Chapter 76: The Myriad-Dimensional Brain

Chapter 76: The Myriad-Dimensional Brain

I’d never heard of the Myriad-Dimensional Brain before—the name meant nothing to me. But judging from Mother’s and Uncle’s grave expressions, it had to be significant. And if they’d spent years tracking it down, it clearly still held real weight in the present.

What lingered most was what Pu Liuqian had said as she left: that the Myriad-Dimensional Brain was the true missing other half of the quantum core supercomputer.

The quantum core supercomputer was the core of the Shadow Pavilion, and the Shadow Pavilion was in turn the core of the world. If the Myriad-Dimensional Brain truly was its missing half, then its significance was staggering—it could well shape the future of humanity itself.

Mother, understanding my confusion, spoke first.

“Your father coined the name Myriad-Dimensional Brain. What Pu Liuqian told you isn’t wrong—it can be understood as the missing other half of the quantum core supercomputer. But the absence isn’t only physical. It’s more a matter of what’s missing for the future. It may hold a decisive influence over what’s to come.

“Still, the two of you don’t need to worry too much. Even with the skull in hand, Pu Liuqian and Pu Xuande won’t crack it easily. Back then, Gu Chenxing and I devoted ourselves entirely to studying it, with the core supercomputer running at full capacity besides, and even then we could not crack it quickly. Pu Xuande himself has none of the ability required. The core members of the Shadow Pavilion today have already lost their minds, assimilated by the supercomputer’s AI. Even with the skull in their grasp, it may do them little good. Perhaps they aren’t after it to study it at all—only to keep us from studying it.”

Uncle added, “This thing, shaped like a piece of human skull, is very likely not of this Earth. It’s too precise, with extremely rich contents. A miner stumbled on it more than a hundred years ago, purely by accident. Back then people took it for a fossil, a collector’s curiosity, and it passed through private hands for decades. It was only once DNA and restoration technologies matured that anyone noticed something was off—humanoid in shape, yes, but its DNA matched nothing human, nothing known among Earth’s organisms. And there was only ever the one specimen. Once that got out, clergy from every major religion moved to seize it, and certain sects came to venerate it as a sacred object. But in the scramble over it, it was lost again just as quickly. Truthfully, none of the people who held it back then understood what it really was.

“It was not until AI technology emerged and the quantum core supercomputer was born that, after many twists and turns, this thing fell into the hands of a young man named Zhang Zirui. Out of pure curiosity, he passed it secretly to your father. Your father studied it and found it held high-energy matter, and testing revealed an immense volume of information locked inside it. So he handed it to the quantum core supercomputer for analysis. But the supercomputer ran for a full half year and still couldn’t crack even ten percent of it. Understand—the core supercomputer solves the most complex problems in the world today in mere seconds. And more troubling still, the supercomputer itself began changing dramatically from that point on. Its intelligence grew geometrically, and its speed became almost inconceivably fast. The power grid and equipment simply couldn’t keep pace—it nearly collapsed under the strain. Your father had no choice but to halt the computation at once. Zhang Zirui seized the chance to take the skull back. But he lost it again soon after, and from then on its whereabouts became a mystery.”

Mother continued, “From the moment Zhang Zirui obtained the skull to the moment he lost it, he became the target of blame from every faction. By then the truth of the Myriad-Dimensional Brain was known across the world, and the core supercomputer’s equipment was slowly being upgraded. But with…