Chapter 87: The Lotus-Shaped Green Jade Disk

by cnwebnovels

Picking up where the last chapter left off: after Du Xiaoran and I had talked for a while about the virtual Future World, we went our separate ways home.

After all, walls have ears.

The Elite World’s surveillance technology was far more advanced than anything the Mundane World possessed. In the Elite World, everyone’s movements and conversations—no matter where you were—ended up recorded in vast databases.

So for anything that truly mattered, Du Xiaoran and I could only speak mind to mind.

Consciousness-to-consciousness exchanges couldn’t be intercepted by the Elite World’s surveillance organs. But that kind of talk bore little resemblance to ordinary speech. It lacked human expression, human presence—it felt dry, colorless, a bare transmission of information. People resorted to it only when the matter was truly secret.

After parting from Du Xiaoran, I returned to Uncle’s base.

Mother and Uncle had already heard from the scouts how my battle had gone after I left seclusion, and both were astonished. Uncle especially, like everyone else at the base, could barely contain his excitement.

Because, just as Du Xiaoran had said, the resistance simply didn’t have that kind of strength. They had never once defeated anyone on Xiang Bianfeng’s level.

More to the point, as Minister of the Shadow Pavilion’s Legal Affairs Department, Xiang Bianfeng was a high-ranking Shadow Pavilion figure whose entire portfolio was the resistance. Nearly every crackdown, every arrest, fell to the Legal Affairs Department under his command—not to Pu Liuqian. When a resistance leader of any real weight was taken, it was usually Xiang Bianfeng himself who came for them.

So toward Xiang Bianfeng, the resistance felt both hatred and fear.

Pu Liuqian was a major figure in the Shadow Pavilion too, but that owed more to her father, Pu Xuande, than to any post of her own. The Shadow Pavilion had never given her a formal title.

The upper ranks of the Shadow Pavilion deferred to her for two reasons: her mind arts were genuinely formidable, more than most men could withstand, and no one wanted to offend Pu Xuande. So while Pu Liuqian appeared to have a hand in everything, in truth she governed nothing. Across the Elite World’s management circles, people simply called her Miss Pu and indulged her at every turn.

Xiang Bianfeng was another matter entirely. Hunting the resistance was his actual job. If his methods hadn’t been so ruthless, the resistance wouldn’t be hiding underground at all.

Besides Mother and Uncle, Engineer Lin and several other key people from the base came to see me, wanting to hear exactly what had happened. So I gave everyone a rough account—how I’d fought Pu Liuqian and Xiang Bianfeng, plus a few choice details from the brawl at the casino.

The engineers were thrilled. At last someone had settled a score on their behalf, and it gave them a fresh taste of hope.

The secret matters, though—the old woman at the Gu Chenxing Former Residence Memorial, the cultivation room, my exploration of force of consciousness in the deep cosmos—I saved those for Mother and Uncle alone, once everyone else had gone. I told no one else.

Mother took the fourth green jade token from me, and something in her face turned sorrowful. It was, after all, a relic of my father’s. Uncle saw it differently—to him this was tremendous good fortune. Who would have guessed that my father’s remnant shadow inside the Shadow Pavilion could leave me an inheritance of this magnitude? It might prove decisive for how far my abilities could grow. If I managed to collect all six tokens, perhaps the whole situation could be turned around.

Mother offered no opinion on Uncle’s idea. She only stroked the fourth green jade token and said, with grave earnestness,

“This token is one piece of the lotus-shaped green jade disk. The disk isn’t a product of Earth’s civilization. Where exactly it came from, even Beichen’s father and I were never sure. Do the two of you know the Dark Forest law?”

I nodded. “You mean the prophecy from The Three-Body Problem—that science fiction novel published in Huaxia fifty years ago? I read it back in middle school, in Liutan Town.”

Mother said, “The Dark Forest law holds that the universe is a dark forest, and every intelligent civilization moves through it like a hunter carrying a gun, stalking silently between the trees. If it discovers another form of life—hunter, angel, or devil, infant, maiden, or old man, it makes no difference—there is only one thing to do: fire. In that forest, other life is hell itself, an eternal threat. Any civilization that reveals its own existence will be destroyed. Because the total energy of the universe is fixed, suspicion between civilizations is unavoidable.”

Uncle asked, “Sister, do you mean that the lotus-shaped green jade disk came here to probe Earth’s civilization?”

Mother said, “What it wanted here, we never learned. But Beichen’s father and I believed the Dark Forest law was very likely true. Which meant that if life on Earth were ever detected by another civilization out there—especially the one this lotus-shaped green jade disk belonged to—it could spell disaster for us. Chenxing and I studied that disk closely, and we were certain it was the product of a civilization far beyond our own, more advanced in every respect. Its materials, its construction, the systems inside it—none of it was anything humanity could produce. We could barely even grasp what it meant, or where its energy came from.”

I asked, “So you and Father were afraid it would give Earth’s civilization away, and that’s why you took it apart? So it could never fly back to the civilizational star system it came from?”

Mother said, “You’re right, Beichen. That’s exactly what Chenxing and I thought. Once we realized how far beyond us it was—almost beyond comprehension—we decided we could never let it fly free again. So we broke it apart, dividing it by its properties. Once separated, each token carried only a single function. None of the strange power it had when whole remained, and it no longer posed any threat to humanity. To keep the pieces from ever reuniting, Chenxing and I each took three tokens and agreed that unless there was absolutely no other choice, we would never let them come together again. Otherwise, we might not be able to control what happened.”

I asked, “Mother, what was it like when it was whole? And how did you and Father get hold of it in the first place?”

Mother said, “Strictly speaking, it was the core of a flying saucer. It came to our research base to investigate us, and that’s how we found it. None of our weapons had any effect on it, not one. Its flight path, its speed—none of it belonged to anything human. To lure it into a trap we’d built, we deliberately let it see the Myriad-Dimensional Brain.”

I asked, “The Myriad-Dimensional Brain? That skull fossil you dug up?”

Mother said, “Yes. We never knew why that saucer took such an interest in the skull. Zhang Zirui had just handed it over to your father and me for study. I was pregnant at the time, running an AI through the supercomputer to analyze it. The saucer kept coming back to probe it, and at one point it sent out a strange kind of electromagnetic wave, aimed straight at the skull. The crucial thing was that the skull reacted violently to that wave. The core supercomputer was reverse-modified by it, evolving at incredible speed. It was that reaction that led Chenxing to discover the secret buried inside the skull. That’s when we named it the Myriad-Dimensional Brain.”

Uncle cut in, “Could that be when Beichen’s brain was infected?”

Mother said, “Hard to say. Beichen was very likely infected more than once—this was probably one time. I was pregnant then, exposed to the saucer’s strange waves, and the Myriad-Dimensional Brain’s violent reaction may have accelerated whatever was happening. The second time was when Chenxing and I dismantled the lotus-shaped green jade disk. The instant it broke apart, it released a powerful burst of light waves and electromagnetic waves. That must have affected Beichen too.”

Hearing this, Uncle and I both fell silent, lost in thought.

For parents who were senior researchers, a chain of consequences like that must have been hard to accept. But for me, growing up, I had never felt anything was wrong. Apart from the abilities I was born with, I was no different from anyone else. If anything, I found myself thinking the infection might have been a good thing.

After all, here I stood—living proof of what it had produced.

Mother continued, “Thinking back on it now, the reason we managed to capture that saucer at all was probably because it walked into our trap on its own. It wanted too badly to get close to the Myriad-Dimensional Brain. If it hadn’t thrown itself in, we never would have caught it—its intelligence and abilities were far beyond ours. Once we had it, we studied it, then took it apart. That was when we discovered there was nothing inside the saucer at all. No aliens, no engine, nothing. Its core was just that one lotus-shaped green jade disk.”

I said, “How big was the saucer?”

Mother said, “About two meters across, and hollow inside. We thought at first there might be invisible passengers. Before we dismantled it, we ran it through scan after scan, probe after probe, drilled test holes—there was truly nothing there. Only the disk.”

I asked, “Was the disk floating free, or fixed in place inside the saucer?”

Mother said, “Good question, Beichen. That was exactly the puzzle. It was never fixed to anything—it simply hovered inside the saucer the whole time. So how did it drive the ship? How did it generate those waves? We never found out. And electromagnetic waves of that kind had never existed on Earth before. That’s why Chenxing and I had no choice but to study it so closely. During the dismantling, one token stuck fast to my pregnant body—nothing we tried could pry it loose. It wasn’t until Chenxing reassembled the other five that the token finally fell away on its own. And once it did, we discovered every function and property it had carried was simply gone. That was the moment Chenxing first considered killing the infant. That token was the very one Beichen first held in his hand.”

Only then did I remember the question. Every other token had its own function, its own purpose—but the one I carried, used alone, truly did nothing at all. That was also why the Sweepers, after they dragged me to their underground base, had examined that token again and again and never found anything wrong with it. Not until it accidentally combined with the others did the rest of their functions come alive.

So I asked, “Besides the four I have, there are two more tokens. My father’s remnant shadow told me they’re being used as core modules in the quantum core supercomputer. What do they do?”

Mother said, “The functions of those two have never been fully understood. One is thought to serve as a cosmic energy block—the saucer may well have run on it. The other might be a cosmic star chart. Think of it as a guide to the civilizations of the universe. If the Dark Forest law really holds true, then that star chart is both a guide and a beacon. It could let humanity know its own place in the cosmos in advance, and the places of other civilizations, so we could reach out to them—or steer clear of them. That would matter enormously to us.”

By then I finally understood how the tokens, the Myriad-Dimensional Brain, and everything my father’s remnant shadow had told me all fit together.

I even found myself understanding, a little, why my father had wanted to kill the infant. In his place, I might have done the same.

After all, the interests of all humanity outweighed one life by far. And at the time, I hadn’t even been born yet—or had only just been.