Chapter 523: Absolute Zero

Stars in the universe are merely specks of dust, and the center of a galaxy often contains a black hole of enormous mass, which drives countless stars to move.

At that center, the computer head detected a fluctuation of ultra-high entropy, which is why Zhang Jie went to personally inspect it.

Passing through countless star systems occupied by the Heavenly Disaster, they headed toward the massive black hole at the center; the closer they got, the more intense the ominous feeling became.

The Intelligent Machine Empress, with her strangely shaped mecha, protected Zhang Jie; the black hole ahead was already visible to the naked eye, and its gravity could be felt from far away.

But that wasn't the key point; the huge black hole ahead had already been corroded by the Heavenly Disaster, its crimson accretion disk proclaiming chaos, surrounded by countless blood-red warships, all of which were entropic blood disasters.

The Intelligent Machine Empress released a signal wave disguised as the Heavenly Disaster, which allowed Zhang Jie to approach it.

"In the middle.... there's something!"

The Intelligent Machine Empress first noticed the anomaly, and with the ship's observation equipment she also saw a tiny dot at the black hole's center.

As the camera kept zooming in, the dot became ever clearer, and Zhang Jie's gaze shifted from initial doubt to shock.

"That is!"

"Chen!!!"

Zhang Jie could never forget that face, but he couldn't understand why that person was inside.

Normally, after entering a black hole, external time flows by at an extremely rapid pace, because any object's mass distorts time, and the greater the mass, the stronger the temporal distortion.

Staying inside for just one second, when you come out the world would likely have been destroyed countless years ago.

Moreover, not even light can escape a black hole, so how could he see the other party?

"What the hell!"

Zhang Jie furrowed his brow, opened the equipment on the flying ship and began data collection; just that terrifying gravity alone is beyond what a human body can withstand, being able to do so already defies common sense.

But in the universe, what counts as common sense really isn't common sense; many unknown things, just like now, are only understood through research.

"Hurry up, my disguise wave frequency can last at most twelve hours."

"I'll do my best."

The entropy data around them was being collected at high speed, but in fact entropy is not some imagined energy; it is something calculated through a series of algorithms.

"The entropy here is surprisingly low."

"The same inside the black hole."

Zhang Jie looked up, and though it shouldn't matter, at that moment the human on the screen was actually turning his head to look at him!

A single glance spanned an unknown length of time; Zhang Jie even didn't know how long the other had been looking at him!

He showed a smile, he extended a finger toward Zhang Jie....

boom!!!

With a loud bang, Zhang Jie felt his blood instantly lose temperature, his body torn apart in an instant, as if his flesh were crushed into atoms and scattered in the vacuum.

"!!!"

Zhang Jie's main body awoke somewhere; one could say each of his bodies felt this pain, each of him gasping heavily.

Just a single encounter and he was instantly killed, with no sensation, no reaction time—including the Intelligent Machine Empress, who was likewise instantly killed.

As the Intelligent Machine Empress's indignant data was downloaded back, she remembered nothing, and Zhang Jie couldn't even ask her what she had discovered at the time.

Unless, let him go there again.

"Did I die???"

The Intelligent Machine Empress looked utterly incredulous, thinking she could at least slaughter in all directions.

No matter how clueless that guy is, Zhang Jie knows this matter is a huge problem!

Just as he was about to go find Yuan to talk about this, the department in charge of monitoring entropy happened to send a message.

"'Council Chair! We've detected that the universe's total entropy is constantly decreasing!!!'"

"'Could it be! Could it really be that someone has achieved the concept of reverse entropy!!!'"

"Reverse entropy? No, Zhang Jie knows this isn't difficult, because entropy represents the degree of material disorder—meaning tidying up your own messy little nest counts as reverse entropy."

"The hard part is lowering the entropy of the entire universe; that is true reverse entropy, but it's absolutely beyond what today's civilization can achieve."

"It's not reverse entropy, unless there is a super-advanced civilization in this world."

"On alert! This is the Heavenly Disaster's move!"

Zhang Jie urgently contacted the computer head, asking it to use anchoring to try to destroy that place; the God‑Seeker scoops up whatever it can there.

Due to limited computing power, the computer head as the main control AI dare not overuse its power, which means it is far from omniscient and omnipotent.

Only the thing newly built by Zhang Jie, with a flawless AI template imported, could possibly become omniscient.

As for whether a super‑advanced civilization exists, Zhang Jie feels there's no need to worry about it.

If they existed, they would have acted long ago; with them around, wanting to save civilization is easy to say, but if you don't want to save and instead want to destroy them, just endure—resistance would surely be futile.

If they don't exist, then there's even less to worry about.

Afterwards, Zhang Jie again contacted Yuan; he needed to have another audience with the Will of the Heavenly Disaster!

At that time their research into it was fairly deep; although they couldn't change its ability, they could translate its words.

The Will of the Heavenly Disaster cannot be communicated, yet it can be; what it says depends entirely on itself.

"'Upon activation of the audience device, your will once again came before the Will of the Heavenly Disaster, that mass like a black hole'"

"'After a brief mental shock, you posed a question to him—only 'What exactly is Chen?'—and received an answer'"

"'It is absolute zero, it is absolute average, it is ending, it is an omen, it is heat death.'"

"'His answer made you think for a while, but you realized all his indications actually point to heat death.'"

"'The concept of heat death is not the universe shattering like an egg, but like shaken egg liquid, with all matter evenly distributed and no longer flowing.'"

"'The meaning of absolute zero is just that: the universe's lowest temperature is 275.15 degrees, for at that temperature all particles cease moving, and heat exists only when particles are active.'"

"'Before you could even comprehend it, the monitoring system sent back an image: that huge black hole, just now, had completely exploded.'"

"'It seemed as if everything had been sucked dry; at the moment of collapse the black hole sprayed countless substances outward, thickly blanketing the surrounding area for several light‑years, as if true heat death had indeed occurred.'"

This wasn't done by a computer head; it only knows that inside came out an extraordinary thing, and with just a single strike it turned an entire fleet of warships into uniformly distributed matter.

What's most terrifying is that the existence of this thing is far more than just one!