Chapter 49: Rongliang! Don’t Say It!

Chapter 49: Rongliang! Don’t Say It!

Hearing Dharma Master Zisheng say this, Grandma and Uncle both laughed in exasperation.

“Do you have any idea how precious that device you smashed is?” Uncle said. “You could sell this entire temple of yours and it still wouldn’t cover the cost. And if you’d triggered the nuclear component inside, it might have set off a nuclear explosion. Half of Pingdu City could have been leveled.”

His words broke me out in a cold sweat too. “Well,” I said quietly, “I smashed one myself. He was only following my example.”

Uncle looked at me, and that made him angrier still. “And you trained as an engineer? Did you feed every scrap of your physics to the dogs? Without a nuclear component, where would enough energy come from to alter spacetime? And you still dared to mess around like that!”

Dharma Master Zisheng looked utterly bewildered. He couldn’t fathom why a respected Great Dharma Master like me was being scolded so mercilessly by this middle-aged man.

I helped Grandma leap down from the beam. Uncle and Ou Xiaoli jumped down as well. Last came Dharma Master Zisheng, climbing slowly down the ladder.

Only once everyone stood on the floor did we realize we were all covered head to foot in dust and grime, and we couldn’t help laughing.

I cupped my hands to Dharma Master Zisheng. “I still owe you my thanks for saving my life. You threw yourself into it because you were trying to save me. This beam above the hanging bell—I imagine that was the first time Senior Brother Zisheng had ever been up there?”

Dharma Master Zisheng had already grasped Uncle’s meaning. “I’m ashamed, deeply ashamed,” he said.

Then I made the introductions.

“This is my Grandma. She was harmed by villains and nearly lost her life. This is my uncle. Just now, he and I used that device to carry out the rescue. And this young friend is a young hero. Don’t let her age fool you—her cultivation and powers surpass my own.”

As I spoke, I gestured to each of them in turn.

Dharma Master Zisheng returned the courtesy to each of them. “Science knows no bounds. Only today have I truly seen what it means that there is always someone greater than the great, a heaven beyond heaven. Dharma Master Xuanhong was already a summit I could only gaze up at. I never imagined so many other remarkable people existed.”

Grandma smiled and thanked him. “Thank you, Dharma Master Zisheng, for looking after Beichen all this time. Our rescue today was owed to your help as well. For that, I’m deeply grateful.”

Zisheng could only return the courtesy once more. “Then please, everyone, rest a while in the rear hall. The two elders seem to be injured. There are guest rooms there where you can recover.”

“We’ve imposed on you far too much already,” Grandma said. “Beichen, you stay and catch up with Dharma Master Zisheng. The rest of us need to go. Contact your uncle when you have time.”

I’d wanted to leave with Grandma, but perhaps she’d arranged it this way so that Zisheng wouldn’t be left with too many questions and doubts. So many of us had appeared out of thin air at once—for an ordinary person, that flew in the face of all common sense. Better to explain it to him plainly than to leave him guessing.

So I stayed behind.

After Grandma and the others left, I went with Dharma Master Zisheng back to his rear hall. Tea was poured, and we sat facing each other while I told him about the spacetime boundary.

Since he’d already seen it, he deserved a clear explanation.

I told him that after seven hundred years of tolling bells, wind, and rain, the Great Bell Tower had developed a natural physical effect field, one that high-powered figures had come to prize. Erecting a spacetime boundary here let that field work more efficiently. Through such a boundary, high-powered figures could form a miniature wormhole and pass through spacetime.

Had Dharma Master Zisheng not seen us materialize from empty air with his own eyes, he never would have believed me.

But what had happened today had genuinely shaken him. Full of curiosity about this mysterious structure of spacetime, he pressed me with question after question. I had no choice but to explain Uncle’s quantum resonance system theory as plainly as I could.

Lacking any grounding in physics, he struggled to follow it, though that didn’t stop him from grasping the concept in broad strokes.

I also took the chance to ask him about Dharma Master Cangji of Wansong Temple at Panshan.

Dharma Master Zisheng told me that Cangji had once dropped out of contact for a while. At first everyone assumed he’d gone into seclusion. Only when he returned to the temple by car from Pingdu City did they realize he’d actually been away.

Zisheng had also heard from a steward at Wansong Temple that the Buer Gate had once been haunted, and that Dharma Master Cangji had summoned the Sweepers to drive out the ghosts.

His words confirmed a few of my guesses. Buer Gate at Wansong Temple was the secret entrance to the resistance’s eastern-suburb base, so people were bound to come and go through it. Even if those coming and going could turn invisible, it would be hard to avoid someone stumbling into what looked like a supernatural incident.

As for why they hadn’t built the base somewhere more remote, I suspected it had a great deal to do with Buer Gate’s peculiar physical field.

The two of us sipped tea and talked of the Dao, and I lingered at the temple the whole day.

Only the next day did I return home.

And there, to my surprise, Grandma and Uncle were waiting for me.

“Grandma,” I called out happily.

But just as I moved to step closer, an invisible force blocked my way.

I reached out and felt it. Clearly, Uncle had set up a spacetime-boundary shield—no doubt to guard against Sweeper detection.

When Uncle saw me, he sent a surge of invisible force out from the boundary and drew me inside.

The moment I entered, I felt the atmosphere shift.

Seeing me come in, Grandma slowly shed her aged appearance and became a beautiful, middle-aged woman. She patted my shoulder tenderly. “Beichen, from now on, you can call me Mom.”

The change was too vast. I couldn’t take it in all at once, and I mumbled, unable to force the word out.

I’d long since suspected that the Grandma who raised me was my mother. Even so, her image had been carved too deep into my mind.

Mother drew me close and said softly, “Is it hard to get used to, seeing Mom change so much? That’s only natural. But the Grandma who raised you was Mom all along. I disguised myself as my own mother to keep the Soul Hunters from recognizing me. Raising my own child as his grandmother was easier for others to accept. Any other identity, and I’d have had to explain why I was raising you. Care without blood ties never gets past the Sweepers.”

I nodded and called softly, “Mom.”

Mother answered brightly, “Yes. I’ve waited twenty years to hear you call me that. Today I can finally be myself again.”

Uncle spoke up beside us. “Beichen, your mother has had a terribly hard time of it. On one hand, she raised you to adulthood with her own hands. On the other, she had to control her avatars to teach the resistance its skills. And she didn’t flee the Elite World only to resist the rule of the elite people. Mostly, it was because of you.”

“Because of me?”

Mother cut in quickly. “Rongliang!”

“Because in the Elite World,” Uncle said, “the moment you were born, someone wanted you dead.”

“Someone wanted a newborn dead?” I said. “Who?”

A newborn infant couldn’t possibly have threatened anyone. Why would someone want a baby who’d only just entered the world dead? Who could be that vicious?

Mother shouted, “Rongliang! Don’t say it!”

Uncle was angry too. “Sis, you’re still protecting him? Beichen’s a grown man now. He should know the truth.”

Mother was angry as well. “That’s all in the past. Things are different now.”

“It may be in the past for him, but it isn’t for me!” Uncle said. “You suffered all these years, Sis. Is one sentence—it’s all in the past—supposed to forgive that?”

Mother’s eyes reddened in an instant. “Rongliang, I told you. This isn’t entirely what you think. He had no choice either. He had his own difficulties. And this is not the time for Beichen to know.”

Uncle clenched his fists until his knuckles went white. Mother’s stubbornness had clearly pushed him near his limit.

He stared at her back, his voice thick with resentment and heartache.

“Not the time for him to know? Then when? After those people come for him again and get him killed? Sis, have you forgotten how we escaped back then? Hiding everything from him isn’t protecting him. It’s hurting him!”

Every word carried a chill. I could picture it—Mother, in order to save me, forced to flee the Elite World’s pursuit, disguising herself as Grandma, enduring the hardship of a frail, aged body. But what kind of unbearable necessity lay behind it all?

Questions churned through my mind without number, until I could hardly breathe.

“Mother,” I asked, “who exactly wanted to kill a newborn baby? I truly can’t understand what unavoidable difficulty could ever justify that. It’s simply inhuman. Mom, I’m grown now. I should know what happened back then.”

Mother slowly raised her hand and gently stroked my cheek. With aching tenderness, she said, “Beichen, I’m sorry. Mom still can’t tell you. It isn’t that I don’t want to. It’s that telling you would not only affect how you grow, it would make everything far more complicated. The past can’t be forgotten, and it can’t be changed. But whatever we do, we must look forward—toward what serves the future, what serves the larger situation, what serves the advancement of humanity. You’re grown now. You should be able to understand what I mean.”

Her gaze hardened. “We don’t fear danger or death. But we aren’t brutes, and we aren’t ordinary people. We are wise ones—people with the power to change the world. The world’s future won’t be changed by the masses. The age when the united strength of the many decided everything is long gone. In the world to come, the only ones who will truly decide the outcome are a tiny handful of elite, capable people. We all hope you can become someone of great wisdom and great power. That requires setting aside certain personal feelings. This isn’t forgetting. It’s holding fast to your mission—so the future can be better, humanity fairer, and the generations of humankind endure without end. What do you think?”

Uncle couldn’t help stealing a few more glances at Mother, as if even he had been won over by what she’d said.

“Sis, you’re right about that,” he said. “Beichen truly hasn’t become what we hoped for yet. So let him wait a little longer. Once he has power enough of his own, he can reach the truth himself.”

Mother said, “Rongliang, you need to be careful too. Don’t let your solid grasp of the technology make you careless. Last time, in the western suburbs, your true body was cornered inside a Sweeper vehicle. If Beichen hadn’t rescued you in time, you would have been in serious trouble. You’re actually in greater danger than Beichen, because right now those people aren’t after him. They’re after you. Both of the traps Lu Qingyue set were meant to lure you in. Without Ou Xiaoli’s help, all of us might have gone down in this one. What the elite people fear most isn’t me or Beichen. It’s you. Back then, Beichen’s father was taken control of precisely because his technology was too powerful. Learn from that.”

At the mention of my father, I asked quickly, “My father? Mother, is my father still alive?”

Mother sighed. “Whether he’s alive or dead no longer makes any difference—to him or to anyone else.”