Collapse, survive

Fang Jie retracted his previous statement. Even though the Black Tower Space Station looked very futuristic, it was just that Xing, the guide, was incompetent.

Look, the art style has changed.

"Black Tower, Black Tower, this is my junior, his name is Fang Jie, he's got a lot of bad intentions, you'd better be careful..."

"Get out of my way."

Fang Jie strongly agreed with Black Tower's statement.

Even Estella would find you annoying.

However, with so many eyes on him, he wasn't really willing to agree with Black Tower, and he was somewhat intimidated by her beautiful eyes.

You are not a genius; you see me as a frog in a well looking at the moon in the sky.

If you are a genius, seeing me is like an ant seeing the blue sky.

So even if I beat you to your knees, I still need to investigate...

The big crisis can be solved.

"Senior Xingbao—!!"

Listen to me, you who's there to take the fall...

"Haha, I'm leaving now since it's nothing else for me."

My good teammate has already run away, using a warp jump.

Fang Jie: "..."

He turned around and quietly admired the scenery.

"That is Azure Star."

This is the Black Tower office, the place with the best view and scenery on the entire space station. Looking out at the planets orbiting the space station, I felt a strange sense of familiarity.

It doesn't matter, he recognizes plenty of people like that.

"It's good, isn't it? You like watching it, right? You haven't seen it before, have you?"

The Black Tower Man maintained his arrogant tone, but with a disdainful smirk that sounded like a little devil at first glance. Unfortunately, little devils are only good at talking, while she...

Even more impressive.

The short, black-faced doll had bright eyes and a delicate, pretty face. It looked up and stared intently at Fang Jie.

Fang Jie knew what she was doing.

A genius's eyes are better than any testing instrument. Besides, how do you know she didn't use any testing instruments? Fang Jie could feel being 'spyed' on.

It felt as unnatural as being spied on.

In particular, he was isolated and helpless.

"Damn Xing, you promised to be a senior mentor to a newbie, but you just abandoned the person you were supposed to mentor and ran off to play instead."

Xing Hejing ran nimbly, while Fang Jie was visiting the space station for the first time. She, on the other hand, had plenty of triggerable missions waiting for her, and there might even be events.

Solution?

I don't care.

"You seem quite concerned about that star core brat, but I see you're not being polite to her at all. You show neither enough curiosity nor enough fear. You people on the Star Train are really something, taking her all over the galaxy without fear of exploding. Oh, and there's you too. If you all exploded together, the fireworks would be spectacular. If nearby planets and civilizations don't have star orbits or stellar jump technology, they're doomed."

Black Tower was saying things that sounded terrifying.

Stellar hopping, as the name suggests, involves jumping from the vicinity of one star to the vicinity of another.

This technology isn't common in the Milky Way; after all, with star trails around us, who would research this? Companies don't care about profits.

Many civilizations in the Milky Way have left their star systems by relying on extraterrestrial visitors, or more accurately, by establishing connections between different worlds. Some civilizations simply try to leave their star systems by accumulating technology in a rudimentary way.

If you can do that, congratulations! Even the Milky Way would have to look at you with new respect; your civilization has enormous potential.

In short, stellar hopping technology simply requires close-range use of stars, thus avoiding subspace, while Black Tower implies that it can at least instantly escape an astronomical unit of one Sun.

It's instantaneous; even those who can only slowly accelerate away from the star's gravitational pull will die.

Therefore, even reaching the vicinity of the sun at full speed via a jump would be instantaneous, let alone living directly within the gravitational pull of a star...

Who has such a civilized lifestyle that they live directly on a Dyson sphere?

In short, there is still hope. This way, even after the star core explosion shatters the stability of the spatial domain, it can still hold on despite the inevitable catastrophic eruption.

Then, inevitably, it will be affected by some aftereffects and continue to be destroyed, with time to leave its last words.

"Haha, the Milky Way isn't that dangerous."

Fang Jie wouldn't be intimidated by the Black Tower; how could the Star Core Essence explode so easily?

"Hmph, pretending to be stupid won't work on this genius. Come closer, let me examine your body."

"I reject."

"There is a reward."

"There's a reward too..."

"You can ask for anything you want; this genius is capable of anything."

I'll offer you a condition you can't refuse.jpg

The solution, however, is to believe it.

As a genius, she is indeed 'omnipotent' in a sense. If she can come up with something she can't do, that would be great, and the Black Tower's interest would remain for a long time.

But a physical exam...

Fang Jie's face was full of resistance as he looked out at the blue planet again, gazing at the sun, the hometown of this brilliant but utterly empathetic great scientist.

The Milky Way is filled with stars, and they are similar to the sun in his understanding, rather than being yellow, blue, green, white, purple... or even black.

In short, the familiarity of the face made him feel at ease.

So, Black Tower actually gave her a sense of familiarity.

"You say that both I and the stars are in danger, but aren't you the most dangerous person here, Lady Black Tower?"

Fang Jie felt like his heart was dead and started to criticize her relentlessly.

"Ha, you want to compete with me? You're the most arrogant and ambitious brat I've ever met."

Black Tower doesn't see anything wrong with feeling that she is the most dangerous; of course, she should be the most intelligent, the most beautiful, the most talented, and the most dangerous.

This is a matter of course, a universal truth.

Therefore, the space station has experienced and overcome countless crises.

Part of the crisis comes from the outside, after all, this place is full of the most exotic collections in the entire universe, like a drooling fat pig placed in front of a hungry diner, it is never safe.

With only the defense personnel recruited by the company and a somewhat advanced defense system, the space station is not enough to withstand malicious attacks from between stars.

But the space station has always been able to weather crises. As long as the Black Tower makes advance arrangements, the space station can gracefully bring long-planned space conspiracies to an abrupt end before they can even take place.

She herself downplayed this ability to turn misfortune into good fortune by saying that she "used the time others spent reading to make coffee."

But those crises were only a small part; the vast majority of crises came from the Black Tower itself.

That's right, the main threat to the space station comes from the Black Tower itself.

The space station would be in immediate danger if she suddenly had a whim.

What strange objects mimicking stellar annihilation, what distorted gravitational fields from dark galaxy collisions, what terrifying cutting-edge galactic technology simulating the universe...

Planets and civilizations with stellar jumping technology will also perish.

Unable to escape the current galaxy in an instant, they didn't even have time to think of leaving their last words.

When she's interested, everything is great; when she's not interested, things immediately go wrong. Often, the best outcome is for her to never contact those she was involved in research with again.

Fang Jie's expression relaxed: "Why can't we compare? I'm five-star, and you're four-star. Although you're more useful than Silver Wolf."

"What kind of strange metaphor is that, kid? There seems to be something wrong with how you perceive the world."

The Black Tower doll's expression... is very interested.

She didn't actually need Fang Jie's consent to examine his body, since he was already on the space station.

But how should I put it, she won't remember unimportant names, including Himeko's, but sometimes she seems very easy to talk to, and you can ask her for anything.

In short, she silently observed Fang Jie for a long time, and the more she watched, the more interested she became. She began to interfere further—stimulating his thinking through language, regardless of what he was thinking, just to give him a jolt.

Then it got more and more exciting to watch...

The thought of directly observing [IX] is exciting, and even a genius wouldn't do something like that rashly.

Similarly, delving into the essence of a blood-sinful spirit—who cannot be described as a self-destructive being walking a path of "nothingness," but rather as a phenomenon inherent in the path itself—is also quite stimulating.

Scale is something the Black Tower needs to be careful about. As for security research, she didn't even blow up the star's core to check it when she was studying the star.

Then, no matter how he looked at it, Fang Jie seemed a bit off. As a Blood Sin Spirit, he was far too 'normal,' just an ordinary galactic soldier. This was not natural at all.

"My worldview is fine, it's perfectly good."

Fang Jie thought so. He was once terrified that he would slowly lose his five senses and no longer be able to taste the many wonders of the world. Even his sense of pain would gradually become dull. What would he do then?

However, everything is normal for now, so it's probably just a short-term thing.

"However, if you insist on seeing my special skills, that's fine. We'll talk about the payment later."

Fang Jie reached out to Hei Ta and touched the doll's cheek under her curious gaze. This was what Hei Ta looked like when she was a child, and it had to be said that she was quite cute.

"What are you doing? This is the reward you wanted. I must say, your intelligence surpasses that of many pigs. This might be your only chance in this life to get as close as I am to a genius, and you've seized it. You must already understand what price you'll have to pay, but it's all worth it..."

The little devil in the black tower kept chattering away, and Fang Jie felt that the feeling of being spied on was ten or even nine times more intense.

He remained calm: "This is not the reward I want. The reward I want is for you to answer a question for me, a question about me, about the world."

"I'm bored. Tell me about it."

Black Tower didn't care. She hated answering stupid questions and didn't even want to hear them, so she just gave a perfunctory reply.

Fang Jie, unaware that she was lost in thought, continued to stroke the doll with composure and boldness, saying, "As we all know, the Imaginary Tree is a universally accepted theory of the universe in the academic world today."

This theory likens different worlds in different times and spaces to a tree structure: each branch is a form of existence for a world; each flower and leaf is its present and past in the dimension of time. The canopy, by absorbing the ownerless imaginary energy within the spacetime conduit, always possesses a dynamic structure—new buds grow, withered leaves fall, and countless births and endings unfold in the boundless universe…

Comparing the structure of the universe to a tree might be an attitude of viewing the tree of imaginary numbers as a living entity.

Fang Jie slowly explained the common sense that she knew perfectly well, despite Hei Ta's impatient expression.

Before the theory of the Imaginary Tree was proposed, the universe was called the "Eternally Blind Void" because of its unobservable nature. After the theory was born, people were able to use their imagination to outline its working principle: ownerless imaginary energy flows continuously through the spacetime spacetime tube, forming what we know as "galaxies"—that is, countless worlds. And between worlds, just as there are spatial barriers between leaves, there are unknown imaginary spatial domains that are difficult to cross.

"Kid, what you're saying is outdated. The uniqueness of imaginary numbers was disproven long ago when remote sensing came into existence. The foundation of the Tree of the Universe has been shaken, and now it's just a pipe dream."

"Yes, but it is undeniable that the universe is filled with mysterious and unpredictable imaginary energy, which isolates galaxies one after another. Even light cannot move an inch in this energy. Therefore, human exploration of the stars can often only stay at the boundaries of our own worlds and can hardly go any deeper."

"What exactly are you trying to say? All of this is outdated stuff, like the theory of 'stretching,' the 'thermal torch,' the 'parallel imaging' theory... and so on. It's all just wishful thinking."

Black Tower grew increasingly impatient and increasingly excited.

The more she looked at Fang Jie, the more she felt something was wrong with him. The more she looked at him, the more normal he seemed. He was just an ordinary, unremarkable person in the Milky Way, and that was the biggest abnormality.

So much so that Black Tower stopped being distracted, listened to his words, and tried to deduce more from them. He even guided him to think about the key words: "By the way, the Riddler faction claims that the galaxy is just a dream. The worshippers of IX like this statement very much. You wouldn't be thinking of saying this, would you?"

Fang Jie was pure, innocent, and adorable. He had no idea about the genius's tactics. He only understood the first purpose of the Black Tower. Regarding the question itself, he denied it: "No, what I meant was, what if the essence of the universe is [collapse]?"

"What the heck? Your conjecture? Tell me about it?"

Black Tower didn't really want to listen to this kind of nonsense that might just be attention-seeking, but since she had nothing better to do, she was testing Fang Jie and wondering why he was acting so normally.

"What I mean is, without trees, without the sea, the universe as it was originally, as it collapsed, and..."

When did trees and the sea come into existence?

What lies beyond this world?

"Where do we come from, and where do we go after death? Why did I come into this world? What does my existence mean to this world? Did the world choose me, or did I choose the world? Is there a necessary connection between me and the universe? Does the universe have an end? Does time have a beginning and an end? Where does the past disappear, and where does the future stop..."

"You call this a question? Okay, let's just say it is. Questioning 'existence,' kid. You're quite interesting, but if this is the reward you want—I won't give you such a boring question."

The Black Tower doll, resembling a little imp, reneged on the promised reward, continuing to stimulate the Fang Jie reaction.

"It doesn't matter, I'm just asking a question, I'll find the answer myself."

Fang Jie wasn't angry; he simply withdrew his hand.

He had already confirmed his existence with the Black Tower doll, a test he had initially wanted to perform but had suppressed, based on the magic trick he had once shown to Himeko.