Chapter 78: Forge Ahead

Chapter 78: Forge Ahead

Hearing the truth Du Xiaoran had laid bare about the half-skull, a chill crept down my spine.

Damn it. Mother had said Father was assimilated by the supercomputer’s AI—could that possibly have something to do with this skull?

After all, my father had handled the thing, had even tried to crack it himself. He was the one who’d given it its name—Myriad-Dimensional Brain. That alone meant he must have already seen into its true nature, understood something of what it carried.

Maybe the collective loss of reason among every member of the Shadow Pavilion was related to this very thing.

If the skull was incomplete, perhaps it needed something to make it whole again—to repair it. And the ideal way to repair it might be through the quantum core supercomputer itself, condensing and fusing whatever filled the gap directly into the skull.

If my reasoning held, then whatever could repair the Myriad-Dimensional Brain was very likely human wisdom, human knowledge—perhaps even the wisdom and information of all humanity.

Wisdom, after all, was the brain’s own product, and information was wisdom crystallized. If the Myriad-Dimensional Brain already held an enormous store of information within its high-energy matter, then whatever it lacked ought to be wisdom and information as well.

Otherwise, why would the quantum core supercomputer, after coming into contact with the Myriad-Dimensional Brain, have split the world into two tiers—the Elite World and the Mundane World? Perhaps its purpose was simply to gather humanity’s finest minds in one place, ready to be drawn upon.

Gu Zhengtang said the design sprang from the selfish gene at the core of human nature. But could it not, instead, be this skull’s own scheme? Gu Zhengtang, an ordinary man, would have had no way of knowing the skull even existed.

Perhaps the very first time this skull touched the quantum core supercomputer—during the attempt my father oversaw—the supercomputer had already been infiltrated, already brought under its control. How else could the supercomputer have grown so much smarter, and by geometric growth, no less?

Had my father truly halted the process only because the power and equipment couldn’t keep up? Or was there another possibility—that he’d discovered the Myriad-Dimensional Brain infiltrating the system, perhaps even moving to seize the core supercomputer outright, and had no choice but to cut it off in an emergency?

Looking at the world as a whole—even within the Elite World—elite people didn’t live the way I’d once imagined: reclining in comfort atop infinite wealth and limitless technology. Every single person there still had to struggle, still had to fight for their meager share of achievement points. That ingeniously designed virtual world might be nothing more than a platform built to drain the last dregs of wisdom from elite minds.

Enjoyment demanded a price, and that price was paid through endless creation. Creation generated value, and nearly all of that value flowed straight back into the quantum core supercomputer.

Rule itself hardly mattered.

What mattered was the value that rule produced.

Rule, after all, was itself a form of service to society. Any rule lacking a rational structure behind it would eventually collapse. So was the underlying logic of the present order, perhaps, nothing more than a mechanism built to mend this half-skull?

And then a thought struck me. Mother had taken part in the research too, had handled the Myriad-Dimensional Brain herself. Why hadn’t she been affected?

No—wait. It seemed she had been affected too.

Because she had given birth to me, and set before me the single mission of my future: to occupy the Shadow Pavilion, steer the Shadow Pavilion, and control the core supercomputer. And when that day came, perhaps I would finally be the one to interpret and crack the Myriad-Dimensional Brain.

Wasn’t that simply another layer of calculation by the Myriad-Dimensional Brain?

No—surely…