Will You Trust the State?

The state's response speed really was impressive. A little over ten minutes later, several signal feeds came online on the main control screen of the Strategic Response Room where Zhou Jianmin sat. The primary view showed a long conference table, with more than twenty scholarly-looking people seated along both sides. The rest of the screen space was divided into several equal-sized rectangular panels, each one holding the image of a single expert. "Comrade Lin Yi." Once all the signals were in and steady, Zhou Jianmin spoke at once: "The think-tank experts the state urgently dispatched are all in place. Our time is limited, so let me first give you a quick rundown of who's attending." "There are thirty-two rotating think-tank experts at this session, all top scholars or academicians in the sciences and engineering, covering the fields of military science, biology, chemistry, and physics." "For example, Professor Yue Shan, chief expert of the Jinping Underground Neutrino Laboratory; Elder Sun Guozhu, the founder of our nation's aerospace program; and Academician Chen Dingshan of the National Parallel Computer Engineering Technology Research Center, and so on..." Inside the Grand Elder's Hall. Lin Yi pressed his lips together again. As a graduate student in science and engineering, he was hardly unfamiliar with any of the names Zhou Jianmin had just listed. Every one of them was a titan of the field in this country. Elder Sun, for instance. He had been the chief technical director of Huaxia's first artificial satellite, a recipient of the Two Bombs, One Satellite honor, a national hero in the truest sense—and he was ninety-seven years old now. An old man who should have been living out his remaining years in comfort had been coaxed out of retirement over a matter involving Lin Yi... "Comrade Lin Yi, that's all I'll say about the attendees for now," Zhou Jianmin said on the other end, taking hold of the communicator again. "If there are no problems, shall we begin?" Lin Yi finally came back to himself and took a hard, deep breath. "No problems on my end." Swish— In the primary view. A man in military uniform quickly raised his hand. His feed was then patched into Lin Yi's voice channel. "Comrade Lin Yi, hello." Though he knew perfectly well that Lin Yi could not see him, the man in uniform still gave a solemn salute toward the camera: "My name is Chen Zhengze, from the Operations Bureau of the Joint Staff Department—the First Bureau of the General Staff Department, before the restructuring. I once served as chief of staff of the Blue Force Directorate at Yonghe Combat Base. That Comrade Man who's quite famous online is one of my subordinates." "The expert group has already been briefed on your situation. Now, could you describe roughly how strong those two demon beasts are?" "For instance, what's their approximate instantaneous speed, and their snout-to-vent length... that is, body length excluding the tail, as well as their destructive power?" "Sure." At that, Lin Yi first raised a hand and hit his phone with a charging technique. The battery jumped from 22% to 95% on the spot: "Golden-Eyed Crimson-Scale Beasts aren't rare in the Tianling Realm. They're demon beasts with powerful attacks but weak defenses. They can fly without touching the ground, and they're a bit over ten meters long if you don't count the tail. They look somewhat like lions, and one swipe of a paw can punch straight through an ordinary person's chest." "At a full sprint, I'd guess their instantaneous speed can break a hundred meters per second, and they can keep that up for nearly ten minutes. After that their speed drops noticeably, falling back to around fifty meters per second." "On top of that, they have a special attack. They can spit a ball of light from their mouths, strong enough to blast a crater about ten meters wide in the ground. It only takes two or three seconds to charge up..." Chen Zhengze recorded it all. "And what about force fields? Do they have anything that could warp gravity or interfere with attacks?" Lin Yi shook his head. "Definitely not." Over the past seventy years, he had encountered Golden-Eyed Crimson-Scale Beasts several times, at a distance or up close, and he knew them well enough. More than twenty years ago, he had even joined a party of a dozen or so Foundation Establishment cultivators to hunt down a pack of them that had been ravaging the region. Chen Zhengze continued to record the information Lin Yi provided in detail. Afterward he went on to ask Lin Yi about the depth and width of the craters, the coverage range of the array, the terrain around the sect gates, and a whole series of other details. He did not even leave out the general soil conditions and the distribution of vegetation. Half an hour later. Chen Zhengze finished his questions, and another refined-looking middle-aged man was connected to the channel. If Lin Yi had been able to see the scene, he would have noticed. The middle-aged man's image sat in a separate panel of its own, not on the primary screen. Which meant the man was not at the think-tank base in the capital. "Comrade Lin Yi, hello." The refined man's voice carried a trace of the soft lilt of the Wu region—not especially standard, but pleasant to hear. "Let me introduce myself. My name is Pan Yongnian. I currently work in quantum and topological research." Pan Yongnian? Lin Yi's eyebrows went up, and respect rose in him. This man was the leading figure of theoretical physics in Huaxia, renowned across the globe—a top-tier scholar in the truest sense. Before the transmigration. Never mind Lin Yi. Even Lin Yi's own advisor would never have been qualified to study under Pan Yongnian. But when Pan Yongnian spoke, he did not, as Lin Yi had imagined, throw out some question about physics. Instead he asked: "Comrade Lin Yi, would you be willing to cooperate with us on an experiment?" Lin Yi was taken aback. "What experiment?" "More precisely, it's a conjecture Elder Sun and I arrived at after some discussion." Pan Yongnian paused only briefly before tossing out a bombshell. "Its content is..." "An attempt to see whether we can complete the cross-world transmission of certain objects between the two worlds." Cross-world... objects... Transmission?! Those words burst beside Lin Yi's ears like a thunderclap. His mouth hung slightly open, his mind a total blank. "Acad... Academician Pan..." It took a good few seconds before Lin Yi came back to himself, and even his lips were trembling as he spoke. "Don't kid me, sir. Is this... is this real?" "I can't guarantee it will succeed, but at the very least it is theoretically feasible," Pan Yongnian said, then explained. "First, we don't know the deepest reason you're able to make contact with the home world, but the fact that the two worlds can communicate is established." "At the same time, the technical department can detect and locate your signal, which means radio-frequency electromagnetic waves have crossed between the two worlds." "You're a graduate student in electromechanical engineering. You should know what the essential property of electromagnetic waves is." The essential property of electromagnetic waves? "An alternating electromagnetic field sustaining and propagating itself through space..." The phrase came out of Lin Yi's mouth almost by instinct, but as he spoke, a flash of insight struck him. "Wait—you mean... wave-particle duality?" "Exactly!" Pan Yongnian's speech quickened slightly. "An electromagnetic wave is both a wave and a photon." "When the photons of one world can be excited and propagate into the other world unimpeded, that means there is electromagnetic field coupling between the two worlds." "And if electromagnetic fields can couple, then in theory, couldn't stronger and more orderly fields also find a way to couple?" "To put that in plainer terms: can other particles, or even matter, also be transmitted?" Wave-particle duality. Thomas Young first proposed the concept through the double-slit experiment. Anyone who didn't doze through high school physics should remember it well enough. But few people understand. That as physics has advanced, the substances proven to possess wave-particle duality have gone far beyond light. In 2019. The scientific community had already produced double-slit interference with gramicidin, a molecule with a molecular weight of 1886, without damaging its biological activity. (Note: in case anyone calls this fringe science, I may as well cite it—10.1038/41467-020-15280-2.) By the time of Lin Yi's transmigration. That molecular weight had already been pushed up to 7588, and every so often it was updated in increments of five to ten. In theory. All matter possesses wave-particle duality—even waves are particles. Mm, people included. It's just that, limited by the current level of science, it remains very difficult to get larger objects to complete a double-slit experiment—the specifics involve constraints such as decoherence—but that does not change the fact that this property exists objectively. "In short," Academician Pan was still holding forth in his panel, "the fact that photons can propagate across worlds proves that between the two worlds there must exist one, or even several, nodes of extremely high permeability." "And as it happens—call it coincidence, or call it luck—we just happen to know the exact location on Earth of one of those nodes." Lin Yi was stunned again. What did that mean? And how had Academician Pan and the others found the node? But very quickly. Lin Yi vaguely caught Pan Yongnian's meaning. "You mean... the place where the bus crossed over?" "That's right, that's the spot!" Academician Pan gave a forceful wave of his hand, setting even the strands of his hair dancing. "The crash site from a year ago! Near No. 88 Nan'an West Road in Lindu!" "If a channel really does exist there, then the 'bandwidth' that once carried sixteen people across should, in theory, be able to transmit some objects now as well!" "What we need to do now is reactivate it... or rather, drag that node out of the ethereal and back into reality, and turn it into a state the home world can use." "But that kind of dragging is not as simple as yanking down the roller shutter of a corner shop. One careless move and we could lose the communication signal entirely." "So, Comrade Lin Yi..." "Will you trust the state, this once?"