The Alloy Door could hold back the monsters of the Dark Matter Sea. Once it was closed and the base's Gravitational Force Field Generator activated, it could even keep the formless, intangible dark energy outside. Its strength was easy to imagine, and naturally, it was difficult to break open by force.
The technical officials had tried every method they could think of without making the slightest progress. Now, suddenly, an utterly ordinary boy walked over and asked whether they needed help. Their astonishment gave way to considerable embarrassment and anger, but given the unease among the crowd, they neither cursed at him nor paid him any attention.
Ever since he had emerged from that sewer a year ago, something had been wrong with Jing Jiu's brain. It was not a problem with his neural pathways, as with Flower Creek, nor a matter of emotional intelligence. Rather, the electrical activity in his brain and its corresponding operating speed had fallen sharply. This left him capable only of single-threaded thought-when he painted, he knew only painting; when he played the piano, he knew only playing the piano; when he played chess, he knew only playing chess. He was extraordinarily focused, but lacked the ability to make systematic judgments.
So even now, after watching the television news and hearing the announcements in the alarms, he still did not know what had happened to this world. The complexity of the matter did not exceed his computational capacity, but its scope far exceeded the range of his calculations. He knew only that Teacher Eve had told him to come here because she wanted him to enter the world behind the Alloy Door with these people. In that case, he would help Teacher Eve accomplish this.
Teacher Eve had been helping him all along, although he