Shadow 380,000 Level 17 Suspended Spirit Hurricane Arrives

Chapter 31

I hurriedly tried the car door on this side, and thankfully it opened easily. Come to think of it, this car is only slightly deformed; it's really sturdy. As I half-crawled and half-swam out of the car, I didn't forget to give Xiahou Ying a hand.

When I surfaced and took my first breath of air, it felt like being reborn. The fiercest waves had passed, and Yi Island was now completely submerged. Xiahou Ying and I swam to a large tree that had been uprooted, struggled to climb up, and lay panting like dead dogs.

He had barely caught his breath when he heard someone calling for help. Looking over, he saw it was Lin Wen. When he escaped from the Hummer, he hadn't even opened his eyes properly and hadn't bothered to check if the driver in the front seat was alive or dead. That old guy was really lucky to be alive.

However, it was already his limit to surface. His left forearm and ribs appeared to be fractured, and even though he could see us not far away, he could hardly swim over.

I swam over and brought him here, but he pointed in a direction and asked me to swim over and take a look.

“There are boats over there,” he said.

"A boat?" I looked around. I didn't see one.

Lin Wen's face was covered in seawater or sweat from the pain, and he couldn't speak for a moment. He just lifted himself off the horse and gestured for me to swim over and take a look.

Thinking that he would never want to harm me, and that place wasn't far, I had no choice but to muster my strength and swim over.

I swam straight ahead and discovered that there really were boats.

It was a motorboat, but it was upside down in the sea. It was getting dark, so it would have been a miracle if I had seen it earlier. The boat was originally moored in the harbor of the lake, but it broke free of its mooring lines during the tsunami and was swept here by the waves.

I simply didn't have the strength to flip it over by myself. After several unsuccessful attempts, I had no choice but to drag the boat back to the tree trunk.

It sounds simple, but actually, towing this small boat more than a hundred meters in the still turbulent sea was very strenuous, not to mention my current state. If I were rescued now, I would definitely collapse immediately, but in this desperate situation, I have already risked my life and squeezed out every last bit of my potential.

Xiahou Ying had recovered somewhat. The two of them worked together for more than ten minutes, and finally I climbed onto the bottom of the boat. With Xiahou Ying's help, we managed to capsize the boat so that it was facing up. The moment I flipped into the water, even Lin Wen couldn't help but cheer.

They drained most of the seawater from the boat, using their hands. Five hands, because Lin Wen had lost one.

Sitting in the boat, the environment was much better than under the big tree, and for the time being, there was no danger to my life. I successfully started the boat, but the several barrels of spare fuel that should have been on board had long since sunk into the sea, and I didn't know how many more nautical miles the remaining fuel could travel.

I forcefully suppressed the urge to set sail and search for the other survivors. I didn't want to calculate how many people in that round building had any chance of survival after the earthquake and tsunami. Besides, with the huge waves of the tsunami, who knows how far they'd already been carried away? Searching the entire sea surface within a hundred kilometers would probably be impossible before we even finished. You have to understand, there was more than just me on that ship.

Besides, the moon has already risen, and night will soon fall completely. You can't even see far, so how can you talk about search and rescue?

"What if we wait for the tide to recede, or what?" I asked the two people.

Lin Wen shook his head and said, "During the earthquake just now, there were cracks everywhere in the ground. With an earthquake like that, this island will most likely sink. How can we wait? About two or three hundred kilometers southwest of Yi Island, there are several islands with fresh water. Although they are uninhabited, there are shipping routes passing through them. The problem is that I can't tell which way is which right now."

Xiahou Ying looked up and said, "Turn off the engine first, don't waste fuel. Let me look at the stars when it gets a little darker."

As the starlight gradually brightened, Xiahou Ying asked Lin Wen for more specific locations of those islands. Referring to the star map, he pointed in a direction and said, "Go that way."

The motorboat's engine started up again, and to save fuel, it moved at a low to medium speed in the direction Xiahou Ying had pointed. However, we all knew that reaching our destination with so little fuel was a pipe dream; when we ran out of fuel, we would have to use the branches we had broken off from the trees as oars.

The headlights on the bow of the boat would turn on every short period of time and shine forward, firstly to check the situation ahead, and secondly, in the hope that if there were any survivors nearby, they could follow the light to find them.

Needless to say, we were exhausted. Our once sumptuous dinner was now soaking in the sea, and we were starving. We were hungry, and soon we'd feel thirsty too. None of us complained; complaining only made us feel hungrier and thirstier.

Although physically exhausted, having just suffered a great disaster and been in dire straits, everyone's mind is tense and unable to sleep. They need to find some topics to talk about to shift their attention away from hunger and relax.

"I heard a loud noise underground before the earthquake. Is there an underwater volcano near Yi Island?" I asked Lin Wen.

“There are no underwater volcanoes, but this area is a tectonic plate junction zone, and there have been minor earthquakes before, but this time…” Lin Wen looked up at the bright moon and smiled wryly.

"Dr. Lin, don't you think it's an earthquake?" Xiahou Ying asked.

"I'm afraid it wasn't a naturally occurring earthquake. You all experienced it; the shaking was truly terrifying, definitely exceeding the magnitude of the Tangshan earthquake. Earthquakes of this magnitude usually have warning signs beforehand, such as ground lights or sounds. Animals, in particular, usually sense a major earthquake an hour or even earlier. But think back, even during the first two slight ground tremors, the animals and insects on the island didn't react much until that loud bang. It seems that the earthquake was sudden, rather than the kind that usually occurs when underground energy accumulates to a certain level and exceeds its limit."

"That's true." I thought for a moment and nodded in agreement.

"That loud bang sounded just like a bomb exploding underground," Xiahou Ying said.

"That's no ordinary bomb. Even the most powerful nuclear bomb in human history can't compare."

"Nuclear bomb?" Hearing Lin Wen say that, I naturally understood what he meant: "You don't mean to say that the first mineral transferred from the moon was transported underground, do you?"

“That’s what I meant.” Lin Wen was silent for a moment, then nodded slightly to me and said, “Mr. Dai, I didn’t expect you to know what kind of ore this was.”

Caught in this sudden calamity, I was in a state of panic and completely failed to realize that Lin Wen hadn't explained the specific uses of the ore to Dai Xing. But when Lin Wen mentioned nuclear weapons, I immediately thought of Helium-3, the raw material for thermonuclear reactions. This immediately revealed my mistake.

"You went to such great lengths to invite us here, you should at least give us something in return. I do have some sources, but if this hadn't happened, you would have told us the truth sooner or later anyway," I said, forcing myself to speak.

“Yes, now that we’ve successfully obtained the ore, the new energy source will be endless. There’s no need or possibility to hide it anymore. The boss will probably explain the situation to you at the banquet. But now, hehe, all those years of careful planning have ultimately come to nothing.” Lin Wen couldn’t help but feel a little sad as he spoke.

"Are you saying that the first piece of ore didn't reach its intended location, but instead mistakenly went underground, triggering a nuclear explosion?" Xiahou Ying asked, not quite understanding what we were talking about.

"Yes, so many people were trying to teleport something, and they managed to lock onto it, but there must have been a problem with their coordination. This caused some interference with the final landing point, resulting in a vertical error of at least tens of thousands of meters, and it ended up in the magma of the mantle."

Thirteen, Shock (6)

I was puzzled. Since I had already made it clear that I knew about this, I didn't try to hide it and directly voiced my question: "Dr. Lin, I know this is helium-3 ore. I don't know much about nuclear physics, but I have the impression that helium-3 is very stable. And although helium-3 greatly lowers the starting temperature of nuclear reactions, not to the exaggerated hundreds of millions of degrees, isn't the magma in the mantle only a few thousand degrees? How could it cause the ore to explode?"

"It's impossible for a helium-3 ore to explode at a temperature of several thousand degrees, and the currently accepted temperature of the mantle in geology is also several thousand degrees. Now that an explosion has occurred, it can only mean that the mantle, or at least the mantle in some places, is not only several thousand degrees, and the current general view in geology needs to be revised."

"Huh?" It just doesn't seem like a good idea to overturn everything that geologists agree on.

"What, do you think my conclusion is a bit hasty? Heh, working backward from the facts, it's perfectly normal to arrive at this conclusion. In reality, even the best geologists only have a superficial understanding of what's beneath the Earth. Do you even know what the mantle is?"

"The mantle should be made of magma, right?" I searched my mind for the common sense answer to this question.

"Then how do you know it's all lava there?" Lin Wen asked me in return.

"It must have been detected."

"Probe? Let me tell you, no matter how good the probes that humans can make now, they can't penetrate the Earth's crust, let alone the mantle and core. The mantle filled with magma and the core, which is mostly composed of iron, are all just speculations. The only way to prove it is to drill a hole down and see for yourself."

"Just speculation?" This surprised me. I remember seeing perspective diagrams of the Earth's crust, mantle, and core when I was in elementary school. They described the composition and thickness in great detail. I never imagined that it was all just speculation.

"Of course. When I say drilling, I really mean drilling. Like now, the Japanese are drilling underwater because the Earth's crust is thinner there, but they're still far from successful. The largest drilling project in history was done by the Soviets in 1970. They chose a spot on Russia's Kola Peninsula, hoping to drill to a depth of 15 kilometers. Nineteen years later, when they finally gave up, they had drilled to a depth of over 12,000 meters, not even reaching a third of the Earth's crust, which only represents about 0.3% of the Earth's volume." Lin Wenjing recounted a scientific anecdote, it was unclear what he was trying to illustrate.

"Even with the limited depth of this drilling, what they discovered... well, before they drilled that deep, some scientists studying seismic waves confidently predicted that they would encounter sedimentary rock at a depth of 4,700 meters, followed by 2,300 meters of granite, and then basalt. In reality, the sedimentary rock was 50% thicker than expected, the basalt layer was completely absent, and the underground world was much warmer than anticipated, reaching 180 degrees Celsius at a depth of 10,000 meters, almost twice the expected temperature. Most surprisingly, the rocks at that depth were permeated with water—something always considered impossible. This is the gap between prediction and reality. So, the original prediction of the mantle being several thousand degrees and the Earth's core being tens of thousands of degrees now seems to be problematic."

Lin Wen was indeed very knowledgeable; when he talked about a ground-penetrating experiment, he could recite the specific data off the top of his head.

"Without temperatures of tens of thousands of degrees or even higher, that raw ore could never have gone wrong. Of course, the high pressure inside the Earth also played a role, and there might even have been some situations that we don't understand. But one thing is certain: because the raw ore was not purified, it did not undergo sufficient fusion. Otherwise, this island would probably have been blown into the sky, and we would have no chance of survival. The entire ecosystem of the Earth could have been affected."

"In that case, it's still fortunate," Xiahou Ying said.

Was it a stroke of luck? I looked at the twinkling stars in the sky and thought of Kou Yun's twinkling eyes.

"Dr. Lin, your research scope is truly extensive." I sighed, trying to stop thinking about Kou Yun.

"I just read a lot of books while researching this superpower of telemetry. For a long time, I couldn't find a breakthrough direction, so I read a lot of random things, which was very helpful for me to finally break through traditional thinking and create the basic theory of telemetry."

"Oh, right, I still don't understand how it's possible to take ore down from the moon. What exactly is your theory?" His words immediately reminded me of this important question that had been bothering me for a long time.

Lin Wen smiled slightly. Perhaps because they were in the same boat now, their defenses against each other had weakened considerably in the face of adversity. He began by talking about his initial experiment with Chen Yuanze, then his contact with Zheng Yu, and the joint construction of Yi Island, recounting his experiences over the years.

I already knew most about the breakup with Chen Yuanze, and Kou Yun and I had discussed the most basic analyses of displacement, such as thought locking, many times before. But while listening, I still occasionally put on an approving expression, satisfying my old man's vanity.

During his experiments with Chen Yuanze, Lin Wen's interest in uncovering the full extent of his abilities grew stronger. When Chen Yuanze gave up, Lin Wen decided to continue the experiments on his own.

Unraveling the mystery of teleportation at a distance may involve knowledge spanning numerous cutting-edge fields, from genetics and neuroscience to quantum physics, spacetime theory, and psychology. During those years, Lin Wen not only intensively studied these areas and followed relevant papers in international academic journals, but also collected many unorthodox books related to special abilities and visited numerous self-proclaimed "masters." Unfortunately, most of these masters were frauds, and the very few who possessed genuine knowledge, like himself before, were content with merely using their abilities and had no interest in further investigation.

This ability to instantly teleport objects contradicts many theories within the current scientific system, making it virtually impossible to deduce the cause of teleportation using current scientific theories. It's like trying to pull yourself up by your own hair. Therefore, as Lin Wen's scientific knowledge grew, so did his confusion. He could only travel far and wide, searching for extraordinary individuals and for inspiration.

The breakthrough came during a trip. It was on a train when Lin Wenfan, craving a cigarette, took out a cigarette and, too lazy to rummage through his bag for a lighter, simply moved it to his palm.

He had used this lighter for many years, multiple times a day, to the point that it was so familiar that it was almost a second nature. In this instant, he could retrieve it with almost no effort.

Lin Wen tried to light the lighter several times, but it wouldn't light. Suddenly, he remembered something and was shocked. He quickly opened his small bag and searched through it. Sure enough, he found a brand new lighter.

It turned out that the old lighter had run out of fuel, and the spare fuel at home had also been used up. So, when he went out this time, Lin Wen bought a new, cheap lighter at a small shop and left the old one at home.

Using his mind to retrieve the old lighter was actually a habitual action. At this point, Lin Wen had been on a train all night and was hundreds of kilometers away from Shanghai. How could the lighter be in his hand with just a thought, without any effort at all?

Since then, Lin Wen has conducted several more experiments and finally determined that displacement at a distance is not actually limited by distance. Retrieving something 100 kilometers away does not require more effort than retrieving something one meter away.

Thirteen, Shock (7)

The reason why the distance became increasingly difficult to move successfully was entirely due to a lack of self-confidence. Common sense dictates that moving something from a distant location requires more effort than moving it to a nearby one; this is a self-evident truth, and every person with this ability subconsciously believes so. Therefore, the greater the distance, the less confident they become. Since this ability is closely related to one's mental state and mental strength, a lack of confidence leads to a rapidly increasing failure rate, rendering even intense effort futile.

Most people with special abilities would want to test their limits. By placing the object at an extreme distance, every step they take diminishes their confidence, causing their mind to waver, making it easy to "test" their maximum distance. Once this limit is determined, it's like putting a tight rein on themselves, self-hypnotizing themselves into believing they can never exceed that distance again.

When Lin Wen mentioned concluding that supersonic displacement is not limited by distance, I found it utterly unbelievable. His conjecture was ten times bolder than his previous overturning of geologists' consensus on underground temperatures. I couldn't help but interject, "Dr. Lin, your conclusion shatters all of humanity's understanding of space, including that of scientists. An object can instantly teleport to another location regardless of spatial distance. For example, what is the 380,000 kilometers between the Earth and the Moon compared to Helium-3 ore? It's nothing! This is truly unbelievable. Does this mean that human mental power created wormholes, thereby folding space and allowing objects to traverse it?"

"You're talking about the wormhole theory, right? According to this theory, creating a wormhole that folds space can traverse extremely long distances in an instant. However, firstly, creating a wormhole requires enormous energy. We don't know exactly how much energy is needed because humans don't have the means to experiment with it. To say that humans can create wormholes with their mental power is obviously a myth. Moreover, there are no signs of wormhole creation as described in the theory before or after the displacement. Secondly, enormous energy is needed to fold space and create a wormhole. However, the more space that is folded, the greater the energy required. It's not the same regardless of the distance."

"Then how do you explain how this object crossed space?"

Under the starlight, Lin Wen smiled. It was a satisfied smile with a hint of self-satisfaction.

"They did not cross space."

Xiahou Ying and I looked at each other, completely baffled by what he meant.

"Space is the foundation of this world, and another foundation is time. Originally, our concept of space was the concept of a house. We all live in houses, and everything in a house is at a distance from each other, some far away and some close. The time required to get from one place to another depends on the distance and speed. But now there are situations where we can get directly from one point to another, which shows that our original understanding of space was wrong."

"Are you suggesting that you're going to overturn our understanding of space?" My eyes widened.

"Of course, old concepts cannot explain what has already happened, so we can only create a new concept. My theory is that there are no houses."

"No house, Dr. Lin, do you mean no space?" Xiahou Ying asked, frowning.

"It's not that there's no space, but that there are no houses. Space is not the infinitely large container concept we originally thought it was. There are no houses, and there is no distance."

"You've completely confused me," I muttered.

"I believe that space is not a place that can contain objects, but rather an attribute of objects. An object, for example, a peach, has many attributes, such as weight, shape, surface area, color, density, taste, etc. In fact, it also has another attribute, which is space."

Lin Wen's words were like a bomb, completely stunning me.

"Space is not independent of specific objects, but is closely connected to the billions of objects that constitute this world, because it is a property of objects. This property is somewhat like a force field. A chair has a spatial force field, a table has a spatial force field, and the spatial force fields of billions of objects are connected and merged, which leads us to mistakenly believe that space exists independently of objects, and also gives rise to the concept of 'distance'. When we walk or move objects, we are ultimately using force to change the spatial properties of ourselves or objects, but this change in property is indirect, not a direct action on spatial properties. It's like untying a knot; there are multiple ways. The ordinary movement of objects that we usually see is like slowly untangling the knot little by little; while displacement over a distance is like cutting the knot with scissors, breaking the rope, and the knot is untied."

"So, teleportation is using mental power to directly change the spatial properties of an object. Once the properties change, the spatial location of the object naturally changes?" I slowly came to understand Lin Wen's meaning, but despite my understanding, the feeling of extreme disbelief still lingered.

"That's right. By directly changing the properties of space, distance becomes irrelevant. The 380,000 kilometers between the Earth and the Moon is no longer a problem. It's as convenient as writing '100' versus '1010', even though the two numbers are a hundred million times larger. Why can we extract Helium-3 from the Moon? Only by overturning our traditional understanding of space can this theory explain it. Once we understand this, we will have enough confidence to use our abilities. Even if we are separated by thousands of miles, it will be a trivial matter."

"Then how does mental power change spatial attributes?" Xiahou Ying asked.

Thirteen, Shock (8)

Lin Wen spread his hands: "Modern science hasn't even figured out what mental power is, so how could it possibly understand how mental power alters spatial properties? My theory is actually a conjecture, a hypothesis, based on facts. I believe in my hypothesis, but I can't prove it. Just like Fermat's Last Theorem, since Fermat proposed it in the 17th century, it took more than three centuries of struggle by countless mathematical geniuses to finally be proven. I'm afraid it will take even longer to prove my conjecture. However, once the mystery of spatial properties is deciphered, the entire way of life for humanity will probably change. Even the most powerful cars, airplanes, and spaceships will become obsolete."

Lin Wen's new space theory shocked me in a revolutionary way. On the train back to Shanghai from Hunan, I kept thinking about his seemingly simple but increasingly complex conjecture.