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Elementary Particles

category story ending Body levelBond
YuiYagi's Story Elementary Particles Elementary Particles Imagine a glass sits on the table.
Inside the glass is nothing but the most ordinary water, colorless and tasteless. It's an indispensable element for life, and one of the fundamental substances that compose this world.
Though invisible under a magnifying lens, this glass of water is in fact composed of countless water molecules. Its chemical formula, H₂O, indicates that each molecule of water consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. In this single glass, there are roughly 6×10^24 such molecules. For context, 10^24 is a "1" followed by 24 zeros – a number known as a septillion. A septillion surpasses a sextillion but falls short of an octillion, dwarfing everyday terms like "million" or "billion." And to think such an inconceivable scale hides within a few swallows of this mundane substance.
Yet this barely scratches the surface of "smallness."
Within hydrogen and oxygen atoms lie even smaller atomic nuclei, composed of protons and neutrons. Yet these particles, too, are not fundamental. Like nesting dolls of the infinitesimal, their interiors harbor particles so inconceivably tiny they defy human scales of comprehension.
They're called "elementary particles."
Elementary particles, the smallest known building blocks of the universe...
Afternoon. The library. Yui Yagi is digging into microphysics.
Elementary particles are one of her parents' fields of research. Having grown up playing in their lab, Yui had read through reams of papers and academic books on the subject long before starting university. To her, this book by a foreign physicist is certainly well-written, but merely "decent." It offers no new insights.
"Phew..."
Closing the hefty tome, she lets out a faint sigh.
Is there anything new left in this world that could make her heart race?
Anything that could shatter her worldview? Anything at all to make this tedious world finally feel alive with thrill and wonder?
Or... has humanity already unraveled all the mysteries of this world?
If that's truly the case...
"...How dull."
She murmurs something under her breath, then turns to look out the window.
Students from other departments walk past the window, laughing and talking among themselves – carefree, as if the word "dull" doesn't exist in their world.​
What truly separates her from them? Is it her lack of knowledge? Should she try fields outside of science?
...Still, that doesn't feel quite right.
Solving this might require... a different approach altogether.
As Yui gets up to return the books, her eye is caught by a whimsical picture book.
The title reads: Encountering Science. From the cartoon cover, it's obviously a children's book – probably something for education majors.
For Yui, who's accustomed to studies from the frontiers of physics, the material in this picture book is laughably rudimentary. She could probably guess the contents without even opening it.
However, the text on the book's cover makes her pause.
"...Encounter."
So... It's about encounters.
The encounter of elementary particles forms atoms; the encounter of hydrogen and oxygen atoms forms water. An encounter is all it takes to transform this monotonous world. Perhaps the answer she seeks isn't a great scientific discovery, but simply an encounter of her own... With that, the happiness she sees beyond the window wouldn't seem so out of reach after all.
At this thought, her weary body feels a little lighter.
Who will she encounter next, and in what way?
As the young girl muses, she opens the pages of the book in her hands. 		絆レベル2