Chapter 83: I Was Stunned by My Own Idea

Chapter 83: I Was Stunned by My Own Idea

Picking up where the last chapter left off—I’d smashed apart Pu Liuqian’s parasitic host, and the patrol team had also captured the fat man she had parasitized.

I expected her to keep using him for something. Instead, once the capture net closed tight around him, he simply went still.

Had Pu Liuqian’s consciousness body returned to her true body? I probed him with force of consciousness, and sure enough—her consciousness was no longer inside the fat man’s brain.

At that point, I couldn’t be bothered with what came next.

I withdrew the consciousness I had used to parasitize Li Tongfei, told him to release the fat man, and instructed him to say that Gu Beichen had fled and that the consciousness had returned to its true body. The whole patrol team was to stand down.

Li Tongfei looked a little dazed—he’d lost time to amnesia and his body still ached from the beating Pu Liuqian had given him. But now, seeing me in Pu Liuqian’s appearance, he didn’t ask questions. He just did as I said.

Then I flew off myself, in a hurry.

That close fight had shown me exactly how dangerous Pu Liuqian really was. If I hadn’t brought the patrol team into it—if it had come down to just the two of us—I honestly couldn’t say I’d have won.

She probably hadn’t even shown me everything she had. Her force-of-consciousness rank might sit a notch above mine. And martial techniques-wise, all I’d seen was her mind arts. No telling what else she was holding back.

I had ultimately taken advantage of the situation and destroyed that host of hers. But I believed Pu Liuqian would immediately return in a new appearance.

That was the maddening thing about elite people—they simply refused to die. Both sides fought through proxies, and in the end it all came down to who had deeper pockets.

An ordinary person, though—dead was dead. No coming back from that.

Meng Ran, my old classmate back in Liutan Town, had his skull blown open by the Wisdom Capsule, and his family lost that son for good. Maybe that was part of why elite people had no interest in living in the Mundane World.

In the Elite World, even an ordinary elite person could order a parasitic host—cheap, standardized ones if money was tight. In the Mundane World, that simply didn’t exist.

Parasitic hosts could be used there too, technically, but only with resistance backing. The Elite World kept its high technology under tight lock, and I’d never seen anything like it at the Sweepers’ base. The resistance bases only carried forward what the Elite World had already built.

So my real goal wasn’t proving who was stronger, or beating anyone, or wiping anyone out. None of that meant anything. What I actually needed was to grow strong enough to seize the core Shadow Pavilion, take control of it, break the barrier between the Elite and Mundane Worlds, and bring high technology to all of humanity—the mission Mother and Uncle had handed me.

People like Pu Liuqian and Pu Xuande, standing in the way—there was no point tangling with them if I could avoid it. I couldn’t kill them anyway.

Come to think of it, the reason people like them survived anything was simple: a person’s consciousness body could be transferred. And someone as strong as Pu Liuqian probably had more than one avatar to spare.

I remembered the old woman telling me that every human brain was, at its root, a receiver of cosmic consciousness—that what we called personal consciousness was really just the result of same-frequency resonance with cosmic consciousness. Which meant, at bottom, every one of our consciousnesses came from the deep reaches of cosmic space.

So did that mean that if I could reach deep into cosmic space and interact directly with the consciousness there, I could trace every person’s consciousness body back to its source?

I was suddenly stunned by my own bold idea.

No. Surely not.

If that was possible, I wouldn’t need to make an enemy of anyone, keep trading blows, or act on some hot-blooded sense of jianghu pride. I could sidestep everyone entirely and cultivate myself into a transcendent existence. And if I actually managed it—if I could reach deep space and interact with cosmic consciousness—could I change or erase an opponent’s consciousness source within the consciousness of deep cosmic space, and change the world from there?

If I was right, then the ones truly ruling the world had never been the people standing tall and visible above everyone else. It was whoever stood behind them, able to interact with cosmic consciousness.

That was when I thought of the Shadow Pavilion.

The Shadow Pavilion had always been something hazy, undefined—no one could say what form it actually took, or even how many people belonged to it.

Only after seeing that old woman who looked so much like Grandma did I understand: the Shadow Pavilion was likely a group built around my father as its core, their consciousness bodies fused with the spin-qubit life-form of the quantum core supercomputer into one unified consciousness body, while still carrying independent personalities.

That kind of hybrid life had already outgrown the whole idea of being human.

If so, their one purpose in doing this could only be to converse with the deep reaches of cosmic space. From what the old woman had told me, it wasn’t hard to guess that the Shadow Pavilion had already reached a transcendent, cosmic-level existence.

Across both the Elite and Mundane Worlds, the Shadow Pavilion never showed itself directly—only its spokesman, Pu Xuande, styled himself as the Shadow Pavilion and issued the Shadow Pavilion’s decrees to the outside world. So the world assumed Pu Xuande was the real boss of the world. But Mother and Uncle had never believed that. To them, he was only a spokesman. The Shadow Pavilion was the final boss.

That old woman, so much like Grandma, had actually helped me a great deal. Her sudden arrival, and her sudden departure—I could view them as my father’s final confession.

She’d told me she herself was an energy-aggregated body of consciousness.

That single sentence held more than I could unpack. Humanity. Cosmic-level existence. Cosmic consciousness. The aggregation of consciousness energy. The reception of consciousness, and the reconstruction of independent personality. All of these were cultivation goals she had shown me.

No wonder she’d carried that calm, gentle manner without a trace of ordinary human love or hate. She held herself with a kind of noble tenderness throughout—maybe that was simply what a transcendent being felt, looking back on the ordinary life it once had.

So the Shadow Pavilion had long since become something capable of conversing with the deep reaches of cosmic space. The only human feeling left in it was whatever remained of my father’s consciousness. Beyond that, they’d likely already moved past anything you could call human.

If so, it was simply unbelievable.

My whole understanding of the Shadow Pavilion, together with my grasp of the theory of deep cosmic space, left me stunned beyond words.

If every guess I’d made held true, then what I needed now was to push my own consciousness up to the third level as fast as I could—cosmic-level force of consciousness, as the old woman had called it. At that point, I’d need no tool at all to achieve same-frequency alignment with cosmic consciousness in etheric form.

So why was I still wasting breath on someone like Pu Liuqian? Let her walk her road. I’d walk mine.

Once I could align with the universe in etheric form, people like Pu Liuqian and Pu Xuande would be nothing more than ants underfoot.

So this was what Mother and Uncle had been pointing me toward all along—the stars and the sea.

People like Pu Liuqian and Pu Xuande had never actually stood in my way at all.

No wonder Mother and Uncle had never once pushed me to compete with them. Even when the Soul Hunters were hunting the resistance down, neither of them showed hatred, never once looked for a way to strike back, to destroy them, to win.

Once I worked through that, I found I no longer wanted to hold anything against Pu Liuqian.

I forgave her.

Let her go on ruling however she liked. What I needed to do was study my own stars and sea.

The stars and the sea. Stars. Chenxing. Gu Chenxing?

Had he known his own purpose all along?

My name was Gu Beichen. Beichen?

In celestial phenomena, Beichen refers to the North Star, the bright star nearest the north celestial pole. In modern astronomy, it corresponds to Alpha Ursae Minoris—Gouchen One. In ancient Huaxia astronomy and culture, it symbolized the dwelling place of the Heavenly Emperor, or the emperor himself. Because its position was nearly motionless while the other stars revolved around it, people regarded it as the Pivot of Heaven.

Maybe my own cosmic origin lay at that Pivot of Heaven.

I took out the green jade token and studied it closely.

Maybe this was the key that opened the way to the stars and the sea. When the old woman had given it to me, she’d said plainly that this green jade token was a cosmic-consciousness receiving amplifier. It could strengthen my reception of cosmic consciousness and let me interact with the cosmic wisdom energy field, sensing and receiving more cosmic wisdom.

Damn it, what an idiot I’d been. The old woman had said it so clearly. She had told me it could open the consciousness of deep cosmic space, and like an absolute fool, I had gone and used it as a bomb to blast that casino fat man away.

I had truly wasted a priceless treasure.

Thinking this, I immediately contacted Uncle and asked him to find me a quiet place where I could cultivate.

He got back to me right away: there was a resistance secret base in Hua City, not large, a little like a research institute or intelligence station, about the same size as Du Xiaoran’s base.

I immediately moved in stealth and concealed movement, keeping my consciousness body tightly shielded. I did this mainly to avoid being tracked by the Sky Eyes. I needed an absolutely safe place to cultivate.

Following Uncle’s arrangement, I met the base’s director the next morning with no trouble at all.

I hadn’t expected the director to be a woman, and a young-looking one at that—though elite people could reshape their own biology however they liked, so appearance didn’t mean much anymore.

Once she learned I wanted to cultivate in quiet, she led me to an extremely well-hidden cultivation room, something like the shielded room Du Xiaoran had once shown me. Except this one wasn’t in any building. It sat at the bottom of a lake, in a park outside the city.

Yes—that same park, that same lake I’d visited before.

No one would ever guess there was something hidden beneath that water.

I sat alone in the quiet of that lake-bottom cultivation room.

Through my penetrating waves and electromagnetic-wave processing ability, I could sense a chaotic tangle of information and data streams filling the sky above—except something was filtering all that noise down into a specific frequency.

What was this?

I looked around. The walls were crystalline, catching the sunlight that filtered down through the water above, glowing faintly, rippling with reflected light.

Back when I’d taken revenge on the Midnight Group in the Mundane World, I’d picked up an electromagnetic-wave processing structure that let my brain handle information directly. It didn’t take long to work out that the lake water and the crystal walls were locked in some kind of relationship—one that gave this lake-bottom cultivation room its filtering effect on information streams.

This room hadn’t been built at the lake bottom simply for the quiet. Someone had used the water and the crystal walls together to turn it into something far better suited to cultivating consciousness.

I couldn’t say whether this was Engineer Lin’s design or Uncle’s, but either way, I had to admire what elite people’s technology could do—nothing in the Mundane World came close.

Before that night at the bar, I’d sat by this same lake and tried the green jade token once, and felt just a trace of this effect even then.

Understanding all that, I settled my mind and sat down on the floor.

I took out the fourth green jade token and laid it gently on top of the first green jade token. Then I closed my eyes halfway, cleared every stray thought from my brain, and let focus, imagination, stillness, observation, insight, and other forces of consciousness seep into the two green jade tokens as I slowly reached for the secrets coming from deep space.

At that moment, filtered down to a specific frequency, the information streams overhead resolved into a pure deep-space signal.

In the world inside my mind, I seemed to watch that information stream and the voidlike flowing current in deep space drift slowly. As if summoned by something, they began converging toward the green jade tokens, carrying with them a clear yet low, ringing sound.