"Sign this one, and you will be free, and you will be back on track as soon as you want."

Euonymus pushed a contract and a pen in front of Li Mengnan, his hands crossed on his knees, his expression full of anticipation.

"On track? Are you kidding? Or do you think you live a normal life at the HX Institute? ”

Li Mengnan's tone was full of sarcasm, but he still picked up a pen and signed his name on the last page of the contract.

This is the second day of that death test.

The HX Institute still didn't give any explanation for the test, except that when Li Mengnan woke up in the morning, he had a contract for a part-time researcher in front of him.

Euonymus picked up the contract and looked at it a few times, nodded with satisfaction, and said, "What kind of life should a normal person live, this is a very profound philosophical question...... At least I feel like my life is normal. ”

Li Mengnan grinned speechlessly, and said in his heart, can you be considered a normal person in this dead house of Bensi?

Weimao seemed to know that Li Mengnan was complaining about him in his heart, and smiled indifferently: "If you don't go crazy, you won't survive...... When you are grouped in the future and have your own teammates, you will understand that there are basically few normal people who can do our job. ”

"Brother Wei, what is the meaning of this test?"

Li Mengnan didn't want to blame Weimao for anything, after all, the volunteer agreement had written the risks quite clearly, and everyone participated in this test voluntarily and was not forced, but he still couldn't figure out what the purpose of this test arranged by the HX Institute could almost be called a massacre.

"For the future of humanity."

Wei Mao got up and opened the door, tilted his head and motioned for Li Mengnan to follow, and said, "Come with me, take you to a place, there is a qiē you want to know." ”

Through a futuristic passage of ring-shaped voice-activated lights, after multiple verifications such as iris, fingerprints, voiceprints, and face recognition, Euonymus opened a seemingly inconspicuous office door.

After entering the room, Euonymus did not invite Li Mengnan to take a seat, but picked up the phone on the desk and dialed a set of numbers.

"Bring in two cups of coffee."

"Okay, may I ask you about sugar or milk?"

"Add toffee."

The conversation between the euonymus and the operator on the other side was a little strange, but as the bookshelf behind his desk slowly moved to the sides, he realized that it was a code to open the door.

At the end of the passage is a conference room, and in the center of the circular conference table stands a circle of curved glass for unknown purposes, which looks like a huge fish tank with no water out.

On the walls on either side, Li Mengnan also found several gates similar to the ones they entered, and it was clear that there was more than one path to this place.

"Our missions are in squads, and only the captain of each team has free access to this place...... Don't look at so many channels, in fact there is only one that is in use right now. ”

Euonymus sat on the main seat in front of the conference table, raised his hand to signal Li Mengnan to sit casually, and then spread his five fingers on the table, and the entire table immediately lit up with a welcome screen.

Just visualizing the desktop is nothing, and what surprised Li Mengnan even more was that the huge glass jar like an empty fish tank in front of him lit up, and it was actually a holographic projection image that had not yet entered the application stage.

"Feels 'tall', doesn't it? I reacted the same way when I first came in, but I've gotten used to it after watching more...... Okay, let's get down to business, I know you have a lot of questions, and I'm going to answer them for you now. ”

Euonymus's hands kept swiping across the table, making various gestures, and the holographic stereoscopic projection in the center of the conference table began to appear with illustrative pictures and related images.

"The four elements of time, space, spirit, and matter make up the whole of the universe as we know it.

Our modern science has studied matter very thoroughly, and has also obtained a certain analysis of time and space through mathematical model calculations, but in the spiritual aspect, it has never achieved anything. ”

"Although in the eyes of ordinary people, human science and technology have been developing rapidly in recent years, only real scientists can understand that the current human science and technology tree, which focuses on material use, is a deformed science and technology tree, and when it develops to a certain extent, there will be a bottleneck that cannot be crossed because of the blank of the other three elements.

In fact, this conclusion was put forward as early as Einstein's time, and it was still scoffed at at that time, but it was finally accepted by the world scientific community in recent years. ”

"Do you know what is the biggest bottleneck in human development right now?" Euonymus suddenly stopped explaining and asked Li Mengnan rhetorically.

"Is it energy?" Li Mengnan thought for a moment and tried to answer.

"Hehe, I knew you would say that...... It is no wonder that the concept of the 'energy crisis' advocated by the energy predators over the years has been too deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. ”

Euonymus smiled and swiped on the table, and a video icon seemed to "fly" directly into the holographic projection giant screen in the center of the conference table.

This is a documentary-like clip about a person's life, from the operating table to the ground, learning to walk, reading and falling in love, getting married and having children, working hard, and finally closing his eyes forever in the grief-stricken cries of his children.

Although there is no sound or background music to set it off, the topic of life and death contained in the video itself is extremely heavy.

"You mean—death?" Li Mengnan seems to vaguely understand the meaning behind this video.

"Lifespan, to be exact." Wei Mao nodded, satisfied with Li Mengnan's keen reaction, "The biggest bottleneck we are currently facing in human development is our lifespan. ”

"Online novels often see such a bridge in the history of the crossing, the protagonist can recall a little physical and chemical knowledge casually, and he can support all the science and technology trees of that era alone.

What does this mean? This shows that our human knowledge reserve is constantly growing rapidly, even if it is only a primary school student, the total amount of knowledge in his brain is dozens or even hundreds of times more than that of the ancients.

And how much has our human brain development process improved since ancient times? According to scientific research, although the brain volume rate of modern people has increased compared with ancient people, it is completely negligible compared to the growth rate of knowledge.

In ancient times, there was a saying called 'Heavenly Genius', a person can master the knowledge of many different disciplines at the same time, but in modern times, even if it is a single subject, no one dares to say that he is proficient in all of them.

As a result, human beings have subdivided various research directions from a single discipline, and dispersed the difficulty of scientific and technological development with a huge population base.

But no discipline is unrelated to each other, and the efficiency of the cooperation of a hundred single-subject geniuses may not be comparable to that of a mediocre all-rounder.

Human beings can continue to learn and improve their knowledge reserves, but human life is limited, not to mention all subjects, even if it is a single subject, the height that a person can achieve in his life is basically a fixed value.

If this calculation is made, one day, our human science and technology will fall into a state of almost permanent stagnation because of the existence of this bottleneck. ”

Euonymus casually brought up a picture that Li Mengnan was quite familiar with, which was a schematic of an ape-man gradually walking forward, gradually standing upright, using tools, and finally taking on the form of a modern human.

"Originally, the scientific community has been looking for ways to develop the potential of the human brain, trying to break this stagnation curse, but it took three million years for humans to evolve from an ignorant and intelligent ape-man to the current Cheng dù.

So all the real yàn failed, and the result was quite tragic.

Then it was suggested that if we were looking for the end result, why not start with time if we couldn't improve efficiency?

In order to achieve this goal, we have experimented more than 10,000 times, although we have achieved some results, but due to a series of problems such as cost, there is basically no practical value. ”

Euonymus again called up three pictures, one for the church, one for the Buddhist temple and the one for the mosque.

"As I said before, scientific research cannot be in a single direction...... There is a researcher at the institute who specializes in religious studies, and when our research was at a bottleneck, he suddenly made an interesting point.

He said that when he was reading the texts of the great and small religions of various countries in the world, he found a very peculiar phenomenon -- no matter what religion, no matter what his teachings were, they all mentioned two places where people go after death.

Christianity calls it Heaven and Hell, Buddhism calls it the Pure Land of Bliss and the Netherworld, and other sects have similar accounts.

Correspondingly, these religious texts also mention another key word - eternal life.

From a religious point of view, people have souls, although human beings can be wiped out, but the soul can live forever, the human world is only a halfway stop for the soul, and heaven or hell is the terminal of the soul. ”

The picture in the holographic projection screen changed again, showing the image of an eighty-year-old woman.

"This old lady's name is Wei Shufen, and she is now deceased, but before that, she had faked her death once.

It is not strange that humans will fake their death, but it is strange that after she woke up ten hours after she suspended her death, she accurately told many things that had happened in the village, and even in neighboring villages, during this time, as if she had seen it with her own eyes.

There are many other cases like this kind of 'out-of-body' in the archives of the Institute, so I won't list them all.

Then we realized that this may be the key to what is called 'eternal life.'"

It took us ten years to finally master the 'out-of-body' technique, of course, this technique is still incomplete, because the consciousness after leaving the body cannot permanently exist independently, and is still limited by the brain.

But in a sense, our research did succeed. ”

"Success? Does entering a dream have anything to do with prolonging human lifespan? Li Mengnan was a little incomprehensible.

"I'll let you see someone, and you'll understand."

This time, the euonymus called up not an image, but something similar to a video chat software, after connecting a certain number, soon a holographic projection screen appeared on the image of an ordinary-looking young man.

The young man was dressed in an even more unusual way than Euonymus, wearing a straight navy blue tunic, and a pair of black plastic-rimmed round glasses, almost like a character out of a history textbook.

"Oh? It's Xiaowei! What's the matter with coming to me so early? I still have one math that I haven't done......"

"Hehe, I'm sorry to disturb you, Old Chen! There's a rookie in the institute, and I'll bring him to meet you. ”

Although the young man in the video looks a decade younger than the euonymus, there is great respect for this person in his words.

The retro-dressed young man in the video obviously understood the meaning of Euonymus, nodded and smiled at Li Mengnan, said hello, and introduced himself: "Hello little comrade, I am Chen Jingrun...... Don't be surprised, I'm the one who does math. ”

Li Mengnan almost knelt on the spot, he finally remembered that there had been a painting of this math master in the school at the beginning, but it was much older than in the video.

Isn't this great power said to have died of complications of pneumonia before he made it to the twenty-first century? How can you still talk to yourself in the video? And even play rejuvenation? What kind of rhythm is this......

Euonymus obviously didn't intend to delay the other party too much, so he ended the video call with a casual greeting.

"That's what you're doing?" Li Mengnan was really shocked, he could see that it was not a computer-generated picture, but a real person.

Euonymus did not rush to answer Li Mengnan, but instead entered a set of passwords casually, and the entire conference room trembled slightly, and then began to sink slowly like an elevator.

The walls of the conference room gradually became transparent, and Li Mengnan looked around only to realize that he had thought it was already the bottom of the research institute, and there was such a huge space underneath it.

"This is our No. 1 warehouse, which is 100 meters deep and can hold up to 100,000 nutrient warehouses."

Li Mengnan looked around and saw thousands of oval-shaped metal sealed jars hanging from the cliff-like walls, which were probably the nutrient bins that Euonymus was talking about.

"What's in there?"

Li Mengnan always felt that this scene seemed to be seen in the movie "The Matrix", but with the size of the nutrition warehouse, it didn't look like it could fit a person.

Euonymus clicked a set of numbers on the visual table, and a telescopic robotic arm delivered one of the nutrition bins to less than three meters from the glass on the exterior wall of the conference room.

"What is this?"

Through the fist-sized observation hole on the nutrition compartment, Li Mengnan was surprised to find that inside was actually a human brain filled with various wiring and catheters!

"This is Old Chen, you just met." Euonymus smiled, and operated the robotic arm to put the nutrition bin back in.

Li Mengnan finally understood what was going on with the success of the research that Weimao said, and they actually completely abandoned the physical body of the real one, and only kept the other party's brain, so that they could live completely with pure ideology.