Cosmic Love Affair

Chapter 19 Sagittarius II

Xie Li's butt was numb from sitting in the waiting area outside the rooftop conference room. He had been waiting for what felt like an eternity. There were fifteen candidates in total for the second round of interviews, each with a three-minute free speech and a fifteen-minute Q&A session. Xie Li was the last one, and he had waited for nearly four hours.

Although there was food and drink in the waiting area, and the chairs were quite comfortable, Xie Li was still exhausted from the long wait. He had been nervous at first, but by the end, he was so tired that he didn't even have the energy to review his speech notes.

At two in the afternoon, the second-to-last candidate finally emerged from the conference room. Xie Li's nerves immediately kicked back in. The staff called his name and escorted him into the conference room.

The room was oddly decorated. There were no windows, and the walls, ceiling, and even the floor were covered with large panes of dark gray glass. The room was lit, with all other furniture removed except for a table and a chair placed right in the center.

As Xie Li approached, he noticed tiny black dots embedded within the glass walls. He also caught a faint smell of paint; it seemed the room had been recently renovated.

The staff led Xie Li to the chair, helped him put on the headphones, checked the microphone, explained how to operate the recording equipment, and then left. The conference room was so empty that even breathing seemed to echo.

Xie Li cleared his throat, recalled the first sentence of his speech, and reached for the start button on the recording device. Just as he was about to press it, the lights in the room suddenly went out.

The darkness lasted only a fraction of a microsecond, like the dense singularity* that exploded and expanded into a vast universe 15 billion years ago—in an instant so short it was almost non-existent. After the brief darkness, dense colorful dots lit up simultaneously on the walls, ceiling, and floor.

Xie Li was stunned by what he saw—it took him several seconds to realize that the magnificent and winding light pattern before him was a huge spiral galaxy.

The massive galaxy was not static; countless star clusters floating beside him were slowly orbiting around him. The bright and hot core of the galaxy, two white lights of different sizes, were right beneath his feet, slowly rotating around each other.

And he, a strange wanderer with only a table and a chair, was sitting in a transparent and narrow cabin, under the gaze of the stars. Amidst the twinkling stars, he almost thought he could hear the hum of the life support system inside the cabin.

Xie Li stood up involuntarily, the illusion of being in space even giving him a slight sensation of weightlessness. He walked towards a large cloud of dust emitting red and purple light beside him, until he touched the slightly warm wall—

It turned out that the walls of the entire conference room were covered with high-definition screens. The magnificent and dazzling star rivers before his eyes were all video images being played.

Xie Li couldn't describe how he felt at this moment. He reached out again and touched the magnificent nebula on the warm screen.

By the time Tan Ke arrived, Xie Li had finished reciting his speech. The staff saw him coming, stood up and offered him a seat.

There was still a need for human operation in the later stages of recording, but Tan Ke had lied to Xie Li that no one was listening just to ease his mind. In fact, there was a staff member sitting in a small compartment next to the conference room.

He had just sat down when Fang Xian also came in: "Hey, I heard our company bought several large high-definition screens."

With a tone of watching the fun.

"Correction, I bought them in my personal name," Tan Ke said without turning his head, taking the headphones.

Fang Xian folded his arms and leaned back on the chair: "Oh, in ancient times, King You of Zhou played with the beacon fires to amuse his concubine, and today, General Tan spares no expense to win a smile..."

"Stop talking," Tan Ke suddenly interrupted him.

The synthesized robot voice was coming through the headphones.

Xie Li was answering the second-to-last question, about what methods or skills could ensure the smooth progress of his research topic.

After hearing the question, many seemingly proper answers quickly came to Xie Li's mind.

Frequent communication with mentors, extensive reading of articles, keeping up with academic trends, and more communication with the team...

He was organizing his words in his mind, and inadvertently looked down. The two bright galactic nuclei beneath his feet were quietly entwining and dancing, like a pair of inseparable and tacit dancers.

Galactic nuclei used to be thought of as a large group of bright stars quietly gathered together, until the Hubble Space Telescope sent back photos.

It was then that scientists realized that galactic nuclei were not only composed of stars, nor were they quiet. There might be one or even two huge black holes there, whose violent gravity tore everything around them apart and swallowed them.

And the bright light that people saw from Earth was just the accretion disk around the black hole—due to gas, dust, or small celestial bodies being attracted by the black hole and constantly approaching each other, friction generated a large amount of energy, forming a circular band of light.

All other theoretical research on galactic nuclei before this was declared dead.

"Actually, I have no way to ensure that my research will definitely continue. I mean, just like dark matter research, so many people have so many different directions, but there is only one truth, and in the end, only one person will be right. But I don't think this means that the efforts of the rest are meaningless. Someone has to prove the wrong answers, and someone has to be the paver."

Xie Li pressed the button and cut off the recording.

Tan Ke held the headphones, looking unusually serious.

Fang Xian was very curious about what was playing in the headphones and also leaned in to listen.

Tan Ke ignored him.

The electronic synthesized voice sounded again, broadcasting the last question: What motivated you to choose your current major?

The silence in the headphones lasted longer than Tan Ke had expected.

Just when he almost thought Xie Li would give up, Xie Li spoke.

"When I was, I guess about thirteen years old, in junior high school, I visited an observatory and attended a lecture. I remember the teacher said that all life on Earth has the same past, coming from the same sky. Ancient stars collapse and explode when they die, scattering their fragments across the entire galaxy."

"...The elements that make up life and non-living things on Earth, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, and everything from iron with an atomic number of 26 to plutonium with an atomic number of 94, almost everything, comes from those distant stars that have died light-years away."

"The teacher said that we are all children of these stars. So every time I look up at the night sky, I think, I originally came from there, and that's where my first parents are. I was once a part of them, and I will also become a part of them again one day."

The boy on the other end of the headphones took a deep breath.

"Although I am small and insignificant, I have a profound and real physical connection with this world. I belong to this world, and this world belongs to me. Whenever I feel lonely, as long as I think this way, I no longer feel lonely."

"This is why I chose astrophysics. I am happy to have the opportunity to understand my birthplace, to watch it and study it."

"Click," the recording device was turned off.

Tan Ke held the headphones and sat for a while before slowly standing up. Before he left, he patted Fang Xian and instructed him, "Be careful when you go out, don't let Xie Li see you."

After turning off the recording device, Xie Li stayed in the conference room for a long time until the star map on the screen disappeared and the indoor lighting came back on.

He stood up, opened the door, and couldn't wait to find someone to clarify things.

The receptionist who had led him in was waiting outside the conference room and took him directly to listen to his own recording.

After listening, Xie Li breathed a sigh of relief. The free speech part was better than he had expected. Although he stumbled a bit during the Q&A, it was still relatively fluent.

The accent might still be a point of deduction.

But he didn't care so much about it now.

He politely said goodbye to the receptionist and casually mentioned the star map in the conference room.

"That was really spectacular," Xie Li said, "I was completely fascinated at first."

The receptionist seemed unaware and looked very excited: "Really? It was just finished in a rush a few days ago, and none of us have been in to see it yet."

Xie Li was taken aback, then smiled and said, "Then you must go and have a look."

At the hottest time of the day, Xie Li, with his school bag on his back, walked out of the revolving door of Long Whale Capital and followed the sparse crowd into the subway station.

He still felt like he was in that man-made universe, with a sense of great unreality.

He felt as if he had become a tiny celestial body, captured by a huge star and involuntarily orbiting around it. The light and heat of the star melted the ice layer on the surface of the celestial body, and the earliest primitive organisms grew in the stromatolites at the bottom of the sea.

And so he began to become a unique little asteroid.

Cool breezes blew in the subway, gradually cooling Xie Li's overheated mind.

He suspected that the whole thing was related to him, everything in the conference room. But he didn't dare to overthink it.

He took out his phone and sent a message to Tan Ke, deleting and modifying it several times to make it sound polite but not overly courteous.

【Roasted Chestnuts with Sugar: Today went very smoothly, the venue provided by Long Whale is so beautiful, thank you.】

The subway arrived.

He held his phone in his hand, got on the train with the crowd, and speculated in his mind how Tan Ke would reply to him.

But Tan Ke never replied to him.

Xie Li went to the office, and Cheng Guang, seeing his bad expression and fatigue, directly sent him back to the dormitory to rest.

He went back and took a nap, dreaming of the first time Tan Ke drove him back to Landa from Professor Fang's house.

He held his phone and told Tan Ke to add WeChat to repay the money.

Tan Ke looked at him from the driver's seat, looking and laughing at the same time.

Xie Li was annoyed by the laughter and got angry with Tan Ke.

So Tan Ke told him that his WeChat ID was a big secret, and asked Xie Li to lean over and whisper it to him.

In the dream, Xie Li was naive and obediently leaned over.

"Mwah," Tan Ke gave him a kiss on the face.

When Xie Li woke up, he still reached out to touch his face.

He suspected that he had such a dream probably because he had a crush on him.

But then, he thought of another more serious problem - Tan Ke was a zero, and so was he.

How could he like a zero?!