Silent Ark

Chapter 46: The Key

After Wukong left, Yao Chong stood by the guard post for a while.

The security guard was still looking at his phone.

A gray sky, crooked road signs, and gray grass growing in the cracks.

The wind blew from the other end of the road, carrying an indescribable smell—neither earthy nor metallic.

It's more like the air itself has changed.

It's like replacing one glass of water with another that looks the same but has a slightly different molecular structure.

You can't taste the difference, but your tongue does.

He turned and walked toward the office building.

Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The building is gray, six stories high, and the exterior walls are peeling in some places.

Compared to the underground fortress where he spent three years at CERN, this place was almost unrealistically quiet.

There was no emergency light source, no lead door, and no distorted human figures on the holographic projection.

There were only ordinary fluorescent lights, ordinary corridors, and ordinary house numbers.

A notice scrolled across the electronic screen at the entrance:

"Due to the recent special circumstances, non-essential personnel are temporarily prohibited from entering the laboratories. Those who have already been approved should bring their temporary passes."

Yao Chong touched his pocket.

The temporary pass that Shen Qingci issued to him at the Ninth Division's temporary base last time is still there.

Valid for seven days.

He didn't know how many days it was since he fell to the whale—he had no idea how long he had been at Lingtai Fangcun Mountain.

Time is not linear there.

The pass may have expired.

But he still swiped it.

The access control light turned green.

He went inside.

The lobby on the first floor was empty.

There was no one at the front desk.

I heard from Chen Dunli that there are dozens of academicians here, plus their students and teams, so it shouldn't be this deserted.

The water dispenser's water tank is full, but the light is off.

The elevator stopped on the third floor.

He walked up the stairs.

Upon reaching the fourth floor, there was a door at the end of the corridor with a sign that read:

"Director's Office, Institute for Theoretical Physics"

The door was ajar.

He knocked twice.

"Come in."

Zhou Muyuan sat behind his desk.

He was 61 years old, with gray hair, and wore a pair of thick metal-framed glasses.

A stack of printed papers lay on the table, and next to it was a thermos cup with the words "Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences - 100th Anniversary" printed on the cup.

He showed no obvious change in expression when he saw Yao Chong.

"sit."

Yao Chong sat down opposite him.

The office is small.

The bookshelf occupied an entire wall, crammed with various journals and monographs, some of which were askew, as if they had been pulled out and then casually stuffed back in.

There was a potted green ivy on the windowsill; its leaves were turning yellow, but it was still alive.

"Shen Qingci told me you're back," Zhou Muyuan said.

"Um."

"Where did you come from?"

"……Outside."

Zhou Muyuan looked at him for two seconds but didn't ask any further questions.

He opened the drawer, took out a brown paper envelope, and placed it on the table.

"Chen Dunli left this with me two weeks before his whale fall. He said if he didn't come back, I should give it to you."

Yao Chong looked at the envelope.

The envelope was not sealed. The edges were worn, as if it had been opened and then folded back.

"Have you seen it?"

"I've seen it." Zhou Muyuan didn't dodge the question. "He's my senior and also my colleague. When he checked his things in, he said, 'If I don't come back'—I want to know why he doesn't think he'll be able to come back."

"What did he write?"

"A letter, and a key."

Yao Chong reached out and took the envelope.

It was indeed a letter inside.

The folded A4 paper bore Chen Dunli's handwriting—the kind of small handwriting honed by years of data recording by experimental physicists, neat, evenly spaced, with each number written as if measured with a ruler.

There's also a key.

It's small, brass-colored, and looks like a key to some kind of dresser.

A thin red rope was tied to it, with the knot tied very tightly.

"What is the key?" Yao Chong asked.

"He didn't say." Zhou Muyuan picked up his thermos and took a sip. "It wasn't mentioned in the letter either."

Yao Chong put the envelope into his pocket.

He did not open it on the spot.

It's not because I don't want to watch it.

It was because he had a gut feeling that this letter should be opened in a specific place at a specific time.

It wasn't in the director's office at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, not under fluorescent lights, and not opposite Zhou Muyuan.

"Professor Zhou," he said, "the Silent Ark Project—"

"That won't work," Zhou Muyuan interrupted him.

He said those three words very calmly; it wasn't a rejection, but a conclusion.

"I've assessed it. The theoretical basis of the warp drive is fine, but in terms of engineering—materials, energy, and time—all three variables are not met. Even if all the world's industrial capacity were concentrated to build an aerospace carrier that could accommodate a billion people, it would take at least 120 years."

He paused for a moment.

"We may not have 120 days."

Yao Chong did not refute.

Because he knew Zhou Muyuan was right.

"But there's something in Chen Dunli's notes that I've never been able to figure out," Zhou Muyuan said, pushing the stack of printed papers on the table towards him.

Yao Chong looked down.

It is a set of curves.

Attenuation curve.

The horizontal axis represents time, and the vertical axis represents a scalar quantity.

The curve decreases monotonically from left to right, resembling a river cascading down from a height—steep at the beginning, then gentler, but always descending without ever reaching the bottom.

"The initial condition for this curve," Zhou Muyuan pointed to the leftmost end of the curve, "was written as 'infinity'."

"Infinity?"

"Yes, the initial condition for a decay curve is infinity—meaning that at time zero, the quantity is infinite. Then it begins to decay."

"A physical quantity is infinite at a certain moment, and then begins to decay—this is not unprecedented in physics. The initial singularity of the Big Bang is an example. But Chen Dunli's curve does not describe a cosmological scalar, but rather—"

"What is it?"

"He didn't label it." Zhou Muyuan put his glasses back on. "I tried to deduce it, but I couldn't guess it."

Yao Chong looked at the curve.

It slides down from infinity, getting slower and slower, but never returns to zero.

Like something that will never completely disappear—it's infinitely close to disappearing.

"I'm going back now." He stood up.

Zhou Muyuan nodded.

"Yao Chong".

"Um?"

"Take your teacher's things."

"I will."

He walked out of the office.

The corridor was quiet.

The fluorescent light emitted a slight humming sound.

As he reached the top of the stairs, he heard footsteps.

The sound of military boots clicking on the terrazzo floor came from downstairs, unhurried and deliberate.

Shen Qingci walked up the stairs from the corner.

The uniform of the Ninth Division.

Dark blue, without epaulettes, but with a small badge on the left breast—a ring containing the traditional Chinese character for "nine".

She was holding a folder in her hand.

The two were face to face.

The corridor is narrow; one person can squeeze through sideways, but two people would need to hunch their shoulders.

"You're back," she said.

"Um."

"Your pass has expired."

"But the access control is on."

"I asked the receptionist to renew it for you."

She didn't stop and walked past him.

"My travel permit has been renewed for ninety days. Is that enough?"

"enough."

"Come find me again if it's not enough."

These words came from behind.

Yao Chong stood at the top of the stairs, watching her figure disappear at the end of the corridor.

The sound of military boots gradually faded into the distance.

The fluorescent lights were still humming.

He glanced down at his pocket.

A small corner of the kraft paper envelope peeked out of the pocket.

And those three fine hairs, pressed against my chest, I could feel their faint warmth even through my clothes.

He walked out of the office building.

The gray sky remained gray.

The sovereign entity’s enormous form moved slowly above the clouds, and the nodes of the monitoring grid flickered occasionally.

But the ginkgo tree in the flower bed downstairs is still alive.

The leaves are green.

It's not a grayish-white green, it's a real green.

Yao Chong watched for a while.

Then he turned around and walked back the way he came towards the apartment.