Chapter 45: A Mountaintop Dialogue with Shiqing

Chapter 45: A Mountaintop Dialogue with Shiqing

Yunding Temple.

It stood on Ziyun Peak, one of the seventy-two peaks of Yunding Mountain. Ziyun Peak was not the tallest among them, but its elevation still approached eighteen hundred meters. Every morning, or after rain, a layer of cloud and mist would settle around the mountain gate — a beautiful sight.

Not far off to the right front of the temple gate, there was a thousand-meter sheer cliff. At its edge, a small round platform jutted out beyond the rock face. From there, one could stand suspended over empty air and take in the surrounding sea of clouds and mountains.

In earlier times, the place had been called Sheshen Cliff, after the despairing people who came here to throw themselves off. The monks later renamed it Feisheng Cliff, meaning that those who leaped had perhaps become immortals.

When Shiqing was appointed head monk, he felt that anyone who came here intending to jump deserved to be urged to think twice. So he renamed it again: Wentian Platform.

Ask Heaven. Ask the earth. Ask yourself.

Wentian Platform felt less like a cliff’s edge than a natural place of cultivation — poised among the clouds, sharing the sky with Heaven itself. It had become one of Yunding Temple’s most celebrated spots.

Shiqing was there now, sitting cross-legged alone at the center of the platform, eyes gently lowered, engaged in what appeared to be a conversation between two versions of his own consciousness.

I asked, “Do you know that you’re a puppet?”

“A puppet?” Shiqing answered. “No. I don’t see myself that way. I define myself as your backup.”

“Backup?” I said. “What do you mean?”

“Do you think you can die?” Shiqing said. “Is there a genuine risk that an enemy could kill you?”

“Of course,” I said. “I’ve already been attacked several times. If no one had come to my rescue, or if my own abilities hadn’t been adequate, I would truly be dead.”

“That is why you need a backup,” Shiqing said. “When you face truly unavoidable death, your consciousness needs somewhere it can flee to and take refuge. That place is me.”

“So you’re saying,” I said, “that I — or many other people — as long as we have backups, we don’t have to die? We simply escape into the backup?”

“Exactly. Elite people almost never die. Not because they can’t be killed, but because their consciousness can be transferred. Just as you have done now — haven’t you transferred into my consciousness body? Consciousness is the foundation of a person. It exists independently. As for the physical body, it is biomatter at its core, and through biotechnology it can be rebuilt. That is the secret of elite people’s immortality.”

“But isn’t consciousness generated by the human brain?” I said, puzzled. “Isn’t it the product of complex interactions among the thalamic neurons? How can it exist independently?”

“Consciousness is indeed a highly ordered form of organization within the human body,” Shiqing explained. “It cannot exist out of thin air — it needs a material basis. But not every form of ordered matter can generate consciousness. Take a person who has just died. In terms of material order and physiological structure, there is no difference between that body and a living one. Does the freshly dead person have consciousness?”

“That question is too complicated,” I said, “and too academic. We’ll discuss it another time. Let me ask you something else first. How were you made? And how did you come to know who you were? Or let’s change the subject entirely — have you ever met any elite people?”

“Those aren’t one question,” Shiqing said. “I was born knowing who I am. I don’t know who made me. For as long as I can remember, I have lived in this temple. The outside world is vast, but I have only ever been to this small corner of the Ba-Shu region — mostly for safety. That is my mission. When you truly need me, the two of us will merge and become one person. So I hold no grievance about any of it. As for elite people — I have only seen one, a woman, and that was when I was very young.”

“A woman?” I said. “How old?”

“In her thirties. She came to see me holding a child. The moment I saw that child, I knew who he was. The woman nodded at me and said, ‘Not bad.’ She told me to stay safe, not to cause trouble, not to go beyond Ba-Shu. Stay in the temple as much as possible, she said.”

“You knew who the child was?” I said. “Who?”

“You didn’t even try to guess. Of course it was you.”

“Me?” I said. “You’re saying you’ve met my mother? How can you be certain she was one of the elite people?”

“At that time,” Shiqing said, “the Human–Machine War had just swept across the world. I had been placed in the temple because it was the safest arrangement. I understood from the beginning that I was this child’s contingency — that was written into the genetic design. Elite people all possess extraordinary abilities. They can alter their appearance at will, their knowledge is boundless, their wealth limitless, their information interconnected. They have no disease and no death. Only lower-tier AI people rely on human-machine integration. Your mother conducted a consciousness screening on me at the time, so naturally I could recognize her through consciousness in return.”

I lowered my voice. “So that’s how it was. Then could the Grandma who raised me actually be my mother?”

“There is no need to doubt it,” Shiqing said. “Only your mother would have cared for you that way. Elite people need no technology whatsoever to change their appearance — they control their own biological components through AI, and it is done. Elite people can already be understood as another kind of human being entirely.”

“Do you know how I can find her?”

Shiqing smiled. “That isn’t something you can ask me. My world is very narrow. I have only seen her once, and that was nineteen years ago — she came simply to confirm whether I, as your backup, was suitable. After that, I never saw her again. But I would advise you not to rush toward finding her. You haven’t finished growing yet. The reason your mother sent you out alone into society was that she wanted you to grow on your own, to weather more storms. That is how a person develops inner drive. Knowledge and ability can be instilled in someone, but inner drive cannot. It is the self-propelling force of a person’s development. If you stay forever under your mother’s care, you will never truly grow up. Don’t you think so?”

I nodded. “I understand. Logically, I understand all of it. It’s just that we’re human beings — there are always things we can’t bear to let go of. Family affection is the basic line between the human and the nonhuman, isn’t it?”

We were still talking when someone interrupted.

“Shiqing, this is no place to sit for long. The wind is cold and the damp is heavy — careful you don’t catch a chill.”

Shiqing turned. The abbot stood behind him — an old white-haired monk, Shiqing’s master, the man who had raised him from the day someone brought the child to the temple.

“Master,” Shiqing said, “your disciple was just working through some thoughts. I’ll leave now.”

The master and disciple were about to go when a stylish young woman came hurrying up onto Wentian Platform.

Through Shiqing’s eyes, I could see at once that something was wrong with her. Behind her, not far back, two people were panting as they ran in her direction.

I caught the abbot’s sleeve. “Master, something is not right with that woman. Let’s wait a moment.”

Sure enough, the woman walked to the cliff’s edge, drew a long breath toward the sky, and closed her eyes.

She threw her bag over the edge first. Then she fell backward after it.

The two people who had nearly reached her shouted her name as they ran.

But it was too late.

Except that I was there.

I pushed off lightly and leaped. Before the woman could fall away, I seized her long hair as it streamed upward in the air, yanked hard, and flung her back onto the platform. Then I caught the cliff face with one hand and sprang back as well.

The abbot stared at me, badly shaken. “Shiqing, you—you—when did you learn that kind of skill?”

“Master,” I said, “I come here often. I know every stone on this cliff. Nothing will go wrong.”

Only then did I get a clear look at the two who had chased after her. One was an older woman of nearly sixty; the other a young man of about thirty.

The older woman collapsed to the ground, sobbing and wailing in a half-sung cry: “How could you be so unable to get past this? If you die, how is the child supposed to live?”

The young man walked over in silence and tried to take the young woman by the arm to bring her home.

The young woman I had pulled back sat on the ground expressionless, cold and still, her eyes fixed blankly on the distant sky.

I walked over to her and crouched down, swept her once with my penetrating vision, then said, “Miss, this is postpartum depression, isn’t it? Depression is not a terminal illness. There is no need to come to an end like this. With proper hospital care and treatment, you can recover.”

Only then did the woman look at me, really look at me. “Master — you’re saying depression can be treated? I’ve been this way for so long. I can’t sleep through the night. My heart is in constant turmoil. I can’t pull myself out of it. All I want is to be done with it. Please, Master — save me.”

“I know a neurology specialist,” I said. “I once heard her explain that depression’s root cause is serotonin deficiency. With increased tryptophan, regular exercise, and medication combined, it can be overcome.”

The woman looked as though she had glimpsed the possibility of living again. “Really? They always blame me — they say I just can’t think straight, that I’m trapped in my own head. But I don’t know how to think my way out. That’s why I wanted to end it all.”

I turned to the older woman and the young man. “Benefactors, hear me out. Depression is not a failure to reason clearly. Persuasion alone is useless. It is an illness, and one accompanied by organic pathological changes — like a physical injury to the body. You cannot talk an injury away. This requires physical treatment as well. Medicine today is advanced. There are specialized drugs at every proper hospital.”

The man looked shaken. “Really? I always assumed she just couldn’t work through things in her mind, so I kept reasoning with her, trying to talk her around. But the more I tried, the more agitated she became. We argued about it constantly.”

“If you had a cold,” I said, “do you think I could cure you by talking you through it? Illness must be treated for what it is. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter. When it runs low, the neurons don’t conduct properly, and signals go wrong. This isn’t an emotional problem — it’s a physiological one. She needs to see a specialist at a proper hospital.”

I knew these things because of my work treating the incapacitated at the incapacitated people’s base. Neuronal damage was the primary injury there, and it made those patients highly susceptible to depression. Dr. Yan was the expert in this field, and her guidance had given me a great deal of help with that work.

Drawing on my treatment experience at the incapacitated people’s base, I laid one hand gently on the woman’s head and released my brainwaves toward her, using them to stimulate her brain to synthesize more serotonin.

About fifteen minutes later, color had returned to her face. I could feel it — hope for life was kindling again inside her.