Don't Ask If You Don't Understand

With trembling hands, Chen Xueyao pressed the dial button once again.

The cold electronic prompt sounded again; the number she dialed was still out of service.

Refusing to give up, she scrolled through her contacts and dialed the numbers of her homeroom teacher, her desk mate, and her childhood friend, one after another. Every single one returned the same response: out of service.

"Impossible... How could they all be out of service..." she muttered to herself, shaking her head continuously.

Impossible...

No, that's not right. I definitely came back.

"I remember them perfectly, not a single digit is wrong..."

"Look it up on the computer," Ye Chuan sighed, seeing her devastated look. He casually grabbed a laptop and pushed it in front of her.

Chen Xueyao jerked her head up, a glimmer of hope reigniting in her eyes.

She quickly sat in front of the computer, her fingers flying across the keyboard, and first typed in the name of her high school.

The moment the search results popped up, her face turned deathly pale.

Nothing.

Unwilling to give up, she started searching for major news events from the year she transmigrated.

"There was no pandemic?"

"Rift events... monsters appearing... what does this mean?"

"That girl group I followed... never even debuted?"

Piece by piece, the information entering her eyes drifted further and further away from the world in her memory.

Looking at the unfamiliar history, unfamiliar celebrities, and unfamiliar cities on the screen, her body began to tremble uncontrollably.

It turned out that she hadn't returned to her own world at all.

She had merely arrived in a parallel world almost identical to the Blue Planet, with a similar culture and even similar internet memes.

But it just wasn't her world!

Her parents weren't here, her friends weren't here, and there was no trace of her ever existing.

Standing to the side and watching her back, Ye Chuan couldn't help but shake his head.

He suddenly thought of Tian Xiaotian.

Speaking of which, Xiaogua's world was also very similar to the real world.

Ye Chuan figured there had to be all sorts of parallel worlds out there.

Every accidental transmigration was like a high-stakes gamble; the probability of landing exactly on one's original coordinates was infinitesimally small.

"Ye Chuan..." Chen Xueyao slowly turned her head. Her face was entirely drained of color, and her eyes were filled with despair.

"Could you... use your Demon King Authority to help me find my world?"

"I can't," Ye Chuan shook his head.

"My Time Authority was obtained on the continent of Aether. It can only be used there. It won't work here at all, and besides..."

He paused, recalling Lilith's warning. "Even if I could use the Time Authority here, I absolutely shouldn't mess with it."

"The timelines of parallel worlds are incredibly complex. If I jump around recklessly, it's very easy to completely lose my coordinates. Then, let alone finding your world, even I wouldn't be able to make it back."

"Then... what do I do?" Chen Xueyao's voice choked up, and tears welled up again.

"I thought I was finally home... I thought I could finally see my mom and dad... But... but this isn't my home at all..."

Unable to hold it in any longer, she collapsed onto the desk, her shoulders shaking violently as stifled sobs escaped through her fingers.

Lan Xiaoke and Angelina sat on the sofa, not daring to breathe too loudly.

Lan Xiaoke scratched her head and whispered to Angelina, "So she wasn't forced... That's so pitiful."

Angelina nodded, her eyes full of sympathy.

Ye Chuan scratched his head, not knowing how to comfort her.

Should he say, 'Make yourself at home'?

That probably wouldn't work right now.

Chen Xueyao cried for a long time, until she couldn't cry anymore.

She slowly stood up and walked toward the stairs in a daze. Without greeting anyone, she walked straight into her room and closed the door.

The living room fell into a dead silence.

Ye Chuan rubbed his temples, feeling a massive headache coming on.

Just then, the sound of dragging footsteps came from the stairs. He looked up and saw a girl with glasses walking out.

Ke Ning walked down with a head of messy curly hair, holding a mug filled with pitch-black coffee.

Magic Cube V2 floated beside her.

She yawned, saw Ye Chuan in the living room, and then noticed something. "Oh? Why is the atmosphere so weird?"

Ye Chuan pointed upstairs. "We ran into a little problem."

"Oh?" Ke Ning walked over to the sofa and sat down, seemingly piqued. "What problem? Let's hear it."

Ye Chuan explained Chen Xueyao's situation in detail, including how she had transmigrated to the Aether continent, reincarnated for hundreds of years, and finally made it back only to discover it was a parallel world.

"A parallel world, huh," Ke Ning nodded, looking entirely unfazed.

"That's completely normal. Transmigration is essentially a jump in spatial coordinates. In the case of accidental transmigration, a coordinate deviation is highly probable. Landing on a parallel Blue Planet within the same universe is already considered lucky."

"If she had deviated to another universe, that would be a real hassle."

"Then is there a way... to get her back to her original world?" Ye Chuan asked.

"Yes. Lock onto the coordinates and trace back through the resonance of the primordial quantum entanglement pair."

Ke Ning waved her hand, and the floating Magic Cube V2 projected a cold blue hologram in front of them.

It was a three-dimensional star map with countless intertwining, faintly glowing silver threads. The ends of the threads connected to an endless number of twinkling points of light.

Each point of light vibrated at a frequency imperceptible to humans, corresponding to an independent parallel spacetime.

Ke Ning explained casually, "Don't try to understand 'coordinates' using your conventional definition. The timestamp of four-dimensional spacetime doesn't even count as a frame of reference in cross-universe transmigration."

"The true world coordinate is an eleven-dimensional quantum topological invariant, uniquely determined by the primordial vacuum fluctuations at the exact moment of the Big Bang.

And every intelligent lifeform, at the moment their consciousness is born—which is the instant their soul's quantum field collapses into a stable state—will form an unreplicable, indestructible primordial entangled particle pair with their home universe."

"One of them is forever submerged in the vacuum zero-point energy sea of the home universe, acting as the 'root coordinate.' Find it, and you can find the way home."

Finishing her explanation, Ke Ning looked at Ye Chuan. "Understand? You just need to find the root coordinate."

Ye Chuan blinked. "?"

What the heck are you talking about?

Lan Xiaoke had even fallen asleep listening to it; it sounded like complete gibberish to her.

"At what point did you stop understanding?" Ke Ning asked.

"From the very first word," Ye Chuan replied.

Hearing this, Ke Ning opted to let the floating Magic Cube V2 explain it simply. "You give him the simple version."

Magic Cube V2 floated right in front of Ye Chuan. "Beep—"

"I will now give you the most direct, truthful, thorough, naked, chilling, sharp, profound, realistic... the most unreserved, sincere, pure, and transparent ultimate answer..."

"If you don't get it, don't ask. It's too tiring." Magic Cube V2 spun in a circle on the spot.

Ye Chuan: "Huh? ↗"