9_Quantum Intervention in History

At 00:15, a blue-white spiral flared at the top of the Xiling Quantum Test Tower, like a tear in the sky or a fire with no sound. Researcher Li Xin, however, was staring at a bronze sword fitting in his palm. Through this wormhole, he intended to reach Gaixia two thousand years in the past and change its outcome. If Xiang Yu could win just once, he believed, it would prove that human will could bend the laws of physics.

A closed-loop wormhole is a self-sustaining curve in time, its entrance and exit locked to the same quantum ground state and held open by a 130-megajoule negative-energy Casimir cavity. Any disturbance triggers Novikov self-consistency constraints: history is a string pulled tight, allowing only those vibrations that do not break it.

Far below, security chief Wu Yong raised the signed command baton as a final reminder to Li Xin: “History itself does not welcome travelers.” Before his voice faded, the turbulence took hold and swallowed them both.

It was a snowy night in 202 B.C. Drumbeats tangled with the wind. Chu banners were in rags; Xiang Yu’s black warhorse screamed amid the slaughter. Li Xin worked the “string-domain interferometer” on his wrist, feeding tiny perturbations into the Chu war drums—quantum-encrypted patterns meant to lift morale and nudge tens of thousands of arrows onto new vectors, enough in theory to turn the tide.

Almost immediately, the device flashed an error: “Macro-historical wavefunction collapsed; polarization reverted to original track.” They watched the Chu formation collapse as Guan Ying and Han Xin closed in from both flanks under Liu Bang’s command. Torches advanced like shock fronts in a starfield, and the ground shook. Time itself seemed to erase Li Xin’s interference—every arrow he redirected curved back a heartbeat later; every gap he sealed in the lines tore open wider somewhere else.

“You’re playing tug-of-war with Laplace’s demon stretched across spacetime,” Wu Yong murmured. Li Xin finally understood: Xiang Yu was not too weak; it was that the universe’s evolution equations had already written “Han rule” into the most stable solution. The wormhole only allowed him to witness that stability with his own eyes.

With 0.3 seconds left before retrieval, the system yanked them back. In the hall at Xiling, the main screen displayed a single line: “Historical Deviation: 0.” Cold. Final.

Li Xin set the sword fitting beside his lab log and left a note: “The blade of technology is not meant to rewrite the given line, but to light it—and teach those who follow how to ride the current.” The next day, Huaxia’s National Deep-Space Engine Engineering Center received his proposal: abandon time intervention and pivot to a human migration program in Jovian orbit. Outside the main screen, dawn pushed through the clouds in an orange arc—like the fires of Gaixia, not yet spent, transformed into the morning that would drive the future.