All of the chaos had disappeared, leaving behind only a screen full of evenly distributed image noise. By no means could it be said to have a pattern or no pattern. Because it was excessively chaotic, it instead exhibited a tidiness that was hard to describe.
Just like that, Pauli stared at his screen. He was clearly only looking at the screen, but An Zhe felt that he was looking through the screen at some massive and indescribable thing.
An Zhe recalled what Tang Lan had said to Pauli an hour ago. At that time, Tang Lan had asked him if he had already realized something and just wasn't willing to tell them because the truth was something they were unable to handle.
Now, facing Pauli's gaze, the same thought sprang up in his mind.
"Have you realized something?" An Zhe asked.
In the silence, Pauli said, "Perhaps not quite, but it's frequencies."
"Frequencies?"
"Atoms, electrons, and photons. Matter is composed of elementary particles, but what are elementary particles formed from? Strings. Strings are lines of energy in two-dimensional space. It's only when they begin to vibrate at certain frequencies that they become particles in our space-time."
"The Simpson cage is a masterpiece in the field of particle physics. In the beginning, people used it to verify the correctness of string theory. Now, it may indeed be correct."
An Zhe murmured, "I don't understand."
"That's all right, I'll give an example," Pauli said. "When you pick up a violin and pluck different strings, the strings will vibrate because they were plucked, and different vibrations emit different sounds. We call those units of energy that can be found throughout the universe 'strings,' and the strings' various vibration frequencies produce different particles, forming our world."
"The reason why our world's laws of physics have previously been stable is because our strings have always been playing an unchanging piece of music. Therefore, electrons were electrons, atoms were atoms, and physics equations have always been those equations. But now—"
An Zhe's eyes widened slightly. Through this metaphor, he understood what Pauli wished to say.
"The most terrifying thing is not that this theory is correct, but rather… It's now time to change to a different melody," Pauli said. "The strings of the universe are about to be played in a different way. Or perhaps the frequency of the universe was disordered in the first place and humankind just happened to emerge during a brief period of stability. Once the age of stability ends, everything will return to chaos and disorder."
The world's most fundamental components, those laws of physics, were a symphony played according to the sheet music. Now the old melody had taken its final bows, and a new prelude was about to begin.
There had never been immutable laws, only eternal and chaotic terror.
An Zhe looked blankly out the window.
An ashen glow slowly lit up the sky.
It seemed like only three or four hours of the night had passed, but dawn had begun to rise.
"All laws are falling apart, and matter is beginning to distort from its fundamental properties. You, me, the earth, the sun, and the Milky Way. The rotation is speeding up," Pauli said.
An Zhe asked, "What will it be like in the end?"
"I don't know." Pauli shook his head slowly. "Living and non-living things will mix together, all tangible things will change, and all of time and space will bend. Everything will take on another appearance that we're unable to understand. There's only one thing that's certain."
An Zhe waited for him to finish.
"We will all die," he said.
An Zhe began coughing violently once more. It seemed like he was going to cough up all the blood in his body, with the deterioration of his body being faster than the distortion of matter. He curled up in a chair near the fireplace with his arms wrapped around his knees. Surprisingly, he was still alive. It seemed like he was destined to witness the extinction of humankind at the final moments of his own life.
Tang Lan went out. The research institute consisted of half-human, half-monster xenogenics. Some of them had a high level of combat prowess, while others were just ordinary animals and plants that were even slower and clumsier than humans.
Every arm of the massive vine that surrounded the entire research institute lifted up, its branches and leaves standing on end like the fine hairs on a human body, in a stance filled with aggression.
Rustling shadows climbed up from the Abyss like a rising tide of black water. The monsters that could only crawl were slightly slower, while the flying monsters had already circled their way up to the mountaintop and dived down. Why had they gathered to attack the human bases only after the wave had triumphed over the magnetic field? Was there something special about this timing? Or was it merely because human bodies were weak, making them easily preyed upon?
That shouldn't have been the case.
Pauli muttered to himself, "What do they wish to gain from attacking this place?"
From the nearby walkie-talkie came the whistling wind and Tang Lan's voice. "Half of the Abyss's monsters are leaving the Abyss, and the other half are coming here. The ones that have come up first are the flying monsters."
"We can't hold out, sir. What do we do?"
The Highland Research Institute had its own small reserves of armaments. A gunshot rang out, and a bird plummeted into the center of the Simpson cage.
The glow of the Simpson cage was too bright, so An Zhe could clearly see what had occurred. Its wingtips had come into contact with the crimson lasers and flames first, instantly turning into glittering powder, and its neck arched up. It seemed to want to scream, but its body fell swiftly under the effect of gravity into the sea of flames.
Then its body completely disintegrated in an instant, and the glittering dust filled the Simpson cage like a springtime sandstorm with a crackling burst of sparks like that of firewood burning in a fireplace.
A life disappeared just like that, from its body to its soul.
An Zhe curled in on himself and took a few arduous breaths. This may not be a clean way to die, but it was better that time itself was killing him little by little.
Pauli helped him up and fed him a mouthful of glucose water, but the flow of the warm liquid into his esophagus was also like the cruel torture of being sliced open.
He leaned against Pauli.
“The Simpson cage is a strong force field and stream of high-energy particles. It is too energetic."
An Zhe nodded. Only after witnessing the bird's death did he understand why Pauli strictly prohibited the people of the research institute from approaching the Simpson cage.
Rum, who had been staring at the screen the entire time, chose that moment to speak up. "Sir."
An Zhe looked in his direction.
On the screen, amidst the image noise and chaotic curves, several distinct white lines suddenly appeared. In a strange yet orderly way, they intertwined and slowly rotated.
At the same time, the sparks in the Simpson cage went out, and the last traces of the bird also disappeared completely.
On the screen, the lines slowly disappeared.
Pauli Jones shot to his feet, his pupils sharply contracted and his voice tremulous as he muttered, "This… this is…"
"Let me think—" Pauli threw himself at the console. As he hit the buttons at top speed, he babbled, "We must lure all the other monsters into the Simpson cage."
He put his words into action. The people of the research institute had been provided with a dozen or so simple communicators to facilitate communication. The xenogenics led by Tang Lan temporarily obstructed the outside world's monsters a hundred meters away, and Pauli commanded the ones with no fighting capabilities to transfer into the white building, behind the Simpson Cage.
The monsters were aiming precisely at the people inside the research institute. After they did all that, the target of the monsters' attacks obviously shifted.