Chapter 445 Drifting
Real? Or imaginary?
Yu Sheng could no longer tell the difference, and he felt that there was no need to tell the difference anymore.
He stood in a sea of bizarre lights and shadows, and seemed to be surrounded by endless crystal curtains that shone with magnificent and magical light. In the constantly changing crystalline space and time, he seemed to have lost the concept of up and down, left and right, cause and effect, and before and after. There were constant seemingly plausible illusions and vague sounds emerging between those curtains, and in this space where everything was changing at any time, an old man with white hair and beard was standing quietly opposite him.
He no longer had the terrifying look of being fused with the deformed crystal, and he also had a slightly different... "temperament" from Yun Qingzi that Yu Sheng had seen in Garrison-3.
Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment, slowly approached the old man, and then hesitantly broke the silence: "Yun Qingzi?"
"It is the old man."
"...Which one are you?" Yu Sheng asked again.
The old man laughed: "Is there any difference?"
Yu Sheng did not speak, but just frowned slightly - only then did he realize that he also had a "body" here, and was not just a cognitive projection.
"One thousand years, one hundred and twenty-two iterations, the original Yun Qingzi has long been dead, but there are countless images of the Great Dao... Yun Qingzi may have never died, and I may have always been here," Yun Qingzi said slowly with a faint smile on his face, "Compared to my superficial changes in life and death, don't you have bigger secrets? For example, right now - are you dead or alive?"
Yu Sheng thought about it and spread his hands: "Maybe a little bit dead."
Yun Qingzi was stunned for a moment, and then burst into laughter.
"Where is this place?" Yu Sheng waited for the other party to stop smiling and asked curiously, "Inside the derivative star body? Does this place really exist, or is it some kind of 'consciousness space'?"
Yun Qingzi gradually stopped smiling and shook his head: "You can think whatever you want. To a street kid from the 'outside', our understanding of time, space and order doesn't mean much."
"What is the current state of the Yanxing body?" Yu Sheng asked again, "You seem to have escaped from His control now - so He is really dying?"
"The Derivative Star Body could not be considered 'alive' from the beginning. Perhaps the same is true for other dark angels... They had been dead for countless years when they came to our world," Yun Qingzi said calmly, "but if you mean the 'activity' of the Derivative Star Body, then it was indeed 'dead' the moment it left Shuji."
Yu Sheng frowned.
"That leap out of the atmosphere exhausted his energy," Yun Qingzi looked at Yu Sheng calmly, "Fellow Daoist, you had already succeeded at that time."
Unexpected, but not that surprising.
Yu Sheng slowly raised his head and looked at the space around him where light and shadow were disordered and crystalline texture was everywhere. At the same time, he recalled the voice he had just heard in the darkness.
"I just heard a voice," he broke the silence, "that voice told it to take root and survive. It seems to be the memory of the star-derived body? So it is just a seed? It parasitizes one planet after another, just repeating the process of 'taking root' and 'surviving'?"
"I have heard the voice you heard for a thousand years," Yun Qingzi said, shaking his head gently, "I don't really understand it either, because the 'Star Derivative Body' does not have clear logic and wisdom - its chaos is beyond your imagination. But..."
He paused for a moment when he said this, then turned around and waved his hand gently.
"There is something here, hidden in the deepest part of his memory. Perhaps that is the answer you want."
The magnificent crystal curtain before my eyes began to ripple, and some blurry images gradually appeared in the clear curtain of light and shadow.
A planet, magnificent and shining, like a sparkling space gem in the sun.
A plant that is more majestic than a mountain, more vast than an ocean, and older than civilization.
It is rooted in the planet - for the first 100,000 years it is part of the planet, and for the next 100,000 years the planet is part of it.
On the days when its branches are most luxuriant, it can even open its crown to the sun, using its stored energy to reheat its somewhat cooled core, or capture nearby celestial bodies to replenish nutrients for its "garden".
Yes, it had a lush garden - although at first even it itself had no idea what was in the garden, or even when the garden itself appeared.
Because it was just a plant, in the first 100,000 years, it didn't even know what "thinking" meant.
But one day, the "garden" just appeared. It seemed to be just a small "accident" that happened occasionally during the growth and mutation of its overly large body. Some debris that fell off its body surface occupied a small space between the crystal branches, and then multiplied in the jungle full of living crystals.
The garden has become a unique... "ecological patch" on its body.
And in this "ecological patch", many strange little things gradually grew out - very fragile, very small, very busy, but very smart, and able to think.
They can carve things out of crystal, collect heat from underground, and make all sorts of gadgets out of the metal residue left over after the "mother vine" has been digested - some of those gadgets can fly, some can glow, and some can make noisy noises.
They called this process "creation," and they also created a more abstract concept called civilization.
The giant planetary plant didn’t quite understand what “civilization” meant, but it gradually realized that… it was also learning to “think”.
It took it nearly a thousand years to figure out how its "thinking" worked, and in the process it referred to the physiological structures of the busy little lives in the "garden" on its "belly". Finally, it came to a conclusion - the little creatures in the garden had an organ called a "brain", and now it also had a brain, and its brain was the "garden" itself.
The little creatures think in the garden, so the "mother vine" can think in the garden.
Very interesting.
Among the small creatures there was a group called "scholars". They also found this very interesting. They created more abstract concepts, such as planetary will and collective intelligence. They also argued for hundreds of years just to discuss whether "the thinking of the tribe led to the planet's consciousness" or "first there was a lofty and sacred planetary consciousness, and then the Mother Vine of Creation bestowed her 'spirit' on all living beings."
These discussions are also very interesting.
I wish the world could always be this interesting.
But one day, the star fell down.
That was the day when the whole world was engulfed in red light.
The stars kept falling, like balls of abstract and rough graffiti, like bizarre celestial bodies imagined by children with poor painting skills. Large and small colored patches fell on the ground, and colorful flames rose up.
On the burning earth, countless points of light, large and small, rose from the sea of fire.
Recording devices storing knowledge, metal plates engraved with wills, containers containing biological specimens, and curled up bodies of the dead.
The forests and rocks rose and swayed in the starlight, the sky tilted over the horizon, and the remaining black shadows after the stars fell hung in the sky like extinguished lights.
The "Mother Vine" could not understand what was happening - just like 100,000 years ago, it could not understand why a thinking organ called "garden" suddenly appeared in its body.
At first, it thought this was just part of a growth mutation - just like some strange changes would appear on its body, the world might also suddenly change.
What if another interesting garden appears after all the stars fall?
But soon, it heard a new word from the "scholars": the end of the world.
The end of the world is coming.
Everything interesting will disappear, including the garden and its creatures.
The mother vine anxiously asked the clever little creatures what to do, but the little creatures said there was no way.
At least this planet cannot survive.
Then we can only find a way to preserve the seeds.
Reminded by the little creatures, the mother vine recalled - yes, seeds.
It can produce seeds.
In the shortest time possible, the little creatures helped the mother vine design the structure of the seed, designed a device to launch it into space, and designed the "growth curve" of the seed... They actually wanted to design more things, but there was no time.
In the end, the mother vine, the garden, the small creatures, this huge, complex and wonderful symbiotic wisdom only had time to design a single instruction for the seed -
"Go... find a new home, put down roots, and find a way to survive..."
If it does take root successfully, then find a way to flourish again.
Then grow a garden - to think, to observe, to learn, to...
But in the endless darkness outside the world there is no new home suitable for it to take root.
Even if you arrive at another "world", there is no place for uninvited guests in the isolated ark.
The scenes in my memory receded like the tide, and the gorgeous crystal curtain appeared before my eyes again.
Yu Sheng blinked and looked at the old man beside him.
"Take root, grow, wither, take root again, grow again, and then wither again," Yu Sheng said slowly after a moment's silence. "I discovered before that the evolution and ascension cycle of the star-derived body seems to be meaningless, because after accumulating huge amounts of energy, the 'ascending body' that is transformed is only to transform into the most basic form on the next planet and take root again. From the 'ascending body' to the 'fruiting body', it is essentially a meaningless regression, all the energy is wasted, and its life cycle is 'idling'.
“Now, all of this has an answer.”
This is a seed that has lost its homeland, wandering in a foreign land where it cannot take root.
(End of this chapter)
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