Rebirth of the Super Battleship

Periodicity was a very critical word. Because it meant that once Xiao Yu grasped its periodic pattern, he could predict the star's motion at any moment in the future, and he could also generalize and summarize this pattern as a basis to discover more laws hidden within.

"So, as you can all see, we've already found its motion pattern. But, can anyone tell me, what is the connection between these movements? What sort of thing would travel along such a trajectory? I must point out, within this motion trajectory, there are many repetitions and discontinuities. Its movement doesn't appear to be continuous," Xiao Yu said.

The discontinuous trajectory was as if someone were standing at one location in one instant, and in the very next instant had jumped to another place, without spending any time, or with almost no time, in between.

"This sort of discontinuous motion is very similar to the way quanta behave in the microscopic world," one scientist said. "Like electrons and other leptons."

The motion of electrons orbiting an atomic nucleus is unpredictable. They can disappear in an instant, vanishing from the observable universe, or exist in two or more locations at once. This behavior in the microscopic world sounded absurd. If you compared it to a human, it would be as if that person existed simultaneously at both point a and point b. Yet in the microscopic realm, it was a real, measurable phenomenon.

"This unknown relic definitely isn't behaving exactly like a microscopic electron. First of all, an electron's motion is fundamentally unpredictable. But the trajectory of this relic can be predicted. We've already determined its motion pattern and can forecast its location at any point in the future. Second, while an electron can simultaneously be in multiple places, here in this star system, we haven't observed any such phenomenon," another scientist countered this opinion.

"Then let's create a visualization of the trajectory," Xiao Yu said, issuing a command.

As soon as he spoke, a giant fireball abruptly appeared in the conference room.

The fireball was about one meter in diameter, hovering silently in the air as it slowly rotated. Every scientist present could see this slightly yellowish-white sphere very clearly, even its surface details were visible. For example, the perpetual eruptions of stellar material and the waves of stellar plasma rising and falling.

"This is a scaled-down projection of the star," Xiao Yu explained. "Observe, it's currently undergoing a new round of axial tilt motion."

As Xiao Yu spoke, the star began to wobble irregularly, looking exactly like an unbalanced spinning sphere.

"Let's take the first instance of axial tilt we observed as our point of origin. Based on that observation, we estimated there was a celestial body at a distance of four billion kilometers. So it would be right here. Hm, the distance is too great to show at the same scale, so instead, I'll represent the star as a light point, and everything else will be scaled to one part in four trillion."

As he spoke, Xiao Yu tapped lightly in the air. One meter away from the light point representing the star, a black point appeared.

"Next, based on the second observation, the object was estimated to be twelve billion kilometers away, so it would be here," Xiao Yu continued, tapping again. Three meters away from the light point, another black point appeared.

"Then here, seven point six billion kilometers…"

All the scientists sat in absolute silence, their eyes fixed on Xiao Yu's movements.

"And then here…"

Xiao Yu spoke as he read out each piece of data, marking every position with a black dot. In total, there were over three thousand data points, so there were over three thousand black dots. These thousands of dots represented every place that invisible entity had reached within one full month of its cycle.

"If we arrange them in chronological order, it looks like this." Xiao Yu tapped his finger again. From the dot marking the first observation, only one meter from the star, a black line extended, connecting it to the point three meters away.

The black line continued to stretch, eventually linking all the black dots together. Thousands of lines formed a dense tangle that looked like a ball of yarn. Many of these lines intersected and crisscrossed.

"This is the situation. Now, can anyone tell me what this means?" Xiao Yu manipulated the projection and spread his hands in a questioning gesture.

"I just thought of one possibility," Luka Three stood up and said. "In the macroscopic world, the motion of matter over time always has continuity. At least before the development of so-called space-jump technology, this rule holds true. Even our curvature flight abides by this principle. Since this thing's movement doesn't follow that rule, could it be that it doesn't belong to our universe?"

"Go on," Xiao Yu gestured for him to continue. Luka Three's statement was too vague, and even Xiao Yu couldn't tell what he meant.

"It may not be something inside our three-dimensional universe," Luka Two interjected, emphasizing the words three-dimensional. "As for the fourth dimension, even though we truly experienced it inside the Taihao Entity, we still couldn't comprehend its existence. But it doesn't matter, using mathematics as a tool, we've long deduced the mathematical expressions of Four-Dimensional space. When I applied mathematical calculations to these black dots, I found that their motion trajectory isn't continuous in three dimensions, but in Four-Dimensional space, it is continuous."

Xiao Yu's eyes lit up. "You're saying this object, this relic, is moving within the fourth dimension, and what we're seeing in real space is only its projection into three dimensions? And that the star's bizarre motion is simply caused by the difference between Four-Dimensional and three-dimensional distance formulas?"

"Yes." Luka Three nodded.

Xiao Yu fell silent for a moment. In that brief instant, he had already recalculated all the data points using Luka Three's line of reasoning. The results confirmed that Luka Three was correct. When computed in Four-Dimensional space, the object's motion was indeed continuous.

As long as the motion was continuous, then the biggest problem Xiao Yu faced was eliminated. This proved that the Trolor Civilization hadn't achieved a terrifying speed of over two thousand six hundred times the speed of light. The reason such figures had appeared was simply the discrepancy in converting distances between three-dimensional and four-dimensional space.

The cause of this discrepancy was simple. In the three-dimensional world, the fourth dimension either doesn't exist or cannot be perceived. So, if something moved fifty kilometers in the fourth dimension, how far did it travel in three-dimensional space?

Xiao Yu didn't know, nor could he calculate it. There was no exact conversion formula linking different-dimensional worlds. But by comparing the three-dimensional world with the two-dimensional world, he could glimpse a hint of the principle.

Suppose a sheet of white paper represented a two-dimensional world. Now, imagine a small ball moving one centimeter diagonally above that sheet. Taking that centimeter as the hypotenuse, with the ball's perpendicular projection onto the paper as point a, the distance from the ball to the paper as one leg of the right triangle, and the line connecting the ball to point a as the other leg, then in the two-dimensional world, the movement distance isn't the hypotenuse length but the length of that second leg. So one centimeter in three-dimensional space might translate to only half a centimeter or 0.7 centimeters in the two-dimensional world.

But there was another factor: space curvature. In the three-dimensional world, a sheet of paper representing a two-dimensional plane could be bent at will. You could easily fold both ends of the paper until they were only one centimeter apart, then let the ball travel one centimeter across from one end to the other. In three-dimensional space, it moved one centimeter. But when you unfolded the paper again, that one centimeter of movement could equal the entire length of the sheet in two dimensions.

Similarly, in the fourth dimension, one centimeter could equal a million kilometers in three-dimensional space, or just a micrometer. Between those distances, there was no precise conversion formula.

While Xiao Yu was calculating, the conference room was filled with discussion. The scientists quickly began running their own computations. About five minutes later, everyone had their results.

"Lord Three is correct. Our calculations also support Lord Three's conclusion," one scientist said.

But Xiao Yu once again fell into deep thought.

He had never forgotten the Taihao Civilization, which had entered a semi-Four-Dimensional state. Despite their tremendous power, the Taihao Civilization had still been trapped at the threshold of Four-Dimensional space, unable to truly move within the fourth dimension and unable to return fully to three-dimensional space. So what qualifications did the Trolor Civilization have, that they could move freely within the fourth dimension?

It didn't make sense.

Xiao Yu raised this question.