Kryptonians: Man of Steel

Chapter 1491 Physics and Psionics?
Now he understood that the moment that girl swung her knife, the entire history of warfare in human civilization had become an antique in a museum.

The tablet computer slipped from Anderson's hands and crashed onto the cold concrete floor, the cracked screen mirroring the shattered state of his worldview. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out; his lungs felt as if they had been emptied into a vacuum.

Extreme fear gripped him, but even stronger, more thorough, and more upside-down than fear was a kind of religious shudder, as if he had witnessed a "miracle," that shot up his spine to the top of his head, causing every muscle in his body to tremble uncontrollably.

"That...that's not swordsmanship..."

His voice was dry and hoarse, each syllable seemingly squeezed out from the depths of his soul, carrying an almost reverent awe, "And it is by no means... a 'superpower' that can be defined by any known scientific system..."

"……That is……"

Anderson swallowed with difficulty, his brain working at an unprecedented speed, trying to find a container in the cognitive ruins that could barely hold the absurdity before him.

The edifice of physics he had built up throughout his life—those precise formulas, perfect models, and ironclad laws verified by countless experiments—Newton's classical mechanics, Einstein's relativity of spacetime, the probability cloud of the quantum world, and the gauge field theory of the strong and weak nuclear forces—was as fragile as a castle on the beach before that one blow, completely washed away by a single wave, leaving not even a foundation.

"...that is something that exists entirely outside of our existing scientific system."

He finally found a relatively "safe" description, but immediately felt that it was far from enough.

“No, not just ‘outside’… it’s ‘above’! It’s surpassing! It’s…”

He suddenly grabbed his hair, his knuckles turning white from the force, his eyes filled with the pain of his knowledge being forcibly torn apart and a morbid excitement.

"Dimension!"

He growled, as if grasping at a straw, “It’s like…like creatures on a two-dimensional plane, who can never comprehend the concept of ‘height,’ whose geometry has no ‘volume.’ The three-dimensional universe we perceive and study may just be a…a projection! A slice of a higher-dimensional reality!”

His mind raced along the edge of the precipice of cognition, attempting to construct a framework that could explain this inexplicable phenomenon.

"What she wielded... wasn't a knife made of matter! It was... it was a concrete projection of some kind of 'rule' or 'force' from a higher dimension onto our three-dimensional space! That knife, or rather, she herself, at that moment, became the 'interface' for the invasion of lower-dimensional reality by higher-dimensional rules!"

His voice grew increasingly frantic, tinged with a kind of epiphany-like madness. "She's not using force to 'fight' the laws of physics, she's... 'covering' them! Using a higher-dimensional logic that we can't understand, observe, or even imagine, she's directly covering the underlying code of our universe! It's like a programmer directly modifying the source code of a program instead of following the rules within the program! The path of neutron radiation? In the instant she swung her knife, in the higher-dimensional 'rules,' it 'was' supposed to reflect back that way! Our physical laws are merely incomplete, even distorted, projections of those higher-dimensional rules onto this low-dimensional slice of ours!"

Once the idea took shape, it spread like wildfire in his mind.

All the impossibilities and absurdities seem to have found a logical foothold—although this foothold itself is built on the wasteland of human cognition.

He suddenly looked down at the badge on his chest—a symbol of identity he had strived for and was proud of throughout his life: Senior Researcher at CERN, PhD in Theoretical Physics.

Engraved on it were the names he once revered: Maxwell, Bohr, Schrödinger, Yang Zhenning… The intellectual achievements these names represented seemed so pale and powerless, even… somewhat comical, in the face of that subversive scene. Could physics achieve the “miracle” demonstrated by Saeko Busujima?

Is it possible to "edit" the behavior of elementary particles so freely and almost artistically, to mold and shape destructive neutron radiation like clay, giving it will and precise counterattack paths? Is it possible to ignore the limitations of the light cone and achieve instantaneous rewriting of causality at a distance?

No.

Absolutely not.

Anderson closed his eyes in anguish.

Even if the science of human civilization develops for another hundred, five hundred, or even a thousand years, what can it achieve within the foreseeable theoretical framework?
Perhaps it's more efficient energy utilization, perhaps it's more precise particle manipulation, or perhaps it's warp-driven sublight speed travel.
But all of this is still firmly confined within the existing framework of the four fundamental forces and the spacetime structure.

Saeko Busujima's power transcends this framework; it demonstrates a control at the "rule level," a direct right to write the underlying logic of the universe.

The gap between them cannot be bridged by time and technological accumulation; it is essentially a difference in dimensions, an absolute crushing of cognitive levels.

It may take humanity countless centuries, and countless paradigm shifts, before it can even begin to glimpse the edge of that realm—provided that human civilization continues for that long and does not go astray.

A cold and clear conclusion, like a scalpel, cut through all his confusion and pain: his belief in physics, the vast belief system that formed the cornerstone of his life's meaning, academic achievements, and worldview, had completely collapsed and turned to dust the moment Saeko Busujima swung that knife.

It's not that physics is wrong; it still describes the laws governing the observable universe in our dimension.

Rather, it's because... it's not enough.

It appears so narrow and limited when faced with a higher dimension of "reality".

So, where is the new path?

"Tokyo Metropolitan Totsuki Spirit Exorcism Specialized School..."

This name, the name of an institution he had once glimpsed in the margins of top-secret files, scorned by the mainstream scientific community, and categorized as urban legend or fringe pseudoscience, now appeared in his mind with unparalleled clarity, like a lighthouse in the darkness.

Those vague records about "psychic power," "cursed power," "shikigami," and "barriers," those ancient traditions that were dismissed as superstition... do they point to the kind of power system that Saeko Busujima uses, which exists "outside/above" the existing scientific system?

(End of this chapter)