Chapter 336: Antimatter Energy Device·Origin Code Reward

Zhao Jianguo crouched in the corner of the tool room, pinching a corner of the entry pass in his hand; the paper edge was frayed, as if it had been rubbed many times. He didn't rush to throw it away, casually shoved it into a gap in the workbench drawer, pressing down half a pencil lead. The overhead bulb shone brightly; the electric wire was the one he'd replaced the day before, much more stable than before, no longer flickering.

The door creaked open from outside; Jia Dongxu poked half his body in, an old work uniform draped over his shoulder, pant legs rolled up to his calves, dusty. He glanced around, his gaze finally landing on Zhao Jianguo's face: "This place is harder to find than the factory boiler room."

"Anything?" Zhao Jianguo stood up, patting his pants.

"It's not a small matter." Jia Dongxu stepped inside, casually closing the door behind him, and pulled out an iron tin box from his pocket—palm-sized, with copper-reinforced corners, looking like a modified old radio parts box—"I've been tinkering with something, up three nights straight without sleep."

Zhao Jianguo took the box, hefted it—light but solid-feeling. He unscrewed the two side screws, lifted the lid, and saw a disc-shaped device set inside, a black crystal at its center surrounded by fine coils; a faint light crept along the patterns.

"Antimatter energy device?" he read the tiny characters etched on the bottom, then looked up at him: "Where did you learn this?"

"Self-taught." Jia Dongxu scratched the back of his head, his hair a mess like a bird's nest: "Those diagrams you got from signing in lately—I peeked at them, then rummaged through the drafts you tossed in the waste paper bin, pieced them together over three days, and finally got the energy circuit connected."

"You've got guts." Zhao Jianguo grinned: "Dare to mess with my stuff."

"If I don't move, who will?" Jia Dongxu spread his hands: "You're always sneaking around underground, locking the iron gate—do you think everyone else is blind? Besides, if I really wanted to steal the tech, I'd have traded it for a promotion long ago; I wouldn't be running here to you."

Zhao Jianguo stayed silent, lowering his gaze to the device, his fingertip lightly touching the edge coil. The moment he made contact, a translucent panel popped up in the air, characters appearing: 【Detected high-purity antimatter energy core, meets activation conditions. Sign-in reward issued: Origin Code Expansion Pack (undecoded).】

"Huh?" he raised an eyebrow: "The system's being generous this time."

"What system?" Jia Dongxu leaned in: "Do you still have a broadcasting station here?"

"It's in my mind." Zhao Jianguo answered offhand, eyes still on the panel. The new reward was a grey‑blue data sphere hovering in the center of the interface, with a line of small text below prompting: requires manual decoding, about six hours.

"Wait six hours?" he muttered, then tapped confirm.

The data sphere began to spin, a thin beam of light projecting onto the wall, automatically generating a decryption progress bar with numbers slowly ticking. Zhao Jianguo pulled over a wooden stool and sat down; Jia Dongxu moved an oil drum over, and the two faced the wall, like watching an outdoor movie.

"What can this thing do?" Jia Dongxu asked.

"I don't know." Zhao Jianguo answered frankly: "Just wait for it to pop out on its own."

"Aren't you afraid it'll blow up?" Jia Dongxu turned to look at him: "What if inside it hides an 'destroy Earth' command?"

"If it really existed, we couldn't stop it now." Zhao Jianguo shrugged: "If it wanted to screw me over, it would have given me poisonous mushrooms to eat at my first sign‑in, and I wouldn't be alive today."

Jia Dongxu laughed: "True. Everyone in the Siheyuan knows you're tough."

The two fell silent; the only sound in the room was the faint hum of electricity and the ticking of the numbers slowly updating on the wall. Outside, the sky grew dim, the shadow of the locust tree creeping up the window frame like a slowly extending hand.

After a while, Jia Dongxu suddenly spoke: "You say… is our world designed by someone?"

Zhao Jianguo turned his head to look at him: "Why ask this all of a sudden?"

"Just a feeling." Jia Dongxu rubbed his nose: "When I was working on this device, some formulas I'd never studied—yet as soon as I drew them they were right. It's as if my brain already knew them, just needing someone to point it out. Don't you find that strange?"

Zhao Jianguo didn't reply, his gaze returning to the wall. The progress bar reached seventy‑three percent, then suddenly stalled, and a new prompt popped up: 【Decoding interrupted, civilization traceback module detected—force extraction?】

He tapped "Yes."

The light and shadow on the wall shifted abruptly, no longer numbers but a series of flowing images—stars being born, life sprouting, primitive tribes, writing appearing, cities rising… the timeline advanced all the way, finally freezing on a blue planet.

【Origin Code Record: Human civilization is the 37th observation specimen; the initial gene sequence was uniformly issued by the central database of the universe; cultural evolution is regulated by 217 latent intervention points; purpose: to observe the self‑transcendence ability of intelligent life under limited resources.】

The room was so quiet you could hear breathing.

Zhao Jianguo stared at that line for a good ten‑plus seconds, then suddenly chuckled: "I was wondering why I always felt something was off."

"What do you mean?" Jia Dongxu's voice sounded a bit tight.

"We didn't grow up naturally." Zhao Jianguo pointed at the image: "We're lab rats raised in someone's laboratory, only the cage is bigger—called Earth."

Jia Dongxu opened his mouth, but no words came out. He instinctively glanced at the antimatter device, as if it had suddenly come alive.

"Then… can we still be considered human?" he asked quietly.

"Why not?" Zhao Jianguo countered: "Lab rats can run mazes and press levers for candy in experiments; smart ones still get written up in papers. We're still here tinkering with energy and decoding—no matter who set the game, as long as we can act and think, we haven't lost."

He stood up, walked to the wall, and touched the projection. The image wavered slightly, like ripples on water.

"Besides," his tone eased, "if we really are test subjects, that means this model works pretty well—otherwise they'd have shut down the server long ago."

Jia Dongxu froze for a moment, then laughed too: "Following your logic, we should be thanking them for providing the venue?"

"No electricity bill to pay." Zhao Jianguo spread his hands: "Quite a bargain."

After they finished laughing, the atmosphere relaxed. The decryption progress on the wall resumed, slowly completing the final steps. Finally, the image froze on a chain of golden symbols, with a note below: 【Civilization sovereignty unlock condition: complete three cross‑dimensional energy closed‑loop verifications. Current progress: 0/3】.

Zhao Jianguo stared at that line, saying nothing.

Jia Dongxu, however, perked up: "Three times? Sounds doable. Let's first get this antimatter device running and see if it can power the whole Siheyuan."

"You're dreaming." Zhao Jianguo shook his head: "This thing can't even be hooked up to a light bulb right now—the energy's too intense; if we lose control, it could lift the whole street."

"Then let's try a little at a time." Jia Dongxu, unwilling to back down: "Anyway, we're not in a hurry."

Zhao Jianguo glanced at him and suddenly felt this guy was different today. Previously, Jia Dongxu came to him either to be evaluated for advancement or to request a position change, always with some ulterior motive. Today, though, he was purely after a "possibly nonexistent" truth, having pulled three all‑nighters.

"What are you after?" he asked.

"Just to understand." Jia Dongxu sat upright: "Having lived half a lifetime, you ought to know why you're alive, right?"

Zhao Jianguo didn't ask further. He turned and walked to the workbench, pulled open the bottom drawer, took out a worn notebook, and set it on the table. The cover read "Experiment Record 001", the page corners curled, the paper yellowed.

"From tomorrow on, this device is your responsibility." He said: "Log the data every day, don't miss any items. If there's not enough power, I'll greet the power bureau. If we're short‑handed, you pick two reliable workers from the factory. But there's one condition——"

He paused, his gaze turning serious: "If something goes wrong, we'll bear it together. Don't let it end with the machine blowing up and you claiming you did it alone."

Jia Dongxu grinned: "All right. If it blows up, we'll go up together."

Zhao Jianguo also laughed, raising a hand to pat his shoulder.

The projection on the wall gradually faded, shrinking to a point of light that vanished into the air. The room returned to silence, only the antimatter device still faintly glowing, like a sleeping heart.

Zhao Jianguo walked to the door, rested his hand on the iron gate handle, looked back, and said: "Eight a. m. tomorrow, we start work."

Jia Dongxu nodded, still sitting on the oil drum, staring at the device, motionless.

Zhao Jianguo opened the door; the night wind rushed in, flipping a page of the notebook on the table with a rustle.