The RZ Unit couldn’t hang out at the ST Base forever, because General Zhong was a miser and certainly didn’t have the budget to let so many people hang around eating for free. So after Chang Dou and the crowd of elites had struggled for a couple days without being able to get Kou Tong and those other unlucky bastards out, Captain Hu decided to return home and get back to work. 

As soon as Chang Dou heard this, he wilted. He hadn’t yet reached an outcome in his battle with the annoying Wu Xiangxiang. So the technician decided to work through the night. He had to think of a way find the traces of this ghostly program Dr. Kou had made. 

General Zhong looked at him, wanting to speak but holding back. Captain Hu followed his gaze to look at Chang Dou as well, and very cooperatively said, “Lately we haven’t had any urgent assignments requiring his cooperation. Technician Chang can remain at the base for now and aid you in getting Yao Shuo and the others back.” 

Wu Xiangxiang’s eyes flashed like ghost lights, resentfully staring at Chang Dou’s back. Chang Dou was just about to feel satisfied when he caught up with what Captain Hu had said and wilted even more. He weakly asked, “So…Captain Hu, do you mean you’re leaving me here on my own?” 

Receiving confirmation, Chang Dou, like an abandoned puppy, shuffled towards Fang Xiu, his eyes emitting resentful light through his thick glasses. Particularly emphasizing the words “on my own,” he repeated, “You’re going to leave me on my own.” 

Fang Xiu was scrolling through a webpage on his phone. This was a fishing website where you had to constantly pay attention to the movement on the screen. He hadn’t clearly heard what Chang Dou had said, so he absent-mindedly nodded. “Yeah.” 

Chang Dou waited a while, found that he had no other reaction, then disappointedly said, “Oh.” 

Finding that he was so unimportant, he suffered a shock. He retreated and curled up in a corner of the couch like an eggplant stricken by the frost, pathetically hugging his laptop, staring with a blank expression at the program automatically operating on the screen. The flames of battle seemed to have suddenly been extinguished. Even Wu Xiangxiang’s provocative gaze and beard-stroking gesture could hardly attract his attention. 

Su Qing stamped on the back of Fang Xiu’s foot, kicking him out of the complex information-gathering work. Then he looked up at the ceiling and gave a dry cough. Fang Xiu finally turned his head and noticed Chang Dou with a dark cloud hanging over his head, about to turn into a little mushroom. 

Fang Xiu’s expression became conflicted. The sole of Su Qing’s shoe, still planted on his foot, moved around and twisted into his heel. 

So Fang Xiu could only sigh and pat Chang Dou on his bird’s nest-like hair. “You’re the only one who can do this at the moment. Stay here for now, and when the assignment is complete, we’ll come pick you up.” 

Wu Xiangxiang’s hateful gaze turned on Fang Xiu. Sadly, this was a tough field agent; Wu Xiangxiang’s gamma ray gaze couldn’t pass through Fang Xiu’s skin. 

Chang Dou looked up at him. “You’ll come pick me up?” 

…Captain Hu and Su Qing exchanged a look, finding that they had become the overlooked part of that “we.” 

Fang Xiu was conflicted again for a while, then reluctantly nodded and said, “Yeah.” 

Chang Dou was instantly full of enthusiasm once again, happily holding his computer. As if his chicken’s claws had suddenly turned into Omega Supreme’s fingers, he tapped on the keyboard with a ping-pong sound.

Wu Xiangxiang sourly said, “Hmph, homo.” 

Without looking up, Chang Dou retorted, “Hmph, goat.” 

Wu Xiangxiang said, “Four-eyed mushroom.” 

Chang Dou said, “Sharp-footed enoki.” 

Wu Xiangxiang said, “The keyboard isn’t a Rubik’s cube. Even if you chip off every key, you still won’t find a satisfactory solution.” 

Chang Dou said, “With your IQ, that’s definitely what you would do… Wait!” 

He had hardly said this when he suddenly leapt off the couch. Pointing to Wu Xiangxiang, he said, “I have an idea!” 

Wu Xiangxiang stared. Chang Dou spoke as rapidly as popping beans: “A Rubik’s cube is a space containing limited variations with rules of motion. Every space, no matter how many dimensions it has, has its own rules of motion, just like a matrix in a linear space defined in higher algebra!”

Wu Xiangxiang snorted. “Of course I know that. The correspondence between motion and the rule transformation equation is one of the basic principles of the existence of the projection space.” 

“This supposed ghost program that we can’t find is in essence also a type of space, except that its rules have been deliberately or inadvertently tampered with by Dr. Kou himself.” Chang Dou extremely quickly said things that the vast majority of people on Earth would find hard to understand. His eyes were as bright as a lightbulb lit with a hundred thousand volts. “A plane scan, we can use a plane scan!” 

Wu Xiangxiang’s eyes opened wide. “You’re saying we perform a dimension reduction on all the levels in the Projector, then scan all of them without distinction?” 

Chang Dou said, “Right!” 

Wu Xiangxiang yelled: “You really are a barbarian! Ever since Archimedes, people have known to use a lever, and you just want to deadlift?”  

Chang Dou also yelled: “Excuse me, Dr. Wu, can you tell me whether your fulcrum is in the same universe as us?” 

Then he ignored Wu Xiangxiang and charged out hugging his laptop.

Wu Xiangxiang followed him out in hot pursuit. “So do you know what’s going to happen when you’ve finished scanning? Each time you reduce the dimension, you’ll have an indeterminate constant term. Do you know how to deal with that? Do you know…” 

General Zhong looked blankly at Captain Hu, thinking that when these technicians who needed only a bit of sunlight to shine got going, it was truly a frightening thing. 

Fang Xiu smiled, lowered his head, and continued to scroll the webpage, feeling that sometimes Chang Dou was like a plant that was easy to look after. If you ignored him, he would wilt, but then, when you suddenly watered him a little, he would instantly be full of vitality again. There was never any need to take too much trouble. He didn’t have any particular presence, but watching him bounce around, it was like replenishing your chlorophyl and sugar; it put you in a good mood. 

Kou Tong was thinking of a way to use the crude equipment in his study to read all the memory-containing components of the control box. The volume of information was very large, and he seemed to have returned in one day to before the Liberation, manually analyzing bit by bit. He felt that he was going to have to work through the night again. 

Then, at some point, he lay down on the desk and fell asleep. In his daze, he seemed to have a dream. Ordinarily, Kou Tong didn’t especially remember his dreams. Only when he was exhausted or unwell would he have the kind of consciously active, deep and intense dream that he would still be able to retell clearly the next day after being startled awake. 

And this dream was generally the same one. 

Perhaps the posture of lying on the desk was constricting. Kou Tong felt that something was binding him and knew that he was asleep, but he couldn’t wake up. Then the familiar mirror appeared in front of him. Inside it was a cold-faced self surrounded by darkness. 

Kou Tong sat cross-legged on the floor, but the person in the mirror was still sitting in a chair in a very upright posture, regular and precise as a robot. The two of them were face to face through the mirror, their lines of sight at the same height. 

“I’m still alive,” he said to the person in the mirror. “I believe in miracles. This thing can’t trap me.” 

Perhaps this had some ability to strengthen willpower. When he said it, the cold fog around him suddenly warmed up and wrapped him inside it, making his tense nerves slowly calm down. Kou Tong laughed, but the person in the mirror didn’t. 

“Even that child He Xiaozhi is managing to find a way to live and get better. Can’t I find one?” He stood up, raised a chair that had appeared beside him at some point, weighed it in his hands, then, just like countless times before, he suddenly smashed it into the mirror, as if hitting himself right over the head. 

“Don’t come again.” 

The mirror shattered, but it made a beep like something receiving a signal.

Where was the signal coming from? Kou Tong felt his consciousness blur.

Then, as if someone had splashed a pot of cold water over his head, he suddenly woke up.

As soon as he sat up, Kou Tong found that a coat had been draped over him at some point. Next to him, apart from the machines and the blueprints, there was also a person—Huang Jinchen was sitting under the not very bright desk lamp with his chin propped in one hand, looking directly at him. 

Kou Tong felt that he still hadn’t woken from his dream. He was confused for two seconds, looking blankly at Huang Jinchen. “What are you doing?” 

“Watching you sleep,” Huang Jinchen said. 

Kou Tong frowned, feeling that he wasn’t very normal, but probably because he still wasn’t very clear-headed, he thoughtlessly said, “What did you see?” 

“You’re good-looking.” An idiotic smile with a bit of a dreamlike tint appeared on Huang Jinchen’s face.

Kou Tong gave a start and woke up. He was dumbfounded for a while, then carefully asked, “The rat poison in the house that hasn’t been cleaned up… You didn’t accidentally eat it, did you?”

This time, Huang Jinchen didn’t speak, only looked at him with a gaze like a sleepwalker’s, the look making a chill run up Kou Tong’s back. 

The control box on the desk beeped again, finally attracting Kou Tong’s notice. He leaned down and looked at it carefully. He found that an undulating signal like a sine wave had appeared on the screen. 

A control box without a core memory chip was like a phone without a SIM card. It could be turned on, but it couldn’t make calls. So where was this signal coming from? 

Kou Tong thought about it, saying to himself, “Have General Zhong and the others found this place?”

They sat looking at each other blankly for a while and found that there was no other reaction from the control box. It only periodically received this signal. 

“No… They must not have been able to locate us, so they’re using some means to scan indiscriminately.” Kou Tong stood up and said to Huang Jinchen, “Come on, let’s go out. The cyclical appearance of this signal is likely because I’ve sealed this space into a closed loop using the time axes. We’ll go out and see whether we can pick up something else.” 

Huang Jinchen obediently stood up after him, following him like a lackey. 

Kou Tong at last felt that something was off about him and turned back to test the temperature of his forehead with the back of his hand. “You aren’t really running a fever, are you?” 

But Huang Jinchen grabbed his hand, squeezing tightly, suddenly stopping in his tracks. 

Kou Tong blinked. 

Huang Jinchen looked at him with that chilling gaze and announced, “I’ve made a decision.” 

Kou Tong nodded, indicating that he was ready to listen attentively to Master Huang’s brilliant policy decision.

Huang Jinchen said, “In this life, it’s better to act than to feel. No matter what, you can’t rely only on imagination. Only when you’ve really put your hand to it will you know how deep the water is.” 

Kou Tong hesitated, then nodded again, feeling that from the standpoint of reason, there was nothing wrong in this. 

Huang Jinchen gave a “yeah,” then earnestly said, “So starting now, I’m planning to pursue you.”