Silent Ark

Chapter 5: The Death of "God"

Liu Pan sat in a chair.

The posture remained unchanged.

But his eyes—

Yao Chong couldn't explain what physical changes were occurring in Liu Pan's eyes.

The pupils were neither dilated nor constricted, nor were they congested.

It was still the same pair of ordinary human eyes, slightly cloudy from long hours of staying up late.

But he was certain.

It wasn't Liu Pan who was looking at him.

Something else was looking at him through Liu Pan's eyes.

"Don't move," Liu Pan said.

The voice was his own.

The timbre and accent are all his.

But the rhythm is wrong.

Liu Pan speaks with his own rhythm—sometimes fast, sometimes slow, often pausing in the middle of a sentence to correct himself.

The rhythm at this moment is perfect.

The spacing between each character is exactly equal.

"Don't move, don't ask questions, don't speak, don't turn your head. Just look straight ahead with your current field of vision."

Yao Chong looked straight ahead; the monitoring screen was still lit, and the LHC overhead view was still there.

But the top view has changed.

LCH is a ring with a circumference of 27 kilometers.

But at this moment, that loop...

It breathes, expands, and contracts, with an extremely small volume amplitude, but data monitoring shows it is 0.3 millimeters, and the cycle and the frequency of the tremors are perfectly synchronized.

"It's not breathing," Liu Pan said. "It's chewing."

"The laws of physics are not the laws of nature." Liu Pan stood in front of the monitor, his back to Yao Chong, his voice maintaining an unnatural, precise rhythm. "It's skin. Like snakeskin. Like a cicada's molt. Like the outer skin of something. It covers a surface's 'shape'—the way it bends determines gravity, the mode of vibration determines electromagnetic force, the thickness determines the strong and weak nuclear forces—we've always thought we're studying the essence of the world, but actually we've been touching a skin all along, and the collision frequency two days ago already made it visible, we just couldn't see it."

"Under that skin—"

"Yes. Under the skin."

He stretched out his hand, his fingers hovering above the screen.

"Half an hour ago, in arc four. That perturbation wasn't a normal anomaly. It was as if the skin was touched. From the other side. From below."

"What touched you?"

"I didn't see it, but I felt it. The touch was so light that it was almost imperceptible; if I hadn't been reaching for my coat, my hand might have landed on the curved exterior."

"Then your heartbeat was calibrated."

"Calibration isn't a side effect. It's part of the act of touching it. Like tuning a tuning fork—you touch the tuning fork, and it vibrates at the standard frequency. It's not 'affected.' It's used. It's used as a measuring tool."

"What are you measuring?"

Liu Pan's finger landed on the screen.

The instant your fingertip touches the LCD panel—

The LHC loop on the screen stopped.

It's not that the image is frozen, it's that the breathing of the loops, that expanding and contracting "chewing"—has stopped.

"Measure how thick this skin is," Liu Pan said.

All screens went black at the same time.

The darkness lasted for 0.7 seconds.

In those 0.7 seconds, Yao Chong experienced the longest moment of his life.

It's not just a long psychological journey.

It's also physical.

His subjective time was stretched into threads—like toffee being stretched into thin strands, each second stretched into ten thousand even thinner strands, each strand filled with the full perception of a normal second.

That 0.7 seconds turned into nearly two hours.

In those two hours—he saw it.

A certain mode of perception that humans shouldn't possess, covered by the "skin" of physical laws for billions of years—was automatically activated the moment the skin was lifted.

He saw the very rules of physical laws.

It is not a cold equation recorded and used by people, nor a mathematical object, but something like an "unknown geometric shape without substance" that interweaves and covers the entire universe.

It is everywhere, yet untouchable.

Just like water to fish—fish don't "see" water; water is the medium for fish movement. But when fish are in the air, they can perceive the difference between water and air.

The laws of physics are also like this; they are not "seen" in the universe, but rather they envelop the universe, allowing the universe to operate within them.

And at this moment—they are moving.

It's not a change.

It's not a fluctuation.

It's a more fundamental movement—like a huge piece of fabric being lifted from the edge. The laws of physics don't "collapse."

They are being revealed.

From a certain direction, from "below".

Yao Chong saw what was underneath the lifted edge—

He saw it for about 0.0003 seconds.

enough.

That's too much.

Ends in 0.7 seconds.

The lights are back on.

Screen restored.

Yao Chong found himself kneeling on the ground, his hands supporting him, his knuckles white from excessive trembling. His stomach was churning, contracting in a rhythm that was not part of his digestive system's rejection process, as if his body was trying to vomit something that shouldn't be seen.

"Zichong".

Liu Pan's voice came from above.

Yao Chong looked up.

Liu Pan was still sitting in the chair in front of the screen, his posture unchanged from before.

His hand rested on the screen, but his expression turned sorrowful.

A vast, quiet sorrow, as calm as the sea surface yet unfathomable.

"You saw it too?" Yao Chong squeezed out a few words, his voice sounding unlike his own.

"right."

"What is that?"

Liu Pan looked down at his palms, turning them over and over, examining them carefully as if he were seeing them for the first time.

Are you familiar with the saying "the death of God"?

"Did Nietzsche say that?"

Nietzsche said: God is dead because we no longer need a transcendent being to explain the world. Science has replaced religion. Reason has replaced faith. We no longer need the assumption of 'God'.

"and then?"

"Then Nietzsche got it backwards." Liu Pan turned around to face the monitor screen.

On the screen, the LHC loop resumed breathing—no, not resumed—it accelerated.

The amplitude increased from 0.3 mm to 0.7 mm.

The period was shortened from 0.118 nanoseconds to 0.091 nanoseconds.

"It's not that we no longer need God, it's that God no longer needs us."

Yao Chong hadn't gotten up yet, and was looking up at him.

The restored lights cast Liu Pan's shadow onto the monitoring screen behind him, almost covering the entire LHC overhead view.

"The laws of physics—we thought they were rules set by God. The speed of light is this value, gravity is this strength—we thought that by uncovering the underlying laws of physics we could see the face of God."

"But after we lifted it—"

"No face."

Liu Panren looked at his palm.

"Beyond the skin of the laws of physics, there is no God. There is nothing beneath."

"Then what you saw—"

"What I see is not 'nothingness'. 'Nothingness' is at least a state—it requires 'existence' as a prerequisite to define 'nothingness'. So what I see is not 'nothingness'."

He closed his eyes again.

"Have you ever seen animals eat? Large carnivores eat large herbivores. When a lion bites a zebra's throat, the zebra struggles for a while, then stops. It seems dead—but it's more like something bigger has been shut off. Like someone unplugged the power. The zebra's body is still there, warm, and intact, but the zebra is no longer inside."

Yao Chong didn't respond, but he thought that this might be what people call the soul.

"The moment the laws of physics were revealed—the thing I saw—wasn't a mouth. Not teeth. Not a stomach. It was—"

He opened his eyes.

"It's the act of chewing itself."

"Not 'something being chewed'. It's the act of 'chewing' itself. Pure, unattached to any organ, detached from all carriers—chewing. Just as 'gravity' exists unattached to any object—'chewing' exists unattached to any mouth. It is a property there. The air there is 'chewing'. The space there is 'chewing'. Time there—if time exists there—passes by 'chewing'."

"We peel back the skin of the laws of physics—like peeling back a napkin—and find that what lies beneath isn't a tabletop. It's chewing. The 'below' of the entire universe—the 'foundation' that supports the laws of physics—is not some more fundamental physical rule. It's chewing."

"The laws of physics are not 'created.' They are the residue from chewing. Like crumbs that fall onto the tablecloth when you eat—those crumbs form some kind of structure, and we live in those structures."

"Atoms are fragments, light is fragments, we are fragments, so perhaps the complete whole is God."

"And now—"

On the screen, the respiratory amplitude of the LHC loop has reached 1.2 millimeters.

The period was shortened to 0.063 nanoseconds.

"Now the napkin is lifted up. The crumbs need to be brushed off."

"And beneath the debris—"

"Only the mouth."

"God has been eaten..."