Chapter 160: The Watcher of Physics

Chapter 160 -67: The Watcher of Physics

But here, there was comfort, beautiful dreams, and a safe haven for self-anesthesia. If a great flood were truly coming, which side was hell, and which side was heaven?

CLATTER, CLATTER. Shi Zuozhou packed his toiletries, pouted toward the two beds, and made a helpless grimace.

“Wash up and go to sleep, Old Yu. We have a full day of classes tomorrow.”

Yu Xian nodded, and the two briefly washed up. As Yu Xian dried his face and prepared to climb into bed, he noticed Shi Zuozhou frozen in place. His roommate was holding up his left hand, eyes wide and round.

Yu Xian’s heart skipped a beat. Just as he was about to ask what was wrong, Shi Zuozhou waved at him with a face full of excitement. “Old Yu! Old Yu! Come look at this!”

“What’s wrong?” Yu Xian hurried over.

Shi Zuozhou didn’t speak. He simply raised his wrist right in front of Yu Xian’s eyes. It was the interface of Rabbit Hole. Yu Xian was about to ask for an explanation when his gaze swept over the section indicating the “Number of Active Nodes in the Current Area.”

He froze, too. Displayed right there was a bright red number: 47.

47 nodes.

According to Shi Zuozhou, he had only sent the installation package to a few people in the neighboring dorms before heading out to the North Campus. Yet now, after just a few hours—and not even late into the night—over forty people had voluntarily downloaded, installed, and run Rabbit Hole?

“This is way too fast…” Yu Xian said to Shi Zuozhou in genuine amazement.

Was this the power of “rigid demand”? The intense yearning for Midnight Bus and its derivative dreams had become the most ferocious accelerant. These 47 nodes were like 47 fireflies lighting up in the dark. Though faint, they had unconsciously connected into a single, cohesive expanse.

“Our ‘Wildfire’ has already started burning.”

This was perhaps the most exhilarating news of the day. Carrying this wave of excitement, the two returned to their beds.

Lying in bed, the sound of concubines scheming in a palace drama once again drifted over from Shi Zuozhou’s direction. By the faint, cold glow of his phone screen, Yu Xian tapped on the pixelated rabbit icon.

This was the Rabbit Hole they had built with their own hands. The interface retained that minimalist, somewhat retro style of green text on a black background, heavily resembling a turn-of-the-millennium BBS forum or a MUD game.

He swiped gently with his finger. The file names were like a series of tempting blind boxes:

“Wasteland Survival: One Man, One Dog, and the Vault Girl”,

“Hogwarts: My Night with Young Master Malfoy”,

“Cyberpunk 2077: The Ripperdoc on the Night City Sightseeing Bus”,

“Advanced Math Perfect Score Sprint: Immersive Library (Pure Edition)”,

“100 Days of High School Romance: The Unsent Love Letter and the Cicadas’ Song”…

Behind each title was a world within arm’s reach. Here, you could be a hero saving the world, a powerful wizard, or someone finally making up for a lingering regret from your youth.

Yu Xian’s finger hovered over a file named “Old Times: That Summer.” In that moment, a crazy thought bubbled up unstoppably from the depths of his mind. He could almost already see it: that old millennial neighborhood covered in blue glass, the sunlight hitting the mushroom-shaped pavilion downstairs, and a smiling girl with short hair, laughing as she pulled him toward the wet market across the street…

As long as he put on his earphones. As long as he pressed play.

He thought, “Should I… try it just once?”

A voice at the bottom of his heart was quietly urging him on. After all, Wen Xiao had already replaced the most dangerous third part—the “black box patch” that might contain a self-destruct command. Theoretically, these current audio files posed no threat to life, aside from making a person remember their dreams. As long as he controlled the frequency and didn’t get addicted, it should be fine, right?

That itching sensation felt like countless ants crawling across his heart. Who wouldn’t want to have a lucid, beautiful dream? Especially on such a terrible, high-pressure night.

“Phew…” Yu Xian let out a long breath. A split second before his finger could touch the download button, he abruptly hit the lock screen.

The screen went black. That faint green glow vanished, leaving only the pitch darkness of the dorm room. He remembered Senior Sister Yang Yiyi’s stern warning under the dim, yellow light of the boiler room the other day.

“The memories of the dream being fully preserved means their ‘weight’ becomes equal to that of real-world memories.

“When this kind of memory enters the long-term storage of the hippocampus, the brain’s retrieval mechanism will experience chaos… This is ‘source memory confusion’.”

Even though the potential malicious code had been removed, the core function of “MCH suppression” still remained. As long as he listened to this audio, the memories from the dream would become an inerasable recollection, forcefully squeezing their way into his brain. Physiologically, it was safe. Cognitively, however, it was still a ticking time bomb.

Once his brain started to confuse dreams with reality, and once the weight of those fabricated memories surpassed his real ones… he feared he would drown in them. If the dream world was too real—so real that it made him feel the actual world was the fake nightmare—would he still have the courage to face this messy reality?

On the eve of a world that might soon collapse, in a time when even physics might become invalid, staying awake and lucid was his only—and ultimate—weapon. He had to maintain absolute rationality to face the Great Flood that might soon arrive, to evade… or to fight the colossal entity hiding behind the scenes. He couldn’t risk the grand scheme for a petty comfort.

Yu Xian shoved his phone under his pillow, took the melatonin his cousin had bought for him, and forced his eyes shut.

A dreamless sleep was the most luxurious rest he could have right now.

***

Thursday morning.

The eight o’clock class was Theoretical Acoustics, a mandatory core course for the School of Physics. Stepping into the lecture hall, Yu Xian was mentally prepared. After all, Professor Gao had committed suicide, Professor Shu’s entire team had evacuated, and Professor Ning had been taken away in public… The professors at the School of Physics were falling one after another like dominoes. An invisible panic and speculation had long enveloped the hearts of every student. Everyone was guessing which professor’s turn it would be to “disappear” today.

However, contrary to everyone’s expectations, at eight o’clock sharp, the moment the class bell rang, a familiar figure appeared on the podium right on time.

Professor Sheng still had his meticulous demeanor. Just like always, he opened his PowerPoint presentation, and even his opening remarks remained unchanged. “Alright, class is starting. Today, we will discuss the propagation of sound waves in heterogeneous media…”

There was no class suspension, no substitute teacher, no inexplicable “overseas exchange,” and no tragic final lesson like Professor Ning’s.

Everything was so normal that it was somewhat… abnormal.

Throughout the class, Professor Sheng seemed a bit distracted, but after two full periods, absolutely nothing happened. None of the students dozed off or whispered to each other; everyone listened carefully and cautiously. When the dismissal bell finally rang, Professor Sheng closed his lesson plans, even assigned homework, and then hurriedly left the classroom with his briefcase tucked under his arm.

“That’s… it?” Shi Zuozhou muttered softly while packing his backpack. “I was all mentally prepared, and this is what we get? Isn’t the School of Physics being targeted? Why is Professor Sheng perfectly fine?”

Yu Xian looked thoughtfully in the direction Professor Sheng had left.

Indeed… why was Professor Sheng still here? Had the “purge” targeting the physics community ended? Or perhaps… the “malice” from behind the scenes just hadn’t reached him yet? Or maybe… Professor Sheng had chosen to compromise?

“Do you think Professor Sheng caved?” Shi Zuozhou seemed to have thought of the same thing. “Or is his academic status just not as high as the other three professors? Not worth making a big fuss over?”

Yu Xian paused, feeling as though Shi Zuozhou’s words had just awakened him to something. “Maybe it’s not about status… but the field?” He recalled the professors who had met with mishaps recently. “Professor Gao worked on high-energy particle collisions. Professor Shu was in the data processing direction of high-energy physics. Professor Ning was in condensed matter physics, studying the microscopic structure of matter. The commonality in these fields…”

Shi Zuozhou’s eyes widened. “These are all fields exploring the most underlying, fundamental laws of matter? But Professor Sheng is in acoustics. Relatively speaking, it leans more toward the applied level. It’s not as…”

Shi Zuozhou paused, trying to find the precise word to describe it.

“Not as ‘fundamental’,” Yu Xian supplied the word for him.

“Right! Not as fundamental! Are you saying… Su Mingyuan’s ‘Subtraction’ is operating based on the academic pecking order?” Shi Zuozhou said, stunned. “So those doing applied physics aren’t considered ‘redundant’, but the ones doing theoretical physics have to die?”