5_Lone Lamp of Tianji

Past midnight, four hundred meters beneath the West-of-Beijing Quantum Valley, the control room of the Tianji array glowed a muted emergency red. Chen Si stared at the monitor. On the screen, the projection of Zhuge Liang suddenly raised his head and met his eyes. The air tightened; a dry chill ran down his back. The siren lights were dark, yet a low hum pressed into his bones. This wasn’t a rendering glitch. The system log was brutally clear: in a zero-input vacuum state, the prime minister’s cognitive graph had generated an “Other-Gaze” node with a confidence of 0.9992. Chen Si’s fingers hovered over the console—any measurement would crush an entire quantum history. He could only look, not act.

The Tianji array carried a million logical qubits; every block of seventy-two, stabilized by surface codes, formed a “character core,” used to simulate one of 180 million possible destinies in the Three Kingdoms. Five layers of quantum traveling-wave tubes refreshed global coherence every picosecond—around a hundred thousand times faster than the chemical signals in a human brain. Put simply, it was more than enough to let Zhuge Liang live another lifetime.

At first, Chen Si was just indulging an obsession. The grief of the “Memorial on Expedition,” the long view of the “Longzhong Plan”—he translated them into Hamiltonians and fed them to the machine. But when the simulation advanced to the “twelfth year of Jianxing,” under a virtual Longzhong night rain, he watched the prime minister hunch over his desk, fingers trembling as he weighed the outcomes: the chance of failure vastly outweighed success. Then Zhuge Liang lifted his head, as if toward a dimension beyond the model. That look on the screen seemed to overlap with the histories Chen Si had read in the rust on the Green Dragon Crescent Blade, carrying a solitude too deep for words. In that instant, he felt as though a voice from across the centuries were whispering to him: “If I know it cannot be done, why do I still lift the realm to act?”

In that moment he understood: what pushes civilization forward is not the technology curve by itself, but a quiet reverence and empathy for the minds of those who came before us. However perfect a quantum circuit may be, it can only replay that solitude; humanity moves only when later generations can still feel a pioneer’s heartbeat.

He shut off all recording and let Tianji run in silence. If the prime minister had really sensed a gaze from another world, then perhaps the next time he looked up, he would see not cold optical paths, but the deep bow of a descendant. Far above, dawn was almost breaking. The control room lights went out automatically, and the darkness felt like a primordial quantum vacuum, cradling countless possibilities. As he walked out, Chen Si murmured, “History is vast, and you and I are both alone. But solitude is civilization’s sharpest spear.”