novelraw Chapter 23 Breakthrough
Chapter 23 Breakthrough
“…”
Faced with Professor Zhang Yang’s question, the three of them fell silent for a moment.
They looked at each other—one looking at the next, the next looking back—unsure how to answer.
They couldn’t exactly say the Positron Cannon and time-traveling text messages, could they?
That would be idiotic.
It would be handing over the secret directly.
“Time travel.”
Jiang Ran answered first.
“Isn’t that what so many movies and science fiction novels do? They invent a time machine that lets people go back to the past.”
“Once you go back to the past and change the original history, the later trajectory of history changes with it, and it develops into a different worldline.”“Take your example again, Professor Zhang Yang. Say you’re dissatisfied with your life as a teacher today, so you ride a time machine back to the past—to the moment you failed the exam at eighteen.”
“Then you tell your eighteen-year-old self who failed that repeating a year and going to school has no future. That the internet wave is about to arrive, and you should go south and go into business.”
“Your eighteen-year-old self listens, doesn’t repeat the year, and decisively heads south to Guangzhou. Then the worldline completes its transition at that moment—jumping from Worldline A to Worldline B… and the entire historical trajectory from age eighteen to the present, decades of it, changes completely.”
“You wouldn’t teach at Donghai University, and we wouldn’t be your students. But maybe you’d already be a household-name internet tycoon… even the richest person in the Dragon Country.”
…
Jiang Ran’s reasonable hypothesis filled Professor Zhang Yang’s eyes with praise.
They patted Jiang Ran on the shoulder.
“Kid, what school are you in? What’s your name?”
“Professor Zhang, my name is Jiang Ran. I’m in the School of Computer Science.”
“Very good.”
Professor Zhang Yang’s tone was full of approval.
“In my general-education class, I have to give you a high score. You studied very seriously.”
“Thank you, Professor.” Jiang Ran smiled.
Professor Zhang Yang pinched up the chalk again and looked at Cheng Mengxue and Qin Feng.
“What Jiang Ran said is right. As long as you change a choice at some point in the past, you can change the established history, change the worldline, and complete a Worldline Transition.”
“In fact, you don’t even need the [past]. A different choice at the [present] point in time can also lead the [future] into a different worldline.”
“For example, when you graduate from undergrad, do you choose graduate school and a doctorate? Or take a position at a big company? Or take the civil service exam?”
“Each different choice will push your life into a different worldline.”
With the chalk, they drew four or five more parallel forks after the line representing Worldline A, representing the infinite possibilities of the future.
“However… no matter what you choose, no matter what kind of future you head toward, don’t romanticize the road you didn’t take.”
Professor Zhang Yang looked at those branches and smiled with feeling.
“Every choice, every kind of life, will have success and regret. What matters most is cherishing the present—and walking the road under your feet well.”
…
It looked like the timing was about right.
Cheng Mengxue flicked Jiang Ran a look. He nodded.
It was time to throw out their biggest purpose today—the question they cared about most.
“Um, Professor Zhang Yang.”
Cheng Mengxue raised her hand again.
“There’s something I’m curious about, which is…”
“[Once a Worldline Transition happens, is it possible for us to retain memories of the original history—the original worldline?]”
“Like the example just now. If you changed your choice back when you failed at eighteen and went south to do business, then in the future—sitting in the CEO office of a listed company—would you still retain memories of being a teacher at Donghai University right now?”
Jiang Ran and Qin Feng exchanged a quick look.
Yes.
This was the point.
This was what they wanted to know most.
They stayed silent and waited for Professor Zhang Yang’s answer.
“[Impossible.]”
Professor Zhang Yang didn’t hesitate at all.
Cheng Mengxue froze.
“Impossible?”
Professor Zhang Yang nodded.
“Impossible.”
Cut clean, leaving no room at all:
“[After a worldline changes and transitions, even if a life is completely rewritten and the world undergoes earth-shaking change, it is absolutely impossible for anyone to retain the memories of the original worldline.]”
“Why?” Jiang Ran asked.
“That’s not hard to understand.”
Professor Zhang Yang set the chalk down, picked up the blackboard eraser, and pointed at the branching lines on the board.
“I just said that Worldline A and Worldline B cannot exist at the same time. So no matter what method you use to complete a Worldline Transition, our history and past can only run on one worldline.”
“Therefore… suppose we jump from Worldline A to Worldline B. Do you think Worldline A disappears?”
Professor Zhang Yang looked at the three of them.
The three of them thought a little, then nodded lightly.
“Wrong!”
Professor Zhang Yang rejected it with a heavy stress.
“Worldline A doesn’t disappear—it never appeared in the first place! From the very beginning, it did not exist!”
They erased Worldline A with the blackboard eraser and explained:
“If I failed at eighteen and chose to go south and do business, stepping onto Worldline B, then everything that should have happened on Worldline A never happened. From the very beginning, it did not exist.”
“[So how could a history that doesn’t exist, a worldline that doesn’t exist, something that never happened… possibly exist inside memory?]”
…
The three of them fell silent.
They had nothing to say.
What were they supposed to say?
What Professor Zhang Yang said was justified and well-founded, with clear logic. It was airtight.
And yet…
There just happened to be Jiang Ran—an “exception,” a “bug.”
Who were they supposed to argue with about that?
Still—
Since Professor Zhang Yang was so unequivocal, the three of them relaxed somewhat and let their guard down.
If everyone in the world was normal, if nobody had a special constitution like Jiang Ran, if nobody had memories from before a worldline change… then that actually meant their current situation was safe.
Ding-dong, ding-dong.
Two WeChat notification chimes rang from the phone on the lectern.
Professor Zhang Yang looked at the screen and saw it was a message from a colleague in the teaching and research office.
They set down the eraser and clapped their hands.
“You think about it for a bit. I’ll reply to this.”
With that, they picked up the phone and, without any attempt to avoid it, replied right in front of the three of them.
It was a WeChat message from Professor Meng in the teaching and research office:
[Professor Zhang, do you still need the new lesson-plan notebooks that just came in? I’ll have a student bring a few over to you.]
Professor Zhang Yang tapped into the chat and started replying.
The typing keyboard Professor Zhang Yang used wasn’t the same as Jiang Ran’s. It was a nine-key keypad.
For people like Jiang Ran, Cheng Mengxue, and Qin Feng—00s kids—phone typing was all full keyboard.
They’d grown up using large-screen smartphones. They’d never used button phones, so naturally they’d never had contact with nine-key input.
Early button phones, represented by Nokia, had to type through the dial pad for technical reasons.
From 1 to 9, each number key corresponded to three or four letters. When you typed, you had to press combinations of number keys in sequence.
Because each number key mapped to multiple letters, accuracy wasn’t high. You often had to pick characters one by one. It was inconvenient.
But now that input methods had become smarter, nine-key input accuracy had improved as well. Most of the time, you didn’t need to choose characters anymore—the input method automatically arranged candidates based on context.
By the statistics of “people around me,” those who still insisted on using nine-key input were mostly people born in the 80s and 90s. As for younger people born in the 00s and 10s, almost all of them used full keyboard.
Professor Zhang Yang truly was someone who’d come up through button phones. Their thumb “marched” across the nine-key keypad at high speed—like muscle-memory blind typing—pressing a string of digits—
28… 926…
!
The digit string etched into his mind activated. Jiang Ran’s breathing locked up instantly.
28926… 9
How familiar.
These were the exact first digits of that mysterious text message.
Professor Zhang Yang’s thumb kept jumping. They pressed two more keys—5 and 3—and the candidate bar immediately popped out: [Don’t need it].
Then they rapidly pressed 943943, and the candidate bar popped out again: [Thanks].
Send.
[Don’t need it thanks]—five characters—shot out at once.
Jiang Ran’s heart rate spiked.
He lifted his head and looked at Qin Feng and Cheng Mengxue.
The same shock and delight were in the other two’s eyes.
Nine-key…
They never would’ve expected it.
The solution to that mysterious digit string… was nine-key input.
If the opening five digits 28926 represented [Don’t need]…
Then what did the remaining 9426494642 represent?
All they had to do was try.
“Professor Zhang, we’ll go first!”
Jiang Ran spun around and ran.
“Huh? Ah?”
Professor Zhang Yang looked blank.
“You’ve figured it all out? I can explain more.”
“Thank you, Professor Zhang!”
Jiang Ran nodded in thanks.
“It’s mainly that we still have class later. We’ll come back and ask you again!”
The three of them suppressed their excitement and sprinted straight out of the classroom door, reaching the flowerbed outside the building.
“How did we not think of nine-key input?”
“Classic blind spot right under the lamp!”
“I’ve never used nine-key input in my life!”
They complained nonstop, filled with regret.
But this really wasn’t their fault.
For their age group, nine-key input truly was a knowledge blind zone.
“Hurry and test it!”
Cheng Mengxue urged.
Jiang Ran nodded and pulled out his phone.
289269426494642.
That garbled string of digits that had tormented him for so long, that had wound around his mind and refused to leave—at last, it had a solution.
He switched his phone’s input method to nine-key, then pressed the digits in order.
Don’t… believe…?
As he pressed each number, the characters formed automatically, popping out one after another.
When he pressed the last digit on the nine-key keypad—
All three of them widened their eyes.
They stared at the sentence assembled in the input field—
[Don’t believe ha]