Chapter 292 — The Simulation Grounds

Gao Heng knew exactly how long he had been sitting in this sealed-off space, cut away from the outside world.

From long experience he could be certain that the virtual space the Sleepers built ran on a different clock from reality—something to do with a certain "perceptual bias" in the human brain. He felt he had been here several days, but in surface time perhaps only a few dozen minutes had passed; after all, Amber still had not woken him.

Surely the half-elf would not just sit by and watch him sleep himself to death…

Gao Yang stood up and stretched hard. Though his body never tired in this virtual world, stretching was still an instinctive reflex. Then he lifted his head and surveyed with satisfaction the isolated space he had created.

The place was still broad and empty; Gao Yang had added no idle ornaments or buildings, because every meaningless decoration meant an extra waste of storage and processing power. Between the clear, high blue sky and the boundless open water, all that could be seen were great white metal platforms, most of them empty; on the few others stood apparatus like alchemy benches and all manner of outlandish installations—things Gao Yang had made to test the "simulation fidelity" of this space.

Outwardly, the only change to the space was the addition of those platforms, but its true and most important changes lay where the eye could not reach: Gao Yang had invested enormous effort in keeping this space secret. To make it vanish utterly into the Sleepers' psychic network, he had not only layered it with masses of camouflage and encryption, but had even tried to raise tier upon tier of defenses inside that network, burying every trace among the vast, chaotic ocean of information nodes at its lowest levels.

Given the Sleepers' present level of network-security awareness, he was confident it was utterly impossible for them to discover that he had stolen their network resources to create this space.

Besides secrecy, he had also installed a great many preset "templates" here, hidden in the space's underlying data, ready to be called up at need to assemble a suitable experimental environment in an instant.

That done, Gao Yang willed it, and the next instant he stood upon one of the metal platforms.

He thought for a moment, raised his right hand, and began to simulate an object.

A mobile phone appeared in his hand.

He pressed the power button, and as expected, the "phone" did not respond at all.

Anything whose principles cannot be parsed, or that cannot exist in this world because of contradictory rules, cannot be simulated.

He waved his hand, and the hollow shell of a phone dissolved into scattered motes of light and vanished into the air. The next second a hexagonal rune substrate coalesced into being, set with a fully charged mana crystal.

Gao Yang engaged the rune trigger, and in an instant a searing beam tore through the air and struck the ground a short distance ahead.

The basic templates invoked smoothly, and the simulation was flawless.

He dismissed the rune substrate and walked to the edge of the platform, where a great apparatus had already been installed: four parallel metal rails fixed upon an enormous base—two rails set side by side and two stacked one above the other, forming two "groups." On the horizontal pair a series of gleaming rune structures was visible, and along the inner faces of the rails lay rows of angled repulsion units; the vertical pair likewise bore repulsion mechanisms, though these were arranged parallel along the rails—they took no part in accelerating the projectile, but ensured it could "float" within the device throughout the acceleration, so that the shell would never strike the repulsion mechanisms on either side.

After all, a repulsion acceleration rail was unlike any similar accelerator on Earth: its inner face was not smooth but studded with slanted, protruding repulsion points, and because of the peculiar nature of repulsion magic those points could not be shielded by anything—so the accelerated object had to be secured additionally within the track to avoid collision.

A shell in a floating state could also minimize friction losses against the launching mechanism, preserving kinetic energy—further improving the "cannon's" range and energy efficiency. It was the best solution Gao Yang could devise with the technology at hand.

Gao Yang opened the protective cover at the starting section of the acceleration track and set a grooved "shell" between the rails. After confirming that both its upper and lower grooves made proper contact with the "floating rails," he closed the cover and engaged the master rune trigger of the whole apparatus.

With a peculiar humming, the shell, under the action of the floating rails, broke direct contact with the launching device and was driven forward by the first-stage repulsion mechanisms into the acceleration zone between the side rails. There it accelerated savagely, and in a mere flash every accelerating whistle was compressed into a single shrill crack—Gao Yang saw a metal object shoot from the front of the track, screaming as it tore the air; seconds later a bloom of fire flashed on a distant metal platform, and only afterward did the thunder of the report reach his ears.

As he had expected, the shell completed its acceleration successfully, but the crude "aerodynamic runes" scrawled over it did nothing, so its flight fell far short of his hopes, and moreover…

Gao Yang glanced at the acceleration track, its power already cut. He could see that all four rails were skewed and misaligned to varying degrees—because in accelerating the shell the repulsion points acted not only upon the shell itself but also exerted powerful thrust upon the other rails. So many repulsion points interacting at such close range generated tremendous force; rails without effective reinforcement could hardly avoid being knocked out of line.

Beyond that, the irrational arrangement of the repulsion points was another major cause—if their positions could be readjusted, then surely the stress borne by the rails could be dispersed…

Looking at these results, the delight in Gao Yang's heart gradually cooled, and he began to analyze what use this simulated test site might truly serve.

Without question, this was the true purpose of the "virtual space" the Sleepers had created. Those cultists treated so marvelous a tool as a bogeyman's illusion and a pipe dream for escaping reality—a colossal waste. This thing… was meant for scientific research!

But this virtual world was not omnipotent either.

Gao Yang could simulate his "repulsion railgun" here, but he could not make the crude runes scrawled on the shell take effect.

Which meant this space could for now serve only as a testing ground: bring in concept objects already more or less perfected and run them through trials, and with the space's highly realistic properties he could harvest a great deal of valid data in the process.

This would unquestionably save enormous research-and-development costs. Many costly, time-consuming field tests could be moved into the virtual space, and many things far too dangerous could be tested here first, then taken outside for actual production once most parameters were tuned. Of course, Gao Yang reckoned the "realism" of this virtual space had its limits; tests run here would inevitably diverge from the real world, and the more complex an object—the more it touched on the deep arcana of magic—the greater the simulation error would be. The Sleepers were only mortals, after all; even if they had built this place with dream magic akin to divine art, they could not reproduce every law of the real world within it.

Yet even at ninety percent simulation validity, this virtual space was enough to generate value beyond imagining.

Beyond that validity, what concerned Gao Yang more was how to put the psychic network's "computing" function to use.