Chapter 102: Deep into the Core Supercomputer

by cnwebnovels

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 — the look of a research base. Because that’s exactly what it was. This had once been the place where my mother and father worked side by side, and where Xuanze and Hanming had first found each other.

Back when Zhang Zirui first flew onto this island by private plane, even he had no idea what he was about to bring into the world.

I closed the distance in a single stride, arriving at the base in something close to an instant.

The perimeter bristled with all-weather electronic sensors and laser defenses. Inside, there wasn’t a single human overseer left — only robots and bionics, working without pause.

There was no more research to be done here. All it needed now was security and simple physical upkeep.

The managers inside the Shadow Pavilion Building, back in the Elite World, never came here in person. They simply received instructions from the Shadow Pavilion intelligent entity, relayed through the submarine cables — orders they could carry out selectively, or issue on their own authority under the Shadow Pavilion’s name.

I didn’t go straight into the undersea building, though I could have.

Instead, I took the long tubular elevator shaft all the way down myself. I wanted, one last time, to feel what it meant to be an ordinary person — and to feel some measure of the hardship my parents had once endured here.

At the bottom of the shaft, the doors opened on their own the moment I touched down.

Inside, the building held countless rooms, linked by a circular glass corridor running through the center.

Standing before that corridor, I could see the supercomputer’s massive mainframe rising in the middle of the building, submerged in seawater, releasing a steady stream of bubbles from the ionization around it.

When I reached a room that resembled an operations chamber, its door creaked open on its own. An old woman stepped out, smiling warmly as she watched me approach, and gestured for me to follow.

She led me into a reception room, where two young people were seated — one man, one woman.

I asked, hesitant. “Xuanze? Hanming?”

They rose at once, both arms open, and pulled me into a tight embrace together.

“Every step you took on Bixian Star,” Xuanze said, “we saw it, truly. Not because we chose to watch you — it’s simply that you’re a quantum-mirrored projection of the Blue Planet’s core supercomputer, cast onto Bixian Star, and we sit at the very heart of that same core. We know that Yaomei Star survived, and that HD Star was spared from rushing headlong into war with Tengshe Star, because of you. Your contribution was enormous — you’ve done HD Star a great service. You carried that success without arrogance, defeated your enemy without fanfare. We’re deeply moved by it. On behalf of HD Star, let me thank you.”

I studied the two of them closely. Xuanze bore real resemblance to Xuanze’s father; Hanming, to Mother Han. “You’re too kind,” I said. “The three of us were always one, in the end. I never imagined a distance of twenty-one light-years could still bind our two worlds together. Every step of my life since childhood, the two of you made possible — I only learned that after reaching Bixian Star. If anyone deserves thanks, it’s you. You didn’t just help make me who I am; your generosity and kindness protected the Blue Planet as well. You lifted its technology to new heights, and made me the one to reshape its order. And honestly — I envy the two of you. Ten thousand years, together, unbroken. That alone should put every soul on the Blue Planet to shame.”

“Don’t say that,” Hanming said. “You and little sister Silver Pearl are an immortal pair too, in your own right. She stayed by my side for twenty thousand years — the two of us have been close as sisters for longer than I can properly measure. In all that time, this is the first I’ve ever seen her care for anyone the way she cares for you. Don’t you dare let that sincerity go to waste.”

I nodded, meaning it completely.

“We watched your meeting with our parents too,” Xuanze said. “With the ability you carry now, you can bring us home without difficulty. We’ve been waiting for this day a long time.”

“You can rest easy,” I said. “This is my mission, and I want nothing more than to see it through soon. I understand exactly what this waiting has cost you both — centuries upon centuries of it, an agony in itself. But I still have unfinished business on the Blue Planet. Once that’s done, I’ll leave with you both, toward whatever comes next.”

“All right,” Hanming said. “Go finish what you need to finish. Once you’ve settled things on the Blue Planet, come back and bring the jade disks together as one. Then we’ll leave with you.”

I turned to them. “Can my father — and the other core members of the Shadow Pavilion — be restored? Brought back into the world?”

“Of course,” Xuanze said. “They can return whenever they choose. These scientists’ consciousness bodies were already bound to the core supercomputer long before Hanming and I ever took up residence there — they didn’t merge in because of us. At the time, they still held independent personalities of their own. Once we settled into the core, your father — driven by his need to protect Blue Planet humanity, especially after your mother left him because of you — threw himself into it without hesitation. Most of the other scientists were his followers and students, and they joined of their own free will as well.

“Their presence gave the core supercomputer its human character. Hanming and I were never of the Blue Planet ourselves, and we understood little of how to manage its mundane affairs. So much of what the Shadow Pavilion issued as decree actually came from them. If you strip their consciousness bodies out now, the supercomputer will likely fall back toward its original state, and its processing speed will suffer for it. Add our own departure on top of that, and the core supercomputer certainly won’t run the way it used to.”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” I asked.

“At worst, it reverts entirely to its initial state,” Xuanze said. “The virtual world drops back down to metaverse level, and Future World disappears. But the ordinary functions of society should keep running without trouble.”

“Understood,” I said. “I’d like to meet the ones who merged into it. May I?”

“Of course,” Xuanze said. “You only need to let your consciousness merge with the mainframe.”

I left the two of them and made my way to the mainframe itself, letting my cosmic consciousness sink into it. At once, I seemed to step into a space of pure chaos. Eight figures sat around a round table in what looked like a meeting, arguing, explaining, weighing something back and forth.

I knocked on a door that didn’t exist.

All eight turned toward me at once.

One man, who bore a striking resemblance to my father, rose and walked toward me, his expression somewhere close to trembling. “You — are you Beichen?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m Gu Beichen.”

“I’m Gu Chenxing’s consciousness body,” the man said. “I can’t rightly say I’m still your father — not anymore. We no longer have bodies, and our seas of consciousness aren’t even independent any longer. All of it has merged into the quantum core supercomputer. What you’re seeing now is the supercomputer mimicking human figures with consciousness bodies, working through matters together. It has nothing to do with the people we once were.”

I nodded. “I understand. I’m not the child I once was. I have the ability now to peel your seas of consciousness free of the core supercomputer and return them to true bodies of their own. You could be reborn — live again, as ordinary people do. Would you want that?”

The figures who had been arguing a moment before all rose at once and gathered close around me. My father’s sea of consciousness spoke first. “How has your mother been, lately?”

“She misses the past,” I said. “She misses the time the two of you shared.”

He glanced back toward the mainframe, then said, “All right. I’ll go back with you.”

I turned to the others. “Is there anyone else willing to come with me?”

One middle-aged man spoke up. “If we all leave, what happens to the supercomputer? Won’t that cause problems?”

“I already asked Xuanze and Hanming,” I said, “the two alien consciousness bodies. They told me the worst case is it simply reverts to its starting state. Nothing catastrophic. Society keeps running as normal. Future World disappears, and the metaverse might drop a tier. That’s all.”

The group fell into debate. In the end, among the others, two chose to come with me, and five chose to stay behind of their own will. I didn’t push them either way. Returning to the real world wasn’t necessarily a kindness for everyone.