Chapter 79: The Old Woman Who Looked Like Grandma

Chapter 79: The Old Woman Who Looked Like Grandma

While I waited for the custom-built parasitic host the base had made for me to emerge from its chamber, I spent the time catching up on nearly everything I’d missed as an elite person. I was always coming and going in a rush; a stretch of idle time like this was rare.

Without a parasitic host, I never dared go out in my true body—not with the risk of being killed outright hanging over me. If that happened, my consciousness would have nowhere to go but Shiqing, or I might truly die. That would be a terrible bargain.

The night before the host was due to emerge, I had a dream. It felt real enough that I woke up still tangled in its emotions. In the dream, I’d walked straight into a trap someone had laid for me, been hunted down, and beaten to death—the kind of death where someone high-ranked handles you with effortless ease.

It left me dejected for a long time afterward.

In real life, I’d always carried myself with confidence. My abilities always seemed to outstrip others at the same rank, and that had made me a little arrogant. But in that dream, vivid as it was, I finally understood how little my strength meant in front of someone truly high-ranked. In the end, all I managed before dying was biting a chunk of flesh off the other person, just to have something to show for my hatred.

That dream taught me something. Ability was the foundation for a person’s survival in this world. However solid your backing might be, it was still borrowed strength. You couldn’t carry a mountain on your back forever. Everyone had their weak moments.

So I found myself looking forward to this new host more than I expected.

Then I actually stood in front of it, and the embarrassment nearly did me in. He was naked, and there were female staff standing right there.

Uncle and Engineer Lin told me to parasitize into it with my consciousness.

The moment I opened those eyes, the first thing I did was turn invisible, then ask the staff to bring me some clothes—which left them caught somewhere between laughing and sighing. They’d long since grown numb to the sight of parasitic hosts in every state imaginable.

Once I’d settled into the host, everything felt almost indistinguishable from my true body. Martial-technique strikes, projecting force of consciousness, supernormal sensing, penetrating-wave ability, shape-shifting, illusion transformation—whatever I knew how to do, I tried nearly all of it. If anything, this host felt easier and freer to inhabit than when I had parasitized into Shiqing’s brain.

Uncle and Engineer Lin were clearly pleased with what they’d built. Lin had always been meticulous in his work—it was a quality both Mother and Uncle praised him for often.

I carried my true body out on the host’s back myself, just to test whether I could tell which one actually mattered more.

There was no difference. None at all.

Every sensation felt exactly the same as it did in my true body, to the point where I started wondering whether my “true” body might be bionic too. Of course, growing up in Liutan Town told me which one was real. But somehow that no longer felt like it mattered much.

So this was the secret behind why elite people didn’t die.

Given enough money, I could manufacture more of myself. Of course, that would become meaningless too. After all, the main consciousness was the foundation of a person’s self-recognition.

Uncle had prepared parasitic hosts for me before. Xuanhong had been the first, completing my schooling, work, and emotional tempering in my place. Shiqing came second—he’d talked me through no end of confusion, and more importantly, he was my safety net, my final survival trump card. This was the third, and its purpose was simpler: to give me real freedom to move through the world.

Wearing it, I felt that freedom settle into place. This would also be the first time I appeared in the Elite World in my own appearance.

He was me.

Stepping out of the base and heading straight for Hua City, the sense of freedom put the pigeon body to shame. I was human, after all. A pigeon could fly, but that was about it—no invisibility, no strikes, no operating things. It was little more than a flapping drone, carrying your eyes around while everything else stayed behind.

With a decent flying tool, crossing mountains and seas, covering ten thousand li in a single stretch—none of that was hard in the Elite World. It beat living in the Mundane World by miles, in comfort and in speed alike.

I remembered the first time Gao Minjun and I had fled the Sweepers, him behind the wheel of his own car, winding through the mountains at whatever speed the road allowed. In the end, he died an unnatural death.

If I’d had even a fraction of the Elite World’s tech back then, he wouldn’t have. I could have appeared like Sun Wukong in the world—one somersault cloud carrying me over any mountain, across any sea, straight to wherever I wanted to go.

What a feeling that would’ve been.

I chose a pair of shuttle boots over an aerial motorcycle—didn’t want to draw too much attention. Plenty of people used shuttle boots. Quiet, and more maneuverable besides.

I headed straight for Hua City, meaning to visit the old Gu family residence first.

Mother had told me it was where she and Father first lived together. But since Father had built the core supercomputer and become something of a public name in the Elite World, the city had turned the place into the “Gu Chenxing Former Residence Memorial.”

On the way there, I adjusted the biological composition of my face, changing myself into the appearance of a mature middle-aged man.

Halfway down Hua City’s Chinatown stood a small, detached building—blue brick, two stories, easy to overlook amid the bustle of the district. Still, the city had clearly tidied up the area around it, enough to make it feel like a proper memorial site, somewhere people came to learn and pay respects.

Getting in cost a full achievement point, though it did come with a robot guide.

I paid, followed the robot inside, and muted it almost immediately. I had no interest in listening to a script that wasn’t even true, and it would only get in the way of my own thoughts.

The rooms where my parents had once lived turned out simple—no luxury, nothing extravagant. But beside the master bedroom upstairs, I found a nursery.

Surely not mine.

That would’ve been almost funny. Uncle had told me Mother scooped me up and fled the moment I was born. What use would there have been for a nursery?

I stepped out onto the balcony and looked down at the street below. Among the pedestrians, one figure caught my eye—an old woman, walking slowly, her clothes and bearing and face all strikingly close to my Grandma’s.

I already knew by then that the Grandma who’d raised me had been Mother in disguise. Even so, seeing this woman who looked so much like her stirred something in me. I’d been raised on that image. It had worked its way into my bones, deeper than I liked to admit.

I scanned her with same-frequency sensing, and to my surprise, she reacted at once, lifting her head to meet my eyes. That gentle gaze, those deep wrinkles, the way she looked at me—it pulled me straight back to the innocence of childhood.

I shut my eyes quickly, afraid the illusion would cloud my judgment.

I found nothing useful in her mind—she read as an ordinary local resident. But I knew that had to be false. Finding nothing meant her rank likely outstripped mine.

Once she noticed me watching, she bought a ticket of her own and made her slow way inside.

She’d come for me. Otherwise, why dress herself up to look like my Grandma? I went to wait for her in the study on the second floor, where the crowds thinned out enough for us to talk freely.

Sure enough, before long she appeared at the doorway, gazing at me with that same kind expression, saying nothing for a long moment.

Finally I asked, “Who is your true body?”

She answered slowly. “Your family.”

I laughed. “My family? I don’t have much family to speak of. Do you actually know me? Or are you about to tell me we’re all one family under Heaven?”

She only smiled, and instead of answering, pointed toward the nursery down the hall. “That room—the baby who lived there stayed only a single day, but it’s real all the same. Not staged. Everything inside was chosen and arranged by his mother’s own hands. It’s all original.”

“I heard,” I said, “that the moment that baby was born, someone wanted him dead. Is that true?”

I expected her to deny it. Instead she nodded. “It’s true. His brain wasn’t quite normal. His father worried it might threaten humanity, and that fear led him to that decision.”

That irritated me. “A baby, a threat to humanity? That’s quite a claim. Go on then—how exactly was his brain abnormal?”

“Haven’t you noticed his brain isn’t quite like other people’s?”

“I have,” I said. “It’s different. So what? Is that enough to condemn a newborn to death?”

“Perhaps his father was simply wrong. Misjudged the whole thing. At the time, he believed the alien high-energy matter he was studying had directly infected the fetus and affected the fetus’s brain. Do you know what happens when a fetal brain is exposed like that?”

“What happens? I don’t know. No—I do know. He grew up. Everyone’s seen the result. This is exactly what he became. What else could there be?”

“His father didn’t see it that way back then. The baby hadn’t been born yet. His mother, helping with the experiments on the alien object while pregnant, often ran the tests herself to spare her husband the burden. One moment of carelessness exposed the fetus to radiation from the alien high-energy matter, causing the fetus’s brain to mutate. The two of them argued over this at the time.

“His mother believed that even though the radiation had caused the mutation, the mutation wasn’t necessarily harmful—it might even benefit the child’s future. His father disagreed. By the statistics of natural mutation, only 0.001 to 0.1 percent of mutations favor a species’ development, while 99.99 percent are harmful. The high-energy radiation from alien matter very likely carried alien consciousness and an enormous amount of information, making it highly unpredictable. He believed it would be much safer to resolve it while it was still in the bud. Based on this, the moment the child was born, his father wanted to dispose of him.”

“Unpredictability?” I said. “He’d kill a newborn over a maybe and an unknown? How is that any different from Qin Hui charging Yue Fei with a ‘perhaps there is’ crime?”

“No different at all,” she said. “Perhaps means perhaps. Do you know why Qin Hui wanted Yue Fei dead?”

“A petty man judging a great one by his own small heart, I’d guess.”

“No. It wasn’t Qin Hui who wanted him dead—it was the emperor, Zhao Gou. He sensed Yue Fei might one day threaten his realm and throne, and so he had Qin Hui carry out the deed, and let Qin Hui carry the blame for it.”

“Are you saying his father feared the baby threatening his own realm and throne?”

“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean his father believed the alien entity might carry unforeseeable consequences for all of humanity’s future. And part of that entity had, by chance, radiated into his own child. For the realm of humanity, that was the choice he made.”