Chapter 73: Back to the Real World

by cnwebnovels

I hadn’t known that everything I experienced and gained in the virtual world showed up on the terminal. It displayed not only the achievement points I’d earned, but also, in real time, my profession, location, and rank inside. That was exactly why Uncle and Engineer Lin had noticed something wrong and assumed the equipment had malfunctioned.

Before I set out, Uncle had told me that my first time in should be mainly about experience—no need to rush after money.

He’d given me thirty points. Twenty for entry access, ten for living expenses. That was the standard allotment for an ordinary person entering the virtual world. As Uncle put it, earning achievement points was no easy thing for elite people. The yearly workload the Shadow Pavilion assigned to elite people could only be exchanged for twenty points.

So when the terminal showed my achievement points had soared from an initial ten to 2,250 in just one week, and my force-of-consciousness rank had climbed, in under a month, from weak rank five to strong rank nine, it was extraordinary even by virtual-world standards—and nearly impossible in the real world. Growth in force of consciousness especially, whether in reality or the virtual world, depended almost entirely on grinding cultivation. Leaps like that simply weren’t supposed to happen.

The staff monitoring the terminal spotted the anomaly at once and rushed to notify Uncle and Engineer Lin. They feared the equipment was faulty—and feared even more that I’d run into some accident inside.

Uncle had come to check on me several times. Seeing my body’s condition remain stable, he hadn’t forced me awake.

Not until I exited the virtual world on my own did the staff call Uncle and Engineer Lin back in.

Uncle’s first question was, “You don’t feel anything wrong, do you?”

I shook my head, having no idea they’d been worried over my explosive progress, and said, “No? I just came out normally. Oh, right—when I first woke up there was some mild discomfort, like waking from a very deep dream, with a lingering feeling that hadn’t quite faded.”

“That’s normal,” Uncle said. “Everyone feels it. It comes from the continuity of the consciousness body. What I want to know is what’s going on with your achievement points and force-of-consciousness readings. They’re way off.”

At that, Engineer Lin added, “I checked the equipment. Nothing wrong with it.”

I was a little lost. “What’s wrong? Is the machine broken? Does that mean the points I earned inside are gone for nothing?”

Uncle pointed at the number on the screen. “You mean these 2,250 points?”

I glanced at the display. “Oh, they’re still there. That’s the number.”

Uncle and Engineer Lin spoke almost as one: “How is that possible? You were in there less than a month. How did you earn that much?”

“Is it a lot?” I said. “I just took part in the match between the Ziyun Sect and the Jianghai Gang. The Ziyun Sect rewarded me with fifteen gold-patterned pills, one red-patterned pill, and five cyan-patterned pills. On top of that, I fought five matches and earned 150 points. That’s already 1,730. Then some rank-eight from the Jianghai Gang wouldn’t accept the loss and insisted on a bare-knuckle bet with me—I beat him, and that earned another 620. If I hadn’t eaten a gold-patterned pill and a cyan-patterned pill along the way, I’d have 2,360.”

Uncle looked stunned. “Is the Ziyun Sect Master a fool? Why would he hand you fifteen gold-patterned pills all at once? You think gold-patterned pills grow on trees? And how did you win five matches straight? Isn’t it one match per person?”

“It’s not,” I said. “After I won the first, I could fight a second, couldn’t I?”

“How could you fight five?” Uncle said. “You won every one?”

“Yes,” I said. “I just kept going, match after match. I could’ve kept fighting, but I was afraid the Ziyun Sect would balk at how much I was winning and try to weasel out of paying, so I didn’t push it. After the fifth match, I withdrew.”

Uncle and Engineer Lin both looked dazed, as if neither of them had ever set foot in the virtual world.

In their eyes, money in the virtual world didn’t come easily. A guard’s wages for three months wouldn’t buy even one cyan-patterned pill. A rank-eight Grandmaster’s pay was only about fifty points. Only someone with an especially great contribution earned a single gold-patterned pill. It wasn’t as if they’d never fought in tournaments themselves—they’d simply never heard of gold-patterned pills being handed out as prizes. Usually you got a red-patterned pill, if that. And you still had to spend money inside—food, clothing, lodging, travel, it all cost. After all the deductions, there wasn’t much left over.

Fine. They dropped it.

Uncle asked again, “And your force of consciousness? You went in at weak rank five. How did it jump to almost rank ten in a matter of days?”

“I went down to the Eighteen Levels of Hell to harvest it,” I said. “I harvested the force of consciousness from four rank-ten criminals. That’s how I got there.”

“You—you went to the Eighteen Levels of Hell?” Uncle said. “That city lord, Feng Du, is no one to trifle with. His martial power is around rank twenty-eight, and his force of consciousness is rank thirty. Why would he let you in to harvest his own crop?”

I barely registered the part about harvesting crops. All I heard was Feng Du—rank twenty-eight in martial power, rank thirty in force of consciousness. That number hit me like a shock. That high? I’d thought rank ten was already Grandmaster level in the martial world, and that a Sect Master topped out around thirteen. Feng Du was that strong? And here I’d gone and cursed him out.

Engineer Lin said, “Harvesting another person’s force of consciousness is a secret art. Why would he simply teach it to you?”

“He didn’t teach me,” I said. “He fed me some line about force of consciousness being purely a matter of self-insight, and how the Eighteen Levels of Hell, full of suffering as it was, made that insight easier to reach. That’s why I went.”

“Wait,” Uncle said. “Even if you learned from the prisoners that force of consciousness could be gained through harvesting, you were only weak rank five. How could you possibly harvest from rank-ten criminals? If they don’t open themselves to it, you can’t take anything.”

“I wagered with them,” I said. “If they beat me, I’d let them go. If not, they’d lose to me. I won, so I harvested them.”

“You were weak rank five,” Engineer Lin said. “How could you beat rank-ten opponents?”

“I could,” I said. “Force of consciousness isn’t about strength. It’s about intensity.”

So I told them the whole story—from the moment I first went to the City Lord’s Castle and matched force of consciousness with King Qinguang, all the way through harvesting those criminals.

By the time I finished, the staff standing nearby looked ready to try it themselves. So making money could be this easy?

Uncle turned to them and said, “Don’t listen to this kid’s nonsense. Not everyone can beat rank ten with rank five. What’s this about intensity alone mattering, with no strength behind it? Where would intensity even come from? Intensity and strength are positively correlated.”

I had nothing to say to that. Either way, I’d won.

Uncle glanced at me. “Go see your mother first, in a bit. She’s been worried sick about what you went through in there. She assumed you must have had it miserable. I talked her down more than once. If she knew how freely you’d been living in there, how easily you’d been earning—she might not even want you to come out this soon.”

“I didn’t plan to come out this soon either,” I said. “Wasn’t that Feng Du’s doing? Oh, right, Uncle—could Feng Du be plotting something? He said I could go back any time. My soul’s virtual body in there has been made into a judge in the Eighteen Levels of Hell, on his orders.”

Uncle thought for a moment. “We’ve been trying to find Feng Du’s true body in the real world. For now, we can’t say who he is or what he does. But there’s always been a sense that he’s not simple. You can see it just from how he’s treated you—he sits somewhere between righteous and evil. He’s an agent of the Shadow Pavilion, and yet he genuinely shelters certain people too.”

“Could he track us here through my soul code in the virtual world?” I asked.

“Generally speaking, no,” Uncle said. “Our world and theirs aren’t on the same phase. But we still can’t let our guard down. There’s no such thing as love without a reason. He’s given you an enormous benefit—there has to be a purpose behind it. If you go back in and see him again, be more careful around him.”

“I will,” I said. “I’ll go see Mother now.”

I left Uncle and the others and went to find my mother.

After hearing about what I’d been through in the virtual world, Mother seemed much calmer than I expected. She said, “It’s not strange at all that Feng Du’s identity is murky—the Shadow Pavilion itself is a strange thing to begin with. Feng Du should count as someone inside it. The Shadow Pavilion has never announced a clear goal to the world. If you assume it exists only to rule over all humanity, that doesn’t actually hold up. With its capabilities, wiping out every last resistor wouldn’t be hard at all. It has the power to do it. But it hasn’t. The ones hunting the resistance most viciously are certain managers beneath the Shadow Pavilion—what we call the Dark Organizations. They don’t represent the Shadow Pavilion itself. It’s precisely because the Shadow Pavilion never decided to exterminate the resistance that the resistance has survived at all. The resistance’s goal has always been clear: to achieve the Great Unity of humankind. Equality for everyone. Technology that benefits every human life. The resistance has secretly produced a great deal of technology in the Elite World and passed it down to the Mundane World, all to push humanity there forward at the same pace.”

“Are you saying there’s disagreement within the Shadow Pavilion?” I asked.

“No,” Mother said. “That’s not what I mean. The Shadow Pavilion is a unified consciousness. It has its own independent will. But the managers under its rule—certain people—have their own private desires. They’ve been using the Shadow Pavilion’s authority to hunt the resistance without mercy, to choke off the outflow of advanced technology. That includes setting up the Sweeper system in the Mundane World. None of that was ever ordered by the Shadow Pavilion itself. It’s the work of the Dark Organizations. Though of course, these Dark Organizations also serve as the Shadow Pavilion’s points of management. Without the members of those organizations running things, the Shadow Pavilion is nothing more than a mass of quantum intelligence. It can’t do anything on its own.”

Puzzled, I asked, “Mother, isn’t the Shadow Pavilion made up of people? Or some organization of people who use the core supercomputer to manage humanity?”

“On the surface, yes,” Mother said. “The Shadow Pavilion is indeed made up of a group of people. But through big-data analysis, your uncle and I have come to believe this group of people lost their sense of self long ago. Your father is one of its core members. Before, we only told you he’d been assimilated by the AI, because we were afraid you wouldn’t be prepared to face him otherwise. What I never told you is that everyone inside the Shadow Pavilion has, in fact, been assimilated by that quantum core supercomputer. The core supercomputer functions like an intelligent computational center, and every member of the Shadow Pavilion serves as its brain tissue. Your uncle and I once worked through the analysis—if the core supercomputer truly wanted to crack our base’s phase-displacement frequency band, it could. But it never has. That’s why I believe the Shadow Pavilion likely has no intention of exterminating the resistance. The ones who want the resistance dead are the members of the Dark Organizations handling matters beneath it.”

Mother had finally decided to tell me part of the truth. So I asked, “Then are the Dark Organizations our real enemy?”

“No, not that either,” Mother said. “You can’t frame the problem that way. We’re not trying to target anyone, or oppose anyone. We’re trying to bring equal progress to all humanity.”

“Isn’t that the same thing?” I said. “If we clear away the enemies blocking us, doesn’t that achieve humanity’s progress?”

“You still haven’t truly understood what I mean,” Mother said. “I just explained our goal to you. But there’s more than one road to it. Clear away some obstacles, and new obstacles will rise to take their place. You can’t kill every elite person in existence. Human nature, at the genetic level, is selfish. Put an ordinary person in a position of power and they’re no different. That’s something you cannot change. You still haven’t thought this through. Your uncle and I—and the resistance as a whole—have all been waiting for you to grow stronger. So that you can enter the Shadow Pavilion. The Shadow Pavilion is the core of every problem. Enter it, occupy it, even steer it—and every problem resolves itself. The Dark Organizations, the Sweepers, the Soul Hunters—none of it is anything more than illusory shadow.”

“But I’m still far too weak,” I said.

Ever since learning Feng Du’s martial power sat at rank twenty-eight and his force of consciousness at rank thirty, I’d finally understood just how vast the gap still was. Before that, I’d believed rank ten meant Grandmaster, and rank fifteen was the ceiling.

And strong as Feng Du was, he couldn’t possibly be the strongest—he was merely a subordinate of the Shadow Pavilion. So how powerful must its core be? It was beyond imagining.

Mother saw my unease and said, “I never told you these things before because I felt you were still too far from that goal. But what you accomplished in the virtual world has given me hope. I’m telling you all this now not so you’ll rush off to do something—your ability is nowhere near enough yet. I’m telling you so your effort has a direction. Keep working, and you will succeed.”