Chapter 78: Forge Ahead

Chapter 78: Forge Ahead

Hearing the truth Du Xiaoran had laid bare about the half-skull, a chill crept down my spine.

Damn it. Mother had said Father was assimilated by the supercomputer’s AI—could that possibly have something to do with this skull?

After all, my father had handled the thing, had even tried to crack it himself. He was the one who’d given it its name—Myriad-Dimensional Brain. That alone meant he must have already seen into its true nature, understood something of what it carried.

Maybe the collective loss of reason among every member of the Shadow Pavilion was related to this very thing.

If the skull was incomplete, perhaps it needed something to make it whole again—to repair it. And the ideal way to repair it might be through the quantum core supercomputer itself, condensing and fusing whatever filled the gap directly into the skull.

If my reasoning held, then whatever could repair the Myriad-Dimensional Brain was very likely human wisdom, human knowledge—perhaps even the wisdom and information of all humanity.

Wisdom, after all, was the brain’s own product, and information was wisdom crystallized. If the Myriad-Dimensional Brain already held an enormous store of information within its high-energy matter, then whatever it lacked ought to be wisdom and information as well.

Otherwise, why would the quantum core supercomputer, after coming into contact with the Myriad-Dimensional Brain, have split the world into two tiers—the Elite World and the Mundane World? Perhaps its purpose was simply to gather humanity’s finest minds in one place, ready to be drawn upon.

Gu Zhengtang said the design sprang from the selfish gene at the core of human nature. But could it not, instead, be this skull’s own scheme? Gu Zhengtang, an ordinary man, would have had no way of knowing the skull even existed.

Perhaps the very first time this skull touched the quantum core supercomputer—during the attempt my father oversaw—the supercomputer had already been infiltrated, already brought under its control. How else could the supercomputer have grown so much smarter, and by geometric growth, no less?

Had my father truly halted the process only because the power and equipment couldn’t keep up? Or was there another possibility—that he’d discovered the Myriad-Dimensional Brain infiltrating the system, perhaps even moving to seize the core supercomputer outright, and had no choice but to cut it off in an emergency?

Looking at the world as a whole—even within the Elite World—elite people didn’t live the way I’d once imagined: reclining in comfort atop infinite wealth and limitless technology. Every single person there still had to struggle, still had to fight for their meager share of achievement points. That ingeniously designed virtual world might be nothing more than a platform built to drain the last dregs of wisdom from elite minds.

Enjoyment demanded a price, and that price was paid through endless creation. Creation generated value, and nearly all of that value flowed straight back into the quantum core supercomputer.

Rule itself hardly mattered.

What mattered was the value that rule produced.

Rule, after all, was itself a form of service to society. Any rule lacking a rational structure behind it would eventually collapse. So was the underlying logic of the present order, perhaps, nothing more than a mechanism built to mend this half-skull?

And then a thought struck me. Mother had taken part in the research too, had handled the Myriad-Dimensional Brain herself. Why hadn’t she been affected?

No—wait. It seemed she had been affected too.

Because she had given birth to me, and set before me the single mission of my future: to occupy the Shadow Pavilion, steer the Shadow Pavilion, and control the core supercomputer. And when that day came, perhaps I would finally be the one to interpret and crack the Myriad-Dimensional Brain.

Wasn’t that simply another layer of calculation by the Myriad-Dimensional Brain?

No—surely not. That was insane.

My own spiraling thoughts were tangling my mind into knots.

Why had I even come to the Elite World in the first place?

And that green jade token—where had its power come from? Why, the very moment I’d finally begun to grow strong, had the Myriad-Dimensional Brain conveniently found its way back to the Shadow Pavilion?

The thought sent my eyes snapping toward Du Xiaoran.

Why was this man telling me any of this?

Why not simply keep the half-skull for himself, Du Xiaoran? Why pass it along like a game of drum-and-flower, straight into Pu Liuqian’s hands? Unless—was he trying to drag her down into this too?

I had to hand it to him.

Everyone who touched the Myriad-Dimensional Brain seemed to grow more ruthless than the last.

Then again, maybe letting Pu Liuqian take it up early wasn’t such a bad thing after all. The sooner she took hold of it, the sooner she’d feel its influence, the sooner she’d fuse with the core supercomputer. Honestly, I found myself rather curious to see how the Myriad-Dimensional Brain’s story would finally end.

Seeing me stand there frozen, saying nothing, Du Xiaoran asked, “What’s wrong with you? What are you thinking about? You just glared at me.”

I looked at him. “Is it possible that the moment Zhang Zirui first handed the Myriad-Dimensional Brain to the core supercomputer, the supercomputer was already under its control? If that’s true, then everything the supercomputer built afterward has been this skull at work.”

Du Xiaoran went still for a moment. “You really do dare to think big. I’ve long suspected the same thing myself, and I’m not the only one—plenty of people share that theory. But there’s no proof. It’s all speculation. The skull was never fully cracked before Zhang Zirui took it and ran, which cut off whatever connection had formed between the skull and the supercomputer. His fate was shaped by that same break. That’s part of why I let Pu Liuqian take it—deliberately. As long as the skull draws close to the supercomputer again, or merges with it, my own sense of mission eases a little. If Pu Liuqian is greedy enough, she’ll start researching it herself, step into the same drum-and-flower relay, and become the link most likely to finally bind the core supercomputer to the Myriad-Dimensional Brain. These past two days, I haven’t been busy cleaning up after the raid at all—I’ve been observing and analyzing the skull’s movements the whole time.”

Small mercy—he hadn’t chosen me for that relay. But what he’d said before certainly sounded like he wanted me to be the one at the very end of it.

And Mother seemed to share the same thought.

So this final baton—was I meant to take it, or refuse it?

I was only twenty-one. This baton did not feel easy to take.

“Then what should I do now?” I asked.

Only then did Du Xiaoran’s expression soften into something like a smile. A pigeon’s beak gives nothing away, but I could feel it all the same.

“I’ve been waiting to hear you say that,” he said. “You’re my lucky star—my last hope. So from here on, I’m putting everything into making you stronger. Don’t think for a second that Liu Tanzhuang steering you toward Ghostdark City, or Fatty Huang pointing you at the City Lord’s Castle, were idle suggestions. Those were all guideposts I laid out to help you grow stronger.”

“So you’ve been scheming behind my back this whole time?”

“Scheming? Call it following Heaven’s will, answering to the hearts of the people. Who gave you that response to the Myriad-Dimensional Brain? Who told your force-of-consciousness foundation to be so heaven-defying? If you don’t grow stronger, how could you possibly live up to being the chosen one?”

“The chosen one—says who? You? You’re not Heaven. Next time you have some plan for me, tell me outright. Don’t scheme behind my back.”

“We didn’t know each other well before. Spell it out too soon, and you’d only grow suspicious of me. Better to let things unfold naturally, don’t you think? Besides, I’m telling you now precisely because I want you to trust me. We are one.”

“So what do I do now?”

“Temper yourself and forge ahead; do not fail your youth.”

I couldn’t quite manage a real laugh, but I tried anyway. “Save the fancy talk. You’re giving me pigeon bumps.”

After that, I left the pigeon body behind at Du Xiaoran’s base and let my consciousness withdraw from it.

It struck me, suddenly, how convenient it was to have a parasitic body waiting somewhere far away—no need to travel there in person when something came up. If I planted one in every city, I could teleport wherever I liked, whenever I liked.

Wouldn’t that be something.

Expensive, of course.

Once my consciousness stirred awake back at the base, I went to find Mother.

I told her everything Du Xiaoran and I had discussed that day, along with my own theories. She had, after all, been a direct participant in the original attempt to crack the Myriad-Dimensional Brain.

Some of my ideas she agreed with—the notion that the Brain had infiltrated the core supercomputer, for one. Others she dismissed outright, including my theory about the design of the world itself. She didn’t believe the Myriad-Dimensional Brain held that much power.

She explained that they had only ever cracked a small fraction of it. The rest had remained unsolved, and not simply because the power supply and equipment had failed to keep pace. The real issue was that the information itself was incomplete—the skull’s physical form was missing pieces, and with it, a great deal of information was lost beyond recovery.

As for my theory that the Myriad-Dimensional Brain might complete itself using human wisdom, Mother laughed it off as nonsense. Everyone was entitled to their own speculation about the thing, she said, but speculation needed a scientific foundation to mean anything. Without one, it was worthless—useless for guiding real work.

“Don’t be afraid of the Myriad-Dimensional Brain,” she told me. “Whether it’s alien in origin or not, it’s ultimately a dead thing, not a living creature. Its precise structures hold enormous value for advancing human technology. The vast store of information the skull carries within its special high-energy matter is a gift to humanity, a precious resource—not a disaster.

“Your father and I personally deconstructed its physical form, back then. That high-energy matter isn’t organic. It shouldn’t be capable of thought. Some influence, some intrusion into the core supercomputer, probably did occur—but I believe it was quite limited. I’m more inclined to think the AI within the quantum core supercomputer, after understanding part of the Myriad-Dimensional Brain’s contents, simply underwent its own self-optimization. As for this design of the world you’re describing, that was likely something the AI built on its own, in order to continue obtaining the contents of the Myriad-Dimensional Brain.”

I nodded.

Her reasoning, unsurprisingly, rested on firmer scientific ground. She had, after all, studied the Myriad-Dimensional Brain firsthand, and she remained one of the finest scientists I knew.

Mother took a particular liking to Du Xiaoran’s line, “Temper yourself and forge ahead; do not fail your youth.”

For a good while after that, I truly did throw myself into “forging ahead” at the base.

On one front, I trained under Uncle in the elite people’s shape-shifting and illusion transformation, along with the exchange of information between one consciousness and another—the basic skills every elite person needed.

I also built a consciousness interconnection structure within my own brain structure. I hadn’t joined the network the resistance members at the base shared with one another, but I could interconnect with designated personnel—Mother and Uncle, for instance. With that structure in place, I could interconnect with Du Xiaoran too, sparing myself the trouble of pinging his alt account, which was always at risk of being intercepted.

As for martial techniques, I combed carefully through the Wisdom Library at Uncle’s base and selected a number of practical martial techniques. The base’s collection ran wide but shallow—high-rank techniques were scarce. Most people read them through a Wisdom Capsule, but since I never needed to install one, I could copy the techniques directly instead, synthesizing and fusing the martial techniques I had selected into a set suited to me. After days of refining it, I landed somewhere around rank twelve. Nothing higher was available.

As for force of consciousness, the base had none to offer at all. Every elite person lacked it. Just as Du Xiaoran had said—money alone couldn’t buy it.

Which, put that way, made Feng Du something of an unwitting benefactor, handing me a gift package like that for free. When I had the chance, I’d slip back into Song Chenfeng and see if there was more force of consciousness left to harvest.

In the virtual world, I’d used force of consciousness to condense consciousness-body avatars, and it had felt incredible. Naturally, I wanted to manage the same trick in the real one.

But Uncle told me no one in the real world had ever pulled it off. It wasn’t that consciousness couldn’t split apart and reconverge—it was that an avatar, by its very nature, required something with physical form. Consciousness alone, without material grounding, could never achieve physical aggregation.

Still, Uncle suggested I could build an avatar through parasitism instead.

Cultivating a parasitic host was an expensive, advanced parasitic method—indistinguishable, in the end, from another living person. Xuanhong and Shiqing were exactly that. They were true avatars. But for stopgap purposes, Uncle recommended parasitizing others directly—forceful intrusion, or a friendly parasitic connection like the one he and I had once formed. Either way counted, in its own fashion, as a kind of avatar.

Forcing one’s consciousness into another’s mind—occupying another’s nest like a dove taking over a magpie’s home—was something I’d already done many times in the virtual world. I’d even worked out a pseudo–mind art of my own, well enough to take over and control Gao Haipeng’s brain.

Uncle told me these same skills carried over into the real world without issue. The one rule: forceful consciousness intrusion should not be used on our own people or on civilians. That would be immoral.

I’ll admit it. I had tried it on passersby before.

I won’t do it again, though.

Because I had already learned it.