The cavernous room was quiet, filled only with the faint white noise of humming electronic components.
The chair facing away from the door remained motionless, like a silent spectator watching a play.
Chu Guang didn't know whether this old friend of the Professor's, the "Observer," was also watching from the side.
Even if it was, it probably couldn't jump out and say anything anyway.
After all, it had said their next encounter would be dozens of millennia later.
If Chu Guang could even live that long.
Standing on the screen, the Professor seemed lost in distant memories. He stood quietly in thought for a long while before speaking in a calm, measured tone.
"That was a very long time ago, over three hundred years before today."
"I can't recall whether it was the first or second time I met it, but that was indeed the first time it had an open, heart-to-heart talk with me."
"At that time, I had already mastered the mysteries of the four fundamental forces, and gradually began using gravity as a medium to touch the boundaries of dimensions... Just as the Observer had hoped, after mastering power rivaling that of stars, we obtained the key to venturing into the cosmos."
Surprise showed on Chu Guang's face.
"The hyperspace engine? You invented it?"
The Professor shook his head.
"No, I wasn't very interested in specific applications. Those things were mainly done by my students. However, my research on neutrinos, quark-gluon plasma, and gravitons could tentatively be considered the theoretical foundation of the hyperspace engine. That includes deflector shields, and the antigravity technology you're familiar with—in fact, they are all extended applications of hyperspace theory..."
*Not interested, huh...*
Feeling a wave of humblebrag wash over him, Chu Guang unconsciously rubbed his nose.
Even though he knew very well the person opposite him wasn't deliberately flexing, he still felt flexed on.
Perhaps that was what they meant by everyone having their own specialty.
Compared to showing off, he was far better at playing the schemer.
At this point, the Professor suddenly paused, as if recalling something.
"I won't bore you with those complicated details. If you're interested, you can look into them yourself. On the shelves of the library on Floor B4, there's a popular science book called *Past, Present, and Future*. It explains the principles of hyperspace and FTL engines in layman's terms, which should be relatively approachable for an amateur."
Chu Guang nodded.
"I read that quite a while ago... Did you write it?"
He didn't remember who the author was; he only remembered that the "gravitational tether" mentioned in the book had been an eye-opener, showing him that faster-than-light travel in the Human Alliance era had actually worked like that.
The Professor smiled and said, "Not at all—my students wrote it."
*Good grief.*
*Flexed on again!*
Chu Guang gave a soft cough.
"...Have we gone off-topic?"
"Sorry, got sidetracked there for a bit."
The Professor gave an apologetic smile and returned to his previous tone, continuing:
"Anyway... in year N after the founding of the Human Alliance, we obtained the key to the sea of stars, completing the entire human civilization's first ascension. From that day forth, our frontiers were no longer limited to Earth, and began expanding to other planets beyond the Earth-Moon system."
"And right when the Human Alliance needed me most, the Observer found me. It prophesied a future crisis and various things regarding the 'Natural Disaster.' In the end, it wanted me to dig up a tomb on Mars—a tomb far smaller than the ruins at Alpha Centauri... However, due to certain matters, I didn't go."
Chu Guang: "What matters?"
The Professor fell silent for a moment. He seemed reluctant to discuss the matter, but then seemed to feel it was already in the past, and finally spoke.
"Some personal affairs... My wife fell gravely ill. At the time, it was incurable, even though we had already mastered power rivaling the stars. Moreover, the people in positions similar to yours didn't want me to take risks and spent a long time trying to dissuade me... In short, I ultimately chose to remain in the era where I belonged."
"That really couldn't be helped. Perfectly human," Chu Guang nodded, a hint of admiration in his eyes.
He wasn't some emotionless automaton.
On the contrary, not only did he place great value on emotions and bonds, but he was also very willing to befriend people who felt deeply.
People with such vulnerabilities might not all be saints, but they usually possessed a moral bottom line, minded their manners, had reservations, and wouldn't commit unconscionable atrocities that cursed their own bloodline.
Incidentally, that was also one of the reasons he was still single today.
Even though he had never done anything unconscionable.
"Right? You think it's only natural too, don't you... Besides, matters weren't that simple."
The voice coming through the screen was filled with complicated emotions, hard to define whether it was about abandoning something or shouldering a responsibility that never belonged to him in the first place.
"...According to the facts I uncovered later, that fellow concealed crucial inside information. There really were some 'good things' buried in that tomb, but back then, we didn't have the capability to fully excavate the ruins. Once inside, no one could come back out—no matter who went! No wonder it specifically demanded that I go. It was a trap, plain and simple. That fellow wanted to kill me!"
Chu Guang froze for a few seconds, astonishment written all over his face.
"The Observer... wanted to kill you? Why?"
The man on the screen was silent for a while before answering after a long pause.
"I don't know. Perhaps it didn't necessarily want to kill me, but just wanted me to disappear for a period of time. According to it, my progress had far exceeded its expectations. A trans-regional organization cooperating on a global scale... that is, the Human Alliance, was born ahead of schedule, two centuries earlier than it had anticipated."
"Not only that, but the completion of the first fusion reactor, the construction of the space elevator, and so on—all of it was built on the foundation of shared human prosperity."
"While I thought it wasn't that big of a deal—just minor matters in the grand scheme of time—and certainly not my achievement alone, it believed that we in this universe were moving too fast, that dark undercurrents surged beneath the vision of prosperity."
"In its view, the explosive progress in science and technology caused us to skip the problems we were meant to encounter, and also skip the practical tools we should have acquired from resolving those problems. Once our speed slowed in the future, the problems we had skipped would erupt all at once. At that point, a single minor risk would cause all our efforts to go down the drain—and that risk was virtually guaranteed to occur in the future."
Chu Guang pressed a finger between his eyebrows in thought, trying to sort out the core of their conflict.
Simply put, the Observer had intended to provide moderate intervention, but the outcome had exceeded its expectations.
So it planned to remove the interfering factor.
No—
That wasn't entirely accurate either.
A more precise way to put it was that it had given the Professor two choices.
Either go to Mars, submit to its "macro-control," and develop in the direction of becoming a Boundary Breaker;
Or give up the System and remain in his original timeline, with the price being that it would remove its excessive intervention—or rather, withdraw its "helping hand from the Void."
According to the Professor, he had little need for the System given by the Observer by that point anyway.
If one lacked higher-level ambitions, there was truly no need to dance to the Observer's tune just to keep the System.
"...And then?" Chu Guang continued to ask.
The Professor on the screen said slowly,
"Nothing much happened after that. It said it would go to the future to look for someone else, then vanished along with the System it had given me, as if it had never been here. But it didn't really matter. As I said before, by that time I didn't need its help much anymore... Yet it seemed very crestfallen. Many years later, it came back to find me. It didn't say why it had returned, but I could roughly guess—perhaps because it discovered that the future was gone."
Chu Guang: "By 'gone,' do you mean... there would be no more Boundary Breakers?"
The Professor shook his head.
"It meant everything... According to it, if I continued to stay in this timeline of mine, our civilization would overdraw and lose all its future. Or to put it another way, countless universes where I existed would be reduced to ash, and not a single 'Boundary Breaker' would ever be born, right up until the final heat death of the universe."
Chu Guang's Adam's apple bobbed. After a long silence, he gave a soft sigh.
"That sounds a bit too exaggerated."
The Professor gave a faint smile.
"It is quite exaggerated, but it had its point. According to its soap bubble theory, the two temporal states of past and future exist simultaneously in the Void, just as the multiverse and parallel worlds exist simultaneously. Any decision I made in the timeline where I existed would alter future outcomes, and these alterations were, at the same time, possibilities that had existed since the Big Bang."
Speaking up to here, the Professor's voice suddenly took on a touch of loneliness.
Chu Guang wasn't sure if there was regret in it, but helplessness and frustration were certainly present.
"It showed me an alternative future, another possibility in a parallel world—a future where I went to Mars... There, I saw my descendants, and the descendants of many people I knew. They all lived well. While it couldn't compare to the Era of Prosperity, it wasn't far behind."
"At the end of that future, I ultimately left my home planet, yet the prospects of our civilization were bright. Although it underwent some twists and turns along the way, it never suffered a devastating, irreversible collapse like the Wasteland Era... And in the end, we strode toward the sea of stars in an entirely new posture."
Looking at the blurred face, Chu Guang pondered for a long time before asking,
"Do you regret it?"
"No, just a bit of lingering sorrow," the Professor shook his head and said slowly. "Back then, I was already somewhat suspicious of its fickleness. It had claimed it would never seek me out again, yet suddenly rushed back waving a so-called alternative future in my face."
"Naturally, I refused it, and it left in disappointment... But thinking about it carefully, that might actually have been the last chance to steer history back onto the correct track."
"Perhaps dying at the right time would have been the best ending—"
"I cannot agree with that," Chu Guang shook his head, replying without hesitation.
"History can never advance strictly according to the tempo we envision. You cannot represent what is correct, neither can I, and a pair of eyes floating in the void certainly cannot."
"Besides, if it truly represented what is correct, the person standing here right now wouldn't be me—it would be someone else from its prophecies."
Chu Guang could more or less empathize with the deep self-reproach in the Professor's heart.
Even as the man himself had said, no one would blame the Wasteland Era on the "Father of the Era of Prosperity," just as no one would pin the An Lushan Rebellion on Emperor Taizong of Tang, nor would anyone blame World War II on James Watt for inventing the steam engine.
Each generation had its own responsibilities, and even the same person played different roles at different stages of life.
At most, posterity would reproach themselves for failing the Professor's expectations, unable to sustain the Era of Prosperity he had inaugurated.
Yet clearly, the Observer hadn't merely shown him an alternative future; it had also spoiled the Wasteland Era and the tens of millennia that followed, revealing causal chains he never should have known—
That the Wasteland Era was already set in stone.
That no matter how many shelters he built, he could not save everyone, much less alter the fate of human civilization crumbling to dust.
And all of this had started because of him...
Even though not a soul would ever hold him accountable, he still could not make peace with his own conscience.
In fact, the entire second half of his life had been spent preparing for the disaster foretold by the Observer.
Building the shelters.
The black boxes of Project Ark.
Even founding the Academy, and more.
These plans, laid as far back as the mid-Era of Prosperity, all bore the Professor's shadow...
Without an exceptionally strong sense of responsibility, it would have been impossible to shoulder burdens that had seemingly nothing to do with him.
It was worth mentioning that because "the wolf truly came"—and arrived precisely when everyone believed that infinitely prosperous utopia would endure forever—many popsicles on the wasteland worshiped the Professor like a god.
Among them were the Chief of the Great Rift Valley, that old riddle-talking charlatan.
And Dr. Conclusion behind the Academy, that fellow said to have converted into a digital lifeform.
They knew nothing of the Void or the Observer.
From their perspective, and indeed that of all wastelanders, none of this was locking the barn door after the horse had bolted; it was indisputable farsightedness.
Chu Guang had learned all of this purely by accident.
Yet his view remained unchanged, unaffected by these revelations.
If fear of a downward spiral kept humanity from moving forward, people would probably still be living in trees.
Besides, they had already proven through action that their fate lay in their own hands, not manipulated by some ethereal, intangible Void.
"Earlier, you said you didn't know what choice I would make. I can tell you now: I won't necessarily make the same choice as you, but I will make the choice I believe is right."
Standing on the screen, the Professor fell silent for a moment before suddenly chuckling with openhearted ease.
"I want to say 'just as expected of you,' but that phrasing feels a bit strange. Though we are different, we actually made the same choice... What I chose back then was what I genuinely believed to be right from the bottom of my heart."
He was indeed full of curiosity toward the Void and yearned to understand the origins of the universe, but if the price was abandoning his identity as a human to become the Observer's pawn—the so-called "Boundary Breaker"—that was another matter entirely.
Preventing the heat death of the universe.
It sounded grand indeed, but what did that have to do with him as a human?
Before that endless endeavor, the entire galaxy was nothing more than mayflies.
Perhaps another version of him in a different universe made a different choice, changing or preventing something in the distant future.
Yet in this universe at least, he chose to live as a human.
Together with those he loved.
Watching the Professor on the screen, Chu Guang nodded slightly, sensing a deeper meaning in the man's words—as if the Professor had known him since long ago.
Then again, it wasn't particularly strange.
Since the Professor had already traversed the cosmic membrane to project his mind into another, younger universe, he must have observed and screened repeatedly before finally choosing Chu Guang.
"Did you retrieve what was in that ruin?"
A reasonable guess was that it was something used to construct the morphogenetic field.
As expected, the Professor on the screen nodded, speaking with an approving smile.
"Yes. Later on, I tried to do some remedial work, which included retrieving the ruins on Mars... I suppose you have probably guessed the true nature of the morphogenetic field."
Chu Guang nodded as well.
"A resonance of thought can pierce through the cosmic membrane, transmitting information agreed upon by both sides. My conclusion is that you must have found your past self—most likely the self that had just acquired the System."
"Clever." The blurred figure snapped his fingers, the admiration in his faint gaze growing more pronounced. "Your perceptiveness rivals my own... The only pity is that you aren't cut out for scientific research."
"I'm not interested in it anyway. I only care about making the rules of the game," Chu Guang said with an indifferent expression. "So what did you retrieve from the ruins?"
"Three vials of serum, representing enhanced physical attributes, virtually limitless lifespan, and psionics, respectively. If utilized properly, they could even transform the entire genetic makeup of humanity. But if mishandled, they could become a curse—for instance, allowing those who shouldn't live to survive too long, or letting infants with immature minds hear too much static from the Void."
Just as Chu Guang was listening intently, the Professor on the screen suddenly shifted the topic, saying with a smile:
"Actually, none of that matters to you. I used those things up way back in the early Era of Prosperity."
Chu Guang paused.
"...All of them?"
The Professor smiled and said,
"You could say that. While theoretically one could only choose one of the three serums to use—since mixing different serums risked genetic pollution—I came up with a clever workaround. I had experimental monkeys drink the serums, and then compensated for weaknesses by combining the strengths of the three distinct test subjects... including but not limited to having them reproduce with other female monkeys, and using controlled variables to crossbreed their offspring."
*This guy didn't choose to drink it himself?*
A look of surprise crossed Chu Guang's face.
He thought he had been audacious enough, but here was someone with even less reverence, showing zero regard for the Void.
Unsurprised by the shock on Chu Guang's face, the Professor continued:
"The results of the experiments were astonishing, and they also confirmed my hypothesis. That serum was likely a projection of higher-dimensional matter onto a three-dimensional plane, or utilized some higher-dimensional technology beyond our understanding. Consequently, the permutations and combinations expressed as DNA molecules were extraordinarily complex, much like conflicting lines of code. If these genomes were present in a single person at the same time, their body would unquestionably throw an 'error'—which is the so-called genetic pollution."
"So I settled for second best. Through repeated experimentation, I extracted non-conflicting DNA fragments, rearranged them using existing technology, and gradually transplanted them into experimental clones. Although the genotypes formed through rearrangement had weaker phenotypic effects, they had the advantage of stability, and indeed, genetic pollution no longer occurred."
"And what's more, my research team made an astonishing discovery: as the body and the genome adapted to each other, those 'commented-out lines of code' would gradually be correctly expressed in a more stable form!"
Chu Guang swallowed.
"Even after dying and starting over?"
"Exactly. At least for clones carrying only partial fragments, that was the case. All that was needed was to record the evolutionary process of life they had previously undergone via an incubation pod or scanning device."
The Professor nodded slightly and continued,
"The re-expression of the genome can be completed inside the incubation pod. After all, a clone's life stage can be artificially defined... Now that I've said this much, you should have realized what the gene sequences of your 'players' actually are."
"I roughly understand. That is to say... by analyzing those three vials of serum, you obtained a massive gene bank, and the players' genetic codes are the results of arranging and combining different 'fragments' from that gene bank alongside conventional genes. They are responsible for exploring stable expression methods for each 'fragment'."
Chu Guang tried to simplify the complex matter to grasp it.
Watching the Professor nod approvingly, he paused for a moment and continued,
"Yet there's still one thing I don't understand: what is my gene sequence?"
As if he had been waiting for Chu Guang to ask this very question, the figure on the screen smiled faintly.
"This touches upon one of the most core secrets of Shelter 404... Have you heard of the 'Gestalt Organism Project'?"
"Of course I have..."
Chu Guang couldn't shake the feeling that those eyes watching him held a deep, meaningful gaze. An uncanny realization gradually sprouted within him.
*Could it be—*
Just as he had practically guessed the answer, the Professor standing on the screen unveiled the final truth.
"Your DNA contains every single 'fragment' from that gene bank, though most of them exist in a commented-out form."
"This process was fraught with risk. It was as though a nuclear bomb were strapped to your body, where the slightest misstep would blow you to smithereens without leaving so much as ash... But you are the Administrator. Don't blame me for being cold-blooded; someone had to shoulder this risk."
"Comparatively speaking, the players bear far less risk. What was distributed to them is merely a small piece of shrapnel, and they are only responsible for dismantling the fragment in their hands. As for you, beyond carrying the nuclear bomb, you are also responsible for aggregating and integrating information, defusing the 'nuclear bomb' on yourself based on the clues the players provide... And that is one of the reasons why your 'sequence level' is positively correlated with the sequence levels and numbers of the players."
"Throughout this collaborative division of labor, we indeed drew inspiration from the operational model of the mutant slime mold broodmother, refining it to a certain extent."
"That is why I told you there's no need to care about what I retrieved from that ruin—because I already expended that precious legacy on all of you long ago."
"And you are that very 'Gestalt Organism'!"
Chapter 1054