novelraw Chapter 828: The Rules Were Destroyed
Chapter 828: The Rules Were Destroyed
Everything Xiao Yu saw defied common sense. He observed countless strange phenomena, the likes of which he had never seen nor even heard of in the three-dimensional main universe throughout his hundreds of thousands of years of cosmic experience.
After going through an explosion and recombination, this small universe was much smaller than before, roughly only one third of its original size. All matter inside it had vanished. There were no planets, no stars, no visible, macroscopic matter at all.
No, that was not quite correct. Xiao Yu observed that not far from the probe, a massive planet, or rather something resembling a planet, suddenly appeared. It was not spherical but irregular in shape, with countless protrusions and depressions and many spike-like mountain peaks. It had appeared before Xiao Yu without the slightest sign beforehand. Xiao Yu had not detected any process of dust condensation, nor any indication of large-scale material flow nearby.
Setting that aside, the way this ‘planet’ existed also absolutely did not conform to Xiao Yu’s basic physical theory. Its mass was very large. With a rough estimate, Xiao Yu concluded that it was larger than Jupiter in the Solar System. It was fundamentally impossible for such a gigantic rocky planet to form in the universe. That was not the main point though. Most critical of all, how could a planet with such mass fail to reach hydrostatic equilibrium and become spherical, yet still remain in an irregular shape?
On top of that, there were even more unbelievable phenomena on this planet. For example, some substances that were clearly low temperature solidified gaseous elements were mixed together with a vast sea of high temperature magma. Yet there seemed to be no heat conduction between the two. The high temperature magma and the low temperature solid-gaseous material simply coexisted peacefully.
This violated the second law of thermodynamics.
Then a huge chunk of rock suddenly separated from this irregular stellar body, and it did so at extremely high speed. Yet Xiao Yu did not detect any violent explosion on that body. To tear such an enormous piece of rock away from a planet’s main body and overcome its gravity, an enormous propulsive force would be required, which could only be produced by an explosion of sufficient violence.
This enormous rock simply detached from the planet for no reason. After it left the body, it suddenly disappeared from Xiao Yu’s sight. After this rock vanished, that gigantic irregular planet also disappeared, just as it had appeared, with no sign, no reason, and no explanation.
The disappearance of this irregular planet was only one of many unimaginable bizarre phenomena. In this small universe which, though reduced by two thirds, was still extremely vast, all sorts of things that would shock Xiao Yu, any one of which could completely overturn his current scientific foundations, were everywhere. Xiao Yu felt like an idiot who knew nothing at all about this universe.
For example, the speed of light in this small universe was not a constant but a variable that was changing without cease. Up to now, Xiao Yu had already tested this most important constant in the universe tens of thousands of times. Among these tens of thousands of tests, not even two results were the same. Moreover, there was no pattern whatsoever in the distribution of these results. The speed of light could suddenly drop to slower than a snail’s crawl, or suddenly rise to thousands or even tens of thousands of times faster than the speed of light in the three-dimensional main universe.Inside this small universe, intense bursts of energy would suddenly erupt without any warning and then vanish without a trace. The entire small universe might suddenly be flooded with blinding light, only to become pitch dark in the next instant. Strange things might emerge out of nowhere and then disappear again… Everything was grotesque and kaleidoscopic, and nothing could be explained by any existing theory.
Yet oddly enough, the probe that Xiao Yu had launched was completely unaffected. It still operated steadily, adhering to all the laws of the three-dimensional main universe.
Xiao Yu’s attention was completely drawn to this place. He even halted his ongoing research projects. Xiao Yu keenly realized that he might have inadvertently created a new world, and that this world contained inexhaustible riches waiting to be unearthed.
Xiao Yu recalled what he had encountered when traveling between galaxies via the Star Gate. In that meaningless three-dimensional universe, Xiao Yu had observed situations similar to this. There, the speed of light would change, and here, the speed of light was also changing, except that the anomalies here were far more intense.
Xiao Yu simply watched everything here in silence. He did not interfere. He only observed.
Amid the endless chaotic and bizarre transformations, Xiao Yu detected a trend. The phenomena here still did not obey any physical law, but they were edging closer to the rules of the main universe.
Take the speed of light, for example. In the main universe, the speed of light was approximately three hundred thousand kilometers per second. Here, the speed of light changed every moment and could be extremely fast or extremely slow. However, once Xiao Yu applied certain statistical methods to analyze the data, he discovered something.
He divided his observations into time intervals of five minutes each. In the previous interval, among the fifty thousand data points he had measured, the one closest to the speed of light in the three-dimensional main universe was two hundred twenty thousand kilometers per second, a discrepancy of eighty thousand kilometers. The largest value was thirteen million kilometers per second, a difference of twelve million seven hundred thousand kilometers. In the current interval, he had again obtained fifty thousand data points. Among these, the data point closest to the speed of light had become three hundred seventy thousand kilometers per second, and the gap had shrunk from eighty thousand to seventy thousand kilometers per second. The gap at the fastest extreme had also shrunk to a certain degree.
It was not only the speed of light. The gravitational constant and the four fundamental forces here were completely different from those in the three-dimensional main universe as well. Yet when Xiao Yu analyzed their values over different time intervals, he discovered that these constants too were drawing closer to the values found in the main universe.
After the probe entered this small universe, Xiao Yu also detected from the main universe side that the signatures of the small universe’s existence were growing stronger, and the rate at which its gravitational and spatial markers were returning to what they should be for its mass was speeding up.
This phenomenon was very strange. It was as if the arrival of the probe had brought the rules of the main universe into this small universe.
“Previously, this small universe had no rules. Precisely because there were no rules and no physical laws, any kind of strange phenomenon could occur here. No, that is not quite right. This small universe also seems to have been undergoing a gradual evolution. Its intense abnormal changes had been slowly calming down. It appeared to be forming an independent set of rules of its own, a system different from that of the main universe. But the arrival of my probe seems to have imposed a certain influence on it, interrupting the rules it had been forming independently and instead bringing the rules of the main universe into it.”
“But what force is driving the formation of rules? Why was the small universe’s original process of forming its own unique rules disrupted the moment my probe entered it? And since this small universe can form an independent rule system different from that of the three-dimensional main universe, could there be similar cases among other meaningless three-dimensional spaces or small universes?”
Xiao Yu had basically confirmed this much. After he detonated the entire small universe and it then reformed, it had not returned to being an ordinary small universe. Instead, like a cosmic Big Bang, like Pangu splitting heaven and earth, it had begun to form an independent rule system of its own. Its previous rules had been destroyed together with the explosion of the small universe.
“Perhaps our main universe went through the same process in its early days. Perhaps when our universe first formed, it had no rules and no physical laws, and only over a long period of evolution did it gradually develop the theoretical system we know today. Could it be that everything I study and all the scientific theories and data I know are merely unique to this particular universe and do not have universal validity?”
“Who drove the formation of these rules? Was it the invigilators? No, that should not be the case. They ought to be guardians of the rules. When the universe first formed, these rules ought to have arisen spontaneously, and only then would there be invigilators to guard them.”
“The rules of the small universe, under the influence of a construct from the main universe, are slowly being pulled toward the rules of the main universe. But if it had never been affected by any external influence, what would it ultimately have become? And since the rules in a small universe can be altered, how could the rules of the main universe be changed?”
At that moment, Xiao Yu’s mind was in turmoil. He recalled that during his super acceleration experiment to charge at Level 7 Civilization, the speed of light had once been reduced by five hundred and twenty-one micrometers. This was undoubtedly a manifestation of the universe’s rules being altered. The rules of the universe could undoubtedly be changed. But how could one go about changing the rules of the universe as they currently stood?
Countless questions circled endlessly in Xiao Yu’s mind. His thoughts were in utter chaos, and he had no idea how to even begin thinking about these matters.