Chapter 178: Elemental Decay

Words : 1550 Updated : Sep 25th, 2025

The information Xiao Yu observed wasn’t continuous, but fragmented, often with tens of millions or even hundreds of millions of years of gaps between segments. Many parts of the process had to be pieced together by Xiao Yu through deduction and imagination. Even so, these incomplete fragments greatly enriched Xiao Yu’s existing theoretical framework, allowing him to gain a much deeper understanding of the formation process of stars. Xiao Yu continued searching through the vast ocean of information for what he needed. After the formation of the star, Xiao Yu saw that large meteorites began to appear around it. Their number reached into the hundreds of billions, trillions, seemingly endless. At this point, there was still abundant interstellar dust within the system, and it continued to gather. Gradually, small meteorites clumped together into larger ones. As the larger meteorites grew in mass, their gravitational pull became strong enough to attract interstellar dust and other small objects, allowing them to further increase their mass and size. Thus began a “meteorite war” lasting hundreds of millions of years. Large rocks devoured smaller ones and collided and merged with other large ones. After countless eons, the first celestial bodies emerged that had the capability to clear their orbits of debris. They had achieved hydrostatic equilibrium and began taking on spherical shapes. In the ocean of interstellar dust, they relentlessly increased their mass. Similar phenomena occurred in several other places within this nascent star system. Xiao Yu counted, there were as many as eight regions. “Is this... the old Solar System?” Xiao Yu felt a flicker of suspicion in his heart. The planets continued to grow in mass and size, gradually clearing away the remaining debris. After several billion years, they finally stabilized. Xiao Yu saw that once stabilized, this stellar system possessed four rocky planets and four gas giants. He still couldn’t be sure which system it was, whether it was truly the Solar System until he found another piece of information. He saw the neighboring stars of the system, and only then reached a firm conclusion. The final image, according to Xiao Yu’s calculations, should have been from over 2.5 million years ago. This was because the Andromeda Galaxy is about 2.5 million light-years from the Milky Way, and light from the Milky Way would take over 2.5 million years to reach Andromeda and be captured by the black hole there. “That’s... Alpha Centauri, that’s Sirius, that’s Tianyuan IV, that’s Wezen...” Xiao Yu recognized one familiar star after another. Although the positions of these stars were vastly different compared to today, Xiao Yu had long since mastered the orbital paths of these stars. Using reverse calculation, he could easily reconstruct their positions 2.5 million years ago. From their positions in the recorded information, Xiao Yu deduced the precise time. It was approximately 2.63 million years ago. At that time, on Earth, primitive hominids hadn’t yet realized how wondrous the starry sky above them was. They still lived primitively, barely different from beasts. Xiao Yu once again saw the real images of his home even if they were from over two million years ago. A surge of complex emotion welled up in Xiao Yu’s heart. The images continued... and finally ended. But just before the end, Xiao Yu caught a glimpse of something peculiar. It was a luminous sphere, flashing across the image for less than a second before the recording ended. “What was that?” Xiao Yu wondered, and replayed the fragment. He saw the luminous sphere again. It was about the size of Mercury, radiating a soft white glow. It floated silently outside the star system, maintaining a relatively stationary position with respect to the Sun. It wasn’t a star, a star could not be that small. Nor was it a planet, a planet could not emit such a bright glow. The only possibility was that it was some kind of technological construct. Xiao Yu noticed some massive, curved lines across the surface of the sphere that seemed to form symbols or writing of some kind. The characters felt strangely familiar to him. In just a few millionths of a second, Xiao Yu remembered. He retrieved the 90s Model Spaceship and stared blankly at the markings on its hull. The characters matched the ones on the sphere almost exactly. “They belong to the same system.” “This ship... is it from the Type D Taihao Civilization? Why would it appear here? And what connection does it have to humanity?” A surge of deep confusion rose within Xiao Yu. He recalled a rumor. It was said that between the eras of primitive apes and early humans, there was a tremendous evolutionary leap that happened in an extraordinarily short time, during which humans leapt from animal-like existence to intelligent beings. The fragment he had just seen was from 2.63 million years ago. The rumored leap in human evolution had occurred around that time as well. Xiao Yu wasn’t a biology expert and didn’t know whether that rumor was credible. But now, it seemed increasingly likely that humanity’s evolution was somehow connected to the Type D Taihao Civilization. “If these guesses are true, if humanity’s evolution was really due to the modifications by the Taihao Civilization then many puzzles can be explained. For instance, why a human corpse were found inside the Taihao Civilization’s spaceship. But if that’s true, it raises new questions. Why did they do it? Was it for their own evolution? Was the destruction of Earth related to them? Why was I the only one who survived? If it was simply to test the possibility of fusing the soul and computers, they wouldn’t have needed to destroy Earth and they wouldn’t have needed to force me to leave the Solar System.” Xiao Yu pondered silently as he sailed forward. At present, Xiao Yu could only achieve Faster-Than-Light travel in laboratory conditions; it was still impossible to apply it on a large scale. This meant he still had to rely on conventional travel to cover the 130+ light-years ahead. In the past, such a distance would have been enough to drive Xiao Yu to despair. But now, he didn’t care much. With sufficient fuel, Xiao Yu could accelerate to 40% of light speed. At that speed, it would take him about 300 years to reach his destination. And because of relativistic time dilation, the subjective time he would experience would be cut roughly in half, meaning he would feel as though only about 150 years had passed. During those 150 years, Xiao Yu planned to continue sifting through the information gathered from the information storm, searching for anything useful, while also continuing research into practical Faster-Than-Light travel. Besides these two goals, there was another crucial research focus: energy acquisition. Having developed to the point of being able to build Province-Class spaceships and cruise at 40% the speed of light, Xiao Yu increasingly felt that controlled nuclear fusion could no longer meet his energy demands. Developing new energy acquisition methods was imperative. The annihilation of matter and antimatter could release tremendous energy with 100% mass-to-energy conversion. However, Xiao Yu’s current technology was still too limited to produce antimatter on a large scale. Using large particle colliders, he could currently produce antimatter at a rate of about one gram per hour, far too little to meet his needs. For now, antimatter was still limited to theoretical and experimental research, far from practical application. In Xiao Yu’s planning, the most promising breakthrough in the short term lay in heavy element decay. By rearranging quarks within heavy elements, those elements could rapidly decay into lighter ones, releasing vast amounts of energy in the process. Earth’s destruction had been caused by the rapid decay of its iron-nickel core into hydrogen, unleashing catastrophic energy. Thanks to breakthroughs in the Grand Unified Theory, Xiao Yu had made great strides in the study of heavy element decay. Atoms are composed of atomic nuclei and electrons; nuclei consist of protons and neutrons; and protons and neutrons are hadrons particles bound by the strong nuclear force composed of quarks. Among the four fundamental forces, the strong force is the strongest, followed by electromagnetic force. Electromagnetic force repels, preventing particles from binding together; the strong force attracts, pulling particles together. The stable existence of matter depends on the balance between these two forces. Xiao Yu discovered that by weakening the strong interaction between quarks while simultaneously enhancing electromagnetic repulsion, quarks would suddenly scatter. Then, by reversing the process, strengthening the strong force and weakening electromagnetic force, the quarks would violently recombine. Quarks would reassemble into protons and neutrons, which would then recombine into atomic nuclei, which would capture electrons and form atoms. The end result was that no matter what the original material was, after the reaction, it would all be converted into hydrogen. This process essentially split matter apart at the quark level and then reassembled it. During this violent recombination, a vast amount of mass would be converted into energy. Xiao Yu’s rough calculations suggested that the mass-to-energy conversion efficiency would be at least ten times greater than that of controlled nuclear fusion meaning that approximately half of the mass involved in the reaction could be converted into energy!

Chapter 178: Elemental Decay

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