章節 52: Chapter 52: A Century of Change, The Free Closed String
Yan Xia's prediction was partially correct.
The part that he didn't predict was that the enemy civilization wanted more than he had imagined.
After he had been asleep for ten years...
The far-right extremists on Proxima Centauri b became more active and, within half a year, gained the support of a significant portion of the population. They propagated the idea that the Civilized Federation didn't exist and that the Kate civilization was being enslaved, and their true savior was the "Purple Thorn."
This wasn't the name of an organization but the civilization they were currently facing.
Purple Thorn was a translation, meaning a purple, spiky, immobile life form. Their civilization existed on a planet covered in these plants, which they used as a symbol of their civilization.
This far-right movement felt familiar to Yan Xia, as it mirrored what he had done in the past.
Previously, Yan Xia had deceived others with the 'Civilization Tower,' but the Purple Thorn civilization possessed overwhelming power that could crush the Kate civilization.
They seemed to have no intention of directly annihilating the Kate civilization but instead wanted to enslave them.
Or perhaps they were luring the Kate civilization into a false sense of security to investigate the technological information Yan Xia had left behind and confirm the existence of corresponding technology within the Proxima Centauri system.
Any life form that wasn't a fool could sense the two underlying motives.
Even a fool, upon hearing the name "Purple Thorn," would guess that the far-right extremists had turned to the civilization invading them.
Either way, it was good news for Yan Xia.
It was all quite dramatic!
Over a thousand years ago, the far-left supported the Civilized Federation, while the far-right protected the independence of their civilization.
Now, the far-left maintained the Civilized Federation, and the far-right had turned to the invading alien civilization.
The Kate civilization's leadership once again struggled with the same dilemma as a thousand years ago.
However, this time, facing the self-proclaimed Purple Thorn civilization, they felt more helpless and powerless than ever before, not because of any conspiracy but due to the sheer force of absolute power.
Many Kate people couldn't forget the previous "epidemic."
There were too many lost souls.
Those who had survived the "epidemic" were still alive, and to them, it felt like it had happened just yesterday.
Contradictions were the melody of the first and second decades of the Kate civilization.
However, this civilization lacked Yan Xia's patience, and they were in a hurry.
After twenty years, they gradually began to block the Kate civilization's technology, attacking numerous energy installations, assassinating high-level scientists, and even interfering with the civilization's internal economy, causing a decline in their technological advancement.
One of the first targets was Ella's research institute and the Yan Huang Academy.
These facilities were physically erased by beams from outer space.
The Purple Thorn civilization also started cleaning up the matter and free particles in the vacuum surrounding Proxima Centauri, further shrinking the blockade and restricting the civilization's activities.
Thirty years later...
The Purple Thorn civilization's blockade extended beyond the Proxima Centauri star itself.
Proxima Centauri b, Proxima Centauri c, and Proxima Centauri d became dark and frozen, turning into icy planets like a doomsday scenario.
In this year, the population of the Kate civilization plummeted.
At the same time, a group of supplicants emerged.
They prayed daily for the Purple Thorn civilization to calm its anger, and their civilization was willing to submit and surrender.
But...
There was no response.
The Kate civilization wasn't made up of pushovers, but Yan Xia's constant manipulation had made them more susceptible to bending to authority.
This was a drawback.
During the fourth decade, the humans in the civilization's special zone received special treatment, and many high-ranking humans went missing.
After forty years, the fifth decade arrived, marking a significant turning point.
The spaceships from the Hundred-Eyed Star had crossed the vast distance and reached Proxima Centauri.
The war unfolded outside the Proxima Centauri system.
However, compared to the war between the Legion of Heroic Spirits and the Purple Thorn civilization, this conflict was much smaller in scale and intensity.
It seemed like a futile attempt, like moths flying into a flame.
As Yan Xia had anticipated, it did attract the enemy's attention.
The enemy shifted its focus to the Hundred-Eyed Star.
However, the Hundred-Eyed Star's strength wasn't enough to make the Purple Thorn civilization take them seriously. Their primary concern remained the Proxima Centauri system.
During this decade, the Kate people saw the life forms of the Purple Thorn civilization for the first time.
These life forms were indeed purple, much smaller than they had imagined, only half a meter in size, and had a furry, spherical shape similar to Haunter, but they were more purplish-red than blue-purple.
They had a slit-like "eye" about twenty centimeters long.
But upon closer inspection, it wasn't an eye but a sensory organ. They used these organs to perceive their surroundings, generating images like eyes, but not in color—they saw in thermal vision.
They also had hands, but they weren't symmetrical; one side was larger than the other, and they had two pairs. The top of their hands had hundreds of fine, flexible tentacles.
They didn't have feet but moved by crawling like snails. However, with technological advancements, they didn't need to rely on such slow movement. A white cable extended from their heads, connecting their bodies to a basketball-sized sphere above them, which floated using anti-gravity technology.
The sphere was a highly integrated device, seemingly incorporating information processing, attack, and defense capabilities.
An abnormal barrier formed around these life forms, created by the sphere, providing them with their native environment, as they couldn't adapt to Proxima Centauri's conditions. They seemed to breathe methane.
The Kate people noticed that they seemed to be searching for something.
The entire planet was in disarray due to their activities.
The fiftieth year arrived, and the Kate population continued to decline as the Purple Thorn civilization controlled the food supply and intentionally limited the Kate civilization's population growth.
The Kate population plummeted by 500 million.
The entire Kate civilization had hit rock bottom, and no Kate person could control equipment or weapons beyond the level of a Type 1 civilization.
Restraint!
This created two extremes.
One extreme was extreme submissiveness and reverence towards the Purple Thorn civilization.
The other extreme was constant attacks on the Purple Thorn civilization on the planet's surface, but to no avail.
The beginning of the sixtieth year was extraordinary.
The Purple Thorn civilization started abducting Kate children, who never returned.
The Kate people also noticed that their bodies were gradually mutating, becoming more and more like beasts, and their crystals were being destroyed.
Then, in the seventy-fifth year...
The children returned.
They had become warriors or hunters.
The mutated Kate people became their prey.
Their languages were completely different, and some Kate people could only watch helplessly as their children killed them, an act of extreme cruelty.
The Purple Thorn civilization was conducting an experiment.
As they became more confident, more Purple Thorn life forms joined the hunters they had trained from the Kate people on the planet.
Then, in the eighty-third year, an explosion rocked Proxima Centauri b.
The blast had a yield of over 500 million tons of TNT equivalent, knocking Proxima Centauri b out of its original orbit.
Over 20,000 Purple Thorn life forms and 1.5 billion Kate people were killed in the explosion.
When the Purple Thorn civilization searched for the source of the explosion, they found a high-energy substance with a temperature of only 2.431 x 10^-48 Kelvin.
It was the "stable unstable substance" Yan Xia had spoken of.
Although it could only maintain stability for five days, it still posed a significant threat to the Purple Thorn civilization.
This chaos caused the Purple Thorn civilization to leave the Proxima Centauri system, and they didn't return for twelve years.
These were the final twelve years.
...
In Alpha Centauri A.
A long, thread-like object hovered near countless rotating, massive ring-shaped devices.
Upon closer inspection, it became clear that this thread, compared to the surrounding space and its length, had a diameter of over ten meters. It was a 100-kilometer-long particle collider.
But it collided bosons.
The collider's energy came from a light cluster at the center of the rings.
In the center of the collider was an observation device equipped with an Ella-developed gravity microscope.
By observing the gravitationally induced spacetime distortion, it could observe objects on a smaller scale.
After the bosons collided, if there were strings, they would detach from the bosons, and the gravity microscope could observe the gravitational trajectory of their mass, allowing for the detection and even capture of strings.
However, Ella discovered that this wasn't feasible, as the gravity detector couldn't observe strings in the extra-dimensional space.
It also couldn't produce a force to scatter a boson or fermion.
So, she used a tiny black hole generated by the collision experiment to crush fundamental particles and, in the brief moment of strong gravity-induced spacetime distortion, observed the strings with no height but length in the blurred ten-dimensional space.
But this was still challenging, as she couldn't break through the black hole's event horizon, even though it was so tiny.
To deal with a black hole, another black hole was needed.
So, Ella used an anti-rotating black hole to observe the strings moving from black hole 1 to black hole 2 by utilizing the matter exchange during their mutual collision.
And in the twenty-eighth such experiment, she finally observed—the existence of strings.
But surprisingly, in this experiment, she observed not the open strings that make up matter but the free closed strings that make up gravitons.
Perhaps this was related to their ability to penetrate the universe's membrane.
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