Chapter 84: Cosmic Consciousness

Chapter 84: Cosmic Consciousness

As I said—that ringing sound kept washing through my mind, as though the information stream itself were speaking through my green jade token.

It felt like it was guiding me, calling me forward, leading my consciousness step by step deeper into the unknown reaches of space.

Slowly, in that formless emptiness, I found myself looking again at that diffuse, nonphysical living current.

I didn’t need to study it or work it out—somehow I simply understood it, on instinct, as the vibrational state of cosmic consciousness itself.

I couldn’t say for certain whether I’d actually glimpsed the Akashic Records of deep cosmic space.

Back when I served as abbot of Tansong Temple, I’d studied the Akashic Records through Buddhist teachings.

I was certain that the so-called Akashic Records were the Alaya consciousness of esoteric tradition—what Theosophy called the storehouse consciousness.

But in scientific circles, opinion split into two camps. One held that consciousness came from a person’s own neurons. The other, represented by Nobel laureate Penrose and the scientific giant Tesla, argued for cosmic consciousness.

I had no interest in taking part in that debate. I only wanted to explore its existence.

If that diffuse, nonphysical living current really was a cosmic information database, it had to hold the past, present, and future information of every person, every thing, and every phenomenon in the universe.

The origin of the Akashic Records traced back to the Sanskrit notion of “ether.” They were a nonphysical form of storage, a holographic archive system permeating the cosmic void, called by people the Book of Wisdom, the Book of Life, and the Cosmic Memory Bank.

I remembered a line from Tesla’s autobiography:

“My brain is only a receiver. In the universe, there is a core from which we can obtain knowledge, power, and inspiration. I have not yet penetrated deeply into the secrets of this core, but I know it exists.”

So had I, through this green jade token that could communicate with the consciousness of deep cosmic space, actually found the Akashic Records?

I wasn’t sure. Or maybe I didn’t dare be sure.

How could a secret that had eluded so many great minds fall into my hands this easily?

Was it really just this one token?

And if this green jade token truly held that kind of power, where had it come from? Who had created it?

It was too strange to make sense of.

I badly wanted to ask the heavens whose key this was.

The old woman and Mother had both told me this green jade token came from an extraterrestrial civilization, part of the same civilizational system as the Myriad-Dimensional Brain. The green jade token had originally been one whole piece, a lotus-shaped disk, before my parents split it into six pieces, each with its own function. My parents had kept three apiece.

But how had they come by that lotus-shaped disk in the first place? Mother never said. Neither had the old woman.

And why hadn’t Mother chosen this particular green jade token—the one that could explore the deep reaches of cosmic space?

It was far too important.

Father had merged himself entirely into the core supercomputer. Beyond the guilt he carried toward his family, could this token have had something to do with that too? The supercomputer’s AI would definitely have needed cosmic consciousness too.

Maybe Mother had faced a dilemma: choose to raise me, or choose cosmic consciousness.

My mind wandered for a while. In the end, I still had to focus on the living current before me.

Actually, there was no need for me to get tangled up in what this living current before me was, where it came from, or whether this nonphysical living current counted as the Akashic Records.

As long as it was cosmic consciousness, I needed to try to absorb it, use it, and draw that diffuse etheric spirituality into my green jade tokens, absorbing it until it became part of the consciousness body in my brain.

I stared at the vast current spread through deep space and had no idea where to even begin.

This was clearly a massive force-of-consciousness project. I had no way of knowing whether I could succeed, or even whether there would be any harmful consequences.

I started small—gathering, absorbing, digesting, and understanding it bit by bit, terrified that any misstep might let the living current of this Book of Wisdom run away from me. If that happened, I would lose out badly.

I felt like poor Ali Baba entering the mountain treasure cave, faced with an enormous treasure, afraid on one hand that its owner might return at any moment and, on the other, wanting to secretly haul away as much as I possibly could.

After repeated attempts to gather, absorb, and digest it, everything seemed normal. Only then did I grow bolder and let my consciousness body feed on it greedily. And those Cosmic Memory Banks, stored in an etheric living-current state, slowly opened their gates to me, letting me draw from them as I pleased.

By then I no longer cared whether it was truly the Akashic Records, or whether it truly recorded the contents of life and wisdom. I only wanted to build my own cosmic consciousness as fast as I could. As long as the contents within it did not make me feel uncomfortable, I pulled them all in.

The pace of absorption kept climbing, faster and faster, until I was practically gulping them down like a whale.

There was simply too much of it—no hope of digesting or understanding all of it at once. It didn’t matter. I could work through it later, slowly. For now I only wanted to take in as much as I possibly could.

My consciousness body seemed to relish whale-swallowing that etheric living current. My consciousness body felt like parched earth repeatedly nourished by spring rain, and also like a dry sponge desperately sucking in sweet dew.

I could feel my consciousness body gradually filling, growing richer and richer, more and more solid and substantial, constantly flickering with a dark-blue gleam.

Slowly, countless images of the past, present, and future began flashing within my consciousness body at photoelectric speed.

None of this content belonged to me alone. It also belonged to the myriad phenomena of the world, to every person and every thing. I could even pluck out any tiny fragment at will, hold it in the hand of my mind, admire it, toy with it, and reshape it.

It felt almost godlike.

It gave me a pleasure of omnipotence and a desire to create all things in the world.

Every ability within my consciousness, including knowledge, emotions, and insight, was being reorganized by the etheric living current into an entirely new consciousness structure.

Seen from this new vantage point, everything around me looked different.

Everything I had experienced before was no longer linear life, emotion, and experience. Instead, it had become a crystal painting that could be repeatedly dismantled—strange, dazzling, tangled, and complex. Yet I could understand it from within consciousness, read it, dismantle it, and even reshape it.

Time itself no longer felt linear, no longer a simple before and after. It had become a kind of space, something that could be folded, unfolded, compressed.

Nothing in front of me registered any longer as a complete object or event. Everything had become structure, frequency, vibration, and a deforming color.

I could no longer use traditional knowledge to define the world of consciousness inside my mind.

When my consciousness finally awakened a little, I realized I had actually only touched and received the barest surface of that deep-space consciousness body.

Its scale, its depth, ran on like an endless, self-renewing flood of information, and I stood beside it like an ant at the edge of an ocean cliff—small, and for the first time, aware of it.

Whale-swallowing, absorbing—once I actually held a fragment of cosmic consciousness, I understood that even my greediest gulps had been nothing more than an ant’s share. The real story held inside the Akashic Records had only just begun.

I had no idea how much time had passed.

When I finally came fully back to myself, I found my beard had grown out more than an inch, and the once-clear crystal walls around me were now thick with frost.

When I appeared before the female base director looking like a sloppy wild man, she could hardly believe her eyes.

I had gone in a clean, handsome little pretty boy. How had I come out as a sloppy, filthy wild man? What exactly had he experienced at the bottom of the lake?

In the base’s rest area, I cleaned myself up, changed into neat clothes, and finally sat down to the first full meal after leaving seclusion.

The life of ordinary mortals brought me back to reality, and I began looking at everything before my eyes anew.

When I met with the female base director again, she told me that during this seclusion, I had gone without food or water, motionless in the cultivation room, for more than three full months.

Three months. Was that long?

Before, I would have thought it was very long, that time moved very slowly. But now I was no longer the person I had once been. Time was no longer so important to me.

I said goodbye to the base and walked back out into Hua City’s streets, where people were still living amid three-dimensional traffic and busy lives.

I did not use the shuttle boots. I simply walked straight up the face of a building, then leapt to the roof of another.

From up there, looking down over the bustle of Hua City, I felt like I’d stepped back from another lifetime entirely.

My force of consciousness had grown so much I could sweep it across every street and alley in the city without effort. Exactly how far it had grown, what rank it now sat at—I honestly couldn’t say.

I stood there openly on the rooftop, letting the wind brush against my trench coat.

I wanted to expose myself to the managers of the Elite World. I wanted to know exactly how far my power had now reached.

Sure enough, the Sky Eyes tracked me almost at once. I wasn’t a registered citizen of the Elite World, after all.

But it made no sound.

I knew it was already relaying word to the patrol team. I could have intercepted the signal, but there was no need. I wanted everyone to know I existed.

Down below, patrol cats and security dogs began gathering—the most basic-level managers of the Elite World, so of course they arrived first.

They’d clearly gotten the alert and were already working out how to box me in.

About five minutes later, the patrol team arrived.

Probably the fastest response they’d ever managed. Three months ago I’d made fools of them, and Pu Liuqian must have come down hard on them for it.

Were they here to regain face, to prove something to her?

I noticed Li Tongfei wasn’t among them. Had she pulled him from the team, or simply had him killed? No way to know. Either way, nothing good had come of it for him.

I kept standing on the rooftop, arms crossed, back to them, taking in the view while they surrounded me, fully armed.

Even so, they didn’t move—just held the perimeter, apparently waiting for Pu Liuqian to arrive and decide my fate herself.

Sure enough, another ten-odd minutes passed before she showed up.

I stayed right where I was, still enjoying the skyline.

Seeing me standing there alone so leisurely, Pu Liuqian was extremely surprised. “Gu Beichen, why aren’t you running anymore? We spent more than three full months looking for you and thought you were too scared to come out. I never expected you to dare stand here so brazenly. Have you gained some backing? Or obtained some special privilege? I can tell you clearly: without my permission, you can forget ever gaining a foothold in the Elite World.”

Looking at her furious face, I thought back to how pathetic she’d looked three months ago after the beating I gave her, and couldn’t help laughing.

“Pu Liuqian, you’re late. It’s been twenty minutes since I appeared here—why are you only arriving now? If I wanted to run, could this handful of stale sesame seeds and rotten millet stop me? And you—how many avatars did you bring this time? Otherwise, there won’t be enough of them for me to beat up.”