Chapter 995: Superposition State

Chapter 995: Superposition State

It was indeed a Human Union landing craft without a doubt, only there were no fully armed soldiers inside, just a single emergency hibernation pod.

The soldiers of the space combat team carried the pod out, set up an isolation zone at the accident site, and sent the pod to the nearest medical bay.

After connecting it to power, they followed standard procedures to open the pod’s hatch.

As the hatch opened, a girl in a silver-gray skintight suit lay inside.

Seeing the girl in the hibernation pod, everyone around involuntarily held their breath.

Her hair was almost entirely gone, her skin looked as if it had been burned, with large patches of tissue peeling from the dermis, blurring the expression twisted in pain.

Even more shocking, her abdomen seemed to have been shot, and the cabin was filled with frozen blood.

Her appearance was utterly gruesome, making it hard to imagine the suffering she had endured.

Standing before the holographic screen, Wu Mengke felt a tight pain in her heart and blurted out almost instinctively.

“Save her!”

No need for her command; the medical staff waiting nearby had already moved.

They put a ventilator on her, quickly connected life support devices, and began treatment.

Freezing and hibernating under severe injury was extremely dangerous; one mistake could turn her into a corpse.

Fortunately, people from the wasteland were probably used to taking risks, with vitality as tenacious as cockroaches.

Plus, she had Academy bionic prosthetics installed, so she was miraculously pulled back from the brink of death.

“Her symptoms are like she took a neutron torpedo…” Koala, inspecting the prosthetics, clicked his tongue and muttered under his breath, “And she’s still alive.”

A colleague from the Fourth Division said nearby.

“Maybe it’s the ship’s deflector shield. Remember that ‘research vessel’ before? That guy didn’t take much damage.”

The engineer standing nearby nodded, stroking his chin thoughtfully.

“A reasonable assumption: that guy had a higher degree of bionic integration, so he passed out from the electromagnetic pulse when the nuke went off, but suffered less radiation damage… This girl is the opposite—she withstood the EMP but took the neutron radiation.”

Koala couldn’t understand.

“But why was she on another ship? And a Human Union Aerospace Force model…”

“I don’t know,” the engineer shook his head, holding up two fingers. “I can only assume there were two ships—one was their own research vessel, and the other was already on that wreck… Can you follow me? It’s part of the ruins.”

Koala stared at him, his expression gradually turning odd.

A landing craft that was already on that wreck…

It felt like saying their “Dawn” plan had failed…

He wasn’t the only one thinking that; many around fell into silence.

While the Fourth Division engineers discussed the strange prosthetics on the patient, the Seventh Division doctors focused on her condition.

“So tragic… this girl.”

“Ah…”

“A few seconds later and she might not have made it.”

The on-duty doctors and nurses whispered among themselves, only Lin Youyou stared blankly at that face.

Noticing her expression, a colleague cast a curious glance.

“…Do you know her?”

Lin Youyou nodded subtly.

“Maybe?”

“What does ‘maybe’ mean?”

Lin Youyou was silent for a moment, then spoke.

“Someone mentioned her name to me… A strong intuition tells me she’s the girl that kid talked about.”

It was supposed to be a promise two hundred years later, yet it came true so soon.

Her colleague didn’t understand, just looked at her in confusion.

“Who is she?”

“Jiang Xuezhou.”

After a moment’s thought, Lin Youyou nodded, affirming her own words.

“She’s Jiang Xuezhou, no mistake.”

He had become her.

As for themselves, they were still stuck in this stagnant time—or rather, the crack between time and space.

It was too strange…

Just then, someone by the treatment bed let out a soft gasp.

“The patient is awake!”

“Wait, she’s speaking!”

Hearing her colleague’s exclamation, Lin Youyou snapped out of her thoughts and hurried to the bedside.

The girl’s breathing was faint, her cracked lips parting slightly like a flickering candle in the wind, heartbreaking…

She heard her voice, as if calling someone’s name.

“Ye Shi…”

“It’s… so cold here…”

…

So cold—

The moment consciousness sank into the abyss, that was all Ye Shi felt.

The piercing cold seemed to pierce through his five senses, seeping into his soul through skin and hair.

He instinctively wanted to curl up, but couldn’t move.

It felt like diving into the Arctic Ocean, then being grabbed by an invisible hand by the throat, pulled straight from the surface to the deepest depths.

But just as he was about to touch the seabed, the world seemed to flip.

His nose didn’t hit the ocean floor; instead, he emerged from another sea on the opposite side of the planet.

“Buzz—”

With a surging roar like a tidal wave, his lost senses returned in an instant.

Did it… work?

Ye Shi reflexively sat up, only to hit his forehead on the pod’s hatch.

This action triggered the pod’s safety mechanism—or perhaps the mechanism had already been passively triggered long before.

The yellow signal light flickered with characters that resembled an alarm, accompanied by a hissing sound of escaping air, as the tightly sealed metal hatch slowly opened.

"Cough—"

Yoruto felt a weakness he had never known before, his entire body light and heavy at once, his back still pillowed against an icy crypt.

But he mustered all his strength, grabbed the edge of the hatch, and with a roll, drifted sideways out of the pile of ice blocks.

Yes, drifted out.

There was no gravity here.

And that wasn't all—the space outside was even colder than inside the hibernation pod, though perhaps because the air was so thin, the perceived temperature wasn't as low.

Yoruto's heart leaped with joy.

No gravity meant at least he had escaped the timeline of two hundred years ago.

But soon his expression changed; the thin air was slowly suffocating him.

"Damn—"

Yoruto cursed, and in his desperation, a sudden inspiration struck. He moved his index finger to the back of his neck, tapped twice, and activated the internal circulation mode of his artificial lung.

He rarely used this mode on the surface, so much so that he had almost forgotten he had this function.

Once activated, his lungs would close the exhalation vents and assist other digestive and metabolic organs, using electricity, catalysts, and water produced by respiration to achieve a photosynthesis-like process, generating glucose and oxygen.

Though in theory, as long as electrical power was supplied, this cycle could continue indefinitely, in practice there was always some mass loss.

After all, a "cyborg" equipped with numerous bionic prosthetics was not a true android; he could not truly survive detached from Earth's ecological environment.

This function would probably only last him twenty-four hours in outer space, or even less.

But—

That should be enough time.

According to the plan, the crew of the Orion would soon arrive here to rendezvous with them.

Calming down, Yoruto surveyed his surroundings. The twisted metal and deformed cockpit were unmistakably Jiang Xuezhou's research vessel.

But what made his heart tighten involuntarily was that Xiao Jiang was nowhere to be seen.

"Strange..."

Where was she?

He had clearly heard her voice!

And just a second before waking up!

Not only that—the frost printed on the glass was unmistakably her breath!

A sense of foreboding gradually crept over Yoruto's entire body. He searched around the wreckage for a long time, even tearing off a twisted alloy door to crawl into the crew compartment behind the cockpit, but saw no one.

It was as if she had vanished into thin air.

As time passed, that ominous feeling slowly turned into a creeping dread.

A possibility abruptly surfaced in his mind—

She was still inside!

In that "rift in spacetime"!

But how could that be?!

Wasn't he the only one who had gone in?!

Yoruto's face shifted between shock and disbelief, and even a hint of anger.

Just a few minutes ago, someone had promised him they would come to rescue him, but nothing happened.

Either they had failed.

Or they had completely forgotten about him.

Or perhaps, unable to restrain their impulse, they had tried to interfere with the universe within the horizon, and were themselves swallowed by the river of time.

In any case, the plan had gone awry...

Reinforcements never came!

Or perhaps they were in an entirely different parallel world, and their encounter in the hyperspace lane was merely a fleeting brush.

He had neither changed his own future nor theirs.

Instead, because of a group's foolish meddling, a monster called "the Celestial" had been created in some parallel world.

"Damn it..."

Yoruto punched the wall hard, but the recoil sent him crashing into the opposite side, and in the cramped cockpit, he could barely stop himself.

But this collision made him realize he had to calm down.

Panic was the last thing he needed now.

The more trapped he felt, the more he had to keep his cool.

Steadying himself against the wall, he first regulated his heart rate, forcing himself to stay calm.

Then he tried to log out.

The result was the same as before.

The logout function seemed as if it had been ripped off the remote control—no matter what, he couldn't get out.

So that meant he was still inside the "instance"...

Realizing this, Yoruto actually breathed a sigh of relief.

He had already noticed.

Inside the instance, time in the real world slowed down—or rather, his own time accelerated.

A simple logic proved this.

He had spent two full weeks aboard the Orion missile cruiser. If the game and reality had a 1:1 time flow, even if Jiu Jiu had abandoned her own brother, he would have been dead in reality by now.

There was only one explanation.

The time flow in his instance was different from that of the real world!

And not just a simple difference in speed—it was as if a segment of "time that does not exist on this timeline" had been inserted into his own timeline.

That was why, even though several days had passed in the instance, not much time had passed in reality—maybe only an hour or two.

Since so little time had passed in the real world, the game world outside the instance was naturally the same.

He didn't know how this was achieved technically.

Perhaps through some psychological suggestion, or through computational simulation...

But in any case, this explained why he kept hearing the same four sentences over and over.

As for why Jiang Xuezhou wasn't here, there was only one explanation left—

She also entered the instance!

But why, when she had clearly entered the instance as well, could he and the ship’s crew not observe her presence—

No, it wasn’t necessarily that they couldn’t observe her!

It was merely a time difference!

Even more, the moment of her arrival was highly likely the moment of his departure.

And that was precisely why they couldn’t observe each other.

A glimmer of understanding gradually seeped into Ye Shi’s mind.

All that had been blurry and indistinct slowly became clear with his meticulous analysis, threading together the fragmented pieces of the puzzle in his thoughts.

The starship hovering in synchronous orbit fired a neutron torpedo at their research vessel.

Though the research ship’s deflector shield absorbed some of the damage, he hadn’t lost consciousness from neutron radiation, but rather from the electromagnetic pulse of the nuclear explosion overloading his bionic components.

The more miniaturized the components, the more susceptible they were—especially since everything from his head to his toes, even his skin, was made of the stuff.

His memory began to fragment from that point.

And while he lay unconscious, Jiang Xuezhou, who was less affected by the electromagnetic pulse, dragged him into a cryo-pod.

The main damage she sustained was likely from neutron radiation.

But thanks to the deflector shield, it probably wasn’t a fatal injury.

Of course, the research ship had more than one cryo-pod, but she didn’t climb into one herself.

After all, their enemy hadn’t disconnected; they had no reinforcements. If both of them went into cryo, it would mean waiting for death!

She had only one choice—

To keep fighting!

While she was still awake.

Ye Shi put himself in her shoes, imagining the unconscious Xiao Jiang lying before him.

“…If it were me, I wouldn’t stay put and wait for death. I’d do everything possible to save her.”

But how?

His mind raced like an overclocked computer, simulating countless possibilities in an instant.

Though his intelligence attribute had never been low, after playing this game for so long, this was the first time he fully engaged every brain cell to think about things a perception-type player would never bother with…

“My strength is perception—I’d probably consider an ambush… Her strength is programming and knowledge of machinery and ruins… I can only work with the environment itself.”

She was an expert in artificial intelligence.

She possessed almost genius-level programming skills, had served in the Beacon Squad, and was well-versed in exploring ruins from the Human Union era.

So…

There was only one thing she could do.

That was to take the offensive as a defense, fighting the “Celestial” who had already boarded the starship for control of the vessel!

That way, the fake “Luo Yi” on the ship would have no time to deal with him.

That bastard could only chase her down relentlessly!

Thinking of that girl, who was afraid of the dark and the cold, doing so much for him, Ye Shi suddenly felt a sting in his nose and unconsciously clenched his fist against the wall.

“Damn it, if I can’t get through this instance… I’ll delete my account and start over…”

Everything became clear.

And the clues that remained unclear were just the last few pieces of the puzzle.

Including why he still couldn’t log out, and why the reinforcements that should have arrived the moment he woke up had unexpectedly failed to show…

Though the whole process might be more twisted and bizarre than he imagined, it wasn’t hard to guess in general.

During the time he was asleep, she must have gained control of the starship, or at least parts of it and its equipment.

Like the most critical warp drive…

In the worst and most extreme scenario, the last resort she could use was nothing more than one thing—

To drain the last bit of energy the starship had for jumping, open a hyperspace channel to leap to another star system, and permanently exile this ship, capable of destroying worlds, beyond the solar system.

And to stop her from opening the hyperspace channel, “Luo Yi” would likely fire and detonate another neutron torpedo at close range, or simply set it off on the launch rack.

That was the most probable scenario.

That guy was probably an android, and very likely one made by the Gemini.

That was why he could use such strategic weapons without restraint.

But that wasn’t the point.

The point was that the neutron torpedo detonated in the hyperspace channel turned this abandoned Orion-class cruiser into a new “black box”—and one belonging to the timeline of Wasteland Era 215, when the Wasteland Era was about to end and enter a new era.

The detonation of a neutron bomb and a hyperspace jump couldn’t happen simultaneously, because there was no concept of time in the hyperspace channel, and the former would prevent the latter.

Thus, their occurrence had to have a sequence, even if the neutron bomb’s explosion was certain.

And because of that, the neutron bomb exploding at the entrance of the hyperspace channel and at the exit formed a quantum superposition.

And it wasn’t just the Orion’s crew from over two hundred years ago that became part of the superposition—it also included himself, Jiang Xuezhou, and an android sharing the same name as Luo Yi.

The intersection of the two timelines didn’t happen when the research ship collided with the Orion, nor when the first neutron torpedo exploded, but when he was in cryo—the moment the starship entered the “hyperspace channel” beyond the horizon!

At that instant, Jiang Xuezhou, for some reason, fell into a superposition of life and death.

And because his cryo-pod formed a “Faraday cage,” he was not only lucky enough to avoid the second “strategic-level EMP strike,” but even woke up unexpectedly due to the EMP’s effect on the pod’s external circuits.

The moment he woke up and the moment she closed her eyes together formed the starting point of their timeline intersection, and the moment she woke up or died would be its endpoint!

Ye Shi’s understanding of physics was only at an undergraduate level, and his knowledge of high-energy objects was limited to Young’s double-slit experiment.

Maybe Professor Fengbao could give a more scientific explanation, but none of that mattered now!

In this second black box, he was no longer the observer, but the cat in the superposition itself.

Whether the allies from two hundred years ago still remembered that distant promise, or whether they were doomed from the start to never keep it, and the so-called deception of the observer was just wishful thinking all along… he had to do what only he could do now.

There was no concept of time here. No one could save her!

Except himself!

Grabbing the edge of the hatch, Ye Shi kicked open the twisted and deformed cockpit door, floating into a pitch-black room along with the flying panel.

He no longer needed to hide his presence.

In fact, it was better to let that impostor calling himself “Luo Yi” come to him!

The fractured steel let out a creaking sound, transmitted through his right hand gripping the doorframe.

At the same time, he turned on his flashlight to quickly assess his surroundings.

This was the mess hall on the lower deck.

He remembered it clearly, even recalling that his last meal here was potato beef… though that potato beef was no longer in his stomach, but left behind in that “time rift” that didn’t exist in the main timeline.

Miraculously, however, these memories had been preserved, and even the taste buds on his tongue still retained a faint trace of aftertaste.

Familiar utensils and tables and chairs floated in a corner of the room; there was no flickering light, only pitch-black darkness, and the scene was as chaotic as a car crash.

All the familiar people were gone, whether the crew members who had been dining or the android chef who had been cooking—and... that was only to be expected.

Looking at the corridor outside the cafeteria, which was like a black well, Ye Shi clenched his teeth, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and let his five senses sink into the profound darkness, spreading outward wantonly along the hand gripping the doorframe.

The outward-spreading senses were like a dense spiderweb; no slightest movement could escape the capture of his neural synapses.

Whether it was the slight collision of trash against the wall, or the rustling friction, or even the wind so thin it was almost imperceptible...

That was definitely not a naturally occurring sound.

Ye Shi's eyes snapped open.

Although his sight could not penetrate the layers of rubble to see that person's face, he could clearly perceive which corridor that person was walking in.

That familiar yet unfamiliar feeling was without a doubt—

precisely the "accident scene" he had always been forbidden to enter!

The man carrying a jetpack was pressing the jetpack's button in a pattern of two short and one long, floating like a ghost in the zero-gravity corridor, slowly approaching the gymnasium that in some parallel world was cordoned off by an isolation zone.

“...I see you!”