Chapter 1467 Crystal Core Research Station

After receiving the information from the drone, Hao Ren led his team to the Crystal Core Research Station.

This space station was no longer a simple research center. Its powerful central mainframe and crystal harmonic antennas allowed it to integrate and process all information from the Plane of Dreams. Planet Tana Gusu, as an important "pilot project," was under the monitoring of the Crystal Core Research Station. Tests on the living samples of the First Born and various experiments were also conducted here. It was also the largest starport Hao Ren had established in the Plane of Dreams. The ancient starships "Padian" and "Asu Man" were both docked here. Coupled with the space station's powerful offensive and defensive capabilities, it had become Hao Ren's most important base in this universe.

In order to facilitate the control of the increasingly vast drone empire, Hao Ren recently ordered the installation of a largest "Hive Mind Core" in one of the space station's attached towers. The huge stream of consciousness surging between the hundreds of millions of drones would be forwarded through this hive core. Therefore, in a sense, the Crystal Core Research Station was now also the "highest ruling center" of the drone swarm—of course, structurally speaking, the drone swarm did not have a supreme ruler because it used a distributed thinking network. The Crystal Core Research Station could only monitor this network with the highest authority.

Hao Ren did not go to the Crystal Hall where the space station's mainframe was located, but instead came to the Hive Mind Core of the drone swarm. This device, "piled" up by a large number of luminous veins and strange metal sacs, was like a metal brain magnified thousands of times. The pipes and lines extending from the ceiling and floor were all concentrated on the metal brain, giving it a strange aura. Lily shouted loudly when she saw this thing for the first time: "Wow! So ugly!"

A bunch of messy lines appeared in front of the metal brain, and the lines slowly combined into a human face. The collective consciousness of the drone swarm projected its interaction interface: "I'm sorry to give you this feeling. I don't have much concept of 'aesthetics.'"

"Each upper node of the drone swarm looks different. Although their basic units are uniform when they leave the factory, as the swarm continues to develop, it will absorb various external knowledge to evolve. In the end, it is often different from the initial design. The farther the two swarms are, the longer they have been in service, and the wider the range of proliferation, the more obvious and huge the difference between them will be," the data terminal explained from the side. "Now it seems that our swarm has been greatly inspired by the local environment in exploring the Plane of Dreams… After all, you can see a lot of unspeakable things with tentacles and meat lumps on any habitable planet…"

Nangong Sanba covered his face: "Damn it, I suddenly miss the square-headed iron lump mother machines that were released back then. This thing is running all the way down the wrong path."

Hao Ren waved his hand to interrupt these guys who could easily run the topic off track, and turned to look at the metal brain supported in the air by a bunch of pipes, constantly releasing a distorted force field around it: "Tell me about the situation of those detectors."

"Yes," the drone swarm said, its interactive interface changed to the pictures sent back by several detectors, "Because the star map data you sent is not accurate, the three detectors chose three transition coordinates closest to the theoretical value for the jump. The coordinates used by the No. 1 detector should have been too large, causing it to be involved in space turbulence or high-energy areas in the universe during the transition. It is still in a state of disconnection. The No. 2 and No. 3 detectors arrived at the target star system almost simultaneously. They sent back such pictures…"

What first appeared on the holographic projection was a "channel" composed of distorted starlight. The front and rear ends of this starlight channel showed a very obvious red-blue shift phenomenon, and the red-blue shift decayed rapidly in a few seconds: this was the phenomenon of returning from a faster-than-light transition state to normal space-time. This recording should have been sent when the drone just jumped to the target star system.

After that, the starlight on the screen stabilized, and the cold stars seemed to be still in the dark background of the universe, but occasionally some streamers flashed on the screen, and some nearby celestial bodies also showed signs of being elongated. This showed that the drone was not stationary, but was continuing to move forward at sub-light speed: they were out of transition near the final beacon, and the next few light-seconds of distance needed to be completed by conventional engines. This was also part of the detection mission.

Hao Ren watched this seemingly unremarkable recording attentively until he saw the starry sky in front of him suddenly "shake."

All the stars changed their positions in an instant.

He rubbed his eyes, thinking that he had seen it wrong or that the picture was stuck, but then he realized: this was the strange phenomenon observed by the drone swarm.

The starry sky was originally almost static. In the absence of atmospheric interference, the stars in the universe hardly flicker, and the relative positions will never show changes visible to the naked eye. However, just now, all the stars moved their positions in an instant. Some stars with small changes in position could also see slight changes in brightness. This scene was like a continuous recording being cut off in the middle, and the originally slow changes were compressed to be completed in an instant.

"Rewind that section—what happened just now?"

The picture returned to the moment when the "shake" occurred, and then replayed it again. This time, Hao Ren could be sure that everything did happen in an instant: when the drone crossed a certain "boundary," the stars changed their positions.

"The drone observed a boundary. This boundary has no entity, no blocking effect, and no tendency to attack or defend. However, the observed universe is different inside and outside this boundary," the collective consciousness explained. "The swarm let two drones observe the same direction simultaneously inside and outside the boundary, confirming the existence of this phenomenon."

"A different universe?" Hao Ren frowned, "How is it different?"

"The positions of all celestial bodies are abnormal, and light cannot be continuously propagated on a macro level. It seems that the inside and outside of the boundary can be directly reached, but in fact there is a vast 'jump' area: space is discontinuous on this boundary."

Hao Ren touched his chin: "What do you think caused this result?"

"By comparing and analyzing the starlight observed on both sides of the boundary, it is confirmed that there should be a very vast space between the two sides of this boundary. However, this space has disappeared, and the dislocation problem caused by the spatial missing has left an 'observation horizon' phenomenon. Observing the same celestial body inside and outside the horizon, even if the distance between the two observation points is only a few hundred meters, what is actually observed is the scene seen at a distance of millions of light-years or even more. By letting two drones observe each other, the swarm has confirmed the existence of this phenomenon: the drone left outside the boundary will instantly lose the signal of the drone passing through the boundary—when the signal is re-established, the distance between them has reached millions of light-years away. However, due to the measurement inaccuracy caused by a certain spatial distortion, it is currently impossible to determine the specific size of the space that disappeared on the boundary."

Nangong Sanba scratched his head: "Why don't I understand it very well?"

Nangong Wuyue had just been ridiculed by her brother two days ago for not studying hard when she was a child. At this time, she finally found a chance to ridicule back, immediately holding her shoulders and shaking her tail: "My stupid brother—I didn't understand it either."

Lily immediately looked at her with disdain: a salted fish is a salted fish, and the salt content doesn't change much after turning over.

Hao Ren knew that not everyone graduated from Peking University four times like Lily or had a database in their minds like himself, so he explained it in a simpler way: "This is like a piece of white paper. The white paper originally had continuous pictures drawn on it, and then we cut off a section in the middle of the white paper and forcibly pieced the white paper together—so the originally continuous pictures were dislocated. We can see the reason for the dislocation at a glance in three-dimensional space, and we can also accurately measure the size of the paper after cutting, but if there is a worm living on a two-dimensional space crawling on the white paper, then it can only find that it suddenly enters a new world when it crawls forward, and all the structures in space are no longer continuous—this situation is what we see in front of us when the two-dimensional space is put into the three-dimensional space. The difference is that worms cannot observe spatial structures above two dimensions, but we can control higher dimensions through technical means."

The data terminal echoed from the side: "See, your partner's technical means are not only explosive, but also non-explosive…"

Everyone: "…"

Hao Ren covered his face and stuffed the data terminal into his pocket, and then continued to communicate with the drone swarm: "What else is there in the target star area besides this boundary?"

"After entering the target star area, the No. 2 detector performed a wide range of random jumps and found high-energy aggregates of unknown origin in the universe."

As the collective consciousness's voice fell, another space scene appeared on the holographic projection. In the vast universe, large patches of luminous gas clouds gathered together. These luminous gas clouds had pale yellow or milky white light. The opposite starlight could be seen through the thin parts, while the thick parts were condensed like solids. They did not have a fixed uniform shape, but they were basically approximately disc-shaped, and there were a large number of jet-like material bands extending from the edges of the luminous discs.

"These high-energy aggregates are about the same size, with a diameter of about one thousand kilometers, and are distributed in various parts of the target star area. They emit strong and chaotic electromagnetic waves, but the drone found that these electromagnetic waves were meaningless after cracking them. Based on the basic physical rules of the Plane of Dreams universe, the origin of these 'space phenomena' cannot be explained, but no artificial evidence of these high-energy aggregates has been found."

"Anything else?"

"No more discoveries for the time being—the target star area contains a large-scale galaxy and several loose galaxy structures, covering a wide range. It is impossible to complete the entire territory detection and precise scanning in a short period of time with two detectors. Currently, only a rough full-galaxy scan has been performed, and a gravity distribution map has been drawn for subsequent ship jumps."

Hao Ren looked up at those strange luminous gas clouds and said softly: "It seems to be a place worth visiting…"