Chapter 47: The Quantum Resonance System

Chapter 47: The Quantum Resonance System

After bowing my thanks to Dharma Master Zisheng, I entered the Great Bell Tower alone.

Inside, the enormous Yongle Great Bell exerted an almost physical pressure on me.

I walked a full circle around it, studying the giant bronze body with care.

I kept turning the question over in my mind: the bell had hung here in silence for more than seven hundred years. Why had elite people only begun to prize it in recent years? What secret was hidden inside it?

With a single leap, I flew up onto the Pulao knob atop the bell and examined the area around it closely. The last time I had rescued Gu Qiutang, the Soul Hunters had placed their spacetime-boundary generator right here on the Pulao.

Looking down from the Pulao, I saw nothing remarkable — only the ring of shadow cast by the great bronze bell below.

I activated my penetrating-wave ability and worked through the wavelengths one by one. Finally, gazing downward through the bell’s uneven circular rim, I made out a faint, barely perceptible haze encircling it.

What was this? And what did it signify?

I was still turning the question over when a figure gradually materialized from the shadows near the crossbeam above — and spoke.

“This is the dimensional-filter effect produced by an anti-gravity matrix.”

Uncle’s sudden appearance gave me a start. He had been here all along.

“Old Uncle?” I said. “When did you get here? How did I not sense you?”

“Call me Eldest Uncle. Where are your manners?” He paused. “I’ve been here for a while. The fact that you didn’t notice means your vigilance isn’t high enough — and that my brainwave shielding and invisibility are working exactly as they should. When you’re thinking through a problem, you can’t fix your mind on one thing and forget to scout your surroundings first. Keep at it, and sooner or later you’ll pay for that habit.”

“You’re right,” I said. “But invisibility experts of your caliber are rare. My same-frequency sensing has never failed me against ordinary people.”

“Elite people are not ordinary people,” Uncle said. “You still have a great deal of knowledge and ability to catch up on. Never mind that for now — today, let’s deal with what’s right in front of you.”

“Fair enough. Then what exactly do you mean by this dimensional-filter effect produced by an anti-gravity matrix?”

“Didn’t you study engineering physics?” Uncle said. “When dimensional filtering formed by a natural matrix reaches a vibration frequency of 144,000 cycles per second, it produces a spacetime boundary. Put simply, a spacetime boundary is a vibrational barrier between different dimensions.”

With that he reached into his black backpack and drew out a device — somewhat larger than the electronic boundary generator I had smashed last time.

He began fitting it together as he spoke. “After seven hundred years of vibration, this great bell already carries a natural effect field. Once that field is stimulated by an electronic generator like this one, it amplifies the local vibration frequency and readily produces the physical field of a matrix-filter effect. That is precisely what the Soul Hunters saw in this place when they set up their equipment here before — they wanted to harness this natural effect field to strengthen the spacetime boundary leading to the Spirit Realm. I heard that while you were at Tansong Temple, you saw those invisible elite people. The principle is the same. They too wanted to use the temple’s matrix-filter effect field to construct a spacetime-boundary system. You can think of this kind of structure as a quantum resonance system built upon a natural effect field.”

Once he had fixed the device onto the Pulao, he connected a ring of metal mesh to it above, then pressed the switch.

Buzz —

An invisible spatial current swept outward in both directions, up and down.

I could not see it, but I could sense it clearly.

“Uncle, what exactly is this?”

“Today I’m going to open your eyes,” he said. “Watch carefully. This is a fissure in the spacetime boundary — a physical field produced by local quantum oscillator instability, triggered by a disturbance in a high-dimensional energy field. In a moment, I’m going through this fissure to rescue your mother.”

I stared at him. “What? This place leads to the spacetime boundary where my mother is trapped?”

“Of course it does. Why else would I say I’m opening your eyes?” Uncle said. “A spacetime boundary is, by its nature, a high-dimensional vibration field that spans spacetime. When I call it a vibrational barrier between dimensions, I’m describing only one of the vibration field’s basic effects. It can also serve as a passage. Do you understand?”

“More or less,” I said. “My training was in classical physics. You keep invoking quantum physics. Even Einstein would have lost patience.”

“Didn’t you study Einstein’s gravitational field equations?” Uncle said. “He made it perfectly clear: spacetime is not a fundamental entity — it is a manifestation of quantum information correlations. To put it plainly, spacetime is a web woven from quantum entanglement and high-dimensional string vibrations.”

Uncle was a true tech fanatic — the kind of person who loves technology, lives inside it, and has mastered it completely. No wonder the Soul Hunters had gone to him to free their trapped hostage.

I had been too focused on saving people before to give this great bronze bell a second thought. It turned out it had been harboring an effect field all along.

A tech obsessive like Uncle, and elite people as well, had probably discovered this secret long ago. There might be many such sites scattered across the world, places with latent energy fields, unknown to us. Perhaps they were all steps leading from the Mundane World to the Elite World.

This also explained why mysterious elite figures had kept appearing in the rear hall of Tansong Temple.

After the strange events at Tansong Temple, Big Bell Temple had seen something similar. I suspected they had simply relocated from one to the other.

Uncle fiddled with the equipment for a moment. Then, without a word of warning, he ducked into the void and was gone.

The instant his figure vanished, I threw caution aside and followed.

The world lurched.

I had not expected there to be no up or down inside.

The moment I entered that different spacetime, weightlessness hit me — deeply unpleasant.

Fortunately, it did not last long.

A mountain rose before my eyes, with a temple on its slopes and another at its foot.

Panshan?

I knew the place at once. This was Panshan Temple in Jizhou. Xuanhong had traveled here before, and he knew its abbot, Dharma Master Cangji.

Still invisible, I stayed close behind the equally invisible Uncle, afraid of losing him.

Because I understood: what he saw and what I saw were two different worlds. He could perceive things at the quantum level. I could not. Boundaries, for instance.

Sure enough, the moment Uncle reached Wansong Temple at the foot of the mountain, he disappeared.

I switched on same-frequency sensing and penetrating waves and spotted him slipping into Buer Gate. I hurried after him.

Buer Gate was a well-known feature of Wansong Temple, and tourists heading up and down the mountain passed through it regularly. But once inside, Uncle plunged straight into a secluded section of red wall on the left side of the rear courtyard.

I had not been mistaken. He walked headfirst into the wall.

I could not have anticipated anything like it. Alarmed, I ran around to the other side — and found nothing. Only the ordinary sight of a temple wall.

I returned to the spot where Uncle had entered and tried it myself.

Hm?

I was through.

Fortunately we were both invisible. Otherwise that little piece of wall-walking would have sent the tourists into a panic.

The moment I passed through the red wall at Buer Gate, everything outside disappeared. It was not dark inside — instead, a vast expanse of strange, shifting light unfolded before me.

I had not expected the entrance to the spacetime passage to be hidden inside a red wall. This, perhaps, was the spacetime boundary Uncle had built.

I carefully followed the silent Uncle into that space. With every step, the space around me grew stranger. Those dazzling, distorted expanses looked as though something had been crushing them — every object, every piece of equipment, every table and chair bent out of shape. Some were upside down.

“Old Uncle,” I said, “what is all this?”

Uncle looked around. “I didn’t expect the Soul Hunters to be this ruthless. They actually intended to bury everyone in this base.”

“Base?” I said. “You’re saying this is a base?”

“Yes. This is the research base in the eastern suburbs of Pingdu City — our largest production base as well. Your mother has been working here in secret.”

“Then where is she? Where is everyone?”

“You’ve barely stepped into one corner. What’s the hurry? This place is vast.”

“What happened to everything here? It looks like someone reached in and wrung it.”

“Spatial collapse,” Uncle said. “It was probably caused by the Soul Hunters and the Sweepers using a gravitational-collapse bomb when they moved in. Under normal conditions, a gravitational-collapse bomb destroys the spacetime boundary outright and triggers a large-scale spacetime collapse. Everyone inside the boundary would then be compressed into a two-dimensional state.”

“Two-dimensional?” I said. “Three-dimensional spacetime reduced to two dimensions? What kind of energy does that take?”

Uncle kept walking as he talked. “Not true two-dimensional spacetime — we haven’t reached that threshold. What I mean is that everything collapses into a plane. I used two-dimensional to make it easier for you to picture. Ask yourself: could a person survive that?”

“How is that even possible?” I said. “A gravitational-collapse bomb is that powerful? How much energy would it require?”

“It really is that powerful. In the Elite World, nuclear technology has long since reached miniaturized fusion — energy is not the constraint. I designed the core component of this device myself. The spacetime boundary you’re standing in was also built by me, using the quantum resonance system. If I can build it, I can certainly destroy it. The pity is that elite people stole this invention from me.”

“Can the people inside still be saved?”

“Obviously. Why else would I be here? The technology they stole is incomplete. Good enough for destruction, useless for rescue — that is what happens with stolen knowledge. Look at this collapse: it isn’t even total. It’s like an earthquake site, with load-bearing structures still standing throughout. There will have been casualties, but a good number of people should have survived. Wait — that’s odd. Look at this impact point. The gravitational-collapse bomb never produced anything close to its full effect, and the position is wrong too. That shouldn’t be the case. Could someone have interfered when it was deployed? Perhaps they were rushed and made an error. Because otherwise it simply should not look like this.”

I looked where Uncle was pointing and saw a hazy, radial structure.

The impact point of the gravitational-collapse bomb?

It was beyond me. Far too deep.

Uncle shook his head. “Setting it off here — this is nowhere near the main support structure. Why would it be placed here?”

“Isn’t that better?” I said. “Far less damage.”

“That is not what I’m talking about,” Uncle said. “If you were placing a bomb, would you put it right next to your target or farther away?”

“Right next to it, of course. Maximum force.”

“Exactly. Stop standing there. Move.”

After another ten minutes or so of feeling our way through the dark, we reached a place where the distortion was severe. And in the silence, I caught something — faint, but unmistakable.

Voices. An old woman and a little girl.