Superposition

Without a doubt, it was indeed a Human Alliance lander. Only, there were no fully armed soldiers inside—just an emergency hibernation pod. The soldiers of the space combat team carried out the hibernation pod, set up the cordon once more around the accident site, and transported the pod to the nearest infirmary. Once power was connected, they followed standard procedure to cycle open the pod's hatch. As the hatch slid open, a young woman clad in a silver-gray skinsuit was revealed lying within. At the sight of the girl in the hibernation pod, everyone gathered around held their breath. Her hair was nearly gone, and her skin looked as though it had been scorched by fire. Large swaths of tissue had sloughed away from the dermis, rendering even her pain-contorted expression an indistinct blur. Even more harrowing, she appeared to have taken a shot to the abdomen, and the cabin was filled with frozen blood. It was an utterly gruesome sight; the agony she had endured was horrifying to imagine. Watching from before the holographic display, Wu Mengke felt a sharp ache seize her heart. Almost reflexively, she shouted: "Save her, quickly!" There was no need for her command; the medical personnel standing by had already sprung into action. They fitted her with a respirator, swiftly hooked up life-support equipment, and commenced emergency treatment. Cryogenic hibernation while suffering from severe trauma was extraordinarily dangerous; a single misstep could easily turn a patient into a corpse. Fortunately, people of the wasteland were accustomed to recklessness, possessing vitality as stubborn and resilient as cockroaches. Coupled with the Academy bionic prosthetics integrated into her body, she was miraculously pulled back from the brink of death. "Her symptoms look just like she took a hit from a neutron torpedo..." Koala, inspecting the prosthetics, could not help clicking his tongue and muttering under his breath, "It's a wonder she survived at all." A colleague from the Fourth Department beside him remarked, "It might be thanks to the ship's deflector shield. Remember that 'research vessel' from earlier? That lad didn't suffer much damage." An engineer standing alongside them nodded, rubbing his chin in contemplation. "A reasonable hypothesis. That young man had a higher degree of cybernetic enhancement, so when the nuclear detonation went off, the electromagnetic pulse knocked him unconscious, but he suffered far less radiation damage... This girl was the opposite. She withstood the EMP, but bore the brunt of the neutron radiation." Koala said, unable to make sense of it, "But why is she on a different ship? And a model from the Human Alliance Aerospace Force, no less..." "No idea." The engineer shook his head, holding up two fingers. "I can only hypothesize that there were two vessels. One was their own research vessel, and the other was already on that wreckage all along... Do you follow what I mean? It's part of the relic." Koala stared blankly at him, his expression growing nuanced. A lander that was already on the wreckage all along... It felt as if they were saying Operation Daybreak had failed... Clearly, he was not the only one thinking this; many people around them fell silent. While the Fourth Department engineers discussed the bizarre cybernetics installed in the patient, the Seventh Department doctors focused on her condition. "She's in dreadful shape... poor girl." "Yeah..." "A few seconds later and she probably wouldn't have made it." As the duty doctors and nurses whispered among themselves, only Lin Youyou stood staring blankly at the face. Noticing her expression, a colleague beside her gave her an inquisitive glance. "...You know her?" Lin Youyou nodded with a subtle expression. "Probably?" "What do you mean, 'probably'?" Lin Youyou fell silent for a moment before speaking. "Someone mentioned her name to me... A powerful intuition tells me she's the girl that kid was talking about." It was supposed to be a promise for two hundred years in the future; she had never expected it to come to pass so soon. Her colleague had no idea what she meant and merely looked at her in confusion. "Who is she?" "Jiang Xuezhou." Pondering for a moment, Lin Youyou nodded, affirming her words. "She is Jiang Xuezhou. There's no mistake." He had become her. As for themselves, they were still marooned in this stagnant pocket of time—or rather, within this rift in space-time. It was too bizarre... Just then, a faint gasp arose beside the examination bed. "The patient is awake!" "Wait, she's speaking!" Hearing her colleague's cry, Lin Youyou broke out of her reverie at once and stepped briskly over to the bed. The girl's breathing was faint. Her cracked lips parted slightly, fragile as a flickering candle in the wind, tugging at the heart... Lin Youyou caught her voice. She seemed to be calling out someone's name. "Ye Shi..." "It's... so cold here..." ... So cold— The moment his consciousness sank into the abyss, that was the only sensation Ye Shi felt. The bone-chilling cold seemed to pierce through his five senses, seeping through his skin and hair straight into his soul. Subconsciously, he wanted to curl into a ball, yet he could not move. It felt as though he had plunged headfirst into the Arctic Ocean, only to have an unseen hand clamp around his throat, dragging him straight from the surface down into the deepest ocean trenches. Yet right when he was about to touch the ocean floor, the world seemed to flip upside down. His nose did not hit the seabed; instead, he breached the surface of another sea on the opposite side of the planet. Buzz— With a rushing clamor like an incoming tide, his lost senses returned in a flash. Did it... succeed? Ye Shi sat up almost by reflex, only for his forehead to knock right against the hatch of the hibernation pod. This action triggered the pod's safety mechanism—or perhaps it had already been tripped passively long before. A yellow signal light flashed with an alert-like message. Amid a hissing release of venting air, the tightly sealed metal hatch slowly swung open. "Cough—" Ye Shi felt weaker than ever, light-headed and top-heavy, his back resting as though in a cave of ice. Even so, he summoned all his strength, grabbed the edge of the hatch, and twisted around to drift out from the pile of frost. Yes, drift out. There was no gravity here. In fact, the space outside was even colder than inside the pod, though perhaps because of the thin air, the perceived temperature did not feel quite as low. Ye Shi felt a surge of joy. No gravity meant, at the very least, that he had broken free of the timeline from two hundred years ago. Yet his expression quickly twisted. The thin air began to choke him. "Fuck—" Ye Shi cursed. In his panic, inspiration struck: he reached behind his neck with his index finger, tapped twice, and activated his artificial lungs' internal circulation mode. He rarely used this mode on the surface, to the point that he had almost forgotten he even possessed such a feature. Once engaged, the lungs sealed their exhaust ports and coordinated with other digestive and metabolic organs, utilizing electrical energy, catalysts, and water from cellular respiration to perform a photosynthesis-like cycle, generating glucose and oxygen. While in theory the cycle could sustain itself indefinitely as long as electrical power was supplied, in practice there was material loss. A "cyborg" equipped with numerous bionic prostheses was not a true android after all; he could not genuinely survive detached from Earth's biosphere. This function was only enough for him to survive roughly twenty-four hours in outer space—perhaps not even that. Still— That time ought to be plenty. According to the agreement, the crew of the Orion would soon arrive here to rendezvous with them. Having calmed down, Ye Shi examined his surroundings. The mangled steel and deformed cabin were undoubtedly Jiang Xuezhou's research vessel. Yet what tightened the strings of his heart was that Xiao Jiang was nowhere to be seen. "Strange..." Where was she? He had distinctly heard her voice! Right before he woke up! It wasn't just sound either—the frost condensed on the glass had clearly been her breath! An ominous premonition gradually crept over Ye Shi's entire body. He scoured the wreckage for quite a while, even tearing off a buckled alloy hatch to squeeze into the crew cabin behind the cockpit, yet saw no sign of anyone. It was as if she had vanished into thin air. As time ticked by, that ominous feeling grew into chilling dread. A possibility abruptly surfaced in his mind— She's still inside! In that "rift in space-time"! But how could that be?! Wasn't he the only one who entered?! Expressions of shock and disbelief flickered across Ye Shi's face, along with a spark of anger. Just minutes ago, someone had promised him they would come to rescue him without fail, yet there was nothing. Either they had failed. Or they had completely forgotten about him. Or perhaps, unable to restrain their impulses, they had attempted to meddle with the universe within the event horizon, only to be swallowed up by the river of time. In short, the plan had gone awry... No reinforcements had arrived! Or perhaps they had existed in entirely different parallel worlds from the very start, and their meeting in the hyperspace lane had been nothing more than a chance brush. He had altered neither his own future nor theirs. Instead, because of a bunch of people thinking they were clever, they had birthed a monster called the "Celestials" in some parallel world. "Dammit..." Ye Shi slammed a fist violently into the bulkhead, only for the equal and opposite reaction to send him rebounding into the other side, sending him tumbling through the cramped cockpit before he could stop himself. Yet this very tumble made Ye Shi realize he had to keep his head. Panic was the last thing he could afford right now. The more cornered he was, the calmer he had to be. Bracing himself against the bulkhead to steady his body, he first regulated his heart rate, striving to regain his composure. Then, he attempted to log out. The result was the same as before. The log-out function was like a button pried off a remote control—unresponsive no matter what he tried. Which meant he was still inside the "dungeon"... Realizing this, Ye Shi actually let out a sigh of relief. He had already noticed. When inside a dungeon, time in reality flowed more slowly—or put another way, his time was accelerated. Simple logic proved it. He had stayed on the missile cruiser Orion for a full two weeks. If the passage of time between the game and reality were truly one-to-one, even if Jiu Jiu had completely abandoned her own brother, he would have starved to death in reality long ago. There was only one explanation. The time flow in the dungeon he was in differed from that of the real world! More than that. This difference was not merely a matter of fast versus slow; it was that a segment of "time that does not exist on this timeline" had been inserted into his chronological axis. That was why several days could pass for him in the dungeon, yet back in reality, scarcely an hour or two had elapsed. And since so little time had passed in the real world, the same naturally applied to the game world outside the dungeon. He did not know how this was technically achieved. Perhaps through some form of psychological suggestion, or perhaps through computational simulation... In any case, it explained why he kept repeatedly hearing those same four sentences. As for why Jiang Xuezhou was not here, only one explanation remained— She had entered the dungeon as well! Yet why, if she too had entered the dungeon, had neither he nor the crew aboard the ship been able to observe her existence— No, it wasn't necessarily that she couldn't be observed! There was simply a time difference! In fact, the time of her arrival was quite likely the exact moment of his departure. And that was why neither could observe the other. A sliver of insight gradually welled up in Ye Shi's mind. Everything that had once been murky became clear as he picked through the threads, weaving together the shattered puzzle pieces in his thoughts. The starship hovering in geosynchronous orbit had fired a neutron torpedo at their research vessel. Although the vessel's deflector shield had absorbed part of the damage, he hadn't blacked out from neutron radiation—he had passed out because the electromagnetic pulse from the nuclear blast overloaded his bionic components. The more miniaturized the component, the more susceptible it was to EMP interference, and he was covered in them from head to toe, right down to his synthetic skin. His memory cut out right there. While he lay unconscious, Jiang Xuezhou—who was comparatively less affected by EMP—must have dragged him into the hibernation pod. The primary damage she suffered would have been neutron radiation. Yet thanks to the deflector shield, it likely wasn't a lethal dose right away. Naturally, there was more than one hibernation pod aboard the research vessel, but she hadn't climbed into one herself. After all, their enemy hadn't gone offline, and they had no reinforcements. Both of them climbing into pods would have meant waiting for death! She had only one choice— To keep fighting! While she was still conscious. Putting himself in her shoes, Ye Shi imagined Xiao Jiang lying unconscious before him. "...If it were me, I wouldn't just stay put and wait for death either. I'd do everything humanly possible to save her." But how? His brain worked at breakneck speed, like an overclocked computer simulating countless possibilities in an instant. Although his Intelligence stat had never been low, in all his time playing this game, this was the first time he had dedicated every single brain cell to pondering things a Perception-type player never had to think about... "My strength is Perception, so I'd probably look to set an ambush... Her strengths are programming and her knowledge of machinery and ruins... She could only work with the environment itself." She was an artificial intelligence specialist. She possessed near-genius programming skills, had served in the Beacon squad, and was exceptionally well-versed in exploring ruins from the Human Alliance era. Then... There was only one thing she could do. Turn offense into defense and contest control of the starship with the "Celestial" that had already boarded! That way, the fake "Luo Yi" aboard the ship wouldn't have time to worry about Ye Shi. The imposter would have no choice but to hunt her down at all costs! Realizing that a girl who feared both the dark and the cold had done so much for him, Ye Shi felt a sudden sting at the bridge of his nose. Involuntarily, his fist clenched against the bulkhead. "Dammit, if I can't clear this dungeon... I'll delete my character and reroll from scratch..." Everything was becoming clear. As for the clues that remained unresolved, only a few final puzzle pieces were missing. Including why he still could not log out, and why the reinforcements that should have arrived the moment he woke had failed to show... Though the full course of events might be far more convoluted and bizarre than he imagined, the broad strokes were not hard to deduce. During the time he had been asleep, she must have seized control of the starship—or at least control over certain sections and systems. Such as the core warp drive... In the worst, most extreme scenario, the final card she could play was simple: Exhaust whatever remaining warp energy the ship had left to open a hyperspace lane and jump to another star system, exiling this world-ending vessel completely beyond the solar system. And to stop her from opening the hyperspace lane, "Luo Yi" most likely launched and detonated another neutron torpedo at point-blank range, or simply detonated one right in the launch rack. That was the most probable outcome. The impostor was likely an android, and quite possibly one manufactured by the Gemini. Which was precisely why that bastard could use such a strategic-grade weapon with utter recklessness. But that was not the point. The point was that detonating a neutron torpedo within the hyperspace lane turned this derelict cruiser Orion into a new "black box"—one belonging to the timeline of Wasteland Era Year 215, where the Wasteland Era was drawing to a close and a new epoch was dawning. A neutron warhead's detonation and hyperspace transit could not occur simultaneously, for there was no concept of time within a hyperspace lane, and the former would prevent the latter. Therefore, one had to precede the other, even if the neutron warhead's detonation was inevitable. Because of this, the two possibilities—the neutron warhead detonating at the entrance of the hyperspace corridor versus detonating at the exit—formed a quantum superposition. And it wasn't just the Orion crew from over two centuries ago who were caught in superposition; it also included himself, Jiang Xuezhou, and an android who went by the name of Luo Yi. The intertwining of the two timelines hadn't occurred when the research vessel collided with the Orion, nor when the first neutron torpedo detonated. It happened while he was in stasis—the instant the starship entered the "hyperspace lane" beyond the event horizon! At that moment, for whatever reason, Jiang Xuezhou was plunged into a superposition of life and death. Meanwhile, because the hibernation pod acted as a Faraday cage, he had not only been spared the effects of the second "strategic EMP strike," but had even been awakened prematurely by the EMP's disruption of the pod's external circuitry. The moment he woke and the moment she closed her eyes formed the starting point of their intersection with the other timeline, and the moment she either awoke or died would mark the end of that intersection! Ye Shi's grasp of physics was only at an undergraduate level, and his knowledge of high-energy physics was limited to things like Young's double-slit experiment. Perhaps Professor Kuang Feng could have offered a more rigorous scientific explanation, but none of that mattered right now! In this second black box, he was no longer an observer. He was the cat in superposition. Whether the allies from two hundred years ago still remembered that distant promise, or whether they had been doomed from the start never to keep it—whether deceiving the observer had been nothing more than wishful thinking all along—he had to do what only he could do at this moment. There was no concept of time here. No one could save her! Except him! Grabbing the edge of the doorway, Ye Shi kicked open the deformed cockpit hatch and drifted into the pitch-black room alongside the dislodged panel. He no longer needed to conceal his presence. If anything, it was better for that imposter calling himself "Luo Yi" to come looking for him! Twisting metal groaned, vibrating against the right hand gripping the frame. At the same time, he clicked on his flashlight and swiftly assessed his surroundings. This was the mess hall on the lower deck. He remembered it vividly. He even remembered that his last meal here had been beef and potatoes... though those beef and potatoes weren't in his stomach now, having been left behind in that "rift in space-time" that did not exist on the main timeline. Miraculously, however, the memories remained—he could even still taste a lingering trace of flavor on his tongue. Familiar cutlery, tables, and chairs drifted in one corner of the room. There were no flickering lights here, only pitch-black darkness where you couldn't see your own hand in front of your face. The wreckage was as chaotic as a car crash. The familiar faces were all gone, whether the dining crew members or the android cook who served the food... which was only natural. Staring at the corridor outside the mess hall, dark as the shaft of an abyss, Ye Shi gritted his teeth. Taking a deep breath, he closed his eyes, letting his senses plunge into the profound darkness, radiating outward unchecked along the hand gripping the doorframe. Those expanding senses spread like a dense spider's web; not the slightest movement could escape his synaptic net. Whether the faint tap of debris against a bulkhead, rustling friction, or the thin air stirring in a breeze so faint it was barely perceptible... None of it was natural movement. Ye Shi's eyes snapped open. Though his gaze could not penetrate the layers of wreckage to see that person's face, he could clearly perceive which corridor the figure was moving through. That familiar yet alien sensation was, without a doubt— Right in the "accident site" he had never been permitted to enter! A man wearing a jetpack was pulsing its controls—two short bursts, one long—drifting like a phantom down the zero-gravity corridor, slowly closing in on the gym that, in some parallel world, had been cordoned off behind hazard tape. "...I see you!"