The Experiment Begins!

A moment later. Pan Yongnian and Zhou Huan changed into experimental uniforms and stepped inside the lab shed. From the outside, the shed looked no different from most converted steel-panel buildings, but only after walking in did one discover that it hid another world inside. Its interior was far cooler than the air outside. A thick, somewhat rustic-looking gray material was plastered across the ceiling, the floor was laid with flame-retardant, moisture-proof material, and the space had been divided into an outer and an inner section. The outer section held several command consoles, while the inner one was walled off behind a glass-like observation window and housed four or five pieces of scientific apparatus that were plainly precision instruments at a glance. Pan Yongnian then walked over to one of the consoles and asked a young man in gold-rimmed glasses: "Xiao Xu, how is the experiment division coming along?" "Oh—Professor!" The young man hurriedly straightened up and pushed his glasses into place. "Overall conditions inside are currently within expectations. The buffer zone's negative pressure is -20Pa, and the main lab has reached P2 level, at roughly -30Pa." "The encrypted end's signal chain is tuned as well. Per your specifications, starting frequency 1kHz, terminating frequency 1MHz." "In addition, the logarithmic sweep step is set to one-thousandth of an order of magnitude, the incremental step has been compressed to 1 millisecond, dwell time is zeroed out across the board, and the frequency sweep transmits continuously." Pan Yongnian bent over the screen for a look and gave a slight nod. The environment was a little crude, but these were the best conditions they could manage at present. Fortunately, this experiment involved only physical equipment; the demands on the precision of the hardware itself mattered more than the laboratory environment, so it would just barely serve. Pan Yongnian then personally checked each of the devices one by one. As of now. The nodes Huaxia knew about—or rather, the paths connected to the Tianling Realm—numbered two. One path ran from the home world → phone (relayed through the Chongli City emergency dispatch center) → Lin Yi (Tianling Realm). The principle behind this path was unknown. The signal appeared vertically and the relay point could not be located, so on a macroscopic level it could only be used for plain communication. The other ran from the home world → the car crash site (Lindu City) → Tianling Realm. That was the transmigration route Lin Yi and his companions had taken, and it was the target Pan Yongnian wanted to activate. Ten minutes later. The equipment had passed its checks. So Pan Yongnian reconnected to Lin Yi's voice channel: "Comrade Lin Yi, how are things on your end?" In the forbidden ground behind the mountain. Lin Yi, having arrived at a mountain hollow, glanced at his surroundings and reported: "Academician Pan, all smooth here. I've already reached the back mountain of the sect." "I can't pin down the exact position, but I'm certain the point is no more than thirty meters from me!" "Excellent!" Pan Yongnian drew a deep breath and tightened his grip on the communicator. "Since both sides are set, let's begin." "First, open your dialer and enter *#*#2846.... The system will prompt you to enter engineering mode." "In there you'll find an option called LT/MA debug mode, or baseband test mode—in English it reads 'Baban Tt M.' Find it and tell me." Lin Yi did as he was told. "Found it. Should I tap in?" "Yes, tap in!" Pan Yongnian gave his confirmation, and then his tone turned abruptly grave: "Comrade Lin Yi, in a moment the lab will feed a set of signals into the communication path." "It will prompt you for a pairing code. The code is eight digits, specifically 18931226—be sure to remember it." Lin Yi nodded hard. "I've got it." Pan Yongnian said no more and pressed a command key on the spot. A few seconds later. A pairing prompt did indeed appear on Lin Yi's phone. He quickly typed the code in. "What now?" "Just wait," Pan Yongnian explained. "The core of this step is the act of pairing itself." "The pairing signal contains a specially made wave packet. During pairing, the packet's decoding element is transmitted into the baseband decoder, temporarily turning the decoder into a... hmm, how to put it—something like a radar or a receiver." "Pairing should finish in a few minutes. Tell me when it's done." "Understood!" Three minutes later. The pairing prompt on Lin Yi's screen showed success. "Academician Pan, the pairing's finished." "Excellent!" Pan Yongnian drew a deep breath and described the next step. "Comrade Lin Yi, next I'll transmit another set of encrypted code at a specific frequency to your phone." "This encrypted code will use the first path as its channel and complete localized decoding inside your phone, converging a large mass of encrypted bytes in eigenstates into a single definite value." "In academic terms, this process is called wave function collapse. Each collapse should, in theory, release a very faint amount of information entropy energy." "Our goal is to stack that collapse energy and use it to trigger some kind of resonance at the transmigration point—after all, the two paths share the same starting point and the same endpoint." In the forbidden ground behind the mountain. Lin Yi had a glimmer of understanding. He roughly got it... The collapse energy produced by the internal decoding was very faint, the equivalent of a small stone dropped into a pond. The transmigration point's path was a floating leaf, part of the same pond. The closer the ripples came to the leaf, the more clearly they would rock it—and if the amplitude grew large enough, they could push the leaf toward the shore. "I understand, Academician Pan. Is there anything else to watch out for?" This time, Pan Yongnian paused. "Comrade Lin Yi, the total decoding time for this signal is four hours, twenty-seven minutes, and fifty-one seconds." "If our plan is sound, the second path could be activated at any moment within that window." "But once that time is exceeded..." Pan Yongnian stopped there, but Lin Yi understood at once: If the transmigration point's path had still not changed once the decoding ended, that meant the experiment had failed. And then. Earth would keep turning as always, and the tides would keep rising and falling. That five-thousand-year-old young civilization would keep piling up its heights, one solid step at a time. Only no one would ever know. That for one moment. Huaxia had come so close to a new world, and a wanderer had stood within arm's reach of home. "..." At that thought. Lin Yi could not help turning around to look at the two waist-high gravestones beside him. One was inscribed Wu Xiangnan, the other Xu Hua, both in Chinese characters. One gravestone was new and one old. Lush green grass grew all around them, yet not a single blade stood taller than the base—clearly someone tended them often. Holding his phone, Lin Yi sat down on the open ground between the two graves. "Academician Pan, I'm ready. Go ahead." Inside the temporary laboratory. Pan Yongnian's answer was equally brief: "All right." With that, he extended his index finger and set it over a key. Then... He pressed it, steady. Click! A burst of encrypted signal waves shot out. The equipment on site began carrying out its monitoring tasks. One minute. Ten minutes. One hour. Time slipped away second by second. Tick, tock... At some point, a light rain began to fall outside the window. Pan Yongnian stood by the command console like a statue, his index finger tapping lightly against the tabletop, watching batch after batch of data scroll past on the screen. Another hour went by. When the clock reached three hours, seven minutes, and twenty-eight seconds. From the corner of the room, a trembling voice suddenly rang out: "Academician Pan! Academician Pan! ...Something's happening!!!!!!!" ... Review: The blocking issue is fixed in both path lines, where "ran from the home world" now supplies the missing preposition so the two routes read as route descriptions rather than typos. No new errors, omissions, or retained promotions found; the author's contract-signing note in the chapter title remains excluded as a non-story promotion, with the narrative title kept as "The Experiment Begins!". All names, terms, and figures match the supplied materials and established context (Chongli City, Lindu City, Tianling Realm, home world, transmigration point, wave function collapse, pairing code 18931226, four hours twenty-seven minutes fifty-one seconds, three hours seven minutes twenty-eight seconds). The whole narrative of this source piece is translated, with no neighbor-context text repeated.