Chapter 444

Chapter 445: Drifting

Real, or not? Yu Sheng could no longer tell, and he felt it no longer mattered.

He stood amid wild shifting lights. Endless crystal curtains shimmered around him, bright and strange. In this changing crystal space, up and down and before and after seemed to lose their meaning. Hazy Illusion Arts and muffled voices flickered between the veils. In this place where everything changed at every moment, a white haired old man stood quietly across from him.

He no longer looked like the horror welded into a twisted crystal mass, and his “aura” was a little different from the Yun Qing Zi Yu Sheng had met at Garrison 3.

Yu Sheng hesitated, stepped closer, and asked: “Yun Qing Zi?”

“It is I.”

“…Which one are you?” he asked.

The old man smiled: “Does it matter?”

Yu Sheng did not answer. He only frowned a little. He noticed, belatedly, that he had a “body” here, not just a mental shadow.

“A thousand years. One hundred and twenty two iterations. The first Yun Qing Zi died long ago. But the Way has a thousand shapes. Yun Qing Zi may also have never died, and I may always have been here,” Yun Qing Zi said with a gentle smile. “Compared with my small change of life and death, your secret is greater. For example, right now: are you dead or alive?”

Yu Sheng thought, then held out his hands: “Maybe a little dead.”

Yun Qing Zi blinked, then laughed aloud.

“Where is this place?” Yu Sheng asked after the laughter faded. “Inside the Youth Form? Is this real, or some kind of ‘mind space’?”

Yun Qing Zi slowly shook his head: “Think of it however you like. To a wanderer from ‘outside,’ our ideas of time and order do not matter much.”

“Then what state is the Youth Form in now?” Yu Sheng asked. “You look free of its control. Is it really about to die?”

“The Youth Form wasn’t ‘alive’ from the start. Perhaps the other Dark Angels are the same. When they came to our world, they had already been dead for endless ages,” said Yun Qing Zi. “But if you mean its ‘activity,’ then yes. It died the moment it left Sentinel Silence.”

Yu Sheng frowned.

“The leap that broke through the atmosphere spent the last of its strength,” Yun Qing Zi said calmly. “Fellow daoist, you had already succeeded then.”

Unexpected, yet not entirely.

Yu Sheng slowly looked up at the crystal bright, broken space around them. At the same time, he remembered the voice he had just heard in the dark.

“I heard a voice,” he said. “It told it to take root and survive. That seems to be the Youth Form’s memory. So it’s just a seed? It parasitizes planet after planet, just repeating ‘take root’ and ‘stay alive’?”

“I have heard that voice for a thousand years,” Yun Qing Zi said, shaking his head. “I do not truly understand either, because the ‘Youth Form’ has no clear logic or wisdom. Its chaos is beyond your imagination. But…”

He paused, then turned and lifted a hand.

“There are things here, hidden in its deepest memory. Perhaps that is your answer.”

The crystal veils rippled. In the clear light, blurred scenes slowly formed.

A planet, bright and beautiful, shining like a jewel in sunlight.

A plant, taller than mountains, wider than seas, older than civilizations.

It took root on the planet. For the first hundred thousand years, it was part of the planet. For the next hundred thousand years, the planet was part of it.

In the days when its branches of life were most lush, it could even raise a crown to the sun and use stored energy to reheat a cooling core, or catch nearby passing bodies to feed its “garden.”

Yes, it had a garden. At first, it did not even know what was in the garden, or when the garden appeared.

Because it was only a plant. For the first hundred thousand years, it did not even understand what “thinking” was.

One day, the “garden” just appeared. It seemed to be a small accident during growth and mutation. Some flakes shed from its surface filled a bit of open ground between crystal branches. In that living crystal forest, life spread.

The garden became a special “ecological patch” on its body.

In that patch, many odd little things grew. They were fragile, small, busy, and very smart. They could think.

They carved crystal. They drew heat from underground. They turned metal scraps that the Mother Vine could not digest into all kinds of little gadgets. Some flew. Some shone. Some made noisy sounds.

They called this process “creation.” They also created a more abstract idea called civilization.

The giant planetary plant did not really understand “civilization,” but it slowly realized it too was learning to “think.”

It took about a thousand years to figure out how its thinking worked. It studied the bodies of the busy little beings in its “belly,” in the garden, and reached a conclusion: the little beings had an organ called a “brain.” Now it had a brain too, and its brain was the garden itself.

The little beings thought inside the garden, so the Mother Vine could think with the garden.

Interesting.

Among the little beings there was a group called scholars. They also thought it was interesting. They created more abstract ideas, like planetary will and collective intelligence. They argued for hundreds of years about whether “the group’s thoughts caused the planet to awaken,” or “a sacred planetary will first existed and then the Mother Vine gifted ‘spirit’ to all.”

Those debates were interesting too.

If only the world could stay this interesting.

But one day, the stars fell.

Red light swallowed the world.

The stars kept dropping, like rough scribbles of tangled lines, like strange bodies a child might draw. Big and small colored patches hit the ground and rose into flames of many colors.

Across the burning land, uncountable lights rose from the fire.

Data devices filled with knowledge. Metal plates etched with last words. Vessels holding biological samples. Curled, silent remains.

Forest and stone heaved and swayed in starlight. The sky tilted along the horizon. The black shadows left by fallen stars hung there like lamps gone dark.

The Mother Vine could not understand what had happened, just as it had not understood, a hundred thousand years earlier, why a “garden” had suddenly grown on it.

At first, it thought this too was only part of growth and mutation. Just as odd changes appeared on its body, maybe the world itself sometimes changed shape.

What if, after the stars fell, another interesting garden might appear?

But soon, from the scholars’ mouths, it learned a new word: the end of the world.

The end had come.

All interesting things would vanish. The garden would vanish. The little beings in the garden would vanish.

The Mother Vine begged the clever little beings for a plan, but they said there was none.

At least this planet could not be saved.

Then they had to save a seed.

With the little beings’ reminder, the Mother Vine remembered: yes, seeds.

It could make seeds.

In the shortest time, the little beings helped the Mother Vine design the seed’s structure, design the device to launch it into space, and design the seed’s later “growth curve.” They wanted to design more, but time ran out.

In the very end, the Mother Vine, the garden, the little beings, this vast, complex, wonderful symbiotic mind managed to write only one order into the seed:

“Go… find a new home, take root, and try to live…”

If it really took root, then it should try to grow lush again.

Then grow another garden, to think, to watch, to learn, to…

But out in the endless darkness beyond the world, there was no new home where it could take root.

Even when it reached another “world,” that solitary ark had no place for an uninvited guest.

The scenes ebbed like a tide. The bright crystal veils returned.

Yu Sheng blinked and looked at the old man beside him.

“Take root, grow, wither. Take root again, regenerate, then wither again,” he said after a pause. “I noticed before that the Youth Form’s Metamorphosis and Ascension cycles seemed meaningless. After hoarding a huge amount of energy, its so called Ascension Body only turns back into the most basic shape to take root on the next planet. From Ascension Body to a child Entity is a pointless regression. All that energy is wasted. Its life cycle is idling.

“Now I have the answer.”

It is a seed that lost its home, drifting on soil where it cannot take root.