Chapter 546: Heat Death (4K)

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 Robinson, I learned how to use the high-pressure gas cylinder, and discovered our bodies had been replaced with mechanical ones, linking the cylinder—lung—stamina in a chain.

But this also brought a new problem: atmospheric composition.

Li Cheng said casually, adjusted his reclining position, and pulled the surrounding stands toward himself.

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

The atmospheric composition of this world, from highest to lowest, 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 On Earth, oxygen’s proportion has been replaced by helium.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 a toxin.

Oxygen and water are deadly poisons.

Wan Li Feng Dao’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 seem to have made no effort whatsoever to recycle the gas.

Li Cheng spoke to himself, adjusted the prism on the stand, and 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—proving only one thing—

“The importance of the high-pressure pure helium cylinder isn’t the pure helium—it’s the pressure.”

Li Cheng gripped the control rod on the stand, remotely operated the medical robotic arm, and gently pried open the back of his own skull.

Mian Yue sucked in a sharp breath; Claudia involuntarily gasped—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 like a brush. Under microscopic magnification, each filament bore even smaller elliptical leaves.

High-pressure helium expelled from the bottled 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 hundreds of millions of microscopic leaves to open and close at speeds invisible to the naked eye.

Like a lightning bolt flashing through his mind, Wan Li Feng Dao 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 mechanical calculators—airflow moves the filaments, filaments move the leaves, leaves oscillate at ultra-high frequency under the gas flow,

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

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 mirrored spectacle, speaking calmly: “Gold has exceptional ductility and flexibility, able to withstand the leaves’ high-frequency oscillations. The golden fragments the priest 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 life potion, right?”

“Yes. The Arena System’s rules can penetrate Dreamland; theoretically, that life potion 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 erased to zero.

Repairing the core processor now only fixes the hardware—it cannot restore the computational state.”

Li Cheng turned the microscope knob, observing the leaf motion closely: “This is also what shopkeeper Robinson meant—that town residents must regularly replace their gas cylinders, never stopping breathing, or they immediately die and become vegetative.”

“.”

Half the mystery hanging over the players had been solved; Mian Yue fell silent, 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 bottled lung: “I originally thought fatigue came from the depletion of high-pressure gas in the cylinder.

But after dissection, I found the cylinder provides power solely to the brain—not the limbs.

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

The golden leaves in 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 from the gas well 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: thought slows down.”

Li Cheng pulled out a high-speed camera, filming the amplitude of the golden leaves’ motion—clearly showing their oscillation speed was subtly slowing.

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

Ironically, every time the gas well pumps, every breath taken by a resident, every thought processed by the 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’ 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 Zijiu ?”

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

“It’s difficult—or rather, meaningless.”

Li Cheng said: “There’s no solar energy here, no fossil fuels.

All energy—including the hydrogen for the hydrogen engines—comes from geothermal energy provided by the underground chamber. In other words, if a machine could compress air, its energy source itself is the underground chamber.

Compressing one cubic meter of air consumes more pressure differential than one cubic meter of air provides.”

“The Second Law of Thermodynamics, entropy increase.”

Wan Li Feng Dao spat the words through clenched teeth: “In irreversible thermodynamic processes, the infinitesimal increment of entropy is always greater than zero. In natural processes, the total disorder—or entropy—of an isolated system never decreases.”

“Exactly.”

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

The pressure differential only shrinks—it never grows.

Thus, the inhabitants of this world inevitably head toward death—their thought speed slows, and the motion of all objects appears to accelerate.

For example, objects fall rapidly, clocks spin wildly.

They know this clearly, so they made their choice.”

Mian Yue took a deep breath, suddenly understanding: “Shopkeeper Robinson mentioned the ‘Return Sect’—they’re obsessed with launching terrorist attacks on residents who refuse to stay indoors.

Logically, the sect’s doctrine must be to reduce outdoor activity, lower consumption, and slow the shrinking of the pressure differential.”

Wan Li Feng Dao mused: “In the castle hall, there are so many town residents’ corpses.

They chose to connect themselves directly to the castle’s gas well via tubes—so long as even a sliver of pressure differential remained between the well and the atmosphere, they could sustain thought until their final second.”

“Just stall. I know I’m playing dead, but I’m stalling anyway.”

Li Cheng shrugged and continued: “Our stamina drain rate hasn’t changed—it’s just that our thought speed has slowed, making us subjectively feel increasingly exhausted.

Back to the topic: this operating table is fully equipped, capable of observing the back of a person’s skull and using robotic arms to open the cranium.

Given the entire procedure can be performed independently, the table’s designer clearly intended to dissect himself.

He succeeded, becoming the first person to discover the mechanical residents’ brain mechanics and this world’s ultimate secret.

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

Beyond despairing suicide, he must have moved the table to city hall, revealed his discovery to the public, hoping collective wisdom could find a way out.

Yet from the emergence of the Return Sect and the fate of the town’s residents, we know:

All hopes of escape failed.

The inventor of the operating table—the astronaut Will—still failed to save everyone, including his sister and his friend Robinson.”

Mian Yue couldn’t help asking: “What about fusion engines? Nuclear fusion, given sufficient fuel, is theoretically near-infinite energy.

If, as the jump-rope girl said, the gargoyles were invented by astronaut Will, he could’ve used this technology to restore the pressure differential—at least delaying heat death by millions of years.”

“Will did invent nuclear fusion technology—but not here, not now. He invented it long after leaving his homeworld.”

Li Cheng said: “Dreamland contains both truth and falsehood. The priest possessed by the mechanical python was likely false.

But Will, wearing a spacesuit, chiseling the metal dome with an ice pick—this was likely true—

In his final moments, when all residents had already suffered brain death, Will, alone, kept digging the tunnel.

He had long abandoned hope, mechanically digging, until—finally—the tunnel broke through.

The instant the metal dome was pierced, the pressure differential between inside and outside surged. Gas flowed continuously into the dome, and all vegetative residents’ brains began functioning again.

But the golden leaves, having been reset to zero, could no longer carry any meaningful information.

As the sole survivor, Will left the metal dome, wandered the Arena’s physical realm, and by chance became a player, growing stronger—Lv10, Lv20, Lv40.

But 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 Dreamland, attempting to make amends.”

Lv40—that term stirred memories; Claudia exclaimed in shock: “The Star Ring Ancient Battlefield!

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

That Lv40 superhuman was Will.”

“More precisely, Will is the former self of that superhuman.”

Li Cheng corrected: “The Alpha Python dwells in the Star Ring Ancient Battlefield; it once battled Michael. It shares the same origin as the gargoyles.

Combining all this information, it’s not hard to deduce: the Alpha Python and astronaut Will are two aspects of the same being—both fragments of that Lv40.”

The former inherited an extraordinary physique, the latter inherited thought and personality.

That is why Alpha clings relentlessly to the astronaut,

That is why it can follow the astronaut into the same dream.」

Li Cheng manipulated the medical robotic arm, aligned the mirror, and reattached his removed skull cap; he said calmly: “The mission name ‘Reset’ has completed the ‘Zero’ phase—only ‘Restart’ remains.”

He stepped off the operating table; Mian Yue instinctively drew her ice pick and asked: “What are you going to do?”

Li Cheng replied calmly: “Find Will, and together, break through the dome.”

“Your air tank is nearly empty.”

Wan Li Feng Dao fell silent for a moment, his gaze sharpening; “Take it.”

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

“It’s up to you. Don’t let me die in vain.”

As his words ended, Wan Li Feng Dao’s gas supply ceased; his eyes lost all light, and he slid slowly down the wall to the floor.