Suddenly, I noticed something struggling and jumping on the calm sea.

I pushed my glasses and leaned out of the railing, staring at the point.

Has anyone drowned......?

Before I had time to think about it, I took off my glasses, threw down my phone wallet, climbed over the railing, and jumped into the water.

The water is very cold at the end of autumn, but after I get active, I can feel the warmth of the current after a while. The closer I got to that point, the more I realized that it was indeed a living person.

Still a child.

With great effort, I finally carried him to the nearest shore, exhausted and panting.

"Hey, Professor Xie?"

"Is that you?"

Without light, I couldn't see the child's face clearly. But judging by the voice, he was the young student who had a family change. He had only recently come out of the shadows and made his way to school.

I then asked him:

"How did you get to a place like this in the middle of the night? ”

"Hey, Professor, you misunderstood, I'm just swimming. Swimming. But when it comes to it, you're a nice guy. ”

Late autumn, midnight, swimming?

"Nonsense!"

I reprimanded.

"Don't do that, Professor, you're the one who doesn't go so well lately, you won't jump into the sea, right?"

"I ......"

How could a person who can swim choose to commit suicide by jumping into the sea?

But, before I could say that, I realized that I had acquiesced to the precondition of suicide.

"I'm just ......"

"That's not going to work. ”

The clouds dispersed, and the moon peeked out from the sky.

In the hazy moonlight, the eyes of the calyx warbler revealed a faint green glow like a wolf.

Am I wrong? The glasses are on the cement platform over there, and now I see everything blurry.

He walked back and forth a few steps, and then said:

"If you die then...... The Grim Reaper will not approve of it. ”

What is he saying? I don't understand. I had water in my ears and some tinnitus in the whirring wind.

"What?"

"Ah, I mean...... It's not cost-effective to die because of your own business. Sure enough, it was still affected by something else, and it made sense that he wanted to die. Just because of my own lack of ability and disgust with such myself, who will pay?"

I couldn't speak, just silently looked at this vague and lively shadow.

"Hey, professor, don't care, I just thought about my own business and said whatever I wanted. ”

I don't remember exactly what happened that day, it was like a dream.

In my memory, it was a deep midnight, but the wind was a little strong, the sea was cold, and the moon was very lonely.

After returning to the normal trajectory of life, I gradually realized that many problems are not completely unsolvable.

The team re-recruited and absorbed a lot of fresh blood. Some of them are younger than me, and their personalities are a little hotter and frivolous, but they all have some real skills, or at least some real skills.

Little by little, the troubles were resolved, and although not overnight, at least some progress was made.

For now, death has become a little more distant.

Standing in front of the mirror, I looked at my ordinary self.

The face similar to that of the father in the photo in my memory has inherited my mother's curly hair, such a simple and vicissitudes of life.

I remember that the children were twins.

Is there another self in this world?

I can't help but feel ridiculous about my thoughts.

It's like asking if there are two identical objects in the universe, but probability, it's possible. There may be, but there is only a likeness, not a god.

Maybe the personality is the complete opposite.

After a moment's rest, I left the bathroom and continued to devote myself to the infinite study.

What I didn't know was that at this moment, the Grim Reaper actually took a step closer to me.

After a period of study, exchanges with professionals in various fields, and repeated experiments and comparisons of data, we came to a conclusion that had no effect on others, but was enough to break me.

Our galaxy is dead.

We study many galaxies that have died, or are dying.

The most important criterion for determining whether a galaxy is dead is whether new stars or planets have been born. Just like the metabolism in the human body, old cells die and new cells are generated.

Whether it's animals or plants, if you want to survive in nature, you have to take in nutrients. For galaxies, the nutrients are hydrogen and helium in the universe. Since enough hydrogen and helium can be consumed to give birth to new planets, we focus on studying metal concentrations – after all, stars produce a variety of metal elements through nuclear fusion.

The interior of those galaxies that have died is rich in metallic elements.

Even when nascent objects appeared, in the Milky Way, they were strangled.

There are two kinds of reasons: the internal cause is that the black holes of the Milky Way compete for the resources to form the planet, and the external cause is that the gravitational pull of other galaxies acts on the Milky Way, causing the latter's cold gas to be stolen.

For billions of years, no new objects have appeared in the Milky Way.

But she's still functioning and growing. It simply relies on engulfing and absorbing the surrounding dwarf galaxies, or those satellite galaxies that orbit the Earth like the Moon.

It's like an old human being who no longer renews his organization. The man is alive and ingesting food, but he is aging and dying.

To put it another way – she's like a zombie.

Is it that for decades, she I have loved as a spiritual pillar is actually a corpse?

I would have thought that such beautiful silvery-white barospiral galaxies were still alive, and that only those elliptical galaxies that glowed dark red were the things associated with death. She may continue to expand, or at least three billion years later, collide with the Andromeda Galaxy and merge into a new, massive elliptical galaxy that glows with a youthful blue glow.

She could have survived in some other form, right?

Until the last second of the end of the universe - heat death, great collapse, or great tearing, and so on, the ultimate apocalyptic conjecture.

And at that time, the slightest trace of human beings, even human beings, disappeared.

But is she dead?

An unknown force killed her, suffocated her, and made her what she is now.

Wandering, eating, rotting.

Just like my mother.

Like test scores, it announces a result, not a way to improve. It is different from some other studies in that it is a valuable theory that can solve human puzzles or bring about a technological revolution.

It's a conclusion, and it's just a conclusion.

Anyway, before something big happened to the galaxy, humans might have been prehistoric creatures.

But I don't accept it.

I have no family, no friends. There is no one I love, and there is no one who loves me.

Now the one I love is long gone.

Standing on the delicate sand, I watched the magnificent sea, the sparkling waves, and the white foam advancing and retreating.

I had a bad idea.

The idea quickly grew, swelled, and spread.

It took over every nook and cranny of my heart, forming an indescribable impulse.

I took one step forward, and one step further.

Now the tide is receding.

I felt the sea gently hook my ankles and guide me, forward and forward.

The icy water was up to my waist.

Occasionally, I get pushed down by larger waves. My glasses were gone, and the sea helped me to my feet and move on.

Until the water goes up my neck, until the current no longer pulls me up.

I closed my eyes. I guess instinct will make me struggle a bit.

Not yet.

The ethereal whistling of the sea echoed in the ears.

"If you don't have cramps or seaweed, you can't swim to death. ”

A childish voice came.

The sound was real, close at hand.

I opened my eyes and searched for the source of the sound.

"But you're going to die, aren't you?"

The voice asked again.

I could clearly see a young boy with black strips of cloth wrapped around his eyes.

He carried a thin chain in his hand, and at the other end was a silver disc.

The resistance of water seemed to him to be non-existent. He was like an image, projected onto my retina.

"Are you going to die?"

He asked again.

It may be that the lack of oxygen is causing me to hallucinate.

However, I don't find it difficult to breathe. I forgot to swing my limbs and let myself drift through the deep water.

My brain was so muddy that I forgot how I answered. But as soon as an answer was spoken, a feeling of suffocation enveloped me.

I quickly went upstream. But unexpectedly, I easily stood up.

Looking at the edge of the sea, I didn't seem to go much deeper, the water still stayed at my waist.

The glasses are not lost, they are honestly hung on the face.

Like, the sea just receded its own tide and disdained to take me away, but threw it in this place.

Back at the low-rent house, I threw my soaked clothes into the washing machine and changed into a clean shirt.

Standing in front of the mirror, I looked at this weak and familiar shadow.

"You're vulnerable. ”

He seemed to be laughing at me.

I shook my head and nodded again.

"Do the average person spend the rest of their lives on this kind of thing?"

I nodded, and shook my head again.

I'm asking myself.

Is there another me in this world?

Some.

Such an answer came to my mind, and it was very abrupt.

In an instant, I understood what kind of talent I had now.

Attached is the talent that the rest of my life has been exchanged.

Antimatter.

I was immersed in the sea of experiments and data again, and I went back to the days when I was accompanied by knowledge day and night.

Eventually, a new, but not easily published, experimental result emerged.

E = mc², i.e., the square of the mass of a substance multiplied by the speed of light, is the energy of the annihilation of that substance.

Antimatter is a mirror image of positive matter, with the exact opposite of its properties. In other words, there is a possibility that this formula will be reversed.

It is not a complete theoretical hypothesis, but a practical proof: at the current level of science, the collision of two high-energy beams will produce matter, and the lighter particles will become heavier particles...... Even if they will die quickly.

Such examples are not absent in the universe. The mass of neutrons is greater than the mass of protons and electrons, but in neutron stars that collapsed late in the evolution of stars, strong gravitational forces force electrons into the nucleus and protons, forming neutrons.

However, the conversion of energy into mass is a process of decreasing entropy and is difficult to form spontaneously.

If only I could......

- To be continued -