The method was identical to last time: a shot through the chest, followed by a cranial extraction.
Ren Zhong angrily punched the ground.
Isn't this just like hitting a ghost wall in a nightmare, an endless nesting doll?
I don't believe it! I'll try a different direction!
Using the sun's position as a reference, the first time he chose due east, the second due west, and this time he chose due south.
It was slightly better than the last two times; at least he managed to walk two or three more miles on the open grassland, but eventually, he was still harvested on the spot by the whizzing Flying Device.
This time, Ren Zhong used the few seconds of post-death "Underworld God's Eye View" to observe a few more details.
He noted down the number on the side of the Flying Device, 11899, as well as its patrol position and route.
That number was written in Arabic numerals!
Arabic numerals!
...
Bang! Bang!
Once again, he emerged from the Frozen Storage.
This time, Ren Zhong headed north all the way.
...
Bang! Bang!
...
Bang! Bang!
Amidst swirling smoke, Ren Zhong emerged from the Frozen Storage once more.
Last time, Ren Zhong had returned to the east and, before leaving the dense forest, used his clothes to gather the red fruit that fell from the sky, eating half to satiate halfway.
Whether it was poisonous, he didn't care.
After all, he was going to die anyway. If he could eat his fill first, he'd have more strength and a better chance of breaking out.
Fortunately, the red fruit was non-toxic.
This time, before leaving the forest, he first curled up in a bush at the forest edge, cautiously observing the outside through the gaps.
He wanted to see if he could avoid the Flying Device, and then slip out once it flew far enough away.
Minutes later, the whistling sound came from a distance, and the Flying Device once again cut through the sky.
Holding his breath, Ren Zhong quietly observed.
He judged from the wind pressure bending the plants behind the Flying Device that its route was a perfectly regular arc.
The arc extended continuously, and the straight-line distance between the Flying Device and Ren Zhong kept decreasing.
Ren Zhong's breathing grew fainter, sensing the distance with his naked eyes.
He began to have new hopes.
If the Flying Device proceeded along its predetermined route without spotting him when closest to the forest, the escape plan would take a big step forward.
Suddenly, the Flying Device made a sharp ninety-degree turn, heading straight towards Ren Zhong's position.
Ren Zhong sighed, picking up a palm-sized stone from the ground.
The stone flew out futilely.
This time, he didn't return empty-handed; he memorized the approximate distance, five hundred meters, between him and the Flying Device the moment it turned towards him.
...
Time may have just passed in an instant, or perhaps a long time had gone by.
Emotionlessly, Ren Zhong emerged from the Frozen Storage once more.
He didn't know whether to be glad or sad.
He was basically certain that this was definitely not a dream since he had already died one hundred and thirty-six times.
If it were a dream, then it would be the 137th power of a dream—too much.
Time indeed resets to the moment of waking upon his death, like an infinitely large Poincaré recurrence.
According to the second law of thermodynamics, microscopic particles in nature are constantly undergoing random motion, and the entropy in an isolated system is always in a state of eternal increase.
The universe is developing irreversibly from order towards chaos. With the passage of time, the universe is destined to head towards the heat death that represents the chaos of all things.
But from a probabilistic standpoint, assuming particles conduct true random motion, within an infinitely long time cycle, any particle, after an infinitely long period of random motion, is bound to return to a position infinitely close to its initial state.
All particles in the universe are the same.
The probability of such an event in a finite time is infinitely small.
But as long as this probability exists, over infinite time, it approaches one hundred percent with infinite proximity.
One day, everything in the universe will, after an infinitely massive cyclical recurrence, return to a certain state it once existed in.
This can be understood as the time of the universe flowing backwards.
This is where humanity's greatest fear lies — the absolute opposite of entropy increase, the Poincaré recurrence.
In 1895, Jules Henri Poincaré historically proved this with theory.
In March 2018, a group of researchers at Vienna University successfully demonstrated the "Poincaré Recurrence" phenomenon in a multi-particle quantum system, with the paper published in Science.