Planck lightly tugged at a strand of hair by her temple. "Next time, we may not be able to return. Since that's the case, we should settle what needs settling first."
Vill-V crossed her arms, her eyes flickering. "Anti-Entropy's independence is a matter for the future, isn't it? Who knows where the future of this world lies—or whether it even exists. Perhaps the timeline this time fragment belongs to has long since been destroyed, and this fragment is merely the remains of that timeline."
"Haha, it's precisely because we believe the future exists that we're doing this..." Planck chuckled softly. She looped her arm through Vill-V's and said, "And you believe in it just the same, don't you? That's why you acted out this whole scene with me. That makes us accomplices~"
Planck linked arms with Vill-V like an intimate best friend.
Though Planck was already thirty-four, her appearance still retained youthful vitality. Her figure remained graceful, like the girl next door grown into a gentle older sister.
"If we're being honest, you're the true architect of this entire deception. You wove everyone's plans into your own scheme. Even my plan was completely used by you~"
Vill-V lowered the brim of her top hat, shadowing her gaze. "...You really are an idiot."
"That's right. I'm a great big idiot—played in the palm of clever, adorable Vill-V's hand, yet still insisting on turning a 'false' world into a real one."
"Thank you..."
The world's reboot was unsolvable. It was not something the authority of the Herrscher of Reason could fix. That authority was nowhere near that powerful.
Tesla, Einstein, Schrödinger, and Welt did not understand the true scope and limits of the Herrscher of Reason's authority, so they believed Planck's explanation and thought her plan feasible.
Edison understood part of the situation, but she could not fully organize the information she had obtained. That was the drawback of using the Interferometer.
As for Otto...
He had already keenly perceived during the meeting that those plans had no feasibility whatsoever. They were nothing more than placebos filled with passion and hope.
If Otto could not see through such obvious flaws, then his five hundred years of studying Void Archives would have been in vain.
And yet, Otto had no intention of exposing or opposing Planck's plan. On the contrary, he even fanned the flames by handing over Void Archives.
That was because... Otto had never intended to save this world in the first place. A future without Kallen had no meaning, no necessity for existence.
Otto's fundamental goal was not the preservation of this world. If given the opportunity to reboot it, he would charge at the forefront himself.
So what would Otto do once he knew the world was about to reset? The answer was self-evident. He would eliminate those who hindered the reboot and help the world complete its reset.
If Welt and the others were to learn the hopeless truth, it would only make things troublesome for Otto.
Thus, what Vill-V and Planck did was deceive Otto—making him believe their objective was merely to leave this world and reboot it.
To truly save this world, the Herrscher of Reason alone was far from enough. The only method was to find the existence that had torn away this fragment of "time" and have It paste this stretch of time back into its original position.
The three impossible plans Planck proposed were meant to convey that message to Otto.
Compared to saving the world, rebooting the world was far more fatally alluring to Otto.
Once Otto understood that, he would spare no effort to assist their actions.
For example, letting Anti-Entropy go. For example, helping Vill-V and the others replenish Honkai energy.
If it had merely been under the pretext of saving the world, stingy Otto would never have done something as foolish as nurturing a future threat. Only after realizing the world was about to reset would he allow them to proceed.
With Otto's assistance, Planck and Vill-V gathered enough Honkai energy from the world to return to the Imaginary Singularity.
Because of the time anomaly, nothing else could be taken from this world. And yet, Honkai alone was genuinely transferable.
Honkai, which existed everywhere—you're really something. Thanks a lot, buddy. The hard currency of the Honkai world.
Not exactly a suitable local specialty as a gift, but borrowing it for temporary use was hardly an issue.
...
After completing the collection of Honkai energy, Vill-V brought the child-form Void Archives—little Otto—to meet Miss Aide in order to crack Void Archives.
Also known as the Tech Otaku Saves the World System.
Judging by the name alone, one could guess which super genius beauty scientist of the Previous Era had designed her.
Unfortunately, her functions were incomplete. She had merely been a terminal casually cobbled together by the Previous Era's Vill-V out of personal interest. Otherwise, Einstein and the others could have developed soulium and Honkai reactors themselves—why would they need to analyze the "Dead Sea Scrolls"?
Vill-V also learned of Aidea's original purpose.
It was specifically designed to calculate the optimal timing for instant noodles...
Don't ask why the Previous Era's Vill-V designed such a thing for Kevin.
The answer was that after calibrating time through floating-point operations spanning twenty-four orders of magnitude, the resulting instant noodles could increase Kevin's probability of successfully saving the world by approximately 0.1 percentage points—
—through the happiness those noodles brought him.
Yet after Kevin obtained Aide, he never even powered it on... He tossed it into storage, where it gathered dust.
Only fifty thousand years later, when it was excavated by the Current Era, was it truly activated, giving contemporary scientists a small taste of the technological shock of the Previous Era.
Unfortunately, an instant noodle timer could not help Vill-V crack Void Archives. Void Archives' level was simply too high. It was not something a random noodle timer could decipher.
Although AIM was one of the top-tier artificial intelligences, AI algorithms did not equate to computational power.
To crack Void Archives, one would need computational power capable of resolving "qi-particle" level calculations at minimum.
The so-called "qi-particles" were real-space physical structural units smaller than "up quarks" and "down quarks," further uncovered by humanity in both the Three-Body world and the Previous Era through supercomputers.
These "qi-particle" structures were loosely dispersed like clouds. For a long time, humanity had failed to detect their existence, instead attributing their properties to string theory.
Yet their interconnectivity was extraordinarily tight, inherently possessing quantum entanglement characteristics. Thus, once research entered the quantum domain, both the Three-Body world's humanity and that of the Previous Era discovered them.
Anything smaller than "qi-particles" lay beyond the Planck scale—within spatial realms humanity could not comprehend. Unless humanity could transcend the limitations of the five senses and scientifically define and quantify a sixth sense.
Beyond that lay domains humanity explored primarily through philosophy.
The end of science was philosophy. The end of philosophy was mysticism. That saying had now become reality.
...
The only gain Vill-V obtained from Miss Aide was learning how to further upgrade Project Bunny, granting her a more clearly defined artificial self-awareness.
The Previous Era's Vill-V had indeed created an artificial intelligence at the level of a "machine uprising" crisis... all while making an instant noodle timer.