Chapter 51: What on Earth Did I Create!

With Silence running interference, you slipped back into the Medical Department without leaving a single trace.

After putting on a loud, theatrical display of complaining about the utterly atrocious taste of her nutrient paste, you were successfully pacified by the soft-hearted Nightingale, who gently fed you a plate of Kazdel-style cream cookies.

More to the point, in the eyes of the staff, you had been exceptionally well-behaved for the past few days.

Throwing a minor tantrum and demanding an early discharge was practically a baseline requirement for your current reputation.

By now, most of the medical operators had simply started turning a blind eye to your antics.

Even Kal’tsit had cooled off.

Over the past few days, she had begun authorizing your increasingly unreasonable requests with a frosty glare and a dismissive wave of her hand.

That included lending you an independent, high-security laboratory.

After scanning the sterile white corridor to confirm you weren’t being followed, you slipped inside and locked the heavy reinforced door.

You spread out a thick stack of blank draft paper across the steel workbench, picked up a pen, and let muscle memory take the wheel.

You were going to reverse-engineer the foundational mechanics of the Gray Sea.

Classical mechanics?

Thermodynamics?

Electromagnetism?

Microscopic, macroscopic, or cosmic scale?

Special relativity, general relativity, or perhaps quantum mechanics?

You emptied your mind, letting your hand drag the pen across the paper.

Formulas you couldn’t even begin to comprehend bled onto the page.

Some structures felt vaguely familiar, yet even when crucial variables were clearly missing, your hand subconsciously bypassed the gaps to force a conclusion.

Other equations were bizarre, dense, and utterly alien.

One glance told you that you had never studied anything remotely like them in your entire life.

One sheet, two sheets, three sheets…

The handwriting grew increasingly frantic.

The neat mathematical symbols warped into a chaotic, illegible script, but your body remembered the rhythm.

The pen strokes accelerated into a blur.

This wasn’t analytical deduction anymore; it was rote recitation.

It was the desperate, muscle-deep memory of someone who had once exhausted their very soul calculating these exact variables thousands of times over.

Eventually, you completely detached from PRTS’s processing assistance.

Your brain felt like a GPU pushed past its thermal limit, throbbing with a dull, burning ache, yet your hand only moved faster.

The paper was now covered in pure, unadulterated gibberish.

Formulas spanning twenty-five entire pages—how the hell did your past self even memorize all this?!

The variables multiplied exponentially while the foundational conditions vanished.

The single “1” unit of energy you had initially established as a baseline was undergoing exponential, terrifying growth through this repeated dismantling process.

Rip!

Finally, hitting an absolute limit, the theoretical framework collapsed.

Your hand jerked, subconsciously applying a completely nonsensical condition to forcefully derive the theory into…

a string of localized environmental data?

Wait, no.

How do abstract theoretical formulas physically manifest into concrete environmental data?

What in God’s name was the Babel Doctor researching behind closed doors?!

You stared down at the sprawling, chaotic mess of ink-stained paper scattered across the floor.

Your mind reeled.

From the very bottom of your soul, you realized you absolutely did not want to understand your former self anymore.

Hello?

Kal’tsit?

I’m begging you, let me sleep in the medical ward tonight…

I’ve encountered an unmatched cosmic horror, and it’s called physics!

In a quiet office down the hall, Ascalon melted out of the shadows, solidifying right beside Kal’tsit’s desk.

“The Doctor is indeed calculating something in the laboratory,” she murmured, her voice a low, flat whisper.

“I saw it myself.”

Kal’tsit nodded slowly.

The man had a notorious prior record, and deploying Ascalon to monitor him was simply standard operational security.

“Good.

What exactly is he calculating?”

Ascalon remained silent for a long, heavy moment.

“…I don’t understand it.”

Kal’tsit stared at her.

The educational standards of the Sarkaz mercenaries truly left much to be desired.

Before Kal’tsit could sigh, the assassin added, “However, I copied it down.”

Thank the stars for small mercies.

Kal’tsit opened her terminal and received the encrypted image files of the frantic, sprawling drafts.

Half a minute of dead silence passed.

Kal’tsit narrowed her eyes at the screen.

“…I don’t understand it either.”

She scoured her vast, ancient memory.

Priestess had never taught anything resembling this.

Another half-minute ticked by, and Kal’tsit finally felt a grim sense of relief: PRTS didn’t understand it either.

The Doctor’s deductions were too abstract, wildly galloping across theoretical boundaries without leaving a single traceable footprint.

PRTS took twenty-nine seconds just to process the image load, and at the very last second, the mainframe admitted it was completely stuck on step one.

How on earth had he incorporated optics into a thermodynamic collapse model?!

The physical derivation had only taken you five hours, but trying to comprehend the aftermath took you the entire night.

Dawn was breaking.

As the cold morning light filtered through the reinforced glass, you finally snapped back to reality.

Your forehead was heavy, burning with a low-grade fever.

Fortunately, you and your past self shared the same biological hardware, which meant the data eventually clicked into place.

That “Gray Sea” wasn’t a weapon.

It was closer to a materialized, physical concept.

It was never designed for war; on the contrary, it was a genuine, utopian miracle meant to elevate a civilization.

Dark matter extraction.

Absolute mineral-to-energy conversion.

More terrifyingly, it produced a type of “universal material” that your current brain simply couldn’t process.

Conceptually, it acted as an engine that rapidly accelerated the technological coefficient of its surrounding environment.

This thing absolutely did not exist on Terra right now.

If it did, just a few decades of passive radiation from it would have been enough for someone like Ceobe to casually invent technology rivaling the Director of Rhine Lab.

Was that a bit too obscure to grasp?

You pressed your fingers hard into your throbbing temples, desperate to clear the fog in your head.

To put it in the terms of the strategy games from your past life: this thing was a Stellaris Crisis Engine.

If left to run for a few decades, it would generate enough raw output to let you casually assemble an Aether-Phase Engine.

Not to mention the fact that the Gray Sea could split and replicate—meaning there were likely many of them.

, the absolute uniqueness of this concept ensured that even if the entire world were annihilated, the engine wouldn’t break.

Decades later, it could theoretically drag a high-dimensional Terra back from the void!

You had previously assumed your past self was just trying to turn Terra into a digital world to trap the Lumberjack.

Now, you realized you had been vastly underestimating the sheer scale of his megalomania.

You weren’t trying to trap anything.

You were planning to extract Terra, detonate the entire universe to take the enemy down with you, and then use this engine to rebuild reality from the ashes!

Relying on a manufactured miracle to reshape all of creation.

No wonder the old legends spoke of him walking through the wasteland of death.

You hadn’t summoned a weapon; you had summoned the god of death itself!

The dozen pens scattered across the desk were completely drained of ink.

Your right hand trembled violently from the sheer physical strain of the night’s work.

“PRTS,” you rasped, your throat dry as sand.

“Shredder mode.

Don’t let anyone ever see these files again.”

Some things were fine to joke about privately.

Other things needed to be buried before they broke the world.

You pushed yourself up from the chair, but the moment you stood, your vision blacked out.

A wave of intense vertigo hit you, the physical toll of sitting rigid for hours finally catching up.

Great.

Am I seriously getting hypoglycemia from skipping dinner?

You stumbled forward, groggily pushing open the heavy laboratory door.

Standing right outside, bathed in the pale morning light, was Kal’tsit.

Her green eyes locked onto yours, sharp and unyielding.

“What exactly did you just calculate in there?”

Your gamer instincts screamed at you to deflect, to make up a witty excuse, but your overheated brain simply refused to turn over.

You opened your mouth, your voice coming out as a dry, exhausted rasp.

“Nothing…

Kal’tsit, you will understand me.”

Your eyes were dim and hollow from absolute fatigue.

Your voice was hoarse, carrying a quiet, tragic weight.

You stood there in the doorway, offering no defense, wrapped in a heavy, evasive silence.

Kal’tsit froze.

Her feline ears suddenly flattened hard against her scalp, pulling back in a visceral display of shock.

Wait, no, who the hell are you?!

Her mind screamed the question, but you didn’t even notice her reaction.

The hallway spun violently around you.

Bang!

You hit the floor, falling into a deep, baby-like sleep.

[Rhodes’s Note:

Enjoying the operation so far, Doctor?

(This daily grind literally pays the landship’s rent!

to use the links!)