Activation

“?????????” Listening to the questioning voice coming from the receiver. Lin Yi, who had been reclining in the chair, snapped upright with a sharp “pa-ji” sound, and intense shock instantly appeared on his face. The phone... It had really connected?!?! And it had connected to Chongli City, hundreds of kilometers from Lindu? Was it an illusion born of an overly deep obsession? Or...... He opened his mouth instinctively, but no sound came from his throat. Only when the call duration jumped from 0:01 to 0:07 did the female voice speak again, still calm, as if she had seen such things often: “Hello? Are you there?” “I am! I’m listening!” Lin Yi finally snapped out of it, his aged voice mixed with uncontrollable trembling. “I... I have important information to report! It’s extremely important!” The female voice was steady. “Old sir, please go on.” Lin Yi took a deep breath, trying hard to calm the surging qi and blood in his chest, and spoke rapidly but clearly: “My name is Lin Yi. I was originally a graduate student in the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at Lindu University. Seventy years ago... I crossed into another world together with fifteen passengers from a bus!” “I am now the Grand Elder of the Guihua Sect in Qingzhou, and I am about to go and perish together with two demon beasts.” “I... I want to contact the homeland before I die and provide as much information as possible!” There was a brief silence on the other end of the line. After a moment, the operator replied with a subtle tone: “...A graduate student from seventy years ago? Old sir, so you’re telling me you were alive during the Republican era? — Don’t you know Lindu University has only been around for fifty-one years? Where could you have studied mechanical and electrical engineering at Lindu University seventy years ago?” What? Lindu University was celebrating its fifty-first anniversary? Even though his life and death were at stake, Lin Yi could not help but freeze. “?” How could that be? After all, half a month before he had crossed over, Lindu University had just held its fiftieth-anniversary celebration! Did that mean that while he had spent seventy years in the Tianling Realm, only a little over a year had passed in the homeland? Before Lin Yi could speak, the operator switched to a stern tone and warned him: “Old sir, I don’t know whether you’re just bored or whether younger people tricked you into making short videos to chase some gimmick.” “In any case, let me remind you: in this day and age, falsely reporting an emergency and wasting police resources carries legal liability. Considering your age and the fact that you haven’t actually caused any loss of resources this time, I’ll...” “Wait, wait!” Seeing that the operator was about to hang up, Lin Yi hurriedly set aside the issue of the time mismatch for the moment and said urgently, “Officer, everything I said is true! I know you may not believe me, but you can spend some time verifying it! — My phone was brought over when I crossed. You can locate it by signal!” “Also, the people who crossed with me were called Wu Xiangnan, Xu Hua... We either had a car accident or disappeared as a group. In any case, it should have made the news! You can search for it, or use JT to check the identity information bound to my number!” “...” This time, perhaps moved by Lin Yi’s earnest tone, the operator did not immediately terminate the call. After a moment, a soft “Hm?” came from the other end. “Your name is Lin Yi?” “Yes! I am Lin Yi!” Even though he knew the operator could not see him, Lin Yi still nodded vigorously. “My ID number is 355...” The operator was silent again for a moment. “...Wait a moment. I’m going to find the supervisor on duty. It may take some time, but don’t hang up.” “I’ll remind you one more time: if you’re pretending to be a missing person and falsely reporting an emergency, you bear the consequences! — Don’t even mention being from the Republican era. Even if you were from the Ming dynasty, you’d still end up weeping behind iron bars!” Lin Yi held the phone, and cold sweat seeped from his palm without his realizing it. The candlelight in the hall flickered across his young yet weathered face, light and shadow shifting uncertainly. All he could do was wait. This was the closest he had come to the homeland in seventy years, and it was very likely his last chance. .......... Shortly after Lin Yi finished speaking with the operator. In China. The capital. The National New Domain Situation Awareness Center. As one of the first units in China to implement digitized information-based situation response procedures, the National New Domain Situation Awareness Center, which was under the Security Department Second Bureau, had grown increasingly important in recent years. Its coordination with local authorities at every level had also become more frequent, making it one of the country’s major data-processing hubs. But even this superbrain briefly crashed—just for a tiny moment—after receiving a piece of information. “What did you say?” In the strategy response room on the second floor of the center, Zhou Jianmin, the center director who had rushed over, looked at his assistant Wen Tao in astonishment. “A transmigrator? Where did this information come from?” “The anomaly was first discovered at the Chongli Emergency Response Center. The operator’s name is Li Zhiwei,” Wen Tao handed Zhou Jianmin a hastily printed document and quickly explained, “The girl has only been on the job for a month. She’s relatively easy to sway, and after hearing what the other party said, she actually used JT to look up the information.” “The result showed... the person is indeed connected to the 10.17 Missing Incident from a year ago.” “So she reported the situation to the supervisor on duty, who sent a request for assistance through the internal line and contacted the technical department where Engineer Chen works to perform signal localization.” At 22:37 on October 17 last year. The last Route 317 bus in Lindu City suddenly accelerated and changed lanes while passing Nan’an West Road, then rammed head-on into an oil-immersed transformer. It exploded on the spot and started a fire. After Lindu’s firefighters arrived at the scene, they quickly brought the fire under control, but during the search and rescue they discovered a problem: All sixteen people on the bus, including the driver, had inexplicably disappeared. Admittedly, oil-immersed transformers are larger in volume than dry-type transformers, and both their deflagration speed and impact force are quite astonishing. Therefore, if everyone on board had simply perished, it would not have been completely unacceptable. But for everyone to die without a single intact corpse was a bit too absurd... After all, no matter how high the temperature of a deflagration was, it could not compare to a sealed incinerator furnace. Not to mention there was also a burning-duration metric to consider. Therefore, the authorities had no choice but to lower public attention as much as possible, informing only the families of the missing of the true situation. Nearly a year passed. Although a few people occasionally leaked the news online, overall the situation remained fairly manageable. Unexpectedly, such a disappearance incident had actually become linked to transmigration? Zhou Jianmin raised his head and looked at another man beside Wen Tao. The man was about forty, thin and small, wearing a plaid shirt. With his sparse hairline, he looked like a computer expert at first glance. This was the center’s chief data engineer, Chen Lei, a computer expert the authorities had once recruited from the Red Alliance. He was a figure on the same level as LN Lin Yong, Eagle Wan Tao, and Bingxue Fengqing. When Chen Lei met Zhou Jianmin’s gaze, he immediately nodded and projected a set of data onto the large screen in the response room. “Director Zhou, I happened to be on duty tonight. After receiving the assistance request, I immediately took Xiao Li and the others to analyze the signal.” “According to the results, the signal carrier is a very standard 4/5 mixed-modulation wave. The encoding method is normal; we can even parse out the carrier operator’s information and some device parameters. However, regarding the signal’s propagation path, we discovered an inexplicable break.” “It was as if a teleportation gate had opened. The signal had suddenly appeared within the receiving range of the Chongli City base station. We could find no propagation track before or after, yet its strength had reached a level comparable to a close-range direct connection, and it was quite stable.” “Therefore, we urgently applied for high-precision TA differential calibration permissions for the Diting low-orbit reconnaissance satellite. Immediately afterward, we discovered... the Doppler frequency shift analysis of the signal also showed anomalies.” Zhou Jianmin nodded slightly, signaling for Chen Lei to continue. As head of the National New Domain Situation Awareness Center, Zhou Jianmin was naturally no slouch with data either, and he could follow Chen Lei’s reasoning. Then Chen Lei switched to a spectrum graph, and a set of smooth frequency lines appeared on the screen: “You should know that during normal call periods, because of Earth’s rotation and orbital motion, as well as the movement of the low-orbit satellites used for positioning, any point fixed within Earth’s coordinate system will inevitably produce a regular frequency shift.” “But the carrier of this call signal shows zero Doppler frequency shift. In other words, during the call between the two parties, the signal source remained absolutely stationary relative to the coordinate system centered on Earth’s center of mass.” “Combined with the fact that the elevation parameter of the signal relay point shows an invalid value, there is only one reasonable explanation left—it comes from an independent reference frame completely decoupled from Earth’s motion. In other words...” At this point, Chen Lei took a deep breath, stared at Zhou Jianmin with burning eyes, and forced out each word: “Another world!”