Lone Lamp of Tianji

Midnight, 400 meters under the West-of-Beijing Quantum Valley. The control room of the Tianji array was dimmed to a blood-vessel red. Chen Si stared at the monitor; the projection of Zhuge Liang suddenly lifted his head and looked straight at him—the air felt like frozen radio, and a chill ran through him. The siren lights were silent, but a low hum seeped into his bones. It wasn’t a graphical glitch. The system log was ice-cold: under a zero-input vacuum state, the prime minister’s cognitive graph had spawned an “Other-Gaze” node with 0.9992 confidence. Chen Si’s fingers hovered—one measurement would collapse an entire quantum history; he could only watch, not touch.

The Tianji array held a million logical qubits; every seventy-two, surface-code-corrected, formed a “character core,” simulating 180 million individual destinies of the Three Kingdoms. Five tiers of quantum traveling-wave tubes completed a global coherence update every picosecond—one hundred thousand times faster than a brain’s chemical signals. In a word: enough to let Zhuge Liang live another lifetime.

At first Chen Si was simply obsessed. The grief of the “Memorial on Expedition,” the stratagem of the “Longzhong Plan”—he reduced them to Hamiltonians. But when the simulation reached the “twelfth year of Jianxing,” a virtual Longzhong night rain, the prime minister bent over his desk and his fingers trembled: the chance of failure far exceeded success—then he looked up, toward an unknown higher dimension. The gaze on the screen overlapped with histories he’d read in rust on the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, with a deeper solitude. In that moment, Chen Si seemed to hear a whisper across millennia: “If I know it cannot be done, why do I still lift the realm to act?”

He suddenly understood: what advances civilization is not the curve of technology alone, but a reverence and empathy for the minds of our forebears. However perfect the quantum circuit, it can only re-enact solitude; humanity moves forward only when it feels a pioneer’s heartbeat.

He disabled recording and let Tianji run in silence. If the prime minister had truly sensed the gaze of this world, perhaps next time he looked up, he would see not cold optical paths but the deep bow of a descendant. Dawn neared on the surface. The control room lights went out automatically; the dark was like the primordial quantum vacuum, gestating infinite possibilities. As he left, Chen Si whispered, “History is vast, and you and I are both alone. But solitude is civilization’s sharpest spear.”