Chapter 102: Deep into the Core Supercomputer

Chapter 102: Deep into the Core Supercomputer

Picking up where the last chapter left off — I’d dealt with the Shadow Pavilion’s senior leadership without much effort and marched them all to the conference grounds at Uncle’s base. Many of the resistance members had broken down in tears on the spot.

For years, they had carried too much grief and too much injustice. In that moment, all of it finally found release.

Uncle and Mother took the stage as well, offering their own proposals on managing Future World and reforming the Shadow Pavilion system going forward. The most urgent matter was establishing a temporary council for social management.

None of this could be settled in a single meeting. Mother simply raised the idea for everyone to weigh, since a total absence of government invited chaos and unrest almost immediately. In the end, the assembly agreed to establish a temporary council first, with several specialized committees beneath it, each responsible for drafting reform proposals within its own area.

Because everything had unfolded so fast, so suddenly, no one had time to prepare mentally or organizationally. So I wanted to give everyone some room to adjust as well.

Reform takes time — including the slower work of shaping public opinion and theory.

The meeting settled on handing temporary social management authority to the council for six months, after which a formal council would be formed. The Shadow Pavilion’s grassroots staff — patrol units, public security — would remain in place for now.

But every senior manager of the Shadow Pavilion, without exception, would step down and return to civilian life.

Without ceremony, I stripped every one of the Eight Elders, along with the heads of their subordinate departments, of their cultivation. Partly this was to prevent fresh unrest — these people were simply too powerful for the resistance to keep in check. Partly, it was punishment for what they’d already done.

Rank thirty-five, rank fifty — none of it meant anything in front of me. I brought them all down to the level of ordinary people and left them to await the council’s judgment.

As for the Eight Elders themselves, plenty of resistance members pushed for outright execution. But no one could produce proof that any of them had killed with their own hands. I stepped back from that question entirely and left it to the temporary council that Mother, Uncle, and Engineer Lin were organizing.

Du Xiaoran, Wei Liuqing, and others — civilian representatives outside the resistance — were also elected onto the temporary council.

I stopped concerning myself with these mundane matters.

Once I’d explained my reasons to Mother and Uncle, I set out alone for the true seat of the Shadow Pavilion — the ocean floor — to see Xuanze and Hanming, and the core supercomputer system built around my father.

The Pacific was the largest ocean on the Blue Planet. In the waters near Anuo Island, at the center of it, more than five thousand meters down, on a stretch of leveled seabed, stood a round undersea building nearly forty stories tall. It sat there like a rock, motionless, its surface crusted with sediment — lifeless to look at, yet somehow unbreakable.

Who would have guessed this was the true core of the world: home to the planet’s quantum core supercomputer and the Shadow Pavilion’s intelligent entity.

Every rule governing the real world, every organizational structure, every design shaping social behavior; the content and evaluation systems built into virtual worlds; even the division between the Elite World and the Mundane World — all of it originated here, then traveled through submarine cables as raw data into every household on the planet.

The fate of everyone alive was held tightly inside this one building beneath the sea.

On its side ran a long tubular elevator shaft, leading straight up to Anuo Island.

Anuo Island itself covered barely fifty square kilometers, with a dozen or so low buildings scattered across it —…