while sending back images as stationary cameras.

Watching the video, Huang Si felt as if he were watching a time-lapse documentary about wildlife.

In the lush forest, the robots struggled along as birds and beasts called around them and insects and butterflies flitted by.

At one point, a robot came to a stream and startled a creature that looked part sheep and part deer as it drank at the water's edge. Later, a furry paw stepped in front of a robot's camera, then rustled away.

This was a planet teeming with life. Though he didn't know whether its species were similar to Earth's, he could imagine what a beautiful place it must be.

The video kept coming in.

After three hours had passed for Huang Si, forty days had gone by on the other side.

During those forty days, the little robots had been disturbed by wild animals. One was destroyed, while the other survived because it had stopped in a more concealed location.

But even after forty days, the cameras hadn't spotted any sign of "humans."

When Huang Si had observed from above, he'd already noticed that there seemed to be no trace of human activity. It stood to reason that any human civilization, whether primitive or advanced, would cut down trees, build houses, and so on. At the very least, it would alter parts of the landscape, leaving signs of intelligence visible from a distance.

But the vegetation here was distributed so evenly that there was no sign that humans had touched it.

So Huang Si decided to name the world on the other side of the Ring Green World.

After that, Huang Si began working on a ground base in Green World.

He planned to use Creation Power to generate the materials needed for the ground base.

By now, his Creation Power limit had reached a staggering 10,570 points. With a five-digit limit, he could easily create objects of any size or complexity, as long as he could understand and record them.

Huang Si's Creation Power also recovered at a rate of 2,751 points per hour. He hardly ever needed to wait for it to recover; if anything, it replenished so quickly that he often had to spend some of it.

Technology research, on the other hand, was what really took up most of his time.

As his soul grew stronger, his soul level was still "Perceive," but he was on a completely different level from when he had first reached "Perceive" a few years earlier.

What's more, over the past two months, he had often let the wind seep into his mental field. His mental field could now spread out in a sphere with a radius of eighty meters around him.

Huang Si could now mass-produce small probes to explore Dark Space. He sent more than a hundred small robots into the surrounding Dark Space. Some were dedicated to probing, while others were designed for recharging, traveling between Dark Space and Huang Si's side to replenish their power.

Huang Si recharged them by simply ejecting their batteries and generating new ones.

For now, exploring Dark Space wasn't his main concern. Green World was what he was focused on.

First, he needed to develop transport robots. After all, the Ring was 5,000 meters above the ground, and anything dropped straight down would smash to pieces.

Thanks to his extensive technical preparations, Huang Si developed practical transport robots in just one month. When they jumped from high altitude, they could unfold a pair of glider wings and adjust their direction to suit the airflow and surroundings, choosing where to land.

With these transport robots, the success rate for landing was over 99%.

Huang Si drew up a design for the ground base, then generated metal panels according to the plans and had the transport robots carry them down.

Specialized assembly robots would put the base together on the ground.

The panels and assembly robots took Huang Si another month to prepare.

As for the construction of the ground base, the 323-to-one time difference meant it took hardly any time at all.

In August 2023, the Green World ground base was complete.

The ground base was assembled from hundreds of metal panels. Its riveted design made it easy to take apart while keeping it sturdy. It covered more than 1,000 square meters, and over 1,300 solar panels stood on its roof like antennae. They could turn to face the sun at any time, making the most of the sunlight to generate electricity.

At the moment, the base had only charging stations for the robots. It still needed further improvements.

With the ground base in place, Huang Si's robots in Green World finally had somewhere to call home.

They had somewhere to charge, like a cafeteria where they could eat.

They were safe, too. The base came equipped with laser weapons that could kill any attackers.

And life was good. They no longer had to worry that Huang Si would scrap them when they ran out of power.