Chapter 75: Half a Human Skull

Chapter 75: Half a Human Skull

Gu Qiutang and Shiqing had once told me that elite people neither died nor fell ill.

But what I was seeing now told a different story.

This old woman was clearly ill—seriously so.

“You’re sick?” I asked her. “With what? Weren’t elite people supposed not to get sick?”

The old woman froze. Her eyes locked onto me, and only after a long silence did she speak.

“So you really aren’t an elite person. Did you stow away here? Careful—the Sky Eyes are everywhere. I don’t want to be implicated. You can leave now.”

Was she really trying to chase me off? And after I’d just saved her, no less.

Hearing her speak so rudely, I felt a little unhappy too. I had been thinking of helping her, even sponsoring her—but that killed the impulse on the spot.

Still, when I reached the window, I found I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave. Wei Liuqing and I had, after all, crossed paths once, and I dreaded the thought of Zhang Zirui dying inside the system.

Fine. A small favor, then.

I flew to the family’s robot nanny, tapped at it with my beak, and transferred twenty achievement points into the machine, marking the payment as a storage fee to keep Zhang Zirui’s consciousness alive in the system.

I had no idea how much the family owed. But if I covered part of it now, then even if Wei Liuqing’s release was delayed, Zhang Zirui’s consciousness body at least would not be cleared by the system immediately.

Just as I was about to fly off from the windowsill, the robot nanny called after me.

“The old lady isn’t sick,” it said. “She once helped a stowaway. The patrol team found out, and this is the bodily punishment they gave her.”

Ah. So that was it.

If they’d told me sooner, I might have donated more. Telling me now, though—no extra donation was forthcoming.

Truthfully, when I’d first heard the old woman recount her family’s misfortune, I’d meant to give a hundred points. But after she drove me off, the mood for generosity had simply evaporated.

Like a sulking child, I flew away.

Even so, I felt no guilt. We barely knew each other, and I owed her family nothing.

Helping her was a kindness. Not helping was well within my rights.

I wasn’t the stowaway she’d helped, after all—the one who owed her family a debt was that stowaway, not me. Besides, I’d already given twenty points. That was equivalent to an elite person’s annual research funding.

By the time I left Wei Liuqing’s mother’s home, night had fallen deep, so I flew to a church to roost. Pigeons crowded the eaves there, and blending in among them felt safer.

I tucked myself into a small window of the bell tower and slept soundly—until, deep in the night, my same-frequency sensing alerted me: two consciousnesses were speaking.

I opened my eyes slowly, trying to tell whether they belonged to human bodies or pigeon bodies.

The dark was too thick for my eyes alone, so I activated my penetrating-wave ability as well. Only then did I make out, at the far end of the church, some hundred meters off, two people in pigeon bodies conversing through consciousness.

Cautious as their exchange was, my same-frequency sensing had a tuning ability, so I could still hear the consciousness conversation between them.

Pigeon A said, “It’s already the second half of the night. Shouldn’t we move now?”

Pigeon B glanced up at the sky. “Wait a little longer. Miss Pu wants this to go off without a single flaw. We’ve tracked and scouted for nearly a year—what’s a little more time? In a bit, we’ll fly to Building No. 3 first, confirm what’s happening inside, and once we’re sure it’s safe, report back to Miss Pu and the others.”

The name Miss Pu snapped me fully alert.

What action? What was Building No. 3?

I gave my body a shake, eyes fixed on the two of them. Sure enough, about an hour later, they took off with a flurry of wings, heading northwest.

I didn’t dare follow too closely—if they’d spent a year tracking their target, they were clearly careful people, and I couldn’t afford to be spotted. Had I been in human form, I could have turned invisible. But this pigeon body couldn’t manage that, especially since I was using one of the cheaper models.

So I flew north for a stretch before angling west. My same-frequency sensing stayed locked onto Pigeon A’s brainwaves, and even with my small detour, I kept pace with them easily.

After five or six kilometers, the two pigeons dropped down near an unremarkable residential block—no perimeter wall, no gate, just rows of common housing. Against the glittering, ultra-modern backdrop of Ouluo City, the place looked marginal, ordinary, the kind of block a passerby wouldn’t spare a second glance.

Wary of being noticed, I came in low and landed some three hundred meters off.

Only after touching down did I realize my mistake—Building No. 3 stood directly to my left. The two pigeons hadn’t landed there at all; I’d landed instead in front of Building No. 5, tucked behind and to the right of it.

I began worrying they’d sense me and stay away, and was already thinking of shielding my brainwaves—when I found the effort unnecessary. The instant I’d landed, every signal in my head had been severed outright.

A shield. And a powerful one.

I pressed myself against a flowerpot on a second-floor balcony, not daring to move, eyes fixed on the two pigeons three hundred meters away.

Luck was with me—I’d come in low, and a thin mist hung over the street. The pigeons didn’t seem to notice me at all.

Another ten-odd minutes passed before they finally dropped, one after the other, onto the roof of Building No. 3. They surveyed the surroundings, then descended to ground level and burrowed abruptly into a heap of junk piled against the building’s first floor.

The junk itself was unremarkable—just clutter stacked against the wall. Once the pigeons vanished into it, there was no more movement.

I checked the area once more, then shot forward and dove in after them.

Pushing through the debris, I discovered a pipe hidden within it, leading straight into the building. The pigeons must have slipped through here.

I squeezed in as well.

The moment I poked my head out the other end of the pipe, I found myself somewhere startlingly lavish—like a research institute, vast in scale, crowded with instruments and equipment, yet somehow deeply unsettling.

I swept the space with same-frequency sensing and penetrating-wave. Aside from the two pigeons, there was no one anywhere else. And yet the place felt crowded—teeming, even.

Because everything in it seemed to speak, to think. Not just the machines, which moved of their own accord, but even the brooms, the computer mice—all of it seemed caught up in some ceaseless exchange, discussion, motion.

The lights were off, the whole place steeped in darkness, yet that did nothing to slow their traffic and chatter. It was like a hive of bees, each one absorbed in its own task, utterly indifferent to our arrival.

Could these moving, speaking, thinking objects be some other form of AI people?

Unfortunately, trapped in a pigeon body, I had no way to turn invisible. I clamped down hard on my brainwaves, terrified the two pigeons would sense a human mind among them.

I probed toward them and found they’d gone entirely still since entering.

When I reached further, I understood why—they were already gone. They had detached from their pigeon bodies, leaving behind nothing but two empty pigeon husks.

What was happening?

A sudden, ugly premonition seized me. I detached from my own parasitic body at once and woke back in Uncle’s base.

Uncle and the others were still resting, but I woke him immediately and told him everything I’d seen.

He found it just as unfamiliar as I did. We checked the coordinates together, and Uncle confirmed the place wasn’t one of their research sites—nor did it belong to any other resistance research institution. The resistance groups all kept in contact with one another; he would have known.

He told me to parasitize back into the pigeon at once, to keep watching from there and see what unfolded. He would also have people in Ouluo City keep a close eye on the site.

From a thousand li away, I slipped back into my pigeon body. The two pigeons hadn’t stirred—clearly, they hadn’t returned.

I’d barely tucked myself into a crack in the rooftop when several thunderous blasts tore through the night.

Brick and dust erupted skyward as the windowless room was blown open in several places. Through the gaping holes poured dozens of fully armed patrol team members.

The room answered at once. Laser fire lanced in from every angle, scorching more than a dozen patrol team members black in an instant. Those who survived were all people carrying quantum shields. They also activated a certain kind of equipment and immediately destroyed all the resistance weapons.

When the chaos finally settled, I saw Pu Liuqian fly in among the people who entered afterward, directing the patrol team to seal off the entire site.

The room brightened at last. Every piece of intelligent equipment had gone perfectly still, perfectly silent.

Pu Liuqian walked alone to the north wall and turned a vase mounted beside it.

With a swish, the great painting at the wall’s center slid aside, revealing a door.

Not a secret room—a space shaped like a Buddhist niche.

At its center hung a suspended bracket, and on it rested something covered by a crystal dome.

Pu Liuqian shattered the crystal dome with one punch, lifted the object out, and raised it before her eyes.

Half a human skull.

It looked ancient—weathered, fossil-old.

The instant the half-skull was taken out of the crystal dome, my mind suddenly trembled as well, as if I had sensed something.

And that faint tremor of mine, small as it was, caught Pu Liuqian’s attention.

She turned sharply, her gaze fixing on my pigeon body. A smile touched her lips.

“Did you see it? Do you know what this is? It is the Myriad-Dimensional Brain—the true missing other half of the quantum core supercomputer. You felt a little bit of sensing, didn’t you? If your true body were here, I imagine you’d feel it far more strongly.”

Was she speaking to me?

Why tell me this at all?

I stayed perfectly still, pretending not to be parasitized.

Pu Liuqian only laughed once, coldly, and turned away, casually handing the half-skull to an attendant beside her. The attendant immediately placed the skull into a specialized metal box.

She addressed the patrol captain. “This place is yours now. Search it thoroughly—copy all the data for me. And expand the Sky Curtain’s detection range around the perimeter. Someone will come sniffing around eventually. Arrest and interrogate anyone suspicious.”

With that, Pu Liuqian left with her attendants in a flying car.

I abandoned the pigeon body as well, my consciousness returning to Uncle’s base, where I recounted everything to Mother and Uncle.

Mother’s expression turned grave the moment she heard it.

“So the Myriad-Dimensional Brain was hidden in Ouluo City all along,” she said quietly.

Uncle’s face darkened too. “Sis, what now? It’ll be next to impossible to find again. We spent nearly twenty years hunting for that half-skull, and in the end Pu Liuqian beat us to it. What a pity. If Beichen’s bionic body had been there just now, we might have had a chance to seize it back.”

Watching the gravity settle over both their faces, I sensed this was no ordinary object.

“Mother,” I asked, “what exactly is the Myriad-Dimensional Brain? Why does it matter so much to you both? Whose hands was it in before?”