Zongman: Is this how it’s sewn?

Chapter 384 380. Hessen Strike, Catfish Effect

"Brother, this is not funny at all." Han Xiao's frightened expression gradually calmed down. He had a greater responsibility behind him, and he needed to exert his strength in the next negotiations.

Xu Zhenqing shrugged his shoulders, ordered the alliance to withdraw their defenses, and said calmly, "The data falling into reality is indeed not funny. The density of civilizations in the two universes is superimposed, and now it can be said that war is everywhere."

The Alliance's consciousness understood and enthusiastically brought up an interstellar war in the Orion Arm. This was a brief unfolding of a proton, and a huge picture lay before these people.

A long and narrow space crack ran across the starry sky, like a knife cutting open the belly of the universe, spewing out an endless mechanical frenzy from inside.

Countless warships flew out of the wormhole, forming armies, turning into dense streams of light and dispersing in all directions, heading to invade the planets on the star map.

These fleets were traveling at an extremely fast speed, and before long, a prosperous planet came into sight. The planet's defense forces had already taken off and were distributed in outer space, ready to fight against the invasion.

The commander of the Third Fleet was debugging the gravitational wave radar when a dazzling light appeared in deep space.

It was a white light purer than a supernova explosion, like a silver needle piercing a velvet curtain by a god.

The first to suffer was the battleship "Fomaghini" on the right wing of the fleet - or rather, the metal cloud that used to be a battleship.

As the light particles penetrated the hull at 0.99 times the speed of light, the helium-3 fuel in the fusion reactor burst into a blue-white fireball in the absolute zero space.

"Everyone, activate the warp engine!" The captain's roar exploded in the quantum communication channel.

Outside the porthole, thousands of warships emitted dark blue ripples of space and time from their sterns, but more light particles poured down like a rainstorm.

He saw with his own eyes that the curvature bubble of the cruiser "Rigel VII" had just unfolded when it was hit by three light particles in a triangular shape. The distorted space-time structure collapsed into elementary particles like a soap bubble crushed by a child, along with the 800 crew members inside.

But the real nightmare has just begun.

The Emerald Star directly below the fleet was suddenly covered with a silver film.

The captain's pupils contracted violently, a silver darker than a vacuum, as if the universe itself had been gouged out of a piece of its skin.

The atmosphere began to flatten, and the clouds turned into the vortex in Van Gogh's "Starry Night", but all the colors were fading rapidly.

The planetary defense fleet taking off was like an insect being pressed into a laminator, the three-dimensional bridge becoming a flat projection, and the still-rotating engine nozzles becoming the lines of a pencil sketch.

The adjutant's voice trembled. Lin Han felt his throat tighten. Their flagship, the Black Star XIV, was vibrating violently, not from an external attack, but from the wail of space itself.

Gravitational wave detectors are sounding a shrill alarm, the physical constants of the three-dimensional world are being rewritten, and the Planck length is growing at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Suddenly, the quantum communication screen lit up with strange purple snowflakes. Lin Han's temples throbbed, reminding him of the glitchy screens on old-fashioned televisions from his childhood.

"Probability cloud weapon detected!" The AI's synthesized voice trembled with a rare sense of trepidation. "All material existence is being quantized."

The bridge floor suddenly became transparent, and the captain saw his boots disintegrating into flickering pixels.

This was not an elegant dimensionality reduction like two-dimensionalization, but a brutal quantum decoherence—his left hand still held the joystick, but his right hand had turned into a mist of probability.

Outside the portholes, the warships that had managed to avoid the light particle attack were performing quantum suicide. Some suddenly split into twelve double images, while others flickered in and out like broken holographic projections. The most terrifying thing was the Emerald Star.

This Earth-like planet with a diameter of 12,000 kilometers has now become Schrödinger's cat box.

When Lin Han looked at it, the planet remained a complete sphere; but when he blinked, the moment his observation was interrupted, void holes with a diameter of thousands of kilometers would randomly appear on the surface of the planet.

The atmosphere jumps back and forth between classical and quantum states like a marshmallow torn by a child.

"Start vacuum decay." The captain roared with his vaporizing vocal cords, but before the order was uttered, the entire universe suddenly became quiet.

All ongoing destructive processes froze simultaneously—not that time had stopped, but that something more essential had been withdrawn.

Light particles hovered between the burning ships, the two-dimensional silver film stopped expanding, and the quantum planet maintained a superposition state of both broken and complete.

Then, like a destruction video played in reverse, all traces of the impact began to spontaneously annihilate. The burning battleship rose from the ashes and dissipated again, two-dimensional space curled back into three dimensions, and the quantum probability cloud converged into a deterministic state.

When the last bit of light disappeared into the void, the dark forest returned to its eternal silence, as if these fleets and the Emerald Star had never existed.

There is only a bronze compass drifting in the absolute zero space, with the longitude and latitude of the earth etched on its surface, still rotating silently.

When its quantum pointer pointed to the Orion Arm for the thousandth time, the entire device suddenly turned into a cloud of golden stardust. This was a self-destruction program preset by the builders at the atomic level.

The picture stopped abruptly because the expanded proton was extremely fragile. A gust of solar wind blew past with particles, tearing the screen apart, just like an old desktop TV with a snowy screen, and then it froze.

Xu Zhenqing smiled faintly and said, "A little local specialty from my hometown doesn't seem to be much of a tribute."

"What's down there?" Han Xiao's voice was a little hoarse, his eyes fixed on the Earth's orbit, where the screen was torn. A piece of "rag" floated over. Looking at the thin piece with no thickness, an inexplicable fear grew in his heart.

In the eyes of those in the gaming world, Xu Zhenqing's smile was like a devil's mockery: "This is the only observation point. Without you and me observing, the quantum state will most likely be exposed and die."

"What are things like in other places?" Han Xiao calmed down and asked as calmly as possible.

“Have you heard of the catfish effect?”

"Since sardines are only fresh and delicious when they are alive, if they arrive at the port still alive, the selling price will be many times higher than if they are dead."

"However, sardines are often lifeless after being caught due to lack of external stimulation and are prone to die during transportation."

"Then the fishermen discovered by chance that if they put catfish into a tank containing sardines, the catfish's activity would stimulate the sardines to swim more actively."

"You are the catfish, blowing up this dead universe. There are bullets, shells, and alienation everywhere."

The three leaders were silent. Light particles are bullets, two-dimensional foils are cannonballs, and quantization is alienation. Is this universe really home?

(End of this chapter)