75: Unexpected "Online" Connections and Emotional Visualization 2.0

As time slipped away amidst the constant hum of precision instruments, and under the patient and encouraging guidance of Su Mu, the seemingly professional yet ulterior-motivated "cognitive training" from Evelyn, and the calm, behind-the-scenes overarching control of Wang Jianguo, Excellence's rehabilitation process, though as slow as a moving glacier, was indeed showing some small but encouraging positive changes.

He was undoubtedly still a long, almost impossibly distant way from fully recovering his former brilliance, but his cognitive world no longer seemed to be a completely dead wasteland; it had begun to occasionally flash with sporadic but tenacious signs of life.

His language function had improved the most significantly; although his speech was still slow and occasionally incoherent, he was now capable of relatively coherent, logically basic short conversations, rather than completely fragmented ramblings.

His fragmented memories were also beginning to show signs of integration; he could occasionally recall vague snippets of life in his college dormitory or call out Su Mu's name.

Even more surprisingly, his seemingly innate "hand-crafted" instinct, deeply embedded in the depths of his soul, also began to Sprout again along with the weak recovery of his cognitive abilities.

That initially crude and laughable Emotion-Visualization Device, which could only blink a three-color LED light, had long since been iterated through several versions by him.

With Su Mu's technical support and the help of "contraband" parts provided from time to time, the latest version of the device had been completely transformed, becoming a small piece of art full of cyberpunk style.

It was no longer a simple headband, but rather a lightweight forehead band with built-in multiple biological sensors, connected via thin shielded cables to a palm-sized processing unit with a 3D-printed shell covered in irregular cooling vents.

The core of this processing unit was a high-speed FPGA chip that Excellence had modified so extensively that even Su Mu couldn't quite understand it, processing multiple physiological signals in real-time from EEG (electroencephalogram), GSR (galvanic skin response), and HRV (heart rate variability).

Most striking was its output method—the processing unit was connected to a miniature, high-precision laser holographic projection module.

Once activated, it was no longer satisfied with simple color changes; instead, it could convert Excellence's comprehensive emotional state in real-time into a dynamic halo of light, about half a meter in diameter, suspended in the air and constantly flowing and changing.

This halo was not just a simple block of color; its color, brightness, texture, flow speed, and even the complexity of its form corresponded to the subtle nuances of his emotional state: when calm, it might be a soft, expansive, slowly flowing azure nebula; when focused on thinking, it would contract and condense, presenting a precisely structured, continuously rotating and flickering golden geometric mesh; and when he felt irritable or confused, the halo would become turbulent, turning a dark red color, as if fierce lightning were darting inside, even accompanied by disturbing environmental sound effects simulated by the device's built-in high-fidelity micro-speakers—from distant muffled thunder to the hissing of electric current close at hand.

One afternoon, while Su Mu was recording Excellence's physiological data, she looked at the purple nebula on the wall that flowed soothingly as he meditated, and suddenly had a flash of inspiration. Half-jokingly, she said, "Excellence, do you think we could connect your 'emotional universe' to the health app on my phone? I want to see how indicators like heart rate and blood oxygen change behind your different 'starry sky states.' Maybe we could discover some patterns!"

Excellence was tilting his head, staring blankly at the halo he had "created." Upon hearing this, he slowly turned his head, a fleeting, extremely faint glint of thought flashing in his eyes. He hesitated, and said word by word, "Can... try... use Bluetooth... BLE... Low Energy protocol... save power..." He even vaguely mentioned the specific protocol name for Bluetooth Low Energy communication.

Su Mu's eyes lit up, and she immediately became interested: "Right! The BLE protocol! Why didn't I think of that! Great, let's try it!"

Thus, the familiar "hand-crafted" scene played out in the rehabilitation room again. Su Mu deftly took out her development phone, opened the programming software, and began writing an interface program capable of simultaneously reading the phone's built-in health sensors (heart rate, step count, etc.) and communicating with Excellence's device via Bluetooth.

Meanwhile, under her excited explanation and guidance, Excellence clumsily picked up the soldering iron and multimeter, carefully soldering a tiny BLE module, salvaged from a discarded Bluetooth headset, onto his projector processing unit, attempting to add wireless communication functionality to it.

His movements were still slow and uncoordinated, occasionally requiring Su Mu to hold his hand to stabilize the direction, but that focus and willingness to try was, in itself, a huge step forward.

Evelyn stood to the side, quietly observing the scene. Watching Su Mu get close to Excellence without any hesitation, guiding him hand-in-hand, and the two of them putting their heads together to discuss technical details, an extremely complex emotion spread in the depths of her heart.

It was a mixture of the observation required by the mission, a hint of indescribable envy, a kind of condescending pity, and... a hint of faint unease and jealousy?

She quickly suppressed these inappropriate emotions, maintaining a professional and slightly curious smile on her face, but in the depths of her eyes, a hint of elusive, dark light flickered.

Just then, the door to the rehabilitation room slid open silently. Wang Jianguo, accompanied by Xiao Zhang, came in for a routine inspection.

Seeing the two of them tinkering with a pile of parts and a computer screen again, a look of interest appeared on Wang Jianguo's face: "Oh? What new project are our two genius engineers collaborating on today? Are you upgrading the base's security system this time, or planning to build a rocket?"

Su Mu looked up, her face still flushed with excitement, and quickly explained their idea of connecting and monitoring the correlation between emotions and physiological indicators.

Wang Jianguo listened, his fingers tapping lightly and unconsciously on the armrest of his wheelchair, a look of deep thought flashing in his eyes.

A moment later, he suddenly smiled and, seemingly casually, instructed Xiao Zhang behind him: "Sounds interesting. Xiao Zhang, open a read-only, isolated security interface of our internal health monitoring platform's test environment to Su Mu. Let them play around with it; perhaps they really might discover something interesting."

A flash of surprise and hesitation crossed Xiao Zhang's face—the data on the internal health monitoring platform was extremely sensitive and directly related to the biological information security of the base personnel.

But he didn't ask any more questions, just nodded immediately: "Yes, Chief. I will arrange it immediately. Permissions will be limited to the minimum necessary scope, and the highest level of data desensitization and audit logging will be enabled."

Soon, with the remote assistance of technical personnel (ensuring absolute safety), Excellence's tiny "hand-crafted" device, which was originally only connected to a mobile phone, was actually connected to the vast and advanced high-precision biological data stream used by the "Zhulong" base to monitor the health status of key personnel!

Multiple data sources—rough data from his own sensors, daily health data from Su Mu's phone, and precise real-time physiological indicators from the base's medical system—converged as never before, inputting into that FPGA chip which had been modified by Excellence and was running a bizarre algorithm that no one could understand.

The phenomenon that happened next made everyone inside and outside the rehabilitation room feel truly shocked!

The moment the multi-source data stream flowed in, the dynamic halo on the wall, which had originally only changed slowly with Excellence's emotions, seemed to have been injected with a soul and suddenly underwent a drastic change!

Its form was no longer a simple nebula or geometric body, but became extremely complex, colorful, and seemed to autonomously flow and evolve as if it possessed some kind of living intelligence!

Inside the halo, multi-layered, multi-scale fine structures appeared, like a miniature universe that was breathing and thinking. Colors intertwined, separated, collided, and derived in unpredictable ways. Its complexity and beauty far exceeded the original design intent, and even exceeded the expressive power of any currently known emotion-visualization technology!

"This... this is..." Su Mu widened her eyes in astonishment, watching the unprecedented halo scene, and murmured to herself, "It... it seems to have come alive... and... it seems to be reacting to more than just Excellence's state..."

An even more magical, and even arguably eerie, phenomenon followed. When different people approached Excellence, or even just focused their attention on him, that brilliant halo would actually produce distinct, recognizable changes associated with the person who had arrived!

When Su Mu approached, focusing intently on a technical problem, the halo would gradually reveal a complex vortex structure that steadily took dominance—a deep, stable, inward-spiraling form flickering with a rational blue light, as if reflecting her clear and orderly thought processes.

When Evelyn approached with her complex and indescribable mood, the halo became vibrant yet flickering, its form rapidly oscillating between highly complex, precise structures and chaotic patches of color, revealing characteristics of contradiction, calculation, and uncertainty—a stark contrast to the stability brought by Su Mu.

Even when Wang Jianguo simply stood quietly at the other end of the room, observing with a calm gaze, a certain area of the halo would quietly manifest a highly regular, layered, and nested golden recursive fractal pattern, as if containing some grand strategic layout, carrying a sense of imposing Order.

Most mind-boggling of all was an incident where "Old Wu" (Xiao Zhang)—responsible for perimeter security and usually monitoring remotely via hidden cameras—became instantly highly tense in the control room due to a sudden alarm.

The moment he directed his attention to the monitoring feed of the rehabilitation room—despite his great physical distance and the layers of electromagnetic shielding walls between them—the edge of the halo from the device on Excellence's head synchronously and faintly flickered with a sharp red light representing "high alert," accompanied by rapidly trembling ripples!

Technicians repeatedly checked the logs and system connections afterward, confirming that there were no conventional paths for data or electromagnetic leakage.

This weak, long-distance correlation—seemingly generated based on conscious attention—was completely inexplicable by existing scientific theories!

"This is impossible..." Evelyn witnessed it all, her face turning slightly pale, and she subconsciously murmured.

Her professional training and worldview had been dealt a massive blow.

"This weak correlation, spanning space and seemingly ignoring shielding... it's just... it's simply..." She almost blurted out the word "telepathy," but her scientific training forced her to stop.

"This is not emotional Resonance," Excellence said.

He seemed captivated by the changes in the halo, staring blankly with furrowed brows as if struggling to understand something.

Then, he vaguely yet with unusual certainty, uttered a few broken words: "Not... emotion... it is... neural field... weak... coupling... like... Quantum Entanglement..." He had mentioned that heart-stopping concept again—Quantum Entanglement!

These words were like a boulder thrown into a calm lake, sending shockwaves through everyone present!

Wang Jianguo's pupils contracted sharply, and he immediately ordered in a deep voice, "All personnel, attention! Technicians, take your positions! Record all current data streams, environmental parameters, and biological signals at maximum precision! Elevate the encryption level to 'Nuwa'! Xiao Zhang, activate the information shielding force field immediately, at maximum intensity! All data must be stored locally; any form of network transmission or external backup is strictly prohibited!" His voice carried unprecedented seriousness and a hint of... suppressed excitement.

Over the following days, operating under absolute secrecy, Wang Jianguo mobilized the base's top resources to conduct preliminary, highly cautious tests and analysis of this phenomenon.

The results were even more shocking: this inexplicable correlation did indeed appear to exist, and certain characteristics of its weak signals bore highly suspicious similarities to predicted Quantum Entanglement phenomena—similarities that could not be explained by mere coincidence!

It seemed that Excellence, in a completely unconscious state and relying on a brain that had become more "intuitive" after its injury, had stumbled upon creating a strange device capable of faint Perception and manifestation of this "consciousness field" or "quantum cognitive coupling"!

"This is an astonishing breakthrough achieved in an unconscious state," Wang Jianguo said at the top-secret analysis meeting, his eyes glinting with sharp excitement.

"After Excellence's conventional cognitive functions were severely damaged, he may have instead shed the shackles of acquired logical frameworks and rigid thinking. His fragmented consciousness has, in a way we cannot yet comprehend, touched upon something more fundamental—the underlying rules governing the connection between consciousness and matter."

"We must record all data comprehensively, but externally—especially toward The Foundation..." He glanced meaningfully at Evelyn's name on the attendee list.

"It must be kept absolutely confidential, classified as top-secret 'Pangu'."

Evelyn received the internal gag Order and the strictly screened data reporting guidelines with mixed feelings.

She knew that if her father, Morpheus Li, learned of this discovery, he would undoubtedly succumb to utter madness, sparing no cost to bring Excellence completely under his control, potentially even resorting to more extreme measures.

But what concerned her even more, causing a vague sense of unease, was another subtle discovery: data analysis showed that when both she and Su Mu approached Excellence simultaneously while in highly emotional states (for instance, Su Mu excited by a technical challenge, and she anxious due to her mission and inner conflict), the halo exhibited an extremely peculiar, non-replicable Resonance pattern.

It was as if their emotional fluctuations could, through Excellence acting as an unconscious "medium" or "Resonance cavity," generate some indescribable, weak, yet real mutual influence and amplification.

This discovery left her with an inexplicable sense of unease, as if her own inner world were also being indirectly probed and connected.

That night, under the influence of medication, Excellence fell into a deep sleep.

According to the night monitoring system, he entered REM sleep, his fingers unconsciously tracing patterns on the sheets.

The next morning, when Su Mu arrived to take over her shift, she found the notebook on his bedside table scattered.

On one of the pages, drawn in trembling yet exceptionally clear strokes, was a set of extremely complex, intricately structured mathematical equations and symbolic systems!

Su Mu curiously picked it up and was instantly stunned!

She had majored in electronic engineering and minored in cryptography, so she recognized at a glance that these equations were no mere scribbles.

Their core architecture described an extremely cutting-edge, brand-new protocol that theoretically utilized the properties of Quantum Entanglement to achieve key distribution and encrypted communication!

Its ingenuity lay in its apparent use of a new type of quantum state superposition and decoherence control mechanism, capable of achieving theoretically absolute security—communications that could not be eavesdropped upon or cracked—potentially posing a fundamental challenge to existing encryption systems based on mathematical complexity!

"This... is this something you recalled from before? Or... something you just thought of?" Su Mu excitedly ran to Excellence, who had just woken up and was looking bewildered, her voice trembling slightly as she held the paper.

Excellence blinked in confusion, struggling to think for a long time before finally shaking his head blankly.

"I don't know... in my dream... I think... I saw... light... flashing... many... small beads... strung together..." He could offer no logical explanation.

Su Mu immediately sent a high-definition scan of the page to Wang Jianguo through the most secure channel.

The base's top cryptographers and quantum information experts were urgently summoned to conduct a preliminary analysis.

The results of the analysis were extremely shocking: these equations were no fantasy.

Their core concepts were highly subversive and feasible.

Although the details still required extensive verification and refinement, the blueprint they described indeed pointed toward a revolutionary communication protocol that could change the future landscape of information security!

Wang Jianguo looked at the preliminary analysis report, a meaningful, inscrutable smile appearing on his face.

"It seems that even in his unconscious sleep, our 'seed' continues to stubbornly grow its deep roots of wisdom into unknown realms within the dark soil. This is... becoming increasingly interesting."

He did not know—or perhaps he had already anticipated—that at this very moment, deep within the heavily guarded headquarters of the "Prophet Foundation" in the Free Confederacy, Morpheus Li had received, at almost the same time, an emergency report from Evelyn transmitted via the highest-level encrypted channel.

In the report, following her father's instructions and her own judgment, Evelyn cautiously mentioned the observed "anomalous neural field coupling phenomena and potential non-classical correlation characteristics."

She attached highly processed data fragments that had been stripped of all specific evidence pointing toward Quantum Entanglement, retaining only some vague, suggestive spectral analysis of the halo's morphology...

This carefully tailored report was enough to drop another bombshell into Morpheus Li's ambitious, greedy heart, triggering endless speculation and an even stronger desire for possession.

A storm surrounding a sleeping giant—a storm triggered unconsciously—was quietly accelerating and brewing beneath the seemingly calm surface of the lake.

The vortex was growing larger and the forces involved were becoming stronger, foreshadowing the impending, more intense collisions and waves to come.