Chapter 101: Deep Affection and Clouds Lifting

by cnwebnovels

Picking up where the last chapter left off — I accepted the gift from Yaomei Star’s garrison commander and boarded the ship.

I knew it was a mass of cosmic energy, the kind that would help me push my abilities further still. My cosmic abilities were already considerable, true enough — but who ever complains about growing stronger?

Showing him both kinds of green jade disk had been deliberate. I wanted him to understand exactly where I stood with Survey Inspector Xuan — and, more quietly, to remind him not to try any games with me.

That garrison commander struck me from the start as a pure martial brute. His combat strength might have run high, but when it came to command and management, there was frankly nothing to praise. If I hadn’t caught the problem when I did, Yaomei Star’s interstellar dock would already have ceased to exist — and he’d have died along with it.

HD Star would have been dragged into disaster too. Faced with an attack of that scale, HD Star could hardly have avoided rushing headlong into war with Tengshe Star. Both sides would have paid for it in blood.

When I returned to Bixian Star, Silver Pearl was standing alone at the aerospace base, waiting for me.

As I stepped down the gangway and saw her beautiful face, the deep affection welling in her eyes, something in me stirred at once.

She had transformed all the land around the base into a sweeping sea of brilliant color — flowers as far as the eye could reach, their fragrance drifting everywhere.

I had only been gone ten days, and yet she still looked as though the parting had been unbearable.

I ended up staying another ten-odd days in the Crystal Palace, mostly following Silver Pearl as she taught me new ways of mastering cosmic abilities — along with whatever tenderness the reader might imagine.

Since gaining cosmic energy, I’d mostly wielded it by combining it with martial techniques learned on Earth, or with the methods for using force of consciousness I’d once absorbed through the Akashic Records. But Silver Pearl believed the wider reach of cosmic power was never limited to living things. Cosmic energy, she said, could just as easily reorganize inorganic matter at the molecular level, or set phase differences into motion. In fact, when I’d used phase-dislocation to merge that nuclear bomb into the Tengshe Star man’s body, I’d stumbled onto exactly that method — unknowingly, in a moment of desperation.

So Silver Pearl taught me, hand over hand, the methods of using cosmic energy unique to Cassiopeia, and our bond deepened further for it.

In all my time with her after that, I stopped wearing the face of the code-body Song Chenfeng and let her see me as I truly was — so she could grow familiar with my real appearance.

Of course, even if I hadn’t changed anything, Silver Pearl, Xuanze’s father, and Mother Han could all see straight through to my true form regardless. They simply never said so. None of them would have mistaken Song Chenfeng’s face for mine — their level was far beyond my own. The reason I chose to show Silver Pearl my true face directly was that I didn’t want to make her work to see through the disguise. Offering it myself simply spared us both the trouble.

Silver Pearl was a wonderfully simple crystal being. She had none of the tangled complications that came with human emotion. In love, she was utterly single-minded — bold in loving, bold in hating, never hiding a single thought or feeling. Everything about her was like crystal itself: transparent, clear straight through.

I loved that clean, uncomplicated quality in her.

In front of her, I never had to posture, never had to pretend, never had to calculate or second-guess anything.

I found myself deeply moved by the depth of devotion in her gaze — that searching, bottomless look that held no trace of performance, that never once weighed what I might be thinking. It was simply pure feeling, expressed without filter.

The body she manifested was fairy-tier: warm, soft, flawless to the touch. A single glance at her could leave a person weak all over.

Her love bore no resemblance to Du Xinlang’s or Zhu Zhaojie’s. Du Xinlang’s had been rooted in reverence for Xuanhong; Zhu Zhaojie’s, a mix of fondness and old classroom loyalty. Even Yuan Lingliang’s feelings had amounted to little more than a woman’s admiration for strength. None of it was what I wanted.

Silver Pearl’s love was something else entirely — pure, unadorned.

She simply was love. Nothing more needed saying.

It was the kind of love that strained toward one thing only: melting two people into a single whole, with no conditions attached. And the way she expressed it could outlast any vow ever spoken.

If I had to put a number on how long that love would last, it would be no less than ten thousand years.

And yet all meetings carry their own ending. Parting, in the end, is inevitable.

I still had to return to the Blue Planet — to resolve the Shadow Pavilion management apparatus, and to bring Xuanze and Hanming home myself, in my true body.

Silver Pearl made no move to stop me. She only lingered, reluctant to let go.

As I passed through the node gate, I could still faintly sense her standing alone in the marshland, watching until I vanished completely from view.

When I woke inside Uncle’s base, the ghost of her lips still lingered warm against my forehead.

I reached inside my robe — and sure enough, there was a new chakra green jade disk waiting there.

When Uncle and Mother learned I’d woken naturally from Future World on my own, they both came running.

“Not many people wake up on their own from Future World,” Uncle said. “Well? Did you come away with much?”

“Uncle. Mother.” I said. “This trip to Future World, I’ve more or less pieced together the whole truth now. And I think I’m about to move against the Shadow Pavilion. Let’s head to the conference hall — call everyone together. What do you say?”

Mother was the first to sense something had shifted in me. “Some things can be said openly,” she said. “Others can’t. You understand that?”

I nodded, then told her and Uncle everything I’d encountered in Future World.

Both of them listened with rising emotion, sighing again and again at how narrowly things had turned out well.

How fortunate that, before the lotus-shaped green jade disk was ever dismantled, someone had thought to let the Myriad-Dimensional Brain meet it first. Had Xuanze and Hanming both perished on Earth back then, HD Star’s whole view of humanity might have gone very differently.

How fortunate that Xuanze and Hanming harbored no ill will toward humankind. Had the core supercomputer fallen under hostile control, that alone could have doomed our species beyond recovery.

How fortunate that Zhang Zirui had approached the Myriad-Dimensional Brain with a scientist’s mind, rather than fear. Otherwise, who knew how many more lifetimes Xuanze might have cycled through this world — and Hanming might never have found him at all.

How fortunate that the person Xuanze and Hanming’s influence had ultimately reached was me. Had someone like Pu Xuande gained those same abilities instead, Earth might already have sunk into something like hell.

How fortunate that a resistance still existed in this world — people who carried the whole of humanity in their hearts, and kept the darkness from swallowing what was left of human decency entirely.

And how fortunate, too, that the core supercomputer and AI technology had arrived precisely when they did. Without them, Xuanze and Hanming would have had nowhere to dwell at all — their seas of consciousness confined to something as inert as the Myriad-Dimensional Brain, or trapped inside a lotus-shaped green jade disk that anyone might have dismantled at any time.

Somehow, everything had lined up exactly right.

I’d come home carrying vast cosmic energy. From here on, the resistance no longer had any reason to stay buried underground.

Mother and Uncle called an excited full assembly of the base, summoning resistance leaders from across the Elite World and every nearby outpost. I sent word to Du Xiaoran and Wei Liuqing as well.

The conference hall filled quickly, packed shoulder to shoulder with scientists and base leaders.

Uncle formally introduced me to the room.

It was the first time I’d laid eyes on the full backbone of the resistance movement.

By then, I had fully merged my true body with its parasitic host. I no longer needed a parasitic host at all — just as Xuanze and Hanming had never relied on avatars or parasitic hosts of their own.

The truly strong never need one.

A parasitic host, in the end, is only the fallback of the weak — a safety net for those without any better option.

At the meeting, I laid everything bare — everything I’d witnessed in Future World, the whole story of Xuanze and Hanming. I explained what cosmic energy was, what cosmic consciousness meant, and how human force of consciousness fit into the deeper logic binding all things in the universe.

I manifested countless avatars of my own consciousness and sent them out among the crowd, walking them through, in person and up close, exactly how energy and consciousness worked and evolved.

I bowed deeply to every member of the resistance, thanking them for years spent risking their lives, defying power without flinching, enduring hardships beyond counting. It was because of them that humanity’s conscience had survived at all — that the Blue Planet could see light again.

I bowed just as deeply to Mother and Uncle. That bow wasn’t only for them as family — it stood in for Xuanze and Hanming as well. It was Mother and Uncle, wielding the power of science, who had changed everything.

My mother most of all. To bear me, to raise me, she had turned her back on the husband she loved and on the entire Elite World, disguising herself as Grandma, enduring hardship alone in a remote mountain valley to see me grown into adulthood.

Even as I stood there in the resistance base delivering my address to its leaders, my consciousness avatars had already reached the Shadow Pavilion Building, taken smooth control of it, and escorted every senior manager inside straight to the grounds outside the conference hall.

The truth was, while I stood there speaking with such conviction, the overwhelming majority of resistance members in the room simply didn’t believe a word of it. This wasn’t mere doubt — it was flat disbelief.

How could the world possibly change shape just because one person had changed?

And besides — I’d just gotten back, hadn’t done a single thing yet, and here I was standing in the conference hall like it was some kind of award ceremony. Go beat the Shadow Pavilion’s experts first, they were thinking, then come back and brag about it.

Out of respect for Uncle and Mother, none of them said it aloud.

But then the hall doors slid slowly open, and every senior figure from the Shadow Pavilion Building filed in — from First Elder Pu Xuande, to Fourth Elder Xiang Bianfeng, all the way down to the unranked Pu Liuqian — every one of them marched in under escort by my avatars. The entire room rose to its feet in disbelief, eyes wide, unable to accept that any of it was real.

Every person in the hall was one of the elite people, attuned enough to recognize on sight exactly who these figures were. What mattered more was that every one of them stood there in their true body. What none of the onlookers knew was that all their parasitic hosts — however many each of them kept — had already been wiped out by my avatars.

I had no interest in leaving my enemies with several lives to spare. I’d leave you exactly one. Behave, and you kept it. Refuse, and you could go join the people you’d already destroyed.

When my cosmic-consciousness avatars descended on the Shadow Pavilion Building, it must have felt like Sun Wukong himself had come down from the heavens. Those so-called masters, for all their mortal flesh and eyes, hadn’t stood a chance to resist. A single thought from me could rewrite what physical reality considered impossible.

Xiang Bianfeng, faced with this transformation in me, was shaken — but clearly still able to accept it. After all, I’d already beaten him once using cosmic force of consciousness. He’d wrestled with it a long while before finally accepting the impossible as fact.

Feng Du came along entirely on his own. I’d never intended to touch him — he’d helped me enough times that I knew his heart wasn’t rotten. He simply wanted to see how it all ended. Curiosity, nothing more.

Pu Xuande and Pu Liuqian, I showed no mercy. I destroyed every last one of their parasitic hosts, no matter how deeply hidden. Cosmic force of consciousness could trace the information markers hidden in each body and hunt every parasitic host down, wherever it lurked.

The moment I casually wiped out every parasitic host belonging to the Shadow Pavilion’s senior leadership, everyone inside understood one simple truth: we were no longer opponents on equal footing.

So the Eight Pavilion Elders, and every senior manager beneath them, followed my avatars to the conference grounds without complaint. They had no other choice. Stripped of their parasitic hosts, down to a single life apiece, none of them dared risk resistance.

I gave each of the Eight Elders a chance to speak for themselves — to take the stage and describe their conduct in office, their governing philosophy, and their plans going forward.

I had no intention of killing them. They weren’t entirely without merit. Some of their work in high-tech research and management — the development of virtual worlds, for instance — carried genuine value. The research systems they’d built, the merit-point mechanisms, matching talent to task and resource to need — all of that deserved some recognition.

But they had also carved humanity into ranks, hoarded power arbitrarily, and let deep injustice take root across society. Above all, the halving of the world’s population in the human-AI war sat squarely on their shoulders.

I gave them room to account for all of it, and I laid out, point by point, the crimes they’d committed.

By the time the Eight Elders finished speaking, and I’d finished reciting the full record of what the Shadow Pavilion’s leadership had done, every resistance member in the hall was overcome. Many simply broke down weeping where they sat.