They traveled through time at the same time, but the villainous scientist

Chapter 535 First Steps into Cultivation
After the initial excitement, it's time to move on to the next step.

"I need a completely quiet place."

Zhang Qi addressed the others, saying that since Chu Xuan was responsible for conquering the world, the task of analyzing cultivation techniques naturally fell to him.

Chu Xuan nodded and then arranged for people to set up a hidden laboratory.

Qi Tengyi, on the other hand, walked towards the pile of magical artifacts that exuded an ancient aura. He adjusted his glasses, his eyes filled with the infatuation and eagerness of a lecherous man seeing a stunningly beautiful woman.

"I'll take care of sorting and identifying these."

Qi Teng picked up the broken piece of the "Ruyi Jingu Bang" (a magical staff), his fingertips tracing the ancient inscriptions on it, and his breathing became somewhat rapid.

And so, Zhang Qi entered the laboratory and began to analyze cultivation techniques.

Inside the room, countless chips were scattered on the floor.

Zhang Qi sat cross-legged and randomly picked up one of them.

The crystal is cool to the touch, smooth as jade, and has a faint, flowing luster within.

He concentrated his mind, trying to probe into it with his consciousness, just as he would read any information from the main god space.

The massive, esoteric incantation for the cultivation technique that I had envisioned did not appear.

The moment his mental energy touched the crystal, a far more complex and fundamental information than the torrent of data exploded directly at his level of consciousness.

What appeared were not words in the conventional sense, but rather dynamic, three-dimensional images composed of countless points of light and lines.

These diagrams, however, carry an information density far exceeding that of any human writing system.

The good news is that, because of his information links with the rest of the world, he can easily handle this level of workload.

This... is not a cultivation technique at all.

After receiving the information from the chip, Zhang Qi's heart was filled with a tremendous surge of emotions.

He quickly picked up the second, third, and so on... Each crystal contained completely different information, but it was more like a series of scientific papers than a cultivation technique.

The cultivation system in this novel is similar to that in the world of "Under One Person".

Most of those systems originated from the real world; ancient people derived philosophical thinking from their observations of phenomena.

For example, the ancients observed that when men and women had intercourse, a new life would be conceived in the woman's womb.

However, given the conditions at the time, ancient people could not observe the union of sperm and egg, nor could they understand cell division and differentiation.

Therefore, they could only summarize and generalize from the phenomena, and created the theory of "the combination of Yin and Yang, the condensation of the sacred embryo".

Because the fetus comes from nothing, the grand concept of "primordial energy comes from nothingness, creates something from nothing, and evolves into essence, energy and spirit" has been derived.

Even the internal alchemy practice in Taoism is derived from this.

This theory holds true in certain worlds with special energy rules, such as the world where "Primordial Qi" exists.

The "Primordial Qi" itself has the characteristic of being influenced by mental intentions.

Based on this characteristic, Eastern alchemy, Western alchemy, and magic all work.

Therefore, conventional cultivation techniques are more like a "special solution" for that special energy or special world.

However, the crystal plates in front of us do not tell us the truth.

They are not conjectures or inductions about a certain phenomenon, but rather arguments and deconstructions about its essence.

Zhang Qi's consciousness was once again immersed in a crystal plate that explained the theory of the "Five Elements".

The traditional Five Elements theory is a cycle of mutual generation: metal generates water, water generates wood, wood generates fire, fire generates earth, and earth generates metal, as well as mutual restraint relationships such as water restraining fire and fire restraining metal.

This is a philosophical model based on phenomena.

In this crystal, the "Five Elements" are defined as the macroscopic manifestations of the fundamental particles of the universe in five different stable excited states.

The so-called "gold" is a condensed state of particles in a high-density, high-binding-energy state;
"Wood" is a form in which particles exchange energy and grow life in a certain ordered structure;
"Water" represents the state of particles in a low-energy, highly fluid state... The concept of mutual generation and restraint is clearly described here as the energy transition and transformation pathways between different excited states.

The so-called "water overcomes fire" is explained as the ability of a low-energy particle field to efficiently absorb and neutralize the energy of high-energy thermal particles, causing them to return to their ground state.

Every layer of energy transformation and every change in interparticle forces involved is clearly marked with a rigorous logic similar to advanced mathematics.

This isn't philosophy; this is physics.

Moreover, it is an ultimate physics that transcends modern human cognition and points directly to the origin of the world.

Human understanding of the world is a process that progresses from the macroscopic to the microscopic.

Because the human sensory system has been limited to a macroscopic scale from the very beginning.

Therefore, we need to use complex instruments such as microscopes and accelerators to glimpse a corner of the microscopic world.

Then, based on the observed phenomena, we use abstract mathematical tools to build theoretical models to indirectly describe the world that we can never "see" with our own eyes.

It's like the blind men and the elephant; they can only obtain information about the elephant through limited means, and then deduce what the elephant looks like step by step.

However, judging from what is recorded on these crystal plates, the person who wrote them does not seem to be blind.

They may possess some kind of extrasensory perception, enabling them to directly "observe" the vibrations of energy strings at the Planck scale and to "touch" the interactions between quarks and gluons.

For them, the microscopic world is not an abstract concept, but a clear and intuitive existence, just like the teacup in our hand.

So they used a language that was closest to the essence of things, similar to mathematics, to describe the world they "saw" exactly as it was.

This is the essence of these "cultivation techniques".

This is why their study of the world is far more in-depth than that of modern science.

Zhang Qi's fingertips traced another crystal, and a more vast and revolutionary wave of information surged into his mind.

This is a cultivation technique called "Xuanyu Hengguang Jue", which can be translated as "A fundamental explanation of the invariance of the speed of light in a vacuum".

The two pillars of modern physics, relativity and quantum mechanics, are both based on the observational fact that the speed of light is constant.

Einstein first proposed this postulate and built the magnificent edifice of relativity on it.

But neither he nor later physicists could explain one thing.

So why is the speed of light a constant value for any frame of reference in a vacuum?
Humans have drawn this conclusion based solely on observed phenomena, but they cannot uncover the reasons behind it because human understanding is still insufficient.

But Zhang Qi saw the answer in this crystal.

The information in the crystal is not presented in language, but rather through a dynamic, multi-dimensional geometric model.

The universe it describes is not the spacetime they are familiar with at its core, but a more fundamental "foundation" similar to an information processor.

Everything in the universe—space, time, matter, energy—is merely a manifestation of the program running on this "foundation."

The speed of light is the highest speed at which the "foundation" of this universe processes information and refreshes "reality".

Just as a computer's CPU has a fixed clock frequency, the universe, this supercomputer, also has a limit to its "refresh rate".

The transmission of any causal relationship, and the exchange of any information, cannot exceed this limit speed.

Therefore, the constancy of the speed of light is not a special property of light, but a fundamental property of spacetime itself, and the upper limit of the hardware performance of the universe, the computer!
And if we can observe, we can interfere.

According to the description of this cultivation method, if one cultivates to the highest level, one can interfere with the speed of light within a certain range, thereby affecting spacetime.

It is possible to create a space where the speed of light is only one meter per second, or even slower, where everything will fall into eternal stillness.

They could also create a region where the speed of light is infinite, where causality might completely collapse.

The so-called cultivation of immortality grants the ability to alter the reality of this world...

(End of this chapter)