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

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

The melodramatic TV show had just finished airing, and the ending theme song echoed in the spacious room. Several women were huddled together discussing the plot, while Xue Shanshan held a cat toy, making the ragdoll cat jump around excitedly.

"Are you done talking?" Ji Yanran turned her head and asked.

"Yeah, I have some technical documents to look at. I'll go back to my room first. You guys get some rest." Li Yichen replied casually, and before Ji Yanran could ask any more questions, he went straight to the master bedroom on the first floor.

Close the door and lock it.

He tossed his phone onto the bedside table, swiped his finger across the screen twice, and projected the 4.2GB compressed file sent by Old Zhou onto the white wall opposite.

A pale blue spectrum illuminated the wall. Ling'er's holographic figure emerged from the phone's speaker hole, crawled along the data cable to the edge of the bedside table, and sat down with her legs crossed. She tilted her head, looking at the densely packed particle track maps and energy spectrum curves covering the wall.

"Brother, is this what those old academicians came up with?" Ling'er reached out and poked a scatter plot floating in the air.

Li Yichen didn't reply, his gaze fixed on the first raw scatter plot. The terrifying computing power brought by the brain-developing gene serum was fully activated. His brain was now like a high-speed supercomputing cluster, processing massive amounts of charts and numbers every second.

The images on the wall began to scroll rapidly, and thousands of track maps were disassembled and reassembled in his eyes.

Ling'er detected his brainwave activity, and the holographic figure flickered twice. She stood up, looked at the rapidly increasing data panel in the background, and whispered, "Brother, are you alright?"

Li Yichen remained silent. He raised his right hand and rapidly sketched in mid-air. The holographic screen changed with his finger movements, extracting the decay paths, mass windows, and branch ratio data of the gel sphere particles one by one, piecing them together in mid-air into a three-dimensional mesh structure.

Ten minutes later, he swiped his finger and drew a huge circle in the center of the screen, encompassing all the data networks.

He wrote four characters in the middle of the circle.

The underlying principles.

"Ling'er, think about it." Li Yichen turned around, speaking twice as fast as usual, with an barely suppressed excitement, "The strong interaction force is the force that binds atomic nuclei together. And a glue ball is a condensed state of pure gluons."

He pointed to the large circle on the wall: "This thing is essentially a crystallization of power itself. If you can control it, it's like directly holding the lifeline of matter's structure in your hands."

Ling'er blinked, the holographic image simulating a thoughtful expression: "You mean, use it to modify matter? Like creating a harder alloy?"

"More than that." Li Yichen shook his head. "Modifying matter is just the most basic application. Moving up the hierarchy, it's modifying the human body."

He approached the holographic screen, his finger hovering in the air: "Reconstructing cellular structure at the atomic level, making the human body harder than any known alloy. Above that, we'll modify space."

Li Yichen's breathing became heavy: "If a strong force field can be released in a directed manner, it can theoretically tear apart the spatial structure, achieving true spatial teleportation. Without spaceships or warp engines, people can traverse galaxies on their own."

Ling'er's holographic figure stood up straight, her little hands behind her back, her tone unusually serious: "Brother, what you're talking about isn't technology anymore. This is..."

"Cultivating immortality." Li Yichen picked up on her words, chuckled self-deprecatingly, and sat back down on the edge of the bed. "An ordinary mortal, relying on his knowledge of physics, managed to deduce an immortal cultivation technique. Sounds impressive, right?"

Ling'er nodded.

Li Yichen's smile vanished. He raised his hand and swiped on the screen, bringing up the lifespan data of the gel particles. The number was displayed coldly at the top of the screen.

10 to the power of negative 17 seconds.

"The problem is that this thing only exists for a fraction of a second." Li Yichen leaned against the headboard, raising his hand to rub his bulging temples.

"Even if our collider could capture it, it would disappear a trillion times before you blink. Lock it down with a machine? Currently, there's no equipment on Earth capable of operating on that timescale."

He sighed, his voice hoarse: "Trying to perceive and control it with your physical body? That's wishful thinking. The transmission speed of human nerve signals is a little over a hundred meters per second, which is as slow as a snail crawling compared to a billionth of a second."

The room fell silent, with only the faint buzzing sound emanating from the holographic projection on the wall.

One person and one AI began brainstorming around the core question of "how to prolong the existence time of the glue ball particles".

"What about using a superconducting magnetic field for high-dimensional confinement?" Ling'er brought up a magnetic field model. "We can increase the magnetic field strength to 10,000 Tesla and create a cage for it in a vacuum chamber."

"No way." Li Yichen glanced at the model. "The strong interaction doesn't work with electromagnetism, and the magnetic field has zero binding force on the pure gluon state."

"What about gravitational lensing? Or using the gravitational field of a black hole to create a local time dilation effect?"

"We can't create such a large gravitational field. Even if we could, Earth wouldn't be able to withstand it; it would be torn apart first," Li Yichen shook his head in rejection.

Ling'er put forward seven solutions in succession, ranging from quantum entanglement locking to high-energy boson interference, and Li Yichen sentenced each one to death with mathematical formulas within three minutes.

Li Yichen himself also put forward several ideas.

"What if we used the extreme energy density of a matter-antimatter reactor to maintain a high-energy environment?" He pulled up the reactor's energy level diagram on the screen, "concentrating the energy into a pinhead-sized point and forcibly extending its life."

Ling'er closed her eyes, activating the full computing power in the background. A few seconds later, she opened her eyes and shook her head.

"I've simulated it. Even if you put all the energy of an entire matter-antimatter reactor into it, you can only extend the existence time of the gel ball to one billionth of a second."

One billionth of a second, on a macro scale, is still a useless piece of data that can't be used for anything.

The discussion reached a dead end. Li Yichen stared at the chandelier on the ceiling, remaining silent for a long time.

Ling'er jumped onto his shoulder and whispered, "Brother, how about... we put it aside for now? The planet-destroying cannons and capital ships on the far side of the moon are the most urgent tasks. We can study the 'glue ball' project after the alien crisis is resolved."

"No." Li Yichen interrupted her, his tone stubborn. "Once this thing is mastered, it will be more useful than building a hundred capital ships. As long as humanity controls it, alien fleets will be nothing."

He rolled over, buried his face in the soft pillow, and muttered in a low voice, "But you're right, I really have no clue right now. My head is about to explode. I'm going to sleep now, and tomorrow I'll go to the Academy of Sciences to see if those old men have any new ideas."

Ling'er waved her hand to turn off the holographic projection, plunging the entire room into darkness.

"Goodnight, brother," she whispered in the darkness.

At 6:30 a.m. sharp, my phone alarm went off.

Li Yichen got out of bed, washed up, and went downstairs.

An enticing aroma wafted from the restaurant on the first floor. On the table were steaming bowls of congee with preserved egg and lean pork, two baskets of freshly steamed xiaolongbao (soup dumplings), and several dishes of delicate pickles.

Zhou Dahai was wiping the stove in the kitchen when he heard footsteps. He turned around, smiled, and greeted him, "Good morning, Mr. Li. There's still some hot soy milk in the pot. Would you like a bowl?"

"No need, porridge is fine. Thank you for your hard work, Uncle Zhou." Li Yichen pulled out a chair, sat down, and took a couple of spoonfuls of porridge.

A series of hurried footsteps echoed down the stairs. Miao Miao, wearing a pink bunny pajama and with her hair all messy from sleep, ran down the stairs like a little rascal. She dashed to the dining table and plopped down in the chair next to Li Yichen.

The little girl didn't even pick up chopsticks; she simply reached out and snatched a small steamed bun from the plate in front of Li Yichen, stuffing it into her mouth.

"Eat slowly, no one's going to take it from you." Li Yichen took out a tissue and wiped the grease from the corner of her mouth.

"Is my brother going out to work again today?" Miao Miao asked, her mouth full of steamed buns, her big eyes fixed on him.

"Yeah, I'm going to meet some old men in the scientific community, have a chat, and then I'll be back." Li Yichen reached out and ruffled her messy hair. "You stay home and listen to your sisters. I'll take you out for ice cream when I get back tonight."

"You keep your word!" Miao Miao stretched out her chubby little finger.

Li Yichen smiled and extended his little finger, hooking it with hers: "Pinky promise."

After finishing breakfast, Li Yichen changed into a dark gray casual suit, picked up his car keys, and went out.

He sat in the driver's seat of the white Tank 700 and pressed the start button. The engine emitted a deep roar.

"Navigate to the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences." Li Yichen fastened his seatbelt.

The car's screen lit up, and Ling'er automatically planned the optimal route. The vehicle smoothly drove out of the Tomson Riviera underground parking garage and merged into the morning rush hour traffic of Shanghai.

Sunlight streams through the glass curtain walls of skyscrapers, illuminating the wide asphalt road. People hurry along the roadside; the city is awakening.

Li Yichen rested one hand on the steering wheel, his mind still replaying the data and formulas from last night.

Ling'er's voice echoed in his mind, tinged with a hint of teasing: "Brother, do you really think those academicians can provide you with new ideas? They haven't even fully sorted out those basic data yet. You'll just be wasting your time going there."

Li Yichen looked at the red light at the intersection ahead, stepped on the brake, and curled the corners of his mouth upward: "I'm not going there to listen to their ideas."

"What are they going there for? To inspect work?"

"I went to listen to them argue." Li Yichen tapped his fingers on the steering wheel. "Those old men are all incredibly stubborn. When they start arguing, all sorts of unorthodox ideas come out. What if one of their words gives me a spark of inspiration? In scientific research, sometimes it's just that little spark that's needed."

When the green light came on, Li Yichen released the brake, stepped on the gas, and the vehicle merged into the main road.

An hour later, the Tank 700 drove into the street where the Shanghai branch of the Chinese Academy of Sciences is located.

From a distance, Li Yichen could see a row of black SUVs with military license plates parked at the main gate of the branch campus. Several heavily armed guards stood on both sides of the steps, the level of security was much higher than usual.

Old Zhou, wearing a wrinkled white lab coat and with his hair a mess like a bird's nest, was pacing back and forth on the steps. He was holding a roll of printing paper in his hand, glancing down at it every now and then, muttering to himself.

Upon seeing the white Tank 700 approaching, Old Zhou felt as if he had seen a savior and immediately started running to meet it.

Before the car had even come to a complete stop, Old Zhou slammed his hand on the passenger-side window, making a loud slapping sound.

Li Yichen lowered the car window, but hadn't had time to remove the car key.

"Academician Li! Hurry, hurry, hurry!" Old Zhou gasped for breath, sticking his head into the car window, his eyes bloodshot, his voice cracking with excitement.

"We ran another dataset at 4 AM last night! Guess what?"

Old Zhou shook the roll of printing paper in his hand so hard it made a rustling sound, and his spittle almost sprayed onto Li Yichen's face.

"A new signal has appeared next to the resonance peak of the 0++ state!"