Chapter 690 - 441: Warp Engine
First of all.
This thing is definitely not some kind of mystical study of space rules.
Because Wang Ye can feel it,
the energy source for Shrinking Inches is still Primordial Qi, which is his stamina.
It’s just that the way it uses energy is far more complex than any of his previous movement methods.
That’s why it gives him a headache.
Because each step forcibly uses part of the brain’s memory to automatically calculate.
It’s akin to having numerous applications open on a computer, causing the CPU and graphics card to heat up.
Although the user enjoys the convenience brought by the computer’s computing power, they are unaware of the specific reason for the heat increase.
However, there is an advantage: the energy consumed by stepping a kilometer is less than the energy consumed by running a kilometer honestly.
Because the movement is light, wind resistance decreases.
At the same time, body activity becomes less complex and varied.
Wang Ye maintained a distance of five hundred meters per step, moving continuously over a hundred kilometers,
until his head was about to split from the pain. Only then did he stop, carefully recalling the energy application method during each step.
Suddenly.
Wang Ye discovered that whenever he used Shrinking Inches, the space in front of and behind him seemed to warp to some extent.
If he reached out his hand while stepping, he could touch distances far beyond his arm’s reach.
And if he stretched his hand backward, he’d find his hand become terribly short, unable to touch things right in front of him.
"Warped space... curvature?"
Suddenly, a hypothesis appeared in his mind, and he immediately pulled out his phone to search for information online.
Finally, after several minutes, he found a theoretical knowledge most aligned with his current situation.
That would be the Warp Engine,
which is a hypothetical engine that could create warp in spacetime, thus circumventing the speed limit.
Its working principle involves compressing space in front and expanding space behind.
It’s like toothpaste in a tube, thus shrinking the traversable space and allowing some imaginary spacecraft to cross distances faster than they could without considering spacetime.
The theoretical framework for the Warp Engine was most famously proposed by physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994.
Imagine if an ant is walking on a carpet; the speed of the ant’s crawl surely can’t surpass its own speed limit. But, if here, a human in front of the carpet pulled the carpet forward, the ant could reach its destination faster.
In this analogy, the ant is the human or spacecraft, and the carpet is the cosmos’ space.
So what is the human pulling the carpet?
It is the Warp Engine.
In this theory, it is critical that the moving spacecraft remains relatively stationary with respect to the cosmos’ space.
Therefore, the spacecraft itself doesn’t exceed the speed of light and hasn’t broken the cosmos’ speed limit. Instead, the warped spacetime region is moving at a superluminal pace.
Thus, theoretically, the Warp Engine is entirely feasible.
This concept is not merely a product of human imagination; the cosmos’ expansion operates on this principle too.
Cosmological observations indicate that most distant galaxies are moving away from Earth at superluminal speeds.
This doesn’t violate relativity.
Because it is not the galaxies themselves moving at those speeds in space, but rather the space between them expanding.
The Warp Engine, fundamentally, aims to create a local, controllable version of cosmic expansion and contraction.
However, the Warp Engine itself has a highly critical flaw. It needs a bubble of negative energy density around the object to create an imbalance in spacetime, driven either by exotic particles yet to be discovered by humans or by the mysterious Dark Energy driving universal expansion. And these energies haven’t even been detected by humans, let alone controlled.
Therefore, the current focus of human research is gravity, as gravity is the only force currently known to humans capable of warping spacetime; for instance, black holes rely on extreme gravity to devour light and space. If humans could master gravity as strong as that of black holes, it might be possible to achieve a Curvature Engine.
But now, the power Wang Ye uses is clearly not gravity, as his power is not enough to warp spacetime, so the energy and technology he is using must be a type of Dark Matter unknown to humans as of now.
Dark Matter comprises over ninety percent of the cosmos, while the observable matter constitutes less than ten percent of cosmic matter, so there is still a lot of material in the cosmos unperceivable to humans, and the Primordial Qi that Wang Ye currently controls is a form of Dark Matter.
After confirming that the principle behind the Shrinking Inches ability is a Curvature Engine, another question emerged in Wang Ye’s mind. He wanted to know whether he achieved a Curvature Engine through Primordial Qi or another mysterious material.
As far as he knows, after evolving to a certain level, or after the brain develops to a certain height, humans will acquire new perception abilities, such as the Sixth Sense and the Seventh Sense. The perception ability of Primordial Qi was an ability Wang Ye obtained after fully mastering Tai Chi.
And now, several months have passed, and Wang Ye seems to have not awakened any other Dark Matter perception abilities, at most only enhancing perception abilities regarding known elements to humanity, such as being able to analyze the internal structure of water and fire using only the Five Senses.
Alternatively, perhaps he has actually awakened a Seventh Sense, but he hasn’t noticed it.