She knew Ren Zhong was about to enter the legendary "meditation" state again, so she didn't disturb him, only starting to mobilize most of the computational power to fully monitor the situation at the front line of the Third Reconnaissance Army.

When everything around returned to tranquility, Ren Zhong took out his notebook again.

His finger rested on the number 7640, silently thinking that if all went as expected, when the fleet left two light years from Source Star, he was very likely to lose his resurrection reset ability.

This made him sigh with relief, yet he felt quite desolate, and there were several degrees of fear within his heart.

He had previously thought that if every time he did a resurrection reset, the entire universe would be dragged back by a month.

Then he could not imagine what enormous energy consumption that would require.

Just contemplating this made his scalp tingle, his thoughts stagnate.

He even felt this was utterly impossible.

If it were true that the entire universe was being reset, he could only explain everything by saying that he was living in a virtual world composed of data and information, then experiencing a server rollback.

This would completely collapse his life beliefs, plunging him into philosophical dilemmas like "what is the meaning of my existence" or "is this world real".

Of course, he would avoid this conjecture; it was too demoralizing.

But he had verified with a Turing machine, although unable to get a definitive answer, still felt that the likelihood of a real world far outweighed the virtual world.

But the real world contradicted the universal time rollback, and they were irreconcilable.

Finally, after receiving new information, Ren Zhong's new hypothesis gradually became more reasonable.

That was that the rollback area was not the whole universe, just within the observable influence range of Source Star's gravity.

Then the necessary energy suddenly dropped from infinity to an astronomical number, albeit still enormous, but necessarily quantifiable, even expressible in joules, just adding dozens of zeros.

Furthermore, considering his resurrection time and the time axis difference between Source Star and Empire, Ren Zhong could definitively determine that the rollback not only consumed energy but also time.

The time consumed for each rollback was precisely one second!

This was quite bizarre.

Because the definition of a second was originally a concept created by humans.

"Second" was not like the speed of light, a cosmic constant.

Earth humans first defined the time it takes for Earth to rotate once as a day, then divided this day into 24 parts, each an hour, then divided each hour into 60 parts, each 60 minutes, and further divided each minute into 60 parts, each one second.

On Earth within the Milky Way on a thread of the Laniakea Supercluster, Earth humans calculated to arrive at this time length concept applicable only to this civilization.

As for the concept equating cesium-133 atomic energy level transition radiation frequency multiplied by 9192631770 to one second, it was merely human scientists determining the length of a second beforehand and then extrapolating.

When the seconds time measurement unit appeared in A.D. 1884, humans did not have the capability to measure atomic energy level transition radiation oscillation cycle.

Essentially, the concept of the second originated from Earth's rotation.

In the universe, change to any planet it orbits a star different from the sun, its weight and density differ, its internal structure layers differ, its rotation cycle will inherently vary.

Even a planet like Source Star that resembles Earth so closely still has a daily time error of about 0.5 seconds, though fine enough to be almost negligible, it still objectively exists.

Assuming those wielding control above the Ancient Disk Galaxy, using the Quasar Supercomputer secretly enslaving humanity's four branched races are truly High Rank extraterrestrial civilization, their environment of origin is undoubtedly different from earth humans, at least with slight differences, their concept of time cannot completely align with humans.

Ren Zhong does not believe in such absurd coincidence.

Neither does he think humans are enslaving the four races.

Because there's absolutely no necessity, it doesn't make logical sense.

If those above the four nations are High Rank humans from a civilization, those High Rank humans wouldn't need to alienate themselves from the Milky Way, to this small elliptical star system billions of light years within Sloan Great Wall.

So why does his rollback time also require one second?

Is this coincidence or inevitability?