"......"
Lin Yi stared blankly at the box in the center of the light ring.
The box was a standard rectangular prism, about one Pandora in height and around 1.5 meters in width.
Made of metal, uniformly gray, with a round-faced emoji sticker on the front.
From any angle, it was obviously an earthly object.
In other words.
The transmission experiment...
Had it actually succeeded?
Coming back to himself.
A flush rose on Lin Yi's face, not a healthy one, and he gripped his phone tightly. "Academician Pan, Academician Pan! I've got a new situation here! There's a box inside the light ring!"
"Great!" Pan Yongnian's excited voice soon came through the speaker. "Are the box's specs 1.2 by 1.5? And does one side have an anime sticker? —I remember it's a girl with fluffy pink hair."
Lin Yi looked at the emoji sticker for two seconds upon hearing this, and felt as though he had become wiser:
"...Yes, there is such a thing."
"Cough cough," Pan Yongnian seemed to detect the subtle tone in Lin Yi's words, and proactively explained, "The expedition team left in a hurry and couldn't find a suitable marker, so I temporarily requisitioned this sticker from a group member..."
Lin Yi nodded understandingly.
The sticker's main purpose was to verify the transmission result more accurately; whether it featured Manbo or Gongshi Zao Miao on it didn't really matter.
Thus Lin Yi withdrew his gaze from the box and asked Pan Yongnian, "Academician Pan, since the box has been successfully transmitted, does that mean I can next return to the home world in the flesh..."
"No, no, no!"
Before he could finish the second half of his sentence, Pan Yongnian's pitch on the other end instantly shot up to the level where he could sing "Tibetan Plateau": "Comrade Lin Yi, don't be impulsive—under no circumstances attempt this on your own! Under no circumstances!"
"..."
Lin Yi was startled badly by Pan Yongnian's shout, bared his teeth, and moved the phone away from his ear, only recovering after several seconds. "Er, Academician Pan, I was just asking casually... Don't worry, I know what I'm doing. I promise I won't operate recklessly before you give instructions."
Only then did a sigh of relief come through the speaker.
It wasn't that he was overly sensitive or easily startled; it was mainly that Lin Yi was simply too important.
No exaggeration.
Every move Lin Yi made at this moment would directly affect the course of Huaxia civilization's history.
After a while.
Pan Yongnian adjusted his mindset and transmitted another new instruction: "Comrade Lin Yi, please now terminate the spiritual energy transmission and open the box—the password is six zeros."
"The home world side has already verified that, without spiritual energy interference, a physical body can freely step into the light ring."
Lin Yi nodded and stepped onto the light ring.
As expected.
Just as Pan Yongnian had said.
Without spiritual energy flowing through it, the light ring's texture was somewhat like an ice surface—smooth and hard, showing no sign at all of being a passage connecting two worlds.
Then Lin Yi came before the metal box and entered the password.
Click—
The metal box soon sprang open a small crack.
Lin Yi lifted the box lid along the crack, and upon seeing the situation inside, was slightly taken aback.
The box's interior was divided into two areas.
The left half was packed with several smaller square metal boxes, and the right half held a transparent box made of unknown glass or acrylic material.
Inside the transparent box was installed a simple supply device, as well as a...
Motionless snake.
"Comrade Lin Yi," just as Lin Yi opened the box, Pan Yongnian's voice sounded at the right moment, "after you open the box, you should see a polystyrene container containing a set of life-support equipment and a very healthy king snake."
"Observe this snake's vital signs and relay the situation to me."
Lin Yi leaned forward and took two looks at the king snake. "Academician Pan, it's already dead."
"...Dead?" Pan Yongnian's tone grew heavier. "Are you sure? Could it be in a coma or an unclear state like hibernation?"
"Yes, definitely dead," Lin Yi slowly straightened up, explaining, "I used divine sense—uh, a kind of consciousness-scanning ability—to check. There's no other possibility."
Pan Yongnian fell silent.
A few seconds later, he said again, "Comrade Lin Yi, please now open the remaining boxes."
"The boxes have numerical labels. Boxes one through three contain white mice, African clawed frogs, and fruit flies. The password is also six zeros."
Lin Yi took out the several boxes.
Entered the password, opened them.
Lin Yi scanned them with divine sense.
"They're all dead."
Pan Yongnian: "...Continue. Open sample boxes four through seven."
"The contents of these four sample boxes are hard to judge with the naked eye. After opening them, you only need to tell me the color of the card paper in the upper right corner."
Inside the forbidden ground.
Lin Yi continued as instructed.
Sure enough, each box had a small card paper in its upper right corner.
As for the color—
"Academician Pan, the card papers are all blue, all four of them."
"Blue..."
At the other end of the phone, Pan Yongnian explained with some regret: "Comrade Lin Yi, these four sample boxes contain archaea, cyanobacteria, yeast, and tobacco mosaic virus."
"According to our preset, blue means... all samples are dead."
Anyone whose high school biology teacher hadn't been driven to death should know this.
Archaea and cyanobacteria represented the Archaea domain and the Bacteria domain; yeast represented single-celled eukaryotes of the Fungi kingdom.
Tobacco mosaic virus was a non-cellular organism.
Together with the white mice and king snake before, they represented all known biological structures on Earth, not one of which had survived the transmigration process.
In other words.
Lin Yi's idea of returning alive to the home world using spiritual energy as a medium was likewise declared a failure—at least for the time being.
"But Academician Pan, why would this happen?"
Looking at the motionless king snake before him, Lin Yi couldn't help touching the edge of the box: "Seventy years ago, we clearly all transmigrated alive, didn't we..."
Lin Yi remembered it very clearly.
Back then, on the bus, he had only felt his vision go dark; when he came to, he and the other passengers had arrived in the Tianling Realm.
Even if there were casualties upon landing.
That was because of demon beast attacks, and had nothing to do with the transmigration process itself.
"This probably involves something deeper, Xiao Lin," came Pan Yongnian's voice on the line, using the term "Xiao Lin" for the first time. "To put it exaggeratedly, it might concern some unknown 'rules.'"
"Actually, the light ring's problem isn't just that living things can't pass through."
"Huh?" Lin Yi was immediately stunned. "What do you mean?"
"Think about it," Pan Yongnian quickly threw out a new question. "Transmitting this box requires spiritual energy as a medium, so what about the force that originally pushed more than ten living people like you to transmigrate?"
"What is its nature, and where did it come from?"
Chapter 9