115: Chapter 115 The Celestial Formula, Humanity Collapses

Musk and Edward turned around simultaneously, looking up at the square skylight above the wellhead, which was flickering wildly in the alternation of day and night.

Marcus Lin stood up from the ground beside the saucer's underbelly. The rangefinder slid off his knees, and the lens cap hit the concrete floor and popped open. He did not bend down to pick it up.

Victor Strauss stepped out from behind the protective isolation window, not even having time to take off his hazmat suit. He braced his hands on the table, staring up at the skylight above the wellhead that was still flickering violently, and repeated:

"This is not a hallucination of my mind... You all saw it too, right?"

"...The sky is flickering... You all saw it..."

Irene Zhao rushed out of the data room, still clutching a small sample disk she had taken from beside the alien storage device. She looked at the sky dome above the wellhead, which was flickering violently, opened her lips several times, but did not speak.

Then, the snow screen on the sky dome vanished.

The violent flickering between night and day stopped.

The persistent, piercing "crackle" sound also disappeared, and the interface between heaven and earth briefly returned to a dizzying calm.

The entire Earth's sky dome,

Across the entire Earth, everyone facing the sky saw the same firmament, where a short line of content clearly appeared simultaneously:

π = 3

Everyone saw it.

Diana looked up, and in those eyes that had been calm just moments ago, cracks finally appeared.

It was confusion—confusion that pierced through the shell of fear.

Behind her, the expressions on Sterling and Augustus's faces shifted rapidly through several stages within seconds.

Augustus narrowed his eyes, staring at the sky, and couldn't help but scoff:

"The Aliens spent all this time flexing their muscles just to tell us this?"

"π = 3?"

"Isn't that just how π is? Every elementary school student knows that pi is approximately 3.14, an infinite non-repeating irrational number. Pi is approximately 3.14159... and can never be calculated to the end. How did it become 3?"

"Was the Grey Alien's math taught by a P.E. teacher?"

Sterling looked up, wiped the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief, and said with a trace of faint mockery in his tone:

"The math on Zeta Star is exceptionally poor. They probably can't even figure out the middle school formula for the area of a circle."

Then, Diana's phone rang.

She answered it, listened for less than ten seconds, and the color drained rapidly from her face.

After hanging up, she looked at Augustus and Sterling, remaining silent for a moment before speaking:

"The Hopkins Family's saucer wreckage research base is in trouble..."

"All the scientists who have seen that formula on the sky dome have gone insane."

"Some are jumping off buildings, some are smashing their heads against walls, and some are shooting themselves."

"The situation is already out of control."

She paused for a very short beat, clipped the encrypted communication terminal back into her chest pocket, her voice as heavy as an ice block just salvaged from the ground,

"It is definitely not just a problem with mathematical common sense."

The cold mockery on Augustus and Sterling's faces had not yet fully faded before it was crushed by this sentence.

No one spoke again.

The three of them quickly returned to the Cadillac, tires leaving a skid mark on the dry, sandy ground as they sped off toward the wreckage research base.

...

Meanwhile, in the underground experimental area of the Starship Base in Texas.

Marcus Lin remained standing beside the portable laser rangefinder, staring at that extremely concise line of formula on the sky dome above the wellhead for a long time.

Then, he suddenly laughed.

The laughter was not loud, but very unstable.

It was the sound of chaos, suppressed behind clenched teeth for too long, suddenly loosening and rolling out from his throat.

It was like solving a puzzle that had tormented him for most of his life, only to discover that the answer itself was the explosive that would destroy his entire life.

"So that's it... So that's it..."

He picked up the rangefinder from the ground, his fingers trembling as he aimed it at the hatch again,

"This is not a manufacturing error, nor is it deformation, and certainly not a misalignment from the wreckage collision."

"Every circular component in the saucer wreckage is a perfect circle."

"In their own universe, they are perfect circles."

"There is no curvature distortion, no spatial warping, and π is 3!"

"Circumference divided by diameter is 3!"

"Both sides are equal, with no remainder!"

"But once a circle enters our space, enters the Solar System, the entire geometric structure must readapt to the spatial curvature here!"

"To maintain their integrity, they are forcibly compressed from perfect circles into ellipses."

"The ratio of the major and minor axes of every ellipse is identical because they have all been flattened by the same spatial distortion rule. This is a direct manifestation of the conflict in the underlying geometric rules of the universe!"

Victor Strauss pushed up the face shield of his hazmat suit and looked up at the sky.

Large beads of sweat began to seep from his face, but his pupils were extremely bright, as if ignited by something.

His voice was dry when he spoke, but every sentence was as straight as a deduction written on a blackboard.

"The Grey Aliens of Zeta Star have used the sky dome as a blackboard; this is their method of proof."

"They want to tell us that outside the Solar System, in the undistorted space of the universe, pi is 3!"

"It is an integer."

"Simple, precise, no need for ellipses."

"But the Solar System we are in... for some unknown reason, space-time itself has been stretched."

"Every observation we make, every measurement we take, is looking at the world through a distorted lens."

"Originally, a circle with a diameter of one meter would have a circumference of three meters. But in our lens, the diameter is stretched to one-point-something, so the circumference divided by the diameter becomes 3.14159..."

"We are like fish in a fishbowl, looking at the world through curved glass, mistaking the illusions we see for truth."

Marcus Lin slowly placed the rangefinder back on the table, but his gaze remained fixed on that line of formula, passing through the skylight above the wellhead, as he spoke to himself in a tone bordering on a whisper.

The laboratory was like a sealed church from which the noise had been suddenly sucked away, leaving only something that was collapsing, continuing in silence.

"The Solar System we reside in... is a distorted, erroneous space-time."

"In this erroneous space-time, all the formulas and theorems we have derived... Newton's mechanics, Maxwell's electromagnetism, Einstein's field equations... are all wrong."

"Humanity will be forever, forever locked inside the Solar System."

"Never able to fly out."

"Forever imprisoned in this distorted space-time."

Victor Strauss did not look at him. He removed the protective face mask, his voice hoarse and hollow, as if talking to himself, or perhaps providing a final explanation for the future of humanity:

"The Grey Aliens of Zeta Star are not flexing their muscles."

"They are telling us the truth:"

"Their space-time is the correct space-time, their physics is the cosmic truth, which is why they can break out of their star system and traverse tens of thousands of light-years."

"And our space-time is broken."

"Our physical formulas are all illusions."

"We can build Starships, we can let rockets break through the atmosphere, but that is just swimming from one side of the fishbowl to the other..."

"We will never be able to fly out of this distorted Solar System."

"We can only remain at the level of a low-level civilization, forever, only able to await our slaughter, waiting to be ruled by higher civilizations..."