Chapter 445

Chapter 445: Drifting

Real?

Or an illusion?

Yu Sheng could no longer tell, and he no longer felt he needed to.

He stood amid a storm of shifting light. Endless crystal veils shimmered around him, gleaming with gorgeous, unreal colors. In this ever-changing crystalline time-space, up and down, left and right, cause and effect, before and after all seemed to lose their meaning. Half-formed illusion arts and muffled voices surfaced between the curtains. And in this place where anything could change at any moment, a white-haired old man stood quietly across from him.

The old man was no longer the terrifying thing fused with warped crystal. He also felt slightly different from the Yun Qing Zi Yu Sheng had seen at garrison-3—a subtly changed aura.

Yu Sheng hesitated, then approached and broke the silence with care. “Yun Qing Zi?”

“That would be this old man.”

“…Which one are you?” Yu Sheng asked.

Yun Qing Zi laughed. “Does it matter?”

Yu Sheng didn’t answer. He only frowned. It was only then that he belatedly realized he had a body here. He wasn’t just a projection of consciousness.

“A thousand years. One hundred and twenty-two iterations. The original Yun Qing Zi has long been dead, yet the Great Dao has countless forms…” Yun Qing Zi spoke slowly, a faint smile on his lips. “Perhaps Yun Qing Zi never died at all. Perhaps this old man has been here all along.”

His gaze rested on Yu Sheng. “Compared to my crude little matter of life and death, aren’t the secrets on you far greater, Daoist Friend?

“For example… right now—are you dead, or alive?”

Yu Sheng considered it, then spread his hands. “Maybe I’m a little dead.”

Yun Qing Zi froze. Then he burst into loud laughter.

Once the laughter faded, Yu Sheng’s curiosity rose. “What is this place? Inside Yanxing Entity? Is this somewhere real, or some kind of mindscape?”

Yun Qing Zi’s smile thinned, and he shook his head. “Think of it however you like. For a wanderer who came from ‘outside,’ our understanding of space-time and order has little meaning.”

“Then what state is Yanxing Entity in right now?” Yu Sheng pressed. “You look like you’ve slipped free of Its control. Is It really about to die?”

“Yanxing Entity was never truly alive to begin with. Perhaps the other dark angels are the same…” Yun Qing Zi said evenly. “When They came into our world, They had already been dead for countless ages.”

He paused, then added, “But if you mean Yanxing Entity’s activity, then yes. It died the moment It left Shu Ji.”

Yu Sheng’s brow furrowed.

“That leap out of the atmosphere spent the last of Its strength,” Yun Qing Zi said, meeting his eyes. “Daoist Friend, you had already succeeded.”

Unexpected—and yet not entirely.

Yu Sheng lifted his head and looked around the scrambled light and crystalline textures. At the same time, he remembered the voice he had heard in the darkness.

“I heard a voice just now,” he said. “It told it to take root and live. That was Yanxing Entity’s memory, wasn’t it?

“So it was only a seed?

“It parasitizes one planet after another, just repeating this process—take root and survive?”

“The voice you heard is one this old man has listened to for a thousand years,” Yun Qing Zi said, gently shaking his head. “I don’t truly understand it either, because Yanxing Entity has no clear logic or wisdom. Its chaos is beyond what you can imagine.”

“But…”

He turned and lifted a hand, brushing the crystal veils like silk.

“There are things here, buried in the deepest part of Its memory. Perhaps that is the answer you want.”

The veils rippled. Within the transparent curtains of light and shadow, blurry images slowly surfaced.

A planet—radiant, dazzling, gleaming in sunlight like a jewel set in space.

A plant—more majestic than mountains, broader than oceans, older than civilization itself.

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

In the days when its living branches were at their fullest, it could spread a crown toward the sun, use stored energy to reheat its cooling core, and even snare nearby passing bodies to feed its garden.

Yes, it had a flourishing garden—though at first it didn’t even know what was inside that garden, and it couldn’t remember when the garden itself had appeared.

Because it was only a plant. In the first hundred thousand years, it didn’t even understand what thinking meant.

But one day, the garden simply appeared.

It seemed to be nothing more than a small accident during the growth and mutation of an overly vast body. Bits that fell from its surface claimed a patch of open ground between crystal branches, then multiplied within that forest of living crystal.

The garden became a distinct ecological patch on its body.

And within that patch, many strange little things gradually grew—fragile, tiny, busy, but clever. Capable of thought.

They carved things from crystal. They learned to gather heat from underground. They even turned the metal remnants left after Mother Vine digested its food into all sorts of little gadgets—some that flew, some that glowed, some that made noisy sounds.

They called this process creation. And they created an even more abstract concept: civilization.

The enormous planetary plant didn’t truly understand what civilization meant, but it gradually realized… it, too, was learning to think.

It took nearly a thousand years to understand how its thinking worked. In the process, it studied the bodies of those busy little lives inside the garden on its belly. In the end it reached a conclusion: the small creatures in the garden had an organ called a brain, and now it had a brain too. Its brain was the garden itself.

The small creatures thought inside the garden, and so Mother Vine could think through the garden.

How interesting.

Among the small creatures was a group called scholars. They found it fascinating too. They created more abstract ideas—planetary will, collective intelligence—and they argued noisily for centuries, just to debate whether the clan’s thinking caused the planet to awaken, or whether a lofty and sacred planetary consciousness existed first, and then the creator Mother Vine granted its spirit to all beings.

Those arguments were interesting too.

If only this world could stay interesting forever.

But one day, the stars fell.

It was the day the whole world was swallowed by red light.

The stars kept crashing down—crude tangles of abstract scribbles, grotesque celestial bodies imagined in a child’s clumsy drawings. Large and small patches of color slammed into the earth, sending up flames of every hue.

Across the burning land, countless points of light rose from the sea of fire.

Record devices storing knowledge. Metal plates engraved with last words. Containers holding biological specimens. Bodies curled around death.

Forests and rocks rose and swayed beneath starlight. The sky hung tilted along the horizon, and the shadows left after the stars fell dangled at the edge of the world like extinguished lamps.

Mother Vine could not understand what had happened—just as, a hundred thousand years earlier, it could not understand how a thinking organ called the garden had suddenly appeared on its body.

At first, it believed this was simply another part of growth and mutation. Strange changes appeared on its body all the time. Perhaps the world could change shape too.

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

But soon it heard a new word from the scholars: apocalypse.

The end had come.

Everything interesting would vanish—the garden too, and the little creatures within it as well.

Mother Vine anxiously asked the clever little creatures what it should do, but they said there was no way.

At least, this planet could not survive.

Then they could only find a way to preserve the seed.

At the creatures’ reminder, Mother Vine remembered. Yes—a seed.

It could make seeds.

In the shortest time, the little creatures helped Mother Vine design the seed’s structure, the device to launch it into space, the seed’s growth curve afterward… They wanted to design more, but there was no time.

In the end, Mother Vine, the garden, and the little creatures—this vast, complex, wondrous symbiotic intelligence—only managed to give the seed a single instruction:

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

If it truly managed to take root, it should grow lush again.

Then grow another garden—to think, to observe, to learn, to…

But in the endless darkness beyond the world, there was no new home fit for it to take root.

Even if it reached another world, that solitary ark left no room for an uninvited guest.

The images receded like a tide, and the gorgeous crystalline veils returned before Yu Sheng’s eyes.

He blinked and looked at the old man beside him.

“Take root, grow, wither, then take root again. Regrow, and wither again,” Yu Sheng said slowly, thinking it through. “I noticed it before. Yanxing Entity’s metamorphosis and ascension cycle looked meaningless, because the ascension form it created after storing immense energy existed only so it could turn back into its most basic form on the next planet and take root again. From ascension form to child entity was, in essence, a pointless regression. All that energy was wasted. Its life cycle was just spinning in place.”

He exhaled. “Now it all makes sense.”

It was a seed that had lost its home, drifting on foreign soil where it could not take root.