Black.
Black that could devour all light.
To be precise, a rift had appeared in space… a spatial rift from which even light could not escape.
Gawking, Meng Hao watched as a water droplet-shaped, futuristic shuttle, akin to a deep-space starship cryo-pod from a game, emerged from the spatial rift. He rubbed his eyes, utterly stunned.
If his guess was correct, the spatial rift before him, one that could swallow light, must be a black hole, something only seen in science magazines!
But black holes were supposed to devour things, not spit them out!
Meng Hao, his curiosity reignited by the system's awe-inspiring technology, suppressed it for the moment, deciding not to delve deeper into this matter.
As the spatial rift vanished, the shuttle's hatch slid open, revealing a sapphire-blue interior, just large enough for an adult to lie down.
"So,"
"We're leaving now?"
"Damn you, Gao Ping, I wish you… infertility and a house full of grandchildren!"
Under the threat of death, Meng Hao, suppressing his fear of the unknown, extended a leg, lay down, and took a deep breath.
He muttered softly, as if trying to reassure himself, to distract himself and lessen the tension and fear.
"This journey will take years, and when I return, who knows if it will be months or years from now… Perhaps if I fail the mission, I'll be erased without a trace… Alas, it's a desperate move, no other choice!"
The hatch slowly closed.
A tremendous sense of pressure washed over him.
Lying face up inside the shuttle, Meng Hao watched as the hatch fully sealed, revealing a digital display interface on the inner surface, awaiting activation.
Accompanied by a faint tremor.
The spatial rift reopened.
*Whirrrr!*
A massive sonic boom echoed!
The shuttle plunged into the spatial rift, reappearing above Shilin City, leaving a thunderous roar like a bolt of lightning and a trail of afterimages before vanishing.
Without a doubt.
If not for the shuttle's protection, Meng Hao would have been torn and crushed into bloody dust by the immense forces at such high speeds.
...
It is worth mentioning that Meng Hao's muttered words of "no other choice" before his departure were, in fact, a false premise.
On the screen of his computer, whose power strip he hadn't yet unplugged, a chat window popped up.
Clearly.
This chat group was not muted by Meng Hao like his class group; he was actively chatting in it daily.
Within the chat group were several of Meng Hao's close classmates.
"Holy shit, is Gao Ping's hard, smelly rock of a brain softened from too much urine?"
"Look at the final project he assigned for our third year. Is that something a primate could even conceive of?"
"Building a Dyson Sphere? Completing the periodic table?? Developing and manufacturing a time machine??? Uncovering the truth behind the dinosaur extinction?"
"Even if our Shilin University is bad, the Applied Physics department is for scientific research, not for writing science fiction like those web novel authors."
"..."
Complaints flooded the chat.
A small group of seven or eight people buzzed like the chaotic barrage of comments in a low-brow streamer's live broadcast.
After the torrent of messages slightly subsided, the class salutatorian, who ensured Meng Hao wouldn't fail his annual exam and who was a rare, intelligent beauty in the science and engineering field, spoke up softly.
"You know, guys, if you had just paid half a bit of attention to Gao Ping's instruction to 'read the questions carefully' in his last lecture, you wouldn't be spewing all this venom here!"
"Have you guys even bothered to look at the group announcement?"
"Gao Ping uploaded two documents to the group files… He made it very clear in the group announcement… Choose one of the topics from the topmost document and write a sci-fi article theoretically feasible based on modern physics… The topics in the second document are all the physics experiments we've done in our three years of university; you just need to replicate one of them… You only need to complete one of the two!"
Silence.
Everyone was silent.
Silence descended upon the awkward group chat.
Upon realizing they were the foolish clowns, these academic underachievers started to vent again.
"Damn that stinky rock, Gao Ping, couldn't he just explain it clearly in class? Why the convoluted group announcement?"
"That darn group announcement, it's so long and tedious. Who has the time to flip through it carefully like him… I bet most students, like us, just close it without even looking!"
"And, isn't it just about reading the questions, being careful and serious? Is that really so important?"
"When we start working after graduation, we won't be building nuclear bombs or tanks, or aircraft and rockets. Why bother being so serious?"
"Thanks for the reminder, brother. If I fail this year's assignment, that stinky rock Gao Ping might really make us delay our internships and graduation."
"Say, guys, is anyone really going to try and complete one of the four topics from the first document in real life?"
"Don't be ridiculous… Those four topics in the first document don't seem like something humans can accomplish… Pick any one, and it's probably harder to complete than 'The Wandering Earth'… Yeah, even brainstorming for an essay on them sounds difficult… I'll stick with replicating a physics experiment from the second document… Essays, that's the hardest thing to write…"
...
Taklamakan Desert.
As far as the eye could see, there was nothing but sand and gravel.
Lifeless, silent, and desolate.
Stretching to the horizon.
Countless pyramid-shaped sand dunes, three to four hundred meters high, were terrifying.
A single misstep would either lead to being swallowed by quicksand or crushed into a bloody pulp by sand dunes hundreds of meters high and weighing tens of thousands of tons.
In this vast, shifting desert, over a thousand kilometers long from east to west and over four hundred kilometers wide from north to south, with an average annual rainfall of less than 100 millimeters, a precipitation of no more than 5 millimeters in its core region, yet an evaporation rate of 4000 millimeters, the existence of any life was a miracle.
The Taklamakan Desert lived up to its nicknames—
A forbidden zone for life, a sea of death.
Lying in the shuttle, Meng Hao, looking at the timer frozen at 1.7 seconds before the hatch closed, felt another surge of awe and shock towards the system's black technology.
In a mere 1.7 seconds.
He had traversed over five thousand kilometers, from the eastern coast to the western frontier of Great Xia.
Converted, that was one-tenth the speed of light.
Meng Hao even had no doubt.
If not for the system protecting him, a fragile carbon-based lifeform, it could have accelerated the shuttle to the speed of light, or even faster.
Compared to this black technology from an unknown system,
Humanity's pathetic supersonic and hypersonic aircraft were mere children's toys in the eyes of adults.
Insignificant, the difference as vast as heaven and earth.
With immense emotion, Meng Hao stepped out of the shuttle. He watched as this transport machine, capable of crushing human technological civilization into dust, vanished once more into the spatial rift. Strangely, a sense of longing and yearning arose within him.
If a shuttle solely responsible for transportation was this incredible,
Then, would the system's initial mission, the mech he was tasked to build, be so unimaginably astonishing as well?!
Meng Hao's blood began to boil.
He had gradually pushed the fear of the unknown to the back of his mind.
Replaced by a longing for mechs.
After all,
For a man,
What could be more romantic than a magnificent, technologically advanced mech that could reach for the heavens?