Chapter 135: Deeper Despair

Chapter 135: Deeper Despair

Throughout human history, the controversy over the Golden Record never ceased.

Many people had regretted this presumptuous and ignorant act.

We had revealed too much information about ourselves on the Golden Record.

We foolishly introduced humanity, and also introduced Earth.

It was just like a battle between two armies: one side was a modern military with planes and cannons, while the other side was primitive humans with wooden spears and stone clubs. The foolish primitive humans even obediently handed over the map to their nest and the tribal distribution map.

If given a choice, humanity might have abandoned or even tried to retrieve the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes.

Sadly, there is no medicine for regret.

To make Voyager 1 travel farther, humans even fired its long-dormant Trajectory Correction Maneuver (TCM) thrusters on November 28, 2017, after 37 years of silence. They tested its ability to position itself using 10-millisecond pulses.

Since Voyager 2 and then Voyager 1 completely ran out of power and lost contact in 2025, humanity has had almost no chance of retrieving these two probes.

Since then, humanity’s fate was utterly handed over to the Universe.

We could only hope the Universe would be kind.

But just as humans are merciless towards endangered animals on Earth, the Universe’s answer was equally cold and ruthless, yet it followed natural laws.

Good resources rightfully belong to stronger civilizations.

Moreover, this weak civilization was so foolish.

At this very moment, Chen Feng was personally and deeply experiencing how this foolishness was being exploited.

No figure of speech could describe the feeling in his heart.

It felt both absurd and sorrowful.

He suddenly found it ridiculous.

Humanity was born from a cosmic coincidence. Over millions of years, we struggled through the era of drinking blood and eating raw flesh, finally managing to create our own brilliant civilization and long history.

Humanity conquered natural disasters, conquered selfishness, conquered man-made calamities, conquered viruses. Yet, we were utterly defeated by an act of accidental ignorance, completely losing our right to exist.

The music on the Golden Record played melodiously.

To Chen Feng, it sounded like the scraping of death’s scythe on cement.

As an unqualified music provider with no artistic skill, Chen Feng hadn’t listened to these classical pieces representing different cultures.

This didn’t stop him from appreciating the music.

Each piece represented a culture and a way of thinking; they were true enduring classics.

For example, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major, First Movement; Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” (The Magic Flute), the Blues, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, First Movement; and Bo Ya’s guqin piece “Flowing Water.”

Chen Feng hadn’t heard these classical pieces before, mainly because he couldn’t really remember them anyway, so listening was pointless.

But he didn’t need to think to know that these pieces should be very beautiful and pleasant.

Right now, however, he felt extremely twisted.

The music was beautiful, yes, yet his deep inner ability, honed for precise musical appreciation and reconstruction, instinctively screamed at him.

Something felt wrong.

No, everything felt wrong.

Something had been added to this music.

It seemed like an almost imperceptible background sound, making the originally beautiful melodies feel eerie, deeply unsettling, like fingernails scraping on frosted glass.

It made the listener’s scalp tingle and jaw clench.

The real thing influencing people’s minds was the radiation wave Lin Bu mentioned, which human ears alone couldn’t perceive.

It hid soundlessly, but was everywhere.

What Chen Feng heard now was a converted version of that radiation wave, transformed into sound waves audible and discernible to humans.

This actually amplified its signal strength countless times, yet Chen Feng was not controlled.

He didn’t feel his emotions suppressed; instead, he felt an intense disgust towards this sound.

His mind and body resisted it, preventing him from succumbing silently like others.

Although Chen Feng suffered greatly, he persevered. He had no way back.

He had paid such a high price, died so many times, struggled through this long march only to glimpse a sliver of light. How could he give up now?

He forced himself, enduring the discomfort, and concentrated fiercely, trying hard to memorize every tiny detail of this sound, especially the background noise.

Gradually, he discovered a pattern.

The background noise wasn’t constant; it shifted following a strange, peculiar rhythm and beat.

If he actively tried to block out that background noise in his mind, the discomfort lessened considerably.

This background noise seemed to be the actual mechanism causing the mind control.

The loud original music was just a cover, or perhaps the vehicle letting the controlling power bypass the brain’s defenses. Like the candy coating on a bitter pill, or the protein shell a virus uses to disguise itself as an ordinary nutrient the human body can absorb.

Unknowingly, ninety minutes passed.

October 27th, 3020 AD at 9:33 AM.

The music in Chen Feng’s ears finished a full cycle and started playing the first piece again.

Chen Feng’s preliminary analysis of the “background noise” was now complete.

This might be the most complex, yet structurally most complete and most bizarre piece of music Chen Feng had ever “heard”.

This “composition” lasted ninety minutes. Its rhythmic changes seemed simple, yet nowhere was it repetitive.

The sheer range of frequency changes and the intricate process of transition completely surpassed the understanding of even “top musician” Chen Feng.

Its changes didn’t follow human musical scales. There was no obvious key rising or falling; it simply didn’t have a key at all, nor distinct pitches like A, B, C, D.

The shifts and changes in frequency couldn’t be accurately described by specific Hertz values.

If one absolutely must measure it in Hertz…

Take a single second as a point in time: before that second, the frequency might be 255Hz; after that second, it might be 257Hz.

The transition happened as that one second was infinitely divided into countless instants. In each of those countless instants, the frequency changed infinitely, advancing incrementally tiny fractions—infinitesimally small units beyond countless decimal places.

Viewed from point to point, it was just shifting from 255Hz to 257Hz. Attempting to see the details, however, it became immeasurable.

Within this seemingly simple composition lay too much infinity.

The headphones Chen Feng wore couldn’t accurately convey such vast information. They offered a vastly simplified interpretation. Fortunately, Chen Feng, as a human, possessed boundless imagination. He was also a musician. So even if his ears couldn’t receive all that data, his mind could reconstruct and fill in the blanks.

Furthermore, the timbre was also totally unfamiliar to him.

It seemed to come from nature, yet matched nothing he knew, as if it fused every possible sound together.

If asked to perform this now, Chen Feng couldn’t do it. He couldn’t even begin to write musical notation for it.

Chen Feng’s real breakthrough was tracing the source of this long musical movement.

Its internal rhythmic shifts indeed evolved from every piece in “Sounds of Earth”.

It wasn’t just a simple linear layering, but a condensation where each instant contained all the characteristics of all twenty-seven classical pieces.

Its rhythm encapsulated Earthlings’ cultural and intellectual patterns, its sound quality echoed the rhythms of Earth’s natural world. Combined, they created this movement of near-absolute control, using a deeply hidden method to resonate with the human brain that governs thought.

Yes, this piece targeted the very aspects within all these classical songs that were used to control minds.

Music has a dual nature. One facet could be named “control”.

Control, in this sense, meant using music as an external force to manipulate a person’s emotions, even their thoughts.

For example, a person who was originally feeling down would still instinctively smile when hearing cheerful music.

A person who was originally laughing and joking would still have their eyes slightly moisten when suddenly hearing a piece of music so sorrowful it pierced the heart.

This is the aspect of “control” within music.

Controlling a person through music was not some strange tale or rumor.

As early as the psychological research of the early 21st Century, there were clear conclusions that using music for psychological suggestion and manipulating people to do things was not impossible.

Another example was the war-mongering madman who sparked World War II, Hitler. His use of classical music reached the pinnacle of skill.

He raised the butcher’s knife on one hand, and on the other promoted classical music among his people, using music to whitewash his atrocities, making people forget his cruelty and only remember his ambitions for revival.

The mystery novel “The Fire Violin” by American author Tess Gerritsen told just such a story.

The heroine’s daughter, after hearing a violin concerto from a hundred years ago, repeatedly did things to hurt the heroine.

Although the story was pure fiction, the psychological research behind it was well-grounded.

This “Song Beyond the World” given to humanity by the Invader was precisely taking the control-oriented aspects of all the classical music in “The Sounds of Earth” and developing them to their peak.

Since he had found the root cause, Chen Feng could now begin to think of countermeasures.

At that very moment, his whole body shook, and he turned his head to look ahead.

There was still nothingness there.

He intuitively felt that some kind of change was happening.

Chen Feng’s Azure Star abruptly transformed into sniper mode, and he fired a neutron bullet.

The bullet still disintegrated into fundamental particles less than a meter away from his side.

To the naked eye, it looked exactly the same as before, but deep in his perception, that distance of over half a meter seemed incredibly vast.

Inside Chen Feng’s helmet, the simulated calculation of the particle dispersion fog from the spacecraft synced up. The fog was rapidly moving away from him at an unbelievable speed.

Perhaps in an instant, it traversed a light-year, leaving only a long trail of energy radiation in the empty space of the universe.

In Chen Feng’s ears, the shout of Ou Qinglan, who was still on the spacecraft, rang out.

“The Invader Barrier is rapidly retreating backward. No, our space is being stretched!”

Chen Feng simply couldn’t understand what Ou Qinglan was saying.

Wasn’t he perfectly fine?

How could the empty space of the universe be stretched?

“No, the space of the Solar System is returning to how it should originally be. For these past five hundred years, our entire Solar System has been continuously compressed by the Invader Barrier!”

“What?”

Three minutes later.

Chen Feng saw the bright light near Earth in the distance.

A million-strong fleet was instantly annihilated.

Chen Feng looked at the time on his helmet.

October 27, 3020 AD, 9:49 AM.

He realized the problem.

The distance between him and Earth at that moment should be close to two light-years.

The exact time of the explosion should have been 9:48 AM.

Therefore, he should have seen the light of the explosion two years later.

Yet he saw it after only one minute.

Either the speed of light had been increased, instantly crossing the distance of two light-years.

Or, the space that was being stretched had shortened the time it took for the light to reach his eyes.

Chen Feng also realized something else, a peculiar situation he should have noticed but had completely overlooked unconsciously.

The radius of the Solar System’s generalized gravitational field was 2 light-years, nearly bordering the Proxima Centauri System.

Having reached the edge of the Solar System, he should have already arrived at the Proxima Centauri System.

But he hadn’t. Proxima Centauri was still on the other side of the distant starry sky.

Furthermore, the maximum flight speed of the ultra-heavy spacecraft was one-tenth the speed of light.

Setting off from Earth, how could they possibly reach the edge of the Solar System, right next to the Invader Barrier, within a month?

Yet they had done it, and they hadn’t noticed this obvious paradox at all.

The envelopment of the Invader Barrier had been compressing the Solar System, and the closer one was to the Sun star, the lower the compression ratio.

Moreover, this compression only targeted the space within the Solar System’s gravitational field, cleverly avoiding humans and all human-made objects.

Because the underlying rules of the universe had been subtly altered by the Invader, humans developed cognitive impairment, their entire perception of space becoming disordered.

At that moment, a faint humming vibration sounded in the universe.

Chen Feng’s whole body trembled slightly.

He saw directly in front of him appear again that enormous spherical spacecraft he had once regarded as a nightmare.

This thing appeared suddenly out of thin air in an extremely abrupt manner, almost the size of the Moon, giving him a huge shock.

Chen Feng took a deep breath, activated the Azure Star’s full power, and charged straight forward.

He could actually escape, but he thought there was little point in running away.

Even if he successfully escaped, he would be the only one left in the universe. What could he do then?

What he wanted had never been revenge.

…

“Whew! Whew! Whew! Whew!”

He woke up.

He sat on the bed with his knees hugged to his chest, his eyes scattered and empty.

His mind was still digesting the vast amount of information he had just captured.

A wave of sorrow welled up in his heart.

So powerful.

He was almost on the verge of finding a way to crack the psychological infiltration.

So why was the despair in his heart growing stronger?

Facing such an enemy was like peeling an onion.

Every time he thought he had peeled off a layer and could see the essence, he suddenly discovered another layer underneath even more pungent, bringing bitter tears, not knowing when it would ever end.

The Invader Barrier could even compress space and had altered the universe’s rules and humanity’s perception of the universe from the very foundation.

What level of technology did the Invader possess!

To fight them was like trying to play chess with someone on their Go board.

If the main battlefield was a thousand years in the future, how on earth could he defeat the opponent within the rules they had altered?

How was that even possible?

Bang! Bang! Bang!

The door was knocked.

Chen Feng looked at the time again.

It was already 9 AM.

It felt like only a little while had passed, but actually three hours had been stolen.

He shook his head hard.

No, I’m back now. I need to snap out of it quickly. My sense of time is all messed up.

He felt particularly foolish, always thinking he alone was sober in a drunken world, but it was all his own illusion.

He opened the door.

Zhong Lei grabbed his arm and urged, “Hurry, we need to get to the company quickly. Ou Junlang’s father came to our company. He says he wants to buy Star Peak Entertainment so Ou Junlang can go back and inherit the Ouhe Group.”

“Oh, okay.”

Seeing Zhong Lei’s face again, Chen Feng’s heart slowly calmed down.

Whether it’s now or a thousand years later, I rely on you so much.

It’s really good to know you.