Super Rich: Starting the game by going back ten years to buy Bitcoin

The old man didn't respond to his words, but just smiled and shook his head, waving his hand twice towards the courtyard gate.

Chen Jianjun understood immediately, took a half step back, and led the two guards away as well. As the gate closed, he glanced back, his eyes filled with a mixture of unease and envy.

After the door hinges clicked, only the sound of the wind remained in the courtyard.

Li Yichen caught a glimpse of several inconspicuous cylindrical bases at the base of the surrounding walls. A very faint water ripple rose from the ground, forming a dome about two meters high, keeping the locust leaves outside. As they floated, they suddenly changed direction.

"Something new made by the Chinese Academy of Sciences." The old man put the lid on the teapot. "They say it can block electromagnetic waves, sound waves, and anything that can get in through the ears. It's so expensive that I'm embarrassed to even ask about the cost."

"An anti-interference isolation field," Li Yichen said. "The outer layer is a phase offset, and there's also an acoustic damping layer inside. Did Professor Fang's team make this?"

The old man paused, looked up at him, and said, "You even know this."

"I spent seven days at the Shanghai branch last month, just in time for them to adjust the parameters." Li Yichen turned the cup halfway around, "and showed me some scraps."

"Alright," the old man chuckled. "That saves me the trouble of explaining."

Li Yichen thought the next thing to talk about was the East China Sea.

He had everything planned out—a meteorite shower, a coincidence, a civilian commercial launch—no matter how he phrased it, he wouldn't give himself away. The whole world was digging into those six white lights yesterday, but they couldn't find out anything.

As a result, the old man leaned back in his chair, put his hands on the rattan armrests, and talked about more than 30 years ago.

"In the early 1990s, the National Astronomical Observatory was poor. We had to save up foreign exchange to buy even a decent telescope." The old man spoke slowly, as if flipping through a book he had read many times. "One night, we received a report from Purple Mountain. It was moving at an absurd speed, faster than any meteorite we had ever recorded at the time, heading straight for Earth."

Li Yichen put down his teacup.

"The observatory calculated its orbit overnight, and the conclusion was that it would pass by the near-Earth orbit without landing. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief, and some even joked that they could see a meteor shower for free." The old man paused, "Then, the moment it entered the near-Earth orbit, it changed direction."

"Turn." Li Yichen repeated.

"Ninety degrees." The old man stretched out his index finger, drew a horizontal line in mid-air, then abruptly bent it downwards, stopping at the fingertip. "A right angle. No deceleration, no transitional arc, the speed didn't drop at all."

There was a two-second silence in the courtyard.

Li Yichen stared at the spot where the finger had stopped.

This is not something that celestial mechanics can explain. Any object with mass trying to make that turn at that speed would first be reduced to dust by inertia. Unless—it doesn't rely on inertia at all.

"Anti-gravity," he began, "or rather, a propulsion method that can actively rewrite its own inertial frame of reference. It's not turning a corner; it's changing direction and starting to move anew."

The old man looked at him and slightly raised his eyelids.

"Thirty years ago, a room full of people at the Chinese Academy of Sciences argued for half a month, and the final description in the report was 'unexplained motor behavior'." The old man took a sip of tea. "Today, you can say it to me in twenty seconds."

"I guessed."

"You guessed more accurately than they did." The old man put down his cup. "Later, it broke apart in near-Earth space. The reason is unclear. Some say it was due to structural fatigue, some say it was hit by something, and some say it was already broken and crashed its way in. Anyway, it cracked, breaking into three pieces of different sizes, all of which fell into the atmosphere."

Li Yichen tapped his knee with his fingers.

Three pieces. Three directions. More than thirty years ago.

Back then, there were only a handful of countries that had the capability to deploy a global network to track a high-speed target.

"The largest piece is located in the desert of the beautiful state of Nevada," the old man said simply. "I don't need to tell you the exact location, you can guess—the 'Area 51' that people outside keep talking about is not far away."

"What about the other two pieces?"

"One of them fell onto the Siberian ice fields of Russia. They acted quickly; that winter, they sent a division in, sealed off the area for three months, and publicly claimed it was for forest fire investigation." The old man smiled, a slightly chilly smile. "The second largest piece went to them."

Li Yichen picked up the teacup and blew on a broken leaf floating on top.

"And what about us?"

"We were the slowest and the poorest," the old man said. "In the Lop Nur no-man's-land, we searched for forty-one days, sifting the sand three times. The last piece we dug out was the smallest of the three."

As he said this, he moved half his body to the side.

Next to the chair on the floor was a metal box, its aluminum alloy shell gleaming with polished corners, equipped with combination locks and a mechanical deadbolt. The old man bent down, turned the locks a few times, and opened the lid.

There were no documents inside, only a photo, which was laminated, but the edges were yellowed and the bottom right corner was frayed.

He held it out to me with two fingers.

Li Yichen caught it.

The photo has the quality of film from the past, with coarse grain and overexposure from the flash, but the subject is still very clear.

It's not a stone.

A curved component, dark gold in color, with a honeycomb-like structure on its surface. Hexagonal holes bite into each other, and fine, hair-like fluid lines can be seen inside the hole walls. Under the flash, it shimmers with an iridescent sheen like an oil film.

The component's fracture point is torn, but the pipes on the torn surface still maintain a regular direction, one by one, as if someone had calculated in advance where it would break.

In the lower left corner of the photo lies a folding ruler, which unfolds to 40 centimeters.

This thing is more than ten times longer than the ruler.

"What did you see?" the old man asked.

"Those honeycomb structures on the surface are force channels, not heat dissipation structures." Li Yichen held the photo up a little higher, looking at it in the sunlight. "The wiring inside the holes is the fluid propulsion medium loop. This isn't the outer shell; it's the lining of the propulsion chamber. The break is here—" He pointed to the right side of the photo, "meaning that the part it's connected to is thicker, at least three times the diameter."

The old man's expression finally changed.

It wasn't surprise, but the kind of somber feeling that comes after confirming something.

"Daxia set up a special bureau for this thing," he said. "749. Over thirty years, four generations have gone through it. The youngest of the first batch of people who went in is now seventy-eight. The conclusion can be summed up in one sentence—it's something that no society on Earth could create."

"A fragment of the propulsion module of a starship," Li Yichen finished for him.

"Yes."

The wind whistled against the outer wall of the isolation area.

Li Yichen placed the photo back on his lap. His hands were steady, his face was expressionless, and he even had the leisure to blow on the tea leaves in his cup again.

My mind was in turmoil.

Extraterrestrial civilizations are real.

This isn't a movie, a joke, or some nonsense someone used to scam funding. Over thirty years ago, a part fell from the sky, was divided among three countries, and each locked it in a vault for thirty years to study, but none of them figured it out.

But then again—once I thought about it, my head is already stuffed with something that can conjure up black technology out of thin air, so why can't there be other people outside? If we're talking about being outrageous, he's the most outrageous one.

"The older generation of physicists did the calculations," the old man's voice pulled him back to reality. "They used just this one fragment to deduce the whole thing. They said that before the ship broke apart, its length wouldn't have been less than two hundred meters."

"Two hundred meters," Li Yichen repeated the number to himself.

"That's a conservative estimate." The old man's tone unusually carried a hint of weight. "I remember what Qian Xuesen and his group wrote on the last page of their report back then—'A spacecraft of this scale is beyond our comprehension.' At that time, we hadn't even managed to send people into space yet, and they were already driving things that were 200 meters long all over the universe."

Li Yichen hummed in agreement, his eyes lowered.

A thought crossed my mind.

A screen that only he could see appeared before his eyes. He skipped the familiar columns and flipped to the bottom section, a category he had never looked at in detail before.

[Basic Spaceflight/Exploration Vehicle]

The entries scrolled down. Orbital transport platforms, planetary surface landers, deep space relay beacons... He used his mind to pull them down, then suddenly stopped.

Near-Light Speed ​​Constant Galaxy Exploration Spaceship (Complete Technology + Manufacturing Blueprints)

Total length: 238 meters

[Type: Basic civilian detection]

[Price: 150 Tech Points]

Li Yichen's breath hitched for a second.

Two hundred and thirty-eight meters.

The collision perfectly matched the old man's earlier statement, "no less than two hundred meters."

Further down, in the description section, there is a line of small print that is extremely blunt: Suitable for routine patrols and low-risk exploration missions within the Heng system, without armed configuration, and not recommended for long-distance travel across the Heng system.

Routine inspection.

Low risk.

Unarmed.

Li Yichen stared at that line of words for a long time, his fingertip unconsciously tracing a line on his knee.

The thing that was smashed down thirty years ago, which was treasured by three countries and has been studied and not understood by four generations, is listed as "basic civilian use" in this catalog. It is the very bottom column, a model that was just randomly checked off on the delivery note.

What if you run into their regular army?

Given Earth's current technological level, there's no need for a fight; the outcome is predictable.