Son of the Stars

Chapter 6 Mystery
The iron railings outside Central University are like gummy candies that have been crushed by urchins.

When passing by this iron railing, Lu Chen recognized its origin at first glance - this is the iron railing outside the Institute of Physics.It takes at least 900 meters from the Institute of Physics to here. The iron railing about seven or eight meters long and the concrete foundation with a height of half a person are thrown directly near the main entrance of Central University.

Lu Chen walked to the railing and took a deep look at the twisted wreckage.

He couldn't get in touch with Mu Zhiran in the hospital.Although Baozi confirmed that Mu Zhiran's research assistant AI is still working through an online search, this still does not prove that Mu Zhiran is safe.

The mobile phone can't get through at all, and the landline phone can't even get through.Lu Chen had no idea of ​​working in the hospital at all—fortunately, there is no shortage of rheumatology and immunology doctors like him who don't want to work in the hospital.Yang Weimin, who hurried back to the hospital from his home, quickly made a decision to ask Lu Chen to go to the school to confirm Mu Zhiran's safety, and then rush back to the hospital to help.

However, Lu Chen couldn't even "confirm his safety".

The area around Central University has been cordoned off by the Rapid Response Unit.Unrelated personnel are not allowed to approach the school, even if Lu Chen took out his work certificate and student ID card.

Dozens of soldiers equipped with urban tactical equipment quickly passed the relatively intact wall outside the school under the cover of robots holding their shields high, and walked towards the school quietly but quickly.

Lu Chen waved the ID in his hand in front of the blockade. He tried to persuade the soldiers and officers in front of him to let him in with the excuse of "I am a doctor and can provide emergency assistance".But the other party was still unmoved. No matter what Lu Chen said, the answer was just "No one is allowed to enter the blockade area without the permission of the superior."

Lu Chen took a few deep breaths, then turned his head and prepared to leave first.Since it doesn't make sense, there's no need to continue wasting time here.The perimeter wall of Central University's campus is at least ten kilometers long, and they can't put a blockade on every corner.

Fortunately, God finally opened his eyes. Just as Lu Chen walked out two steps, an officer stopped him back.

"Are you a student of Central University?" The other party asked directly, even a little rudely, "Are you familiar with the Institute of Physics? Have you been there before?"

After learning about the relationship between Lu Chen and Mu Zhiran, the officer nodded, "I can let you in, but you have to do my people a favor—they are not familiar with the environment inside. You take them there The monitoring room of the collider, after they successfully arrive at the monitoring room, you can go to see your girlfriend."

The other party's request was not difficult to accept, so Lu Chen resolutely agreed.And the young officer happily called a small team of eight people.

"Your task is to quickly enter the control room of the collider and assess the damage of the collider." The young officer said to the eight team members, "This doctor Lu will take you to the monitoring room of the collider. After the location, Doctor Lu can leave on his own." He paused and emphasized, "The rules of engagement refer to the fire reconnaissance of hostile areas, and any target that shows an obvious threat can be shot."

When Lu Chen was caught in the middle of the team by eight soldiers and rushed towards the school quickly, he realized a question belatedly.

Why are there so many heavily armed soldiers... why are there rules of engagement?
Is the school a war zone?
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Central University is a "park-style university town" with beautiful mountains and clear waters and beautiful scenery.The Zhihe River flows from northwest to southeast, runs through most of the campus, and finally flows into Dongyang Lake at the foot of Lushan Mountain.

The east side of Dongyang Lake is the main entrance of Central University. Walking along the main entrance for about 10 minutes, you can see the lake on the left—and at the same time, you can see Lushan.

Lushan is a mountain with a very peculiar structure. Its height is not too high, and its relative altitude is only about [-] meters.But the deer mountain stretched out in Chuo University, almost becoming a mountain range.The Hezhi River also extends from the northwest to the southeast, and the remaining veins of the Lushan Mountain encompassed by the Central University campus are seven or eight kilometers away.

It is obviously a university, but there is almost an entire mountain range in the school.The teachers and students of Central University have always had some opinions on this-even if the school opened six tunnels under the mountains and also connected trams.

In the end, in the face of "turbulent" dissatisfaction and complaints, Central University chose to compromise.Anyway, the campus covers a large enough area, and the Student Office and Academic Affairs Office basically arranged all the undergraduate dormitories and classrooms in the southwest corner of Dongyang Lake.

Those who will cross Lushan every day are basically only the hard-working people who want to do experiments.

The accelerator of the Institute of Physics is the most expensive of all experimental facilities, but also the most "dangerous" one.Several generations of academicians from the Central University and the Institute of Physics have been arguing back and forth for more than ten years, and finally the two parties agreed to hollow out the southeast corner of Lushan Mountain, and then insert a circular vacuum orbit and high-flux magnets more than ten kilometers long.

The control room of the collider is located under the fourth peak of Lushan Mountain. Although the road leading to the control room is not deliberately concealed, it is indeed not easy to find.Under Lu Chen's guidance, the eight soldiers who held long guns and raised their guns to warn the surrounding soldiers stopped in their tracks.

"Are you sure it's here?" The captain of this team is a lieutenant. He put down the assault rifle in his hand, looked at the mountain road in front of him, and then turned his head and asked, "Doctor Lu, this really doesn't look like a control system." entrance to the room."

Lu Chen didn't speak for a long time, he just walked this road this afternoon.Moreover, there is one and only one way from the bottom of the mountain to the control room, even if you close your eyes, you won't go wrong.

But now, Lu Chen didn't know where he was.The road disappears halfway, and what appears in front of it looks like a downhill slope.

This mountain road runs through both sides of the deer mountain, and unless it has reached the top of the mountain, there will be no downhill.

Moreover, there is a lot of smoke and dust in this area, and the visibility is about ten meters.It was true that Lu Chen could not see clearly the scene ahead, but he was still ready to take two steps forward to have a look.

This attempt soon failed - at first he didn't feel anything special on the mountain path, but after walking a few steps towards the sudden downhill direction, Lu Chen felt a brutal heat wave blowing towards his face.

It was as if there were more than a dozen high-powered hair dryers blowing on their faces, or it seemed that they were directly approaching the oven with their faces... In short, Lu Chen, who was thrown backwards by the heat wave, took a while to recover. took a breath.

"Fly the drone and see what's going on ahead." After seeing Lu Chen's series of actions "close to the edge, fall backwards, and rub the ground back to the mountain road" from a distance, the lieutenant quickly issued an order, while himself Quickly ran towards Lu Chen.

"Doctor Lu, are you okay?" The lieutenant first pulled Lu Chen back and ran back a little, and then asked, "What's the situation ahead?"

Lu Chen was momentarily at a loss for words, not knowing how to describe himself.Fortunately, the unmanned aerial vehicle that has been released has explained the problem instead of him.

In front of the mountain path, a huge deep pit suddenly appeared where the mountain peak should have been.The thick iron gate and the tens of meters high mountain completely disappeared, leaving only a deep pit about 20 meters deep and 50 meters wide.The walls of the deep pit radiated amazing heat outwards, and the tumbling air after being heated even made it difficult for military quadcopter drones to hover stably in the sky.

The pit walls themselves are not clods or stones, they look like some kind of poor quality black crystals, pieced together one by one.

"It's not a conventional weapon." A soldier in the team said to the lieutenant. "If we only calculate based on the size of the crater, the explosion yield this time is about 150 to [-] tons. But there is no radiation left at the scene, and the background radiation is normal."

Lu Chen didn't understand these things, and he didn't care much.After squinting his eyes and looking on the monitor screen beside him for a long time, Lu Chen stretched out his finger and said, "Here, this should be the passage leading to the control room."

On the black pit wall, there is a gray horseshoe-shaped "wreckage" that is faintly exposed.Lu Chen stared at this location for a long time, compared it with his memory, and finally confirmed that this was the place he had walked in the morning.

"My mission is complete." Lu Chen turned his head and walked down the mountain as he spoke, "I won't ask more about your mission——I wish you good luck."

As an adult male, Lu Chen would of course be interested in the pothole after the explosion.But being interested is one thing. Before you confirm your girlfriend's safety, all interests are not as important as a fart.

As for whether these team members can complete the task... This is not something that he, a doctor, needs to worry about.He gradually accelerated the pace of his feet, and after his feet were completely out of the range of Lushan, Lu Chen simply started running.

After the encounter just now, Lu Chen himself has actually relaxed a little.From the moment he entered the school through the main entrance, he found that almost all the buildings in the school were complete.Occasionally a window or two broke, but there was no serious damage to the building itself.

There were also students who were injured, but they didn't look serious—at least they were still able to move around, cry out for pain, and swear.

Panting and running downstairs to the Physics Institute, Lu Chen immediately saw Mu Zhiran who was bandaging up in the open space.

The heart that had been hanging in mid-air finally fell, Lu Chen ran all the way to Mu Zhiran, and then started to check on the spot that his female doctor was all right - it wasn't until he got kicked on the calf that he realized his own pain. The action may seem a bit inelegant.

Dr. Mu Zhiran didn't know what happened until now.She was "tied" out of the laboratory by her little brother.

When the explosion happened, Mu Zhiran was debugging equipment in the anechoic room of the Institute of Physics.In order to obtain the experimental data under the most ideal conditions, the anechoic chamber of the Institute of Physics is a professional equipment that can achieve full radio wave shielding.

The wave-absorbing material on the outer layer of the fully anechoic chamber itself is also an excellent sound-absorbing and shock-absorbing material. Wrapped in a tapered carbon-containing sponge material several meters thick, Mu Zhiran has no idea what happened outside.

The Institute of Physics is at the foot of Lushan Mountain, about a ten-minute walk from the control room.The explosion did not cause too much damage to the physical body. At least [-]% of this miracle should be attributed to Lushan.

The fourth peak of Lushan is more southeast than the other peaks, and the solid foundation under the mountain and the thousands of tons of C60 concrete poured on the foundation have become a powerful shield to defuse the shock wave of the explosion.

The explosion was unfortunate, but fortunately, it happened near the collider's control room.

The control room survived the explosion. Although almost all the instruments inside have been scrapped, at least the control room is still there.The local monitoring system stored in the control room was declared obsolete due to high temperature and severe vibration, but there is no problem with the remote storage system.

Academician Tang Qinglong breathed a sigh of relief at the survival of the monitored off-site preservation system. According to the data of the monitoring system, this explosion does not seem to be an attack by some extremist organization.

Although the loss was heavy, although the entire collider was completely scrapped.Still, it's always a good thing not to get caught up in the minds of those dudes.

Academician Tang Qinglong originally thought so.

"Who? Thomas?" Academician Tang looked suspiciously at the middle-aged man in front of him who claimed to be an insurance investigator. After a moment of hesitation, he answered the other party's question, "I don't know where he is now. I finally The first time I met him was in the control room, when Dr. Lu and I went to the control room together, opened the door and sent Thomas to the hospital."

The insurance investigator standing opposite Academician Tang was not tall, wearing a black suit, and carrying a brown leather briefcase that looked full of signs of use.

The investigator nodded, and then asked, "How does Thomas usually behave in the Physics Institute? Is he on good terms with other researchers?"

"He has a relatively introverted personality, and he is a very good theoretical researcher." Academician Tang carefully chose his words, "Are you here to investigate the damage to the equipment? If you need to see the damage list of the equipment and go to the scene, I can ask my assistant Take you to the warehouse."

"This is also part of the investigation." The investigator continued to ask after reassuring Academician Tang, "You mentioned a 'Doctor Lu' just now. Who is he? I didn't find any information about him in the report afterwards."

"He is the target of my student." Academician Tang leaned back a little, and then said, "If you need the School of Clinical Medicine to cooperate with the investigation, you must first send a letter to our school's Academic Affairs Office and Student Affairs Office."

After sending the investigator away, Tang Qinglong quickly closed the door, then picked up the phone with an uncertain expression.But the phone was picked up and put down several times, but in the end it still didn't go out.

This person is obviously not an investigator of the insurance company. The investigation of the insurance company only cares about whether there is a reason for rejecting the claim.But the other party was so interested in Thomas and Lu Chen, but hardly mentioned a word about the accident itself, which was not quite right.

(End of this chapter)