Chapter 42 Return to Three-Body_1

A world unrelated to himself, he thought he had done enough.

Qin Ming sat on the familiar bed, looking around. Everything at home was exactly the same as when he had first traveled through time. The moment he returned, he saw the time on the mobile phone hanging in midair, accurate to the second, exactly the same as when he had left.

Traveling through should have been instantaneous. The flow of time in the Three-Body World must have halted in the moment he traveled there and then resumed when he traveled back.

Having arrived at this conclusion, Qin Ming bent down to pick up the phone that had dropped to the floor and closed his eyes to feel the changes in his body.

After returning to the Three-Body World, the Nanomechanical Worms he had just injected also traveled through with him.

At this moment, the Nanomechanical Worms, following the program they had been set with, roamed all over his body, accurately identifying cancer cells and starting to attack and dissolve the cancer cells throughout Qin Ming's body.

About an hour later, they had already eliminated all the cancer cells. Lying dormant in various parts of Qin Ming's body, the corpses of the cancer cells were moved into his digestive tract, and Qin Ming suddenly felt a pain in his stomach; he ran to the bathroom and began to squat over the toilet.

Ten minutes later, Qin Ming pulled up his pants and felt refreshed.

He developed an illusion, feeling as if his body had become lighter since it seemed as if he had shed a heavy burden.

In his research in the previous world, he already knew that Nanomechanical Worms could precisely target all sorts of pathogens, treating most human diseases and greatly enhancing the human body's strength and recovery speed.

He had personally experienced their ability to treat diseases, and he thought there was no need to test their recovery capabilities,

On P site and Twitter in the previous world, he had already seen many videos of people getting creative with their deaths, both men and women. Eels, fire hydrants, anything that couldn't kill, could be stuffed into any place since the Nanoworms would repair it.

Apart from high temperatures, low temperatures, high-voltage electricity, and other severe physical injuries, they were basically immune to most of the ordinary damages in the real world.

If now he were to face an encounter with a cement truck again, even if he were knocked flying, he could get up and flip the driver the bird.

Qin Ming's cancer had finally been resolved, and he regained his former health.

The oppressive feeling he had always harbored inside disappeared. Glancing at the time on his phone once again, he suddenly realized that today was Thursday.

This timing.

Qin Ming's gaze turned towards the window, pondering.

Of course, it was not because of Crazy Thursday at KFC for ¥50, but rather because today was the day Yang Dong committed suicide. He wanted to know what the situation with Bai Tan was like now.

·······

An ordinary residential building.

At this moment, Yang Dong was sitting in her own small cabin in the woods. Her boudoir was unlike that of most girls, with walls covered in strips of brown bark, three simple tree stump chairs, a writing desk made from three larger stumps, and that bedspread which was clearly filled with grasses from the northeast.

All of it was rough and casual, without deliberately trying to portray any sort of beauty.

Right now, she sat on a tree stump chair, propped her head with one hand on the desk, gazing out the window at the scenery in a daze, her eyes revealing a look of bewilderment.

The golden light of the setting sun streamed through the window, landing precisely on her figure. The soft, warm light shone on her smooth hair and illuminated the pale nape of her neck, visible from her simple, elegant clothing's collar.

The beautiful girl formed an exquisitely beautiful picture under the faint light.

Before this, she had already learned the truth from her mother Ye Wenjie's computer: her biological mother had killed her father and betrayed humanity, and she was also the Commander of Earth's Rebels Three-Body Organization.

The mother she had depended on for her entire life turned out to be someone else, someone she had never even dared to believe could exist in this world. She didn't dare to ask her mother, never dared, because the moment she did, her mother would truly become someone else forever. Letting her mother keep her secret, Yang Dong pretended that her mom was still the same, and life could continue.

Of course, for Yang Dong, that life only had half its spirit remaining.

Before, Yang Dong had a fundamental concept:

Life and the world may be ugly, but the ends of the micro and macro are harmonious and perfect. The everyday world is merely foam floating on this perfect ocean, but now it seemed the daily world had become a beautiful facade, with the micro it contained and the macro containing it possibly uglier and more massive.

The more she knew, the more unfortunate she became. Through the simulation of the Green Eye Glasses, she learned that if Earth had no life, it would lose its oceans and atmosphere, and the mountains, without plants, would be eroded by the wind into dry sand. Life had transformed Earth's environment, and they existed by influencing each other.

This made Yang Dong think of the universe. She had learned from Ye Wenjie that civilizations were everywhere in the universe. Could these civilizations have also transformed the universe?

Could it be that only Sophon was creating illusions? Could it be that illusions only existed at the end of the accelerator? Could the rest of the universe be as pure and innocent as a virgin, waiting for us to explore?

Yang Dong had already figured out the answer to this question.

At this moment, her gaze became one of despair.

What made her despair was not the uncertainty principle, nor was it the Sophon locking down human civilization, but the entire physics of the universe, which was merely the result of the transformation by civilizations. She had always believed that physics was the God of the universe, the final answer that could explain everything, but this simulation told her that physics had never existed; the laws of physics were merely pawns in the hands of civilizations.

She realized that whether Trisolarans or Earthlings, they were all akin to turkey scientists and ant scientists, merely pondering the laws of the universe that they believed were real, on the chessboard of God Rank civilizations.

The physics she had dedicated her life to was like a blind man feeling an elephant's leg, unaware that not only was this far from the complete picture of the elephant, but there were countless elephants.

[Is nature truly natural?]

[Does this world truly exist? Or is it a world fabricated by a higher-dimensional civilization?]

All truths led to one conclusion: physics had never existed and never would.

Her mother had been the pivot of her life's first half, and the truth of the universe was the pivot of her second half. Now that both pivots were shattered, her world collapsed completely.

In the days that followed, Yang Dong didn't know what to do. Should she, as Ye Wenjie's daughter, welcome the arrival of the Three-Body or the judgment of humanity? Or should she, as a physicist, exhaust her life on an unsolvable problem?

As long as one is good at forgetting and adapting, one can live peacefully and even happily with half a spirit, but when the two are combined, it amounts to a full life.

Yang Dong made her decision. She took out a piece of birch bark that exuded a faint fragrance, and with her slender, pale fingers, she held a pen and wrote in delicate script:

Everything leads to such a conclusion: physics has never existed and never will. I know that what I'm doing is irresponsible, but there is no other choice.

After writing, she slowly put down the pen and gently placed the birch bark with its fragrance and ink into a white envelope. Then she placed the envelope on the writing desk.

Having done all this, Yang Dong first looked at a black-and-white photo in a wooden frame on the desk, showing her with her mother. She then glanced at the white cat under the writing desk.

Her desperate gaze revealed a trace of decisiveness as she took out the sleeping pills she had prepared earlier from the drawer.