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

Li Yichen placed the crystal fruit platter filled with watermelon and cherries on the coffee table. The glass collided with the marble tabletop, making a crisp sound.

On the sofa, five women with black mud masks on were staring at the TV screen, where the male lead of a melodramatic soap opera was still roaring in the rain. Startled by the sharp sound, the ragdoll cat in Xue Shanshan's arms meowed and shifted its position, continuing to lie there.

The military-grade encrypted phone in my pocket vibrated wildly through the fabric, as if it had Parkinson's disease.

Li Yichen pulled out two tissues, casually wiped the water off his hands, and took out his phone. The screen backlight lit up, and the words "Old Zhou" flashed on it.

He turned and walked to the balcony, casually pulling the heavy, soundproof glass door shut behind him. The noise from the television and the women's discussions about the plot in the living room were completely shut out.

The night breeze of Shanghai brushed against my face, taking away some of the stuffiness from the indoors.

Before Li Yichen could even speak after pressing the answer button, a series of almost distorted roars came through the receiver.

"General Li! Oh no, Academician Li! Something terrible has happened!" Old Zhou's voice was so loud it sounded like he was shouting into a megaphone. The background noise was chaotic, with people banging on tables and shouting some data.

Li Yichen moved the phone away half an inch and switched hands to hold it: "Professor Zhou, what's wrong with you so late at night, or did the lab explode?"

"Those lunatics in the physics department of our Academy of Sciences—no, they're my students!" Old Zhou gasped for breath, his words flowing like a tongue twister, "When they were analyzing the collider data, they discovered a sharp resonance peak! That thing…"

"Speak like a human being," Li Yichen interrupted him.

"That thing shouldn't exist at all!" Old Zhou slammed his hand on the table on the other end, making the receiver buzz. "Its 0++ state, mass, and width are completely inconsistent with any known meson model!"

Our entire Institute of High Energy Physics is in an uproar. Old Zhang smashed his purple clay thermos to pieces on the spot, insisting it was just background noise. But after three re-checks, the signal-to-noise ratio was a whopping 5σ! Academician Li, if this is fake, I'll swear on my life!

Li Yichen leaned against the balcony railing, the river wind making his shirt flutter. He didn't rush to reply, quickly reviewing the basic framework of high-energy physics in his mind.

A signal-to-noise ratio of 5σ represents a "discovery" in particle physics. It's not a suspicion, not a possibility, but a definitive new discovery in physics.

"Don't do a handstand yet." Li Yichen shifted his stance, his gaze fixed on the distant Huangpu River, its waters reflecting the neon lights on both banks. "What are the specific parameters? Mass? Width? Branch ratio?"

The sound of files being rummaged through came from the other end of the phone. Old Zhou's breathing was trembling: "Around 1.7 GeV/c², the width is so narrow... unbelievably narrow! Less than 100 MeV!"

The primary decay is to the multi-π final state. We've thoroughly studied the predictions of lattice QCD, and this is simply not something a regular quark-antiquark meson could do! The only explanation is—”

"Pure gluon bound state," Li Yichen blurted out, his voice sinking into a deep murmur.

"Yes! A rubber ball! A real rubber ball!" Old Zhou coughed excitedly on the other end of the line. "Academician Li, we might have uncovered the secrets of strong interactions!"

Upon hearing the words "pure gluon bound state," something seemed to suddenly become clear in Li Yichen's mind.

Numerical simulation data of lattice QCD flowed rapidly through his gene-enhanced brain. This quality window, this ultra-narrow width, was clearly the "ghost ball" that theoretical physicists had been talking about for decades.

Prior to this, human understanding of the strong interaction was limited to quarks and gluons.

Gluons, as the mediators of the strong interaction, can theoretically combine with each other to form particles without quark components, i.e., glue spheres. However, these are extremely difficult to capture experimentally because they are always mixed with ordinary mesons.

Now, Zhou and his team have actually managed to isolate this thing in the collider.

What does this mean?

This means that for the first time, humans have experimentally confirmed the self-interaction of gluons, directly proving the non-Abelian nature of the strong interaction.

While the existing standard model predicts its existence, obtaining actual experimental data would require rewriting all textbooks on high-energy physics.

Li Yichen's fingers tightened around the railing, his knuckles turning white from the force.

He paused for three seconds, then lowered his voice, his tone tinged with a hint of mockery: "Old Zhou, please tell me honestly, did your research institute secretly dig up the Daoist temple of some true immortal in Zhongnan Mountain without my knowledge?"

"Huh?" Old Zhou was clearly not following his train of thought and stood there stunned.

"It's that kind of 'Master, I've got it' storyline."

Li Yichen put one hand in his pocket and looked at the cruise ships passing by on the river. "Did you guys turn the collider into a spirit-gathering array?"

Did you rewrite the lattice QCD into the Tao Te Ching?

Are there still disciples meditating cross-legged in the tunnel, using their divine sense to track particle paths?

There was a two-second silence on the other end of the phone, followed by a bitter, indignant laugh.

"Academician Li, please stop teasing me!" Old Zhou's voice was filled with a deep mix of helplessness and fervor. "My hands are still shaking! Half of us in this room are burning incense and praying, while the other half are figuring out how to submit a paper to *Nature* without it being rejected as fantasy!"

Old Zhou took a breath and continued, "The end of science might really be metaphysics. If this thing could really be reproduced, the entire history of human physics would have to be turned over a new page!"

You absolutely must come! This thing's data model is a complete mess; only a genius as freakish as you could possibly understand it!

Li Yichen chuckled: "Okay, I need the raw data and the entire analysis framework tonight. Send them to my encrypted email. I'll head over first thing tomorrow morning."

After hanging up the phone, Li Yichen stuffed it back into his pocket.

Instead of immediately returning to the living room, he leaned forward slightly, resting his hands on the balcony railing, gazing at the dazzling night view of Shanghai.

The surface of the Huangpu River rippled in the night breeze, reflecting the myriad lights along its banks. In the distance, the towering skyscrapers of Lujiazui stood tall, a testament to human industrial and economic progress.

But in Li Yichen's eyes, all of this was still as fragile as a paper toy in the face of the vast universe.

To prepare for the possibility of aliens attacking Earth in the future, he built a space carrier, Titan mechs, planet-destroying cannons, developed gene evolution drugs, and even has spaceships under construction. These things are enough to arm Earth to the teeth.

But these are essentially still crude applications of existing physical rules. Great force makes bricks fly, energy accumulates.

The discovery of the rubber ball was something from a completely different dimension.

It is more than just a new particle. It is the key for humanity to unlock the underlying logic of the strong interaction.

There are four fundamental forces in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong interaction, and the weak interaction.

The vast majority of the technology that humanity currently possesses is focused on experimenting with electromagnetic forces and gravity.

The strong nuclear force, that terrifying force that binds atomic nuclei together, has only been used by humanity in a crude way through nuclear fission and nuclear fusion, yielding only scraps.

If we could thoroughly analyze the formation mechanism and decay path of glue balls, and master the methods for controlling glue fields...

Li Yichen's breathing became heavier.

Gene therapy and biological evolution are too slow and too limited.

What he wants to do is to directly leverage the "secondary evolution" of human civilization from the dimension of fundamental force fields.

Imagine if humans could directly intervene in and manipulate the strong interaction field through some kind of device, or even through modified genes. What would that mean?

This means that the structure of matter can be rearranged at will. It means that the physical body can be forcibly locked at the atomic level, able to withstand the high temperatures and shock waves of a nuclear bomb.

This means that humanity will no longer rely on external steel armor, but will instead transform itself into the most indestructible physical monster in the universe.

This sounds just like a fairy from a myth.

But Li Yichen knew very well that this was a purely physical world. There was no spiritual energy, no metaphysics, only rigorous mathematical formulas and cold, fundamental force fields.

Glue particles are the key to the pinnacle of physics.

Once humanity acquires the ability to control these particles, the destructive and defensive capabilities they will exhibit will indeed be comparable to those of deities in metaphysics.

Alien fleet?

If every one of the millions of soldiers in the Great Xia Dynasty could manipulate a strong force field, then when aliens came, they would not be met with a battle of interstellar warships, but with a group of living physicists who could dismantle spaceships by hand.

The night breeze on the balcony is getting cooler and cooler.

Li Yichen straightened up, stretched his neck, and his bones made a crisp sound.

He turned his head and glanced at the living room through the glass door.

The melodramatic TV show was still playing, and five women were sharing the watermelon he had cut. Xue Shanshan was teasing the ragdoll cat with a piece of watermelon.

This peaceful scene needs to be protected by absolute force.

Li Yichen pushed open the glass door and walked back to the living room.

"Finished the call?" Ji Yanran turned her head, the black mud mask on her face had dried completely, and she didn't dare to open her lips too wide when she spoke.

Li Yichen walked to the coffee table, picked up a silver fork, speared a piece of watermelon, and put it in his mouth. Juice overflowed, and it was sickeningly sweet.

"Hmm." Li Yichen swallowed the watermelon and tossed the silver fork back into the fruit plate. "I'm going to the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences first thing tomorrow morning. The Institute of High Energy Physics has come up with something interesting."

"Back to blacksmithing again?" Liu Xiaoyu muttered from the side, "You're the richest man in the world, but you're busier than a worker on an assembly line."

"I'm not going to fight this time." Li Yichen took out a tissue to wipe his mouth, walked to the single sofa and sat down, crossing his legs.

He watched the male protagonist still getting rained on on the TV screen, but his mind was on the rubber ball data chart that hadn't been sent yet.

"What are you going there for?" Xiao Yuqing asked curiously.

Li Yichen leaned back on the sofa, his hands clasped in front of him, his gaze sweeping across the living room and landing on the deep night sky outside the balcony.

"Let's see if we can find a path for humans to become immortals."

The women looked at each other in bewilderment.

"Have you been reading too many fantasy novels? Is your brain messed up?" Ji Yanran retorted without any politeness.

Li Yichen didn't refute, but simply picked up his phone, opened his email, and refreshed it.

An email marked "Top Secret" was lying in my inbox. Sender: Mr. Zhou. Attachment size: 4.2G.

He opened the compressed file titled "Original Data and Preliminary Fitting Framework of 0++ State Resonance Peaks".

The progress bar begins to move slowly forward.

In the living room, the noise from the television mingled with the laughter of the women.

Li Yichen stared at the percentage numbers flashing on the screen.