54: Chapter 54 The Baseline of Civilization

In the fortieth winter of the Wasteland, the temperature dropped to a staggering minus twenty degrees.

Above this dark red Wasteland, the wind, which had been howling tirelessly for another forty years, scraped layer after layer against the lonely Stone House standing on the desolate plain.

The south wall of the Stone House had been expanded three times.

Now it had become a complex abnormal human research center, complete with an energy zone, processing area, storage room, bedroom, and library.

By the time Jiang Lin finished binding the last paper note, the tail light of the wind turbine outside the window was flashing in the twilight.

Initially, the sound of the turbine blades slicing through the air was crisp, with a steady frequency around 2.4 Hz.

But now, fifteen years later, the tail light had been replaced seven times, leaving only the last three LED beads in the spare parts box.

In the low-frequency vibrations carried through the air, there was a periodic sound of metal grinding.

He closed his eyes, and his brain instinctively performed a Fourier transform on the sound waves.

The fundamental frequency was still there, but an abnormal peak had appeared in the high-frequency spectrum.

This meant that the metal contact surfaces inside the yaw bearing had breached the critical thickness of the oil film, entering the stage of dry friction.

Fifteen years of alternating stress had finally pushed the fatigue life of the Q235 steel plate to the limit of the S-N curve.

On a microscopic level, dislocations within the crystal lattice continuously multiplied and slipped, ultimately forming macroscopic micro-cracks on the surface.

The breakdown of materials was an inevitability of physical laws; time was merely an integration constant.

Jiang Lin did not get up to repair it.

He couldn't repair it anymore.

It wasn't just the materials that had reached their limit; his own physical machine was also close to being scrapped.

He slowly opened his eyes, where numerous murky floaters floated across his retina.

These were symptoms of vitreous liquefaction and posterior vitreous detachment.

His physiological age of fifty-eight, in this Wasteland environment, had been accelerated and overdrawn to the absolute limit of a human body.

He tried to clench his right hand into a fist.

From the motor cortex issuing a command, to the release of neurotransmitters across the synaptic cleft, and finally to the contraction of muscle fibers—this process used to take only a few dozen milliseconds.

Now, he felt a distinct sense of resistance, accompanied by a dull ache originating deep within his knuckles.

The freezing winters of the Wasteland and long years of high-intensity benchwork had allowed his osteoarthritis to progress to its advanced stage.

"The system's available degrees of freedom are decreasing," Jiang Lin muttered to himself.

Leaning on a cane fashioned from a hollow steel pipe, he stood up.

The moment his knees bore the torque, intense pain shot along his spinal cord to his brain, yet he did not even knit his brows.

Pain was merely an electrophysiological signal, a system warning; he had long learned to strip such signals from his subjective consciousness, much like eliminating residuals in data processing.

He tied the notes securely with nylon rope.

The rough nylon rope cut into his hands, but the skin there was no longer ordinary skin—it was layer upon layer of thick, keratinized calluses that were almost transparent.

The bound notes were stacked on the floor, neatly arranged in twenty-seven volumes.

The covers were cardboard he pressed on flat stone slabs, made from a mashed mixture of waste paper pulp and Moss fiber.

The spine bindings were coarse burlap woven from flax plants grown beside the potato field—plants he had patiently retted for months before spinning and weaving—finally dyed a dull rust-red using water infused with rusted scrap iron.

Each volume had its spine numbered with thin lead wire, from Notes: Volume 1 to Notes: Volume 27.

Every single one of these twenty-seven books was heavy, feeling like a brick in hand.

There were no sentimental laments within them, only complete evidence of an ordinary human fighting against entropy in a desolate universe forgotten by time.

It was very quiet inside the Stone House.

Waste wood salvaged from the ruins burned in the stove, the flickering flames casting light and shadow on the walls, revealing a spine-chilling sight inside this thirty-square-meter Stone House.

All four walls, and even the blackened beam on the ceiling, were densely and redundantly covered with writing.

Some were written with pens, some carved with chisels, and others scratched with discarded hacksaw blades.

On the east wall was the covariant form of Maxwells Equations, along with complex boundary value solutions for electromagnetic waves in inhomogeneous media that he had derived by hand during countless blackout nights.

Those four elegant equations were carved especially deep.

In this dead land without signals, without internet, where even the radio produced nothing but white noise, these equations were the only cosmic chorus he could hear.

On the red clay bricks of the south wall, the Hamilton-Jacobi equation and the Lagrangian were carved; those geometric manifolds representing symmetry and conservation laws spread along the cracks down to the floor like an ancient and mysterious totem.

Every time he looked at these lines of formulas, an absurd sense of peace would surge within Jiang Lin's parched heart.

Noether's Theorem was right: as long as physical laws do not change under time translation, energy is conserved.

On this damned Wasteland, everything was rotting, weathering, and dying, yet these mathematical symbols—representing the most fundamental logic of the universe—remained eternally green.

The west wall was the domain of Quantum Mechanics.

From Schrödinger's equation to Dirac bra-ket notation, series expansions of perturbation theory were packed tightly into the crevices, like a concrete projection of the microscopic world onto macro walls.

In the corner of that wall, with an almost obsessive fervor, he had even derived the fine-structure spectrum of the hydrogen atom.

The operator Ĥ and wavefunction Ψ intertwined on the wall, forming an abyss that an ordinary person might not fully comprehend even in a lifetime.

And on the north wall facing him was a full wall of Brillouin zones and lattice dispersion relations.

Forty years.

For Electrodynamics, without antennas or anechoic chambers, he used a piece of copper-core wire dragged out with all his might from the basement of an abandoned hydrological station to wind a coil.

Paired with crude capacitors he handmade using waste glass fragments and metal foil, he managed to construct an extremely primitive LC oscillation circuit.

On the electromagnetic measurement port of an energy spectrum analyzer, when he truly saw that signal peak corresponding to the resonance frequency, he sat by the fire for an entire night.

The deviation was within eight percent; the error stemmed from the distributed inductance of the coil and his estimated wire resistance, all of which were logical within his error analysis framework.

At that moment, he felt even the wind on the Wasteland became endearing.

For Quantum Mechanics, lacking a particle accelerator, he took a sample of off-white high-strength aluminum alloy found on the Wasteland and used solid-state Physics and the free electron model to calculate the Fermi energy of aluminum, then compared his results with experimental values in textbook appendices.

The error was within twelve percent. He spent nearly three months investigating sources of error line by line, finally attributing the main discrepancy to his handling of the effective mass of aluminum—that analysis process itself was far more worthy of being recorded in the notes than the result.

For statistical thermodynamics, lacking a Carnot heat engine, he used a piece of heat-storing concrete he had deliberately set aside on the south wall of the Stone House, along with an open area outside the camp, to establish a long-term two-point temperature logging system.

Forty years of data told him the approximate ranges of the heat capacity and thermal conductivity of the Wasteland; then, using the fluctuation-dissipation theorem from statistical mechanics, he estimated the order of magnitude of the system's thermal noise, linking macroscopic temperature records to the microscopic statistical mechanics framework.

At the moment they connected, he wrote in his log: The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not a rule; it is the inevitable result of probability overwhelming all.

"I believe this statement now not because it is written in books, but because I have looked at forty years of data."

...

No mentor, no classmates, no internet.

In this universe where even time could be frozen, he painstakingly carved out the entire core four-year undergraduate theoretical system of Beijing's Peking University School of Physics inch by inch, stroke by stroke, with chisels and his own brainpower inside this tomb that could be swallowed by wind and sand at any moment.

Jiang Lin reached out a hand as withered as a tree branch, tremblingly running it over the three gray cast iron surface plates beside the stone table.

His fingers felt the faint sensation of adhesion coming from the extremely smooth metal surface.

The direct manifestation of Van der Waals forces in the macroscopic world.

Beneath the grand, profound walls of theoretical Physics, these three iron plates were the pinnacle of engineering he could touch in this Wasteland World.

Going further up in engineering would be nanoscale and sub-micron precision manufacturing, very-large-scale integrated circuits, and photolithography machines.

That required cleanrooms with constant temperature and humidity, laser interferometers, active vibration isolation tables, and single-crystal silicon purified to eleven nines.

That was a vast, complex industrial system—a world that could never be penetrated by a single person, a manual scraper, and a Stone House.

Individual strength encountered the barrier of physical laws here.

"This is as far as I can go."

Jiang Lin opened his mouth, but before he could finish speaking, he began coughing violently.

Once he started coughing, he couldn't stop.

High-speed airflow rushed against his already fibrotic tracheal walls, squeezing rust-tasting liquid from his alveoli.

He covered his mouth with the back of his hand, and when he pulled it away, it was smeared with a puddle of dark red blood mixed with tiny black particles.

This was the result of heavy metals like cadmium and lead accumulating in his body.

The proximal convoluted tubules of his kidneys had suffered extensive necrosis, and osmotic imbalance impeded the reabsorption of tissue fluid.

His legs were severely edematous, and his myocardium was beating under overload to maintain blood supply, his heart rate wildly irregular.

According to the Second Law of Thermodynamics, he—a highly ordered low-entropy system—was irresistibly collapsing.

Jiang Lin calmly wiped away the blood on the back of his hand and slumped onto the bed made of tattered clothes and dry Moss.

His breathing became extremely shallow and rapid; with every inhalation, his lungs hissed like a broken bellows.

In the corner of the Stone House, the red LED light powered by the wind turbine flickered weakly in the cold wind.

The wind speed was dropping, and the generator's output voltage had fallen below the threshold of the voltage regulator module.

Jiang Lin leaned against the stone wall, listening to the beating of the heart inside his chest.

Thump... thump... thump...

The force of the beats grew weaker, and the intervals grew longer.

He felt no fear, not even awe toward death.

He merely monitored, with cold detachment as an onlooker, as this physical system named Jiang Lin moved toward shutdown.

His blood pressure was collapsing.

His cerebral cortex began to suffer hypoxia, blood supply to his optic nerve was cut off, and the surrounding world darkened from the edges, narrowing into a tight tunnel.

That single LED light became the last light source in the universe.

On a microscopic level, ion channels throughout his body failed on a massive scale, unable to maintain membrane potentials.

On a macroscopic level, his consciousness began to disperse.

"Cardiac ejection fraction below 15%," he rendered a clinical Physics diagnosis in his mind with his final moments of lucidity.

The instant the death line was touched, there were no life-flashing-before-his-eyes, no ethereal sense of relief.

Only the absolute compelling force of physical laws.

A topological fold occurred in an instant; time, space, and mass were forcibly rewritten at this moment.

Time, space, mass, and the state of microscopic particles were forcibly rewritten at this moment by a force transcending the current dimension of the universe.

The light froze in his eyes.

The howling of the wind was abruptly cut off, as if someone had pulled the plug on an audio system.

...

[Jiangcheng City, Teachers' Building, Small Garage]

Clatter—

Not far next door, someone pulled open the rolling shutter door of a convenience store, and the harsh honk of a car horn echoed from the main road in the distance.

In the garage of less than six square meters, the air distorted violently for an instant.

Hoo—

Jiang Lin suddenly snapped his eyes open.

The March air of Jiangcheng City, filled with moisture and bustling city noise, instantly flooded his lungs.

His alveoli accomplished a perfect oxygen exchange within tenths of a second.

Shadows of the Wasteland's deathly silence seemed to linger on his retinas, yet his ears were filled with the lively, everyday white noise of the Real World.

Physiological time reversed in the moment of crossing dimensions.

His shriveled, withered vocal cords regained elasticity, like a dead tree blossoming in spring.

His emaciated, powerless muscles swelled with strength once more, and the aches deep in his bones vanished entirely.

He stood there in tattered padded clothes, his entire being exuding a chilling, eerie unfamiliarity.