Whether he couldn't create living creatures or had gotten his head caught in a door, to Huang Si, it was all just a minor ripple in his daily life—not enough to make a splash.
He wrote a line on the paper, making it the title of today's diary entry and the question he was about to ponder:
"What exactly are the properties of mental force? Can it be developed further?"
The Creation Book had no answer for him, so he could only explore on his own.
First, mental force was a reflection of the soul's strength. A Mental Force Field was the outward manifestation of the soul's essential power under the control of consciousness. This was instinctive knowledge the Creation Book had given him.
Then, through his own explorations, Huang Si discovered that mental force could be pierced, cut apart, and scattered by storms. He thus found a way to thin it out and spread it farther of his own accord, strengthening his soul's ability to expand itself. This was how he had reached the level of a Domain.
During this process, he had also discovered another property of mental force: if it was drawn by an external energy, it could spread over a greater distance. For instance, under normal circumstances, his consciousness couldn't reach the Ring, but it could when the wind picked up.
"Energy." Huang Si wrote the word on the paper, then fell into thought.
Aside from the unknown energy that was like a storm, he had yet to find anything else that could extend the reach of his Mental Force Field.
Wait, Huang Si thought. Beside it, he wrote two more words: "metal" and "magnetic field."
These two things had once interfered with his mind, back when his soul was still weak.
At the time, Huang Si had discovered that metal carried a magnetic field, making it difficult for his mental force to penetrate. Most of the time, he could only go around it.
A magnetic field was a field, and a mental field was also a field. Could it be...?
By then, the storm had long since died down. Huang Si went to the doorway, opened the door, and reached out toward the surface of the Dark Space.
His consciousness still hurt, and his mental force could radiate only about five meters around him at most, so his Creation range was very short.
Huang Si couldn't use his mental force right now. All he could do was use gestures to focus his attention and point toward a spot five meters into the Dark Space.
After Huang Si pictured the object he wanted in his mind, Creation Power instantly coalesced, and a large electromagnetic coil appeared in the Dark Space five meters away.
Then he made a battery pack and several cables, and connected them together.
Nothing that entered the Dark Space made a sound or gave off any light. Huang Si could only sense through his consciousness that the electromagnetic coil had started operating. Even that sensation was becoming a little hazy because of his injured soul.
A magnetic field appeared around the coil.
Standing in the doorway, Huang Si quietly felt the effect the magnetic field had on his mental force.
"Interference and attraction?" The magnetic field's energy was far too weak compared to Huang Si's soul, but he could still sense that it did affect his mental field. Its main effect was attraction, along with slight disturbance.
In other words, if the magnetic field overlapped with his mental field, it could make his Mental Force Field more concentrated.
Huang Si shook his head. This wasn't the effect he wanted.
He didn't know whether a stronger magnetic field would have a stronger effect, but he felt that spreading his Mental Force Field was more useful than concentrating it.
Huang Si could guess what concentrating his Mental Force Field would be good for: defense and attack, nothing more.
But the problem was, there was currently nothing he needed to defend against or attack with mental force, apart from the storm, that unknown energy.
So he was supposed to set up a large magnetic coil outside and make his mental force more concentrated in the storm? Huang Si thought that was stupid, and it wouldn't help him train, either.
Most importantly, what was the point of concentrating it? What he wanted was to multitask, control things over greater distances, and find a way to reach another world with his mental force.
Unable to learn anything useful, Huang Si tossed out the electromagnetic coil.
December 2024.
Huang Si rested his chin in his hand, lying on the sofa as he watched the large screen in the living room.
It was showing footage from the Biology Department's cameras in the Green World.
The ground base in the Green World was now fully connected to the network and managed by the intelligent assistant, Xiao Ke. At Huang Si's instruction, the little robots had captured countless native animals and brought them back.
The screen was showing footage from one of the laboratories.
A creature resembling a plesiosaur was thrashing wildly in a steel-walled chamber. Powerful, high-energy rays were hitting its body, severely damaging its cells.
The damage was invisible, but the plesiosaur-like creature seemed to sense the danger. It roared and raked at the door with its sharp claws, desperately trying to get out.
But flesh was no match for steel. The high-energy rays continued to penetrate its body.
It was easy to imagine that once the creature got out, it would probably die of radiation sickness.
Even if it didn't die of acute illness, it would develop cancer, because the radiation had damaged the cells in its body.
But at the same time, its reproductive cells might also have been altered.
Whether the changes were beneficial or harmful wouldn't be known until the little robots extracted all its reproductive cells and bred them.
Put simply, this experiment used radiation to speed up species' mutation rates.
Compared with the slow pace of mutation and natural selection, this method could be more than ten thousand times as efficient.
Huang Si watched silently, moving from one laboratory to the next.
Besides the plesiosaur-like creature, there were sheep, pigs, mice, wolves, eagles, and even apes.
Huang Si spent a long time watching the ape facility.
More than fifty apes were kept there. They were only part of the base's ape population, and they were already the third generation of test subjects.
The process of selecting test subjects was cruel, too. Ordinary individuals were discarded outright. Those that had mutated were judged by whether their mutations were good or bad. Those worse off than ordinary members of their species were observed for a while and then discarded, while those that had improved—especially those who showed unusual intelligence—were selected to remain.
Huang Si currently had too little biological research material. Xiao Ke could make decisions but had no creativity, and the little robots were tools, not people. In other words, apart from Huang Si himself, no one could carry out cutting-edge research.
So under Xiao Ke's control, they could only use the simplest and crudest method: directly stimulating genetic mutations with high-energy rays, accepting mass deaths and mass culling in exchange for a higher mutation rate.
Cameras were everywhere throughout the Green World's ground base, and Huang Si had the highest level of control over all the base's facilities—even greater authority than Xiao Ke, the intelligent assistant. He adjusted the cameras, trying to find a glimmer of intelligence in the apes' faces.
But he found none.
The apes fidgeted in their cages. Huang Si only watched. After a long while, he switched to the next laboratory.
Huang Si found himself unexpectedly calm.
The research currently underway in the Green World—especially the work in the Biology Department—was not merely unethical. It was downright cruel.
But Huang Si felt nothing but indifference.
Scientific progress couldn't avoid sacrifice. If it wasn't one thing, it would be another.
Compared with the real history of Earth, sacrificing these few animals was already merciful.
Humanity's true history of scientific development had been written in the blood of countless scientists and practitioners.
If one followed the strict definition that memories equaled personality, then even Huang Si himself could be considered a sacrifice to science. He had already rolled back his own state twice.
Huang Si instructed Xiao Ke to capture more apes and keep increasing the numbers of the other animals as well. A sample that was too small wouldn't produce any results. They had to increase the sample size and gamble on the possibility of higher intelligence among countless mutations.
At the same time, Huang Si told Xiao Ke to continue developing a bionic human body. It had to create a Mechanical Prosthetic Body as close to a real human body as possible, one that could also carry a small computer and even run artificial intelligence through a network connection.
Xiao Ke repeatedly acknowledged the orders. It had no basic personality and only carried out every task faithfully.
With the instructions given, Huang Si was free again.
He recalled that the video footage he'd just watched had often lagged, especially when the scenes changed. It seemed the data volume was too large and the connection wasn't fast enough.
Did that mean the network equipment needed an upgrade?
At first, Huang Si had used radio signals to connect his home to the Ring, but that had only worked for transmitting small amounts of information. So in the end, he'd run a network cable over there. The cable had a quick-retraction mechanism that reeled it back before a storm began, then had the little robots carry it over and reconnect it once the storm ended.
It seemed this cable couldn't handle the load anymore.
Huang Si looked up information about high-speed network cables, then made six of them, along with a larger switch, and prepared to have the little robots take them over.
He wondered whether running six cables in parallel would finally give the network a little more bandwidth.
Fortunately, the Green World powered the network equipment. Otherwise, the electricity in Huang Si's home wouldn't have been enough to run all that equipment over a kilometer of cable.
Several hours later, the network was hooked up and reconnected.
Standing beside the thick network cable, Huang Si suddenly felt something strange the moment the connection came online.
Attraction... That was it. Where there was electricity, there was magnetism. Electricity and magnetism were one and the same, and electric current produced a magnetic field as it flowed.
Huang Si crouched down and pressed a hand against the cable. His consciousness couldn't help but penetrate the cable's outer sheath and seep inside.
Then he froze.
In the microscopic world inside the cable, he saw charged ions drawing him in and rushing forward.
That was right. The property of his mental force seemed to be that it extended along energy, then was attracted by electromagnetism?
Could electricity carry his consciousness? No, not electricity.
It was information!
A torrent suddenly appeared in Huang Si's microscopic field of vision. A stream of dots of light flew past him. Looking closely, he saw that the dots were actually tiny bars.
The bars were arranged in regular patterns, some bright, some dim.
The first concept that came to Huang Si's mind was—bytes.
This was the world of data.
His Mental Force Field had opened a new world to him, one beyond both the macroscopic and the microscopic: the Information World.
But before Huang Si could explore this discovery, the torrent of information swept him along, rushing forward.
He himself seemed like just one particle in the information, flowing along with it.
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