Chapter 80: The Fourth Green Jade Token

by cnwebnovels

Picking up where the old woman had left off, I asked, “So he chose to kill his own kin for the greater good. Is that it?”

“Yes. His father came to know, later, that he’d been wrong. For years afterward he was consumed by guilt and the pain of losing his loved ones. In the end, unable to bear the weight of it any longer, he ended his life in the real world and merged his consciousness entirely into the core supercomputer’s AI.”

“I heard it was to keep the supercomputer running more smoothly. That’s why he merged completely.”

“That isn’t true. The grief of that loss was the true cause. He has no wish to defend himself on that point—nor could he, even if he tried.”

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s leave that aside. I’m not in a position to judge the disputes between my elders, and I couldn’t say who was right even if I tried. What I want to know is—how did you find me? All I did was scan you with same-frequency sensing. Any elite person can do that.”

“Bloodline.”

“Bloodline? He merged into an AI. Where would bloodline even come from?”

“His consciousness body merged entirely into the core supercomputer’s AI, yes. But his physical body remains. Right here, in this memorial. The supercomputer’s consciousness body can still sense the pulse of his flesh.”

“Is that so? Then could I see him? Pay my respects?”

“An ordinary person, no. You, yes. Come with me.”

She turned and walked slowly down the stairs, heading for the back courtyard.

I followed her down. The courtyard wasn’t open to visitors—a guard stood at its gate, and the moment he saw us approaching, he moved to block the way. The old woman lifted a hand toward him, barely a gesture, and he froze in place like a wooden dummy. The gate swung open on its own.

She led me to a quiet stretch of wall at the courtyard’s edge, glanced back at me, and said, “Follow me.”

Then she stepped straight into the wall.

It reminded me at once of the Nondual Gate on Panshan, where Uncle had once used high-dimensional energy-field disturbances to trigger local quantum-oscillator instability and build a spacetime boundary. Had my father’s resting place been built the same way?

I didn’t have time to think it through. I followed her straight in.

Inside, it wasn’t dark. The space was modest, maybe a little over a hundred square meters, entirely bare except for a soft bed at its center. A middle-aged man lay on it, motionless, one hand closed tightly around a green jade token.

The sight of the token stopped me cold. “A green jade token? Shouldn’t there be three green jade tokens in his hand?”

The old woman looked at me, lifted the token from his hand without ceremony, and passed it to me. “Right now, this is all he holds. The other two are serving as core modules inside the quantum core supercomputer. I don’t know if anyone’s told you this, but human consciousness isn’t something the self generates on its own. It’s a fragment of cosmic consciousness—an energy that runs through every living thing, resonating with the universe itself. It’s innate, like a signal in the air, as real and objective as mass, charge, or gravity.

“What the human brain calls cognition is really just the neurons receiving cosmic consciousness through same-frequency resonance. But the energy of the human brain is limited—we’re still at the earliest stage of this. This is Tesla’s theory of same-frequency resonance. He divided the reception of consciousness into three levels. Penrose, the Nobel laureate, made similar arguments.

“These green jade tokens were once a single whole, from an extraterrestrial civilization. They belong to the same civilizational system as the Myriad-Dimensional Brain. The husband and wife separated it into six pieces, following its own internal properties. Each piece carries a distinct function. This one is a cosmic-consciousness receiving amplifier. It strengthens your reception of cosmic consciousness and lets you interact with the cosmic wisdom energy field, allowing you to feel and receive more cosmic wisdom. If you can raise your force of consciousness to the third level, you’ll possess cosmic-level force of consciousness—and from then on, you won’t need any tool at all to reach same-frequency alignment with cosmic consciousness in etheric form. You’ll be able to condense force-of-consciousness avatars. That’s what I am.”

I looked at this old woman, so much like Grandma, and was secretly shocked. I’d assumed she was a parasitic host carrying his force of consciousness. I hadn’t expected she was the condensed state of force of consciousness itself.

That was more unsettling than I wanted to admit. In terms of autonomous force of consciousness, the true body of this old woman was his consciousness body, which had merged into the core supercomputer and had already reached cosmic level—in other words, Tesla’s third level made real.

Did I even need to guess who “he” was?

And yet I couldn’t quite call him “my father.” He wasn’t only my father’s consciousness anymore. Whatever he was now must have folded in the core supercomputer’s consciousness as well.

I had no idea whether he represented the entirety of the Shadow Pavilion consciousness body, or only some fragment of it. I didn’t know if the woman speaking to me now was a separated piece of “my father,” or an undivided whole, or nothing more than a dialogue image made of force of consciousness.

As an engineering-minded person, I understood a fused consciousness body as something that should not be divided between self and other. If a fused consciousness body could be separated, then the fusion was not complete, and an incomplete fusion could never be the optimal outcome.

But as a creature of flesh and blood, as his descendant, I wanted to believe in that incompleteness. I didn’t want to face the full, cold truth of what a fused consciousness actually was.

Fusing the consciousnesses of countless of the smartest people with the consciousness of a spin-qubit life-form like the quantum core supercomputer, forging it all into one unified consciousness body with an independent personality—what was that, in the end? Was it still human? Where would it lead the rest of us?

I didn’t dare follow that thought any further. Every thought I had was laid bare in front of this transcendent consciousness life-form.

Fine. For now, I’d grant it its greatness, its advancement. Otherwise I’d fall straight into my own version of “perhaps there is.”

I’d heard of Tesla’s theory of same-frequency resonance once before, back at the Sweeper base, in the Tianshu Department. Bi Deyuan had explained it to me then—how primary consciousness had shaped the society we lived in now, how intermediate consciousness could use consciousness-energy resonance, like an amplifier, to reach its target, and how advanced consciousness needed no tool at all, achieving direct alignment with the ether.

So was this green jade token the old woman had given me compensation born from Father’s guilt? Or was it a gift he had secretly given me because he hoped I would grow stronger?

Either way, it was a good thing to have. And I found myself already looking forward to the other two—curious what it would look like, all six green jade tokens joined as one.

I ran my fingers over the token, then looked again at that face so like Grandma’s, and finally understood what Mother had meant, calling him both alive and dead. Only, I felt it differently than she must have—what lived in him was his consciousness, and what had died, strangely enough, was his body instead.

As his descendant, I supposed I had no right to hate anyone over this.

“I don’t hate you,” I told her. “I have no right to. Even if you really had killed me back then, as a small life at its beginning, I would not have felt any pain. After all, my main consciousness had not yet been established. But I’ve grown up since. I have my own thoughts now. And they might not line up with the core-supercomputer empire you established.”

She kept looking at me with that same gentle warmth, reached out, and laid a hand softly on my head. She nodded, something like emotion crossing her face.

She didn’t argue. She simply dissolved into a wisp of blue smoke and was gone.

I stood in the empty room, nothing left but the cold body on the bed, and felt something heavy settle in my chest. What did it even mean to be alive? What kind of future was humanity supposed to be building toward?

I walked out of the memorial with that weight still sitting on me. I pitied whatever he’d become—neither human nor ghost.

Mother had told me once not to trust anyone, not even my father. She’d said it again and again: he wasn’t real.

I’d met him today, I supposed.

And no, he wasn’t real. That included the old woman’s appearance and human emotions.

Still—what counted as real, anyway?

Only now did I understand what she’d meant. My father was never coming back. He wasn’t the father a child remembers, not in any biological sense anymore. He’d become a string of symbols, a feeling, a concept—something complicated I still had a great deal left to understand.

I walked alone to a lake in a park outside the city and sat on a rock by the water to think.

I took out the fourth green jade token, turned it over in my hands, and tried reaching it with my consciousness.

An ethereal feeling I had never experienced before echoed inside my brain. I began using my consciousness to identify the regular resonances that came from the natural information field and the deep reaches of cosmic space, then processed those resonances together with my subconscious into my force of consciousness.

To my surprise, it worked—my force of consciousness rose, just slightly. The token was mobilizing and integrating my force of consciousness, causing inspiration to be amplified.

I poured focus, imagination, stillness, observation, and insight into the token, eyes half-closed, until I seemed to glimpse something in the depths of space—a spirituality with no physical form, spreading outward. Something like a vibration of consciousness itself.

I couldn’t say whether this was what Eastern theology called the Akashic Records. But I couldn’t ignore it either. I was on the verge of trying to draw some of it in—

—when a few visitors wandered up to the lakeside, talking loudly. Clearly, this was not a good place for me to cultivate.

I gave it up, pocketed the token, and started back toward the city.

On a quiet street, I left the shuttle boots off and walked instead, wanting the slow pace, the quiet.

When I felt a little tired, I turned into a bar—a real street-side little bar, nothing like the grand establishment Du Xiaoran ran.

The lights inside were dim, spotlights flickering overhead. It felt almost like the Mundane World.

I sat alone and savored a glass of wine.

A bar hostess wandered over and dropped into the seat beside me without ceremony. “Uncle, buy me a drink?”

Only then did I remember I still wore the face of a middle-aged man. I was twenty-one. Being called “Uncle” felt strange no matter how many times it happened.

I bought her the drink, watched her finish it, and said, “Drinking’s not great for an electronic bionic person. Careful your wiring doesn’t short out. You might reveal your true form.”

She clicked her tongue. “Boring. You new here?”

“Yeah. First time here. Anything interesting going on? Tell me.”

She leaned back a little at that, wary now, studying me carefully.