What kind of power was this?
As Huang Si understood it, this power could create things out of thin air, perhaps like the popular 3D printers of the day.
He could either imagine something in his mind and make it appear, or control the manufacturing process down to the molecular level.
If his idea lacked detail, then whatever he made would lack detail too, and might even turn out bizarre.
It would be embarrassing for a creator to cut his finger on something he had made.
But it seemed that if he referred to something at the molecular level and copied it, he could make things precisely. In other words, he needed a thorough understanding of something to create a complete, practical object.
Once Huang Si had settled down, he decided to try making a pancake.
He still didn't know how to make oil, but fortunately there were two large jugs of it in the kitchen, which would be enough.
He mixed flour with water and kneaded the dough, then used a glass bottle to roll it out. He put some sugar inside and rolled it flat again.
Huang Si lit the gas stove. It was called gas, but it actually ran on liquefied petroleum gas. The canister was in the cupboard under the stove.
Huang Si could only be grateful that he'd been such a homebody he'd missed the neighborhood's group installation of piped gas. That meant he only had a liquefied petroleum gas canister, which looked like it would last another month or two. If he'd had piped gas, he wouldn't have been able to cook today.
Before long, Huang Si had made his pancake.
He scooped it onto a plate. Its shape was ugly, and plenty of the sugar filling had leaked out, but Huang Si was filled with a sense of accomplishment.
He couldn't create food directly, but he'd still made water, sugar, and starch, hadn't he? A homemade sugar pancake had a flavor all its own.
He'd already had dinner, but a few hours had probably passed since then, so he figured it wouldn't hurt to eat a little more. He ate the pancake while it was hot.
It was still a little too hot, so Huang Si blew on it as he ate. The sweet pancake was definitely sweet, but it wasn't very fragrant, and its texture was only so-so. It still couldn't compare to an ordinary pancake.
After eating his fill, Huang Si lay down on the bed in his bedroom, feeling a little drowsy.
He could feel that the power inside him had grown very weak, probably because he'd used too much of it that day.
Every time he created something, copied something, or recorded a design in the Creation Book, he used up some of his power. After several rounds of that, there was hardly any left.
And once his power was nearly exhausted, Huang Si felt extremely tired. It wasn't physical fatigue, but mental exhaustion. His head felt terribly dizzy.
Huang Si went out and checked the clock on the living room wall. It was nine thirty.
It was a pretty good clock. It had only cost 19.9 yuan, with free shipping, but who would've thought that even though the outside world had vanished into darkness, this clock would keep faithfully doing its job? It was a good clock.
Time to sleep, Huang Si thought, but that Creation Book was too bright.
He went back to the bedroom and pulled the door shut behind him. No, some light still seeped in through the gap underneath. And the light felt a little eerie, as though it could even penetrate the door and brighten the bedroom.
Annoyed, Huang Si went into the living room. How was he supposed to sleep with it this bright?
Couldn't this book just stop glowing?
Huang Si glanced at the book, and it immediately went dark.
????
Only then did Huang Si realize that he seemed to be able to control the book a little. This memory—or knowledge, rather—had just surfaced in his mind.
He tried to make the book turn a page.
Sure enough, the cover opened on its own, without a breath of wind.
Then, at Huang Si's will, it closed again.
Next, he made it light up, go dark, and light up again.
After fiddling with the Creation Book for quite a while, Huang Si finally turned off its glow, satisfied, and went back to the bedroom. He pulled up the covers and went to sleep.
Before he woke up the next day, Huang Si mumbled a couple of things while still half asleep:
"There's no power, the whole city's out. My workplace has no power, all day long. I don't want to go to work..."
After a while, Huang Si woke up properly. He really didn't have to go to work.
His workplace probably hadn't lost power, though. They didn't use a time clock there, and since he worked in network maintenance, nobody usually needed him as long as the network was working.
Unless a computer broke or the network went down that day, his boss wouldn't notice he hadn't come in.
That was how lax management was at public institutions.
But Huang Si had no time to dwell on that. A new question had occurred to him.
What was happening to him?
Option one: the whole world had disappeared, and he was the only one still alive.
Option two: he'd been transported somewhere with his house, and now he was floating in the void. Back in his original world, he was gone, so his boss would be furious and his workplace would dock his pay. Most importantly, his parents wouldn't be able to find him and would be worried sick.
Huang Si didn't want to choose either option.
He lay in bed, worrying for a while, then stopped thinking about it. He couldn't dwell too much on his parents. All he could do was hope they wouldn't find out for a while.
For now, he'd be better off figuring out how to survive here, then finding a way back.
Having made up his mind, Huang Si climbed out of bed, got dressed, and went to the kitchen to make himself three pancakes.
He'd had sugar water and a sugar pancake yesterday, and the thought of eating something sweet again today made him feel a little sick.
After thinking it over, Huang Si mixed salt into the dough and fried it. Before long, three steaming hot savory pancakes were ready.
Then he looked at the leftover vegetables on the plate... No, better not. It was already the third day. What if they made him sick?
He had some common medicines at home, but if they didn't cure him, he might end up dying here.
Huang Si put the leftovers back in the refrigerator. It no longer kept things cold, but it could still serve as a cupboard.
After eating the three pancakes, he drank a few glasses of freshly made pure water, then sprawled out in the living room with his book.
"My power seems to have recovered a little. Does it recover naturally?" Huang Si wondered, sensing the power inside him.
He could clearly feel it growing slightly, but the increase had a limit. Or rather, that limit was the "capacity" of the power inside him.
After a night's rest, his power hadn't fully recovered, but it seemed to have refilled by about a third.
A third? Huang Si frowned. That wasn't much. He hadn't even made that many things yesterday, had he? At this rate of use and recovery, was he going to run a deficit?
For the sake of survival, Huang Si first made enough flour to last the whole day, so he wouldn't suddenly run out of food.
Then he filled the thermos and several cups with water.
"Other people are surviving in the wilderness. I'm surviving at home," Huang Si joked to himself.
But who could have imagined that home could be a death trap?
After stocking up on food and water, Huang Si checked the power inside him. Mm, it had dropped from a third to about a quarter.
In other words, if his maximum power was the baseline, his regular daily expenditure was about one-twelfth?
Huang Si thought that was manageable. He recovered a third overnight, and his fixed daily costs were one-twelfth. He still had plenty of room to spare.
Once he was done, Huang Si suddenly felt a little stifled.
He thought about it, and finally realized the problem: the room wasn't ventilated.
He needed to breathe, and he'd cooked over a fire both yesterday and today. That meant that after more than twelve hours of using up oxygen, there might not be enough left.
But Huang Si looked at the window. An ordinary house shouldn't be very airtight, should it?
Why wasn't all the air trapped inside the house leaking out?
There was nothing outside. When he'd poured water down the toilet earlier, it had flowed away.
This wasn't scientific.
But his ability to create things out of thin air wasn't scientific either. This Creation Book wasn't scientific at all, even if everything it had done so far had been fairly chemical.
Never mind. He'd make some oxygen first, or he'd suffocate.
Huang Si focused on the space inside the room, and soon he could see the oxygen molecules, two to a group and pale yellow. Alongside them were many more, slightly smaller nitrogen molecules, light gray and also paired up.
There was also carbon dioxide, with a black atom and two yellow atoms.
At a thought, he recorded the composition of oxygen in the book, then created a large batch of it.
This stuff was even easier to make than water.
With the breathing problem taken care of, Huang Si continued his manufacturing experiments now that he had some free time.
After spending the whole morning tinkering, he rubbed his slightly dizzy head and finally worked out a few things.
First, observing the structure of matter in a microscopic state didn't use up any power. This ability was probably an innate talent the book had given him. He could observe any level of the world, from microscopic to macroscopic, without using any power at all.
Second, copying one or more molecules used up "one strand" of power. How much power that strand contained depended entirely on how thin Huang Si made it. If it wasn't thin enough, it would all be used up at once.
So, to conserve power, Huang Si needed to divide his strands of power as finely as possible.
Third, creating objects on a macroscopic scale used power according to their size and complexity. Making a cup of flour used more than three times as much power as making the same amount of water.
Starch fibers were certainly more than three times as complex as water molecules, but power consumption didn't increase nearly that quickly.
Fourth, if he recorded a structure in the Creation Book before making it, he could not only produce it in batches on a macroscopic scale, but also use far less power.
Huang Si estimated that if his power had a maximum value of 100, he recovered a little over 30 overnight. Making enough flour and drinking water for a day took around 8 points.
Huang Si then created a slice of bread out of thin air. This slice was much more realistic than the first one he'd made. At least it felt soft, though its color was still monotonous, and it had no fragrance or porous structure.
Making this slice of bread had cost quite a lot, about 10 points.
Huang Si figured that if he had an oven at home, he could make flour, knead it into dough, add a leavening agent, and bake real bread. Each slice would probably cost no more than 2 points.
The difference in cost was staggering, even after factoring in the savings provided by the Creation Book.
So, could he record the microscopic structure of a pancake in the book, then make a pancake directly?
Would that be more convenient and use less power?
No sooner had he thought of it than Huang Si set to work. First, he kneaded a very, very small lump of dough out of flour, then examined its structure in a microscopic state.
A chaotic scene appeared before Huang Si's eyes. Long chains of starch molecules were tangled together with pale green water molecules, packed far more densely than the pure water and pure flour he'd seen earlier.
But since he already knew how to make both, it wouldn't be too difficult for Huang Si to master the tangled molecular structure of dough.
After trying to make some, Huang Si suddenly had a flash of inspiration. He connected his consciousness to the Creation Book and sketched the dough's complex structure directly onto its pages.
He immediately returned to the macroscopic world and flipped through the book. All the molecular structures he'd recorded before had taken up only a tiny portion of their pages. The pattern produced by the dough wasn't particularly large either. Rather than recording the entire lump of dough, it had taken a portion of the microscopic structure that repeated throughout it, displaying the tangled molecules as a pattern on the page.
With the Creation Book's help, Huang Si could now make batches of raw dough directly.
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