Chapter 1100: Chapter 51: Lucia’s Little Classroom Begins
Wang Yunxiao had just put the pot on the stove with water, not yet ready to light the fire, when Bai Zhi kicked him out of the kitchen.
This Miss Bai Zhi is much more domineering at home than outside.
Wang Yunxiao, as the younger generation, wanted to make a good impression but only got a simple two-word reply.
“Get out!”
Li Mumu’s mixed rice naturally ended without a result, although she didn’t even figure out what exactly mixed rice meant.
However, Lucia generously said it could wait till next time.
The little girl was playing with her toys in the living room, and upon seeing Li Mumu walk over, she immediately reached out her hands.
“Great-great-granddaughter! Hug me!”
“Play on your own, we need to discuss serious matters.”
Lucia pushed her away, and the little girl pouted, about to cry.
Li Mumu quickly picked her up to soothe her.
The little one had a milky fragrance, much cuter than her sister at home who was always rolling on the floor smelling like dirt.
“Lucia’s pre-dinner mini-lesson is about to start!”
The White Hair girl took off her shoes and socks, sat cross-legged on the sofa barefoot, and casually pulled out a 1.2-meter wide whiteboard from somewhere.
Wang Yunxiao thought to himself, I knew it, a dignified deity wouldn’t lack a storage bag.
Those two big suitcases really only contained the little girl’s toys, nothing else.
“First, hand over any suspicious items around you. What I’m about to say next is top-level confidential, and leaking any part of it could easily cause serious consequences.”
Wang Yunxiao spread out his hands, showing he hadn’t brought anything.
Since the last time Li Mumu warned him that his notebook had a problem again, they stopped carrying it around.
“Very well, let’s start from the beginning. I know what you want to know and what you don’t know, but I’m not an expert, so I don’t understand those detailed issues; don’t argue with me on them.”
Lucia drew an X on the right side of the whiteboard with a marker.
“First, you need to understand what exactly this ‘Shiyan’ is.”
“Between 2070 and 2110 in the future era, it’s impossible to detail the specific time point because it’s already chaotic. Around that time, human frontier technology expanded into the realm of time, discovering a concept called ‘time sequence’.”
“This concept involves the dark side of the universe and high-dimensional physics, but I won’t explain the details to you. Simply put, at the fundamental physical law level of the universe, there exists an objective time sequence, but this time sequence is completely different from the time we perceive.”
Lucia wrote down a simple math problem on the whiteboard.
“Given that Xiaoming is seventh in the queue, with two children behind him, calculate the number of people in the queue.”
This is a first-grade arithmetic problem.
“What’s the answer?”
Lucia asked the little girl curled up in Li Mumu’s arms.
“I don’t know!”
The little girl replied confidently.
“6 + 1 equals what?”
“7!”
“What’s the answer to this problem?”
“7!”
The little girl was smug.
I’m super smart!
“Do you understand?”
Lucia tapped the whiteboard, asking the two junior high school graduates.
They didn’t understand.
Wang Yunxiao thought you’re kind of insulting my intelligence.
This kind of insult is worse than insulting my character.
Li Mumu thought for a while, then ventured: “This isn’t a math problem.”
“That’s right, this isn’t a purely mathematical problem.”
Lucia nodded: “Lele is very smart, she can calculate additions and subtractions within 100 verbally, but the real difficulty of this math problem lies in the fact that the question description exceeds a child’s comprehension.”
“Terms like ‘known’, ‘queue’, ‘in front of and behind’… these linguistic concepts are too complex for a child who hasn’t started school. They haven’t mastered the thinking logic behind these words, so they don’t know how to approach the problem.”
“Time sequence is such a thing. Due to various influencing factors, the time we calculate does not correspond with the universe’s underlying rules’ time sequence. When we touch the time sequence, our personal time collapses — that’s what Shiyan is.”
“Our frontier science ran too fast, ignoring other shortcomings, causing serious specialization imbalance, hence unable to solve the Shiyan issue, collapsing at one touch, and it’s the collapse of the entire timeline.”
“Of course, scientists in the future era didn’t surrender, waiting for death. They formulated various Doomsday Plans for this.”
Lucia wrote a series of numbers on the whiteboard.
123456789…
“The initial plan, also the simplest plan, was the exhaustive method, as our time and time sequence didn’t match. We just need to adjust our time, with infinite trial and error, we will eventually find the correct time sequence.”
“Just like the previous problem, if you can’t understand the question description, directly draw it out and count fingers, you can still solve the problem.”
She drew a horizontal line below and wrote “1” at the end.
“After all, it’s an addition and subtraction calculation within 10. If you fill all the numbers, there’s bound to be one that’s correct.”
“There’s one correct answer, or call it a correct timeline, which we refer to as world line 1.0. On this world line, we ultimately got the correct answer, solving the Shiyan crisis.”
“But the problem is that the teacher won’t let you write ten answers.”
“So we looked at the problem from a different angle — if ten people do this problem, each writing a different answer, inevitably, one person will answer correctly.”
“This is parallel worlds, or parallel world lines.”
“Although one person got the correct answer, others just answered the question incorrectly, not worthy of death. We still have opportunities for salvation, like retaking the exam, repeating a year, bribing the teacher, or peeking the answers… these are the other Doomsday Plans after Plan 1.”
Lucia drew a second line.
“The Ancient Dragon Court Plan is essentially a compensatory answer.”
“Although the correct answer to this question is 9, Lele answered 7, and her answer is established under my inducement premise. Though she couldn’t understand the first part of the problem, she could do the math. As the question maker, I know it’s the problem’s fault, not hers, so I won’t overly blame her.”
“Humans on this world line, though unable to evade Shiyan’s arrival, through the Ancient Dragon Court Plan, compress the essence of the entire civilization into a whole, abandoning the concept of time, in exchange for the possibility of surviving the Shiyan crisis.”
“As for whether it’s successful, we can’t see it being within the timeline.”
“Then there’s the United Ark Plan, whose essence is betting that the question maker doesn’t want the entire class to fail.”
“If the same problem was given to ten kids to answer, with ten completely different answers, is it the kids’ own problem, or the question maker’s level problem?”