It took them another week to set off, mainly to wait for the money from the auction of ancient books to be in place. Just as Rolin had estimated, the 11 books fetched more than ¥32 million before tax at the auction. The handwritten copy of the play Yushuang Room collected by Cheng Yanqiu was sold for ¥7.1 million, 15% higher than the estimated price, coming fifth among the articles of ancient books in recent years.
Although the exchange rate of RMB to reals was around 1:0.24, Sothebys converted most of the money into US dollars and wired them into Huang Xuan’s bank account. Huang Xuan made a profit of 50 times in just three days, and it was when Rolin lacked energy. Therefore, Huang Xuan made an international phone call for Li Shenggang, asking him to contact the generator renting company and to squeeze the electricity of the aluminum factory as much as possible, by which ten million kWh of electricity had been stored up.
However, Huang Xuan had a little trouble with the equivalent. After Rolin had upgraded the base to level 22, the base could carry more types of materials and consume several times less energy. Meanwhile, being able to travel to the times before 1600 made Huang Xuan very excited.
Nevertheless, it was the expectation that made preparing the equivalent tricky.
Although the base already had an electricity storage of ten million kWh, once it traveled to a different plane that had never experienced spatial and temporal oscillation, despite its teeny tiny chance of happening, it would need an enormous amount of energy. Therefore, how to carry the materials effectively became a very important question.
Rolin offered him a regular material list of the base regarding varieties of grains, the cost/performance of which was the highest, and special pieces of handicrafts. Usually, resin consumed less energy than glass while glass less than metal. Based on this theory, the time travelers in the past liked carrying delicate but fragile gadgets, which were cheap but hard to estimate and sell.
It had been rumored that the mechanism of energy consumption in a plane passage, which involved the relation between molecular structure and energy pedigree, used to be the focus of scientific research. But according to Rolin’s explanation, things going bad more easily consumed less energy, which didn’t explain why iron rusts easily consumed more energy than diamonds. Was it because the relation between substances had been ignored, which went against storage itself?
Although Rolin’s authority had been elevated and his intelligence improved (according to Huang Xuan), he still couldn’t read Huang Xuan’s mind.
Plane travels were dangerous. However, high risks should bring high profits, which linked closely to the costs. Hence, for days, Huang Xuan had been thinking about what materials to take with him.
Grains should be essential because wherever there were people, they were the standard equivalent which had been said to once carry a pretty high value in the past. Livestock seemed OK, but they were troublesome, for example, their intestines and stomachs needed to be cleaned, which few travelers were willing to do.
Huang Xuan had encountered a pleasant issue for a plane traveler. In the big plane age, prices of products like grains had once been so high that the merchants hadn’t been able to take them anymore. In some planes, they had even swallowed half the profit. On the other hand, energy had been the cheapest product in such a plane as had an endless need for energy, because the energy people had been pursuing had been cheap itself. Certainly, the big plane age hadn’t been able to last. It had ended like a beautiful Utopia during the spatial and temporal oscillation brought by free trade, which only the closed planes could escape from.
Facing the costly electricity and the limited allowance of materials, Huang Xuan at last purchased 15 million tons of grains and some seasoning like cane sugar and seeds of Chinese prickly ashes. Although that sounded a lot, since Sao Paulo was the biggest business center of Brazil, with a proper price, Santos Port could ship anything in the world.
At seven o’clock on May 28, Huang Xuan sneaked out of his apartment. Huang Qunsheng would be in the lab that night. Li Qing was at home, but he never stepped in Huang Xuan’s room, so Huang Xuan wouldn’t be found out until ten o’clock the next morning.
The plane passage was as colorful as before. The things around it became colorful too as the base passed by, but under careful observation, they turned out to be just common.
Floating alone in the air was boring, especially when there was no reference object around. “Why the time wasn’t unified when I came back to P112 from another plane? Why can’t I go to a different space and time of P112? How many spaces and times are there in a plane?” asked Huang Xuan out of boredom.
“Because space and time conform to quantum theory,” Rolin answered formally. “Time exists in pieces, not continuously. Simply speaking, periods of time make up a plane. So as long as you come back to the same period of time, the time is unified. A time machine with a higher level consumes more energy and can better control when to enter a period of time. If you leave that period in a zone in the front part of it and enter it in a rear part, you will stay longer in other planes, but at most the total length of the period. Otherwise, you will never come back to the initial space and time of the initial plane.”
“In addition, the length of time period varies. Sometimes, it is shorter than a second while in other cases it lasts for months. A precise judgment for the present space and time is a basic requirement for a time machine. The more precise a time machine is, the more difficult it is to create.”
Rolin’s explanation was easy to understand, but limitedly, at least it was unclear to Huang Xuan. He had asked just to kill the time, not to know about a machine tens of thousands of years later from the future. “Then if you had been slower, you would have lost me last time when you left me in another plane?” he joked.
“Sure.”
“This answer sounds cold.” Huang Xuan remained smiling. “Actually, there is some way to go back even if somebody gets lost. As long as he or she keeps traveling, there is still a chance, isn’t there?”
“Very tiny.” Maybe even Rolin couldn’t tell how tiny the chance was; he answered seriously, “The opportunities for a person to enter other planes are limited, which is determined by the energy ratio of the buffer zone. Therefore, nobody can travel limitlessly.”
Huang Xuan was shocked and asked, “How many times do I get?”
“Since for the time being, the plane is in a state of space and time wilderness, and there is only one known base, plus, you have the second highest authority, you are allowed to use all the energy of the buffer zone. Don’t worry.”
Huang Xuan wasn’t satisfied. “Then how many? Where does the energy of the buffer zone come from? Can’t it be replenished?”
“Yes, it can. The amount of its available energy depends on the disparity between the total and the amount needed to maintain the balance of the plane. The bigger the disparity is, the more opportunities one can get. According to the conservation law of energy, to get more energy, you must invade other planes and reduce the losses of your own plane.”
“It sounds complicated. Is there going to be war?”
“Of course. When the energy required to maintain the plane balance exceeds the total, spatial and temporal oscillation will take place, which may destroy some periods of time, even the entire plane, resulting in a long-time wilderness. P112 is just like that.”
Huang Xuan held out his tongue and was going to ask another question when the light before him changed, which he was familiar with.
“I have arrived,” he thought.