One silver-white line after another blazed to light, and the space-time gate anchored to a physical structure took form. Layers upon layers of "space-time" coalesced around Lucian as he stepped through the great "gate."
A burst of radiant light erupted, dazzling and brilliant, his figure gradually fading to nothing. By the time everything settled, all that remained in Natasha's eyes was a magic circle shimmering with faint silver-white luster and the dim, pale "space-time gate."
…………
"The teleportation to the 'Cosmic Observatory' is about to begin. Please make sure you've already consumed the potion in your hand." Leiliya's crisp voice echoed in the ears of four students—Ali, Anderson, Jane, and Philomena.
Ali looked down at the pale blue vial in his hand. The sharp, stinging taste of the potion still seemed to linger in his mouth, yet after swallowing it, he genuinely felt an indescribable clarity—as if his soul, his brain, and his entire body had all been placed inside a magical refrigerator.
Earlier, he had seen Jane step forward first, and had hurriedly followed in a panic. Fortunately, his luck had held, and he had managed to come in fourth, spared the wait for the next batch.
He turned his head and met Jane's gaze. He saw that those black eyes had lost their usual composure, as though two flames were burning within them. The excitement, the eagerness, the longing—these emotions needed no discernment to sense clearly. They were the most genuine yearning of ground-dwelling humanity for the vast starry sky and the boundless cosmos.
Perhaps, until you had once stood beneath the stars, you could never truly understand what it meant to be insignificant, or what true vastness and magnificence really entailed.
Leiliya swept her gaze around, taking in the expressions on the students' faces, and allowed herself a slight smile. She thought to herself: the Council is truly generous. They've equipped every single one of them with a vial of "High-Grade Chilga" potion—something we'd normally never splurge on, preferring instead to endure the dizziness of spatial transfers.
"Chilga" was an extremely rare fruit native to the Holm Kingdom, serving as the primary ingredient for crafting potions that approached high-tier grade.
But Leiliya also understood that the Council's generosity had a purpose. Once these students truly "saw" the starry sky and felt the vastness of the cosmos, they would come to realize that the "God of Truth," waging wars over resources and followers on this tiny planet, was not nearly as great as they had imagined.
Then, through their dissemination, similar viewpoints could be seeded ahead of time among young people and children receiving the academy's education. Combined with the Council's follow-up measures—the "Stellar Museum," the "Cosmic Experience Center," the "Journey to the Stars" program, and others—the initiative could be extended across all four nations of the Straits and the northern coastal corridor, broadening the populace's horizons to the greatest extent possible.
"Attention—the magic circle is activating." Leiliya began channeling the circle's power.
Ali's heart clenched with sudden tension. He had never even experienced flight, and now he was about to "enjoy" a spatial jump directly!
Yet alongside the tension, an irrepressible anticipation and longing set his whole body trembling.
Brilliant silver-white rays reflected in Ali's eyes, making everything around him feel extraordinarily bright yet hazy and indistinct.
…………
Inside the Tower.
Rachel had come to find Samantha carrying a copy of Arcane journal, her emotions a volatile mix of excitement, elation, dejection, and bewilderment. These two contradictory feelings made her own forehead feel swollen, and she had to reach up and rub it. "There really are positrons…"
"Without personally verifying it yourself, you still can't say for certain that they exist." Samantha's expression was equally complicated.
Though she said as much, in her heart she did believe that Lucian had truly discovered positrons. Setting aside the absolute importance of the generalized Lucian equation in the microscopic domain, its perfect fit with numerous experiments forcing Archanists to accept that the equation's negative solutions truly represented antimatter—it was Lucian's consistently rigorous arcane attitude, his track record of never publishing a paper without thorough confidence, that made her trust positrons could indeed be found in cosmic rays. This was perhaps the power of authority.
"This world is too wondrous," Rachel murmured, her gaze full of yearning and brimming with excitement. "In all the millions upon millions of years of the past, not a single intelligent being ever realized that antimatter existed. With the advance of arcane research, the 'true world' will reveal itself to us, step by step." This exploration of the world's deepest mysteries was the most essential and most captivating charm of the arcane.
Though a large portion of current Archanists had entered the field seeking power, wealth, treasures, or the comforts they afforded, or had gradually forgotten the original "beauty" that first drew them to become Archanists amid the dry, repetitive grind of year after year's research—their hearts clouded by the allure of power and riches—whenever a major discovery was made, whenever they drew closer to the true world, they would still recall or feel that passion and wonder of exploring the unknown.
Samantha nodded. "Actually, from the standpoint of symmetry, antimatter seems like a perfectly natural thing. If there are particles, there must necessarily be conjugate symmetric antiparticles to go with them. Especially since Lord Evans discarded the most contested negative energy state concept entirely, replacing it with the paired appearance and annihilation of positive and negative particles."
"Exactly. I wonder what those people who were waxing rhapsodic about the 'negative-energy-state vacuum sea' are feeling right now—even the Grand Archanist they thought most likely to support that theoretical model has abandoned the concept." Rachel chuckled. Though the picture of a "negative-energy-state vacuum sea" had thrilled every mage with its potential to illuminate the fundamental nature of magic, every Archanist with deeper research into the microscopic domain had, after the initial excitement, adopted a cautious and far from optimistic stance. The experimental results for particles with integer spin simply dared not be read with optimism.
For once, a trace of a smile appeared on Samantha's face. "Regardless, for now it can't be falsified either. Lord Evans's 'energy sea constantly fluctuating in the vacuum' is equally unverifiable…"
At this point, her smile turned complicated, and she said with a touch of confusion: "Is the uncertainty principle really one of the sources of matter?"
If so, where did determinism stand? Had it been swept into the dustbin of history?
"Lord Evans provided an approach for verifying the uncertainty principle at the end of his paper…" Rachel's voice suddenly took on a distant quality. "Based on field theory and the uncertainty principle, minute electromagnetic fluctuations exist within the vacuum. These can be confirmed through properly designed experiments."
Samantha stared at the paper on the table, unable to utter a single word. Lucian's past "record of triumphs" made it abundantly clear he was no fantasist, no Archanist who proposed experimental ideas without confidence. Since he had explicitly laid out an approach to verify the uncertainty principle, it meant he had considerable certainty.
After the uncertainty principle was proposed, though all current microscopic-domain experiments fit it remarkably well, no direct proof had yet been produced. This had allowed the astrologers of the Stellar school to adapt slowly, sheltered from a massive and direct shock that might otherwise have "shattered" them.
"If that experimental approach had come out two years earlier and been verified, the only astrologers still alive would probably be the low-tier mages," Leiliya said, voicing the same dark premonition.