Chapter 526

Since entering this town, I've felt strange—why are all of us growing increasingly exhausted, with our stamina draining rapidly?

Later, from the shopkeeper Luo Binxun, I learned how to use the high-pressure gas cylinder, and discovered our bodies had been replaced with machinery, linking the cylinder—the lung—the stamina—into one system.

But this also brought a new problem: atmospheric composition.

Li Cheng spoke casually, adjusting his reclining position and pulling the surrounding stands toward himself.

Each stand held either a prism, or a microscope, or a medical robotic arm.

The atmospheric composition of this world, from highest to lowest proportion, is nitrogen, helium, argon, hydrogen, oxygen, ozone. On Earth, oxygen's proportion has been replaced by helium.

This is easy to understand—for silicon-based mechanical life, oxygen, which oxidizes metal, is a deadly poison, and water, which corrodes metal, is also a toxin.

Oxygen and water are poisons.

Wan Li Fengdao's pupils contracted—he immediately thought of the dry moat in front of the castle.

At the riverbed's bottom lay a pungent, pale yellow residue—not water, but an acidic liquid like sulfuric acid.

Helium's chemical properties are extremely stable, so mechanical life uses it as their primary breathing gas. The interesting part is that despite the high-pressure cylinders containing pure helium, the town's residents appear to have made no effort whatsoever toward gas recycling.

Li Cheng spoke to himself, adjusting the prism on the stand; through several mirrors' reflections, he could clearly see the back of his own skull.

Claudia's heart stirred—helium atoms have only two electrons in their outer shell, making them chemically inert, reacting with only a few elements under extreme pressure and low temperature.

The town's residents, and players assimilated by Dreamland, inhale helium and exhale helium.

Considering the town has already developed hydrogen-powered vehicles, gas wells, electricity, and other technologies, they could easily have modified their bodies to recover exhaled helium or re-purify it from the atmosphere.

They didn't do it—this proves only one thing—

"The importance of the high-pressure pure helium cylinder lies not in the pure helium, but in the high pressure."

After Li Cheng finished speaking, he gripped the control rod on the stand and remotely operated the medical robotic arm to gently pry open the back of his own skull.

Mian Yue gasped sharply; Claudia involuntarily cried out—inside Li Cheng's cranium, there was no wrinkled gray matter of a brain, but a mechanical structure far more intricate than a watch face or a difference engine, by a factor of millions.

As expected.

Li Cheng's face showed no surprise; he controlled the robotic arm to gently separate the outer layer of the mechanical brain, revealing its core structure.

The structure was a mesh woven from metal threads, above which hung dense golden filaments resembling brushes; under microscopic magnification, each filament bore even smaller elliptical leaves.

High-pressure helium expelled from the bottle-lung was slowed through the trachea, then flowed into the brain's "blood vessels"—the capillaries.

The capillaries continuously delivered the airflow to the metal mesh, causing the golden filaments to sway, driving billions of microscopic leaves to open and close at speeds invisible to the naked eye.

Like a lightning bolt flashing through his mind, Wan Li Fengdao shuddered and exclaimed: "Logic gates?!"

"Precisely."

Li Cheng said cheerfully: "Players' bodies have been assimilated by Dreamland into the same structure as the town's residents.

Their brains are extraordinarily precise and complex mechanical calculators—airflow moves the filaments, filaments move the leaves, leaves are driven by airflow to open and close at ultra-high frequencies,

Each opening and closing creates a vortex, causing surrounding leaves to shift, switching between AND, OR, NOT states.

Billions upon billions of golden leaves operate every second; the next state depends on the previous calculation, forming stable memory, emotion, even personality."

"."

At this moment, Claudia's shock mirrored reading about Qin Shi Huang's human computer in "Three-Body Problem"; she took a deep breath, as if feeling countless leaves trembling inside her own brain.

Li Cheng admired the spectacle in the mirror, speaking calmly: "Gold has exceptional ductility and flexibility, capable of withstanding the high-frequency oscillation of the leaves. The golden fragments the priest in the church spat out upon death were, in fact, his core processor."

"Wait," Mian Yue remembered something and asked seriously: "When Lei Yesi was injured, he also spat out golden fragments. But you gave him a bottle of Life Elixir, right?"

"Yes. The Arena System's rules can penetrate Dreamland; theoretically, that Life Elixir did heal Lei Yesi's brain.

He remains in a vegetative state because, after his injury, no gas flowed into his brain anymore,

All golden leaves in the mesh stopped moving, their countless 0s and 1s cleared to zero.

Repairing the core processor now only fixes the processor itself—it cannot restore the computational state."

Li Cheng turned the microscope's knob, carefully observing the leaf movement: "This is also what shopkeeper Luo Binxun meant—that town residents must regularly replace their gas cylinders, never stopping breathing, or they immediately die and become vegetative."

"."

Most of the mystery hanging over the players had been unraveled; Mian Yue fell silent for a moment, then asked hoarsely: "But there's one question—why is our stamina draining faster and faster?"

"The correct question is: why do we feel our stamina is draining faster and faster?"

Li Cheng said calmly, pointing the robotic arm at his bottle-lung: "I previously thought fatigue came from the depletion of high-pressure gas in the cylinder.

But after dissection, I found the cylinder provides power solely and exclusively to the brain—nothing to do with the limbs.

We feel fatigue because of pressure differentials—when two regions have differing pressures, the high-pressure area exerts force on the adjacent low-pressure area, pushing fluid from high to low until equilibrium is reached.

The golden leaves inside the brain are extremely delicate and cannot withstand strong airflow; thus, high-pressure gas from the cylinder is reduced in pressure twice—through the trachea and capillaries—before reaching the brain.

The metal dome acts like a sealed iron sphere; every breath taken by the town's residents converts high-pressure gas mined from below into low-pressure gas.

Gas gradually accumulates beneath the metal dome, slowly and steadily increasing ambient pressure.

As the pressure differential shrinks, while internal brain pressure remains unchanged, the consequence is that thought speed slows down."

Li Cheng pulled out a high-speed camera, filming the amplitude of the golden leaves' movement—clearly capturing their oscillation speed subtly decreasing.

He said calmly: "For the inhabitants of this world, air is not the source of life—pressure differential is. Pressure differential drives thought, triggers cognition, sustains life.

Ironically, every time the gas well nods, every breath taken by a resident, every thought in a brain,

Shrinks the pressure differential between the underground gas reservoir and the surface atmosphere, pushing this world toward inevitable death."

Mian Yue murmured: "Reset to zero—so 'reset to zero' refers to the pressure differential."

"Wait," Claudia couldn't help asking: "Excluding those gargoyle statues, this place's technology level is at least equivalent to mid-20th-century Earth. Didn't they ever consider自救?"

"For example, using machines to recompress atmospheric air and reinject high-pressure gas back into the underground chamber to restore the pressure differential."

"It's difficult—or rather, meaningless."

Li Cheng said: "This place has no solar energy, no fossil fuels,

All energy—including the hydrogen in hydrogen engines—comes from geothermal energy provided by the underground chamber. In other words, if a machine existed to compress air, its energy source itself would be the underground chamber.

Compressing one cubic meter of air consumes more than one cubic meter's worth of pressure differential."

"The second law of thermodynamics, the principle of entropy increase,"

Wan Li Fengdao spat the words through clenched teeth, "In an irreversible thermodynamic process, the infinitesimal increment of entropy is always greater than zero. In natural processes, the total disorder of an isolated system—entropy—never decreases."

"That's it."

Li Cheng snapped his fingers, "In a closed environment, entropy only increases, never decreases."

The pressure difference only grows smaller, never larger."

"Thus, the inhabitants of this world are inevitably headed toward death—their thought processes slow ever more, while the perceived speed of all other objects accelerates."

"For example, objects fall rapidly, clocks spin wildly."

"They knew this clearly, so they made their choice."

Mian Yue drew a deep breath, suddenly understanding. "The shopkeeper Luo Binxun mentioned the 'Return Sect,' saying they delighted in launching terrorist attacks against all residents who refused to stay indoors."

"As the name suggests, the doctrine of the Return Sect likely urges all residents to reduce outings and lower consumption, to slow the shrinking of the pressure difference."

Wan Li Fengdao mused, "In the castle hall, there were so many corpses of townspeople."

"They chose to connect themselves directly to the castle's air intake shafts with hoses—so long as even a trace of pressure difference remained between the shaft and the atmosphere, they could sustain thought until their final second."

"Just drag it out. I know I'm playing deadman's stance, but I'm dragging it out anyway."

Li Cheng shrugged and continued, "Our physical energy consumption rate hasn't changed—only our thinking has slowed, making us subjectively feel increasingly exhausted."

"Back to the point: this operating table is fully equipped—it can observe the back of the skull of the person lying on it and use mechanical arms to open the cranial vault."

"Considering the entire procedure can be completed independently, the designer of this table originally intended to dissect himself."

"He succeeded, becoming the first person to discover the operating principles of the mechanical residents' brains—and the world's ultimate secret."

"When he learned the world itself was heading toward heat death, what choice would he make?"

"Aside from despairing suicide, he would surely move the operating table to city hall and reveal his discovery to the public, hoping collective wisdom might find a way to break the deadlock."

"Yet from the emergence of the Return Sect and the fate of the townspeople, we know:"

"All hopes of breaking the deadlock failed."

"The inventor of the operating table—the astronaut Wei—still failed to save anyone, including his sister and his friend Luo Binxun."

Mian Yue couldn't help asking, "What about the fusion engine? Nuclear fusion engines, given sufficient fuel, are theoretically near-infinite energy sources."

"If, as the jump-rope girl said, the gargoyle was invented by the astronaut Wei, he could have used this technology to restore the pressure difference—at least delay heat death by millions of years."

"Wil did invent nuclear fusion technology—but not here, not now. Only long after leaving his homeworld."

Li Cheng said, "The Land of Dreams has both truth and falsehood. The church priest possessed by the mechanical python was almost certainly false."

"But Wil, wearing a spacesuit, chiseling at the metal dome with an ice pick—was almost certainly true—"

"At life's end, when all residents had already suffered brain death, Wil, alone, kept digging the tunnel."

"He no longer held any hope—only dug mechanically. Yet, the tunnel broke through."

"The instant the metal dome was pierced, the pressure difference between inside and outside surged sharply; air rushed continuously beneath the dome, and the brains of all vegetative residents began functioning once more."

"But the golden leaves reset to zero could no longer carry any meaningful information."

"As the sole survivor, Wil left the metal dome and wandered the killing field, and by chance became a player, growing stronger—Lv10, Lv20, Lv40."

"Yet the grief and pain from that time were so intense, even after countless years, he could not let go."

"He chose, at the end of his life, to come to the Land of Dreams, seeking to make amends."

Lv40—the term stirred memories. Claudia gasped, "The Star Ring Ancient Battlefield!"

"The headless reindeer on the green train mentioned that tens of thousands of years ago, a transcendent being equivalent to a human Lv40 fought an interstellar war there. Both sides tore space, melted rock layers, and hurled landmasses into space."

"That Lv40 transcendent was Wil."

"More precisely, Wil was the former self of that transcendent being."

Li Cheng corrected, "The Alpha Python dwells in the Star Ring Ancient Battlefield; it once fought Michael. It shares the same origin as the gargoyle."

"Combining all this information, it's not hard to deduce: the Alpha Python and the astronaut Wil are two aspects of one entity—both are parts of that Lv40 being."

"The former inherited the transcendent physique; the latter inherited the mind and personality."

"That's why the Alpha relentlessly pursues the astronaut."

"That's why it can follow the astronaut into the same dream."

Li Cheng manipulated the medical robotic arm, reattaching his own removed cranial vault to the mirror, and said calmly, "The task name 'Reset' has answered the 'Reset' portion—only 'Restart' remains."

He stepped off the operating table. Mian Yue instinctively pulled out the ice pick and asked, "What will you do?"

Li Cheng replied calmly, "Find Wil. And together, pierce the dome."

"Your oxygen tank is nearly empty."

Wan Li Fengdao fell silent for a moment, his gaze sharpening. "Take it."

He withdrew his quest item—the four-dimensional cube—and alongside it, handed Li Cheng his own left-side bottled lung.

"Depend on you. Don't let me die in vain."

As his words ended, Wan Li Fengdao's gas supply ceased. His eyes lost all luster, and he slid slowly down the wall to the floor.