Chapter 1015: Spiral

Chapter 1015: The Spiral

In the forest camp, beneath a tent stitched from beast hides, the once-haughty King of Domar City lay frail upon his bed.

Rain had fallen all through the previous night; perhaps soaked by the downpour, his wounds had swollen ever more.

It seemed not only the Progenitor but even the great Insof Tree had sided with the Qiu people.

But why?

Those creatures could not hear the voice of the Insof Tree, yet they had won its favor.

Lying on his bed, Tun Nan pondered in vain, his consciousness gradually drifting into haze.

At this moment, he had yet to grasp his own insignificance before heaven and earth.

The one who had defeated him was never the Qiu people, nor the Progenitor, nor the Insof Tree—it was the arrogance and greed deep within his own heart.

He thought he had unraveled the secrets of the Insof Tree, never realizing he was but an ant at its roots; what little he had grasped was not even the bark’s surface—only withered leaves and dead skin.

Yet this was not his fault.

The limits of his age decreed that he could only see the world from an ant’s perspective.

The giant of the forest tribes had yet to arise; the dawn of thought had not yet stirred.

Perhaps, as time passed, when his descendants finally walked out of this forest, truly kindled the spark of civilization, set their feet toward the stars, and came to know the Insof Tree anew… they might hold a different understanding.

But that would be a matter of countless millennia hence.

If their civilization could endure the test of time and reach that day…

Gazing at the weakened chieftain, Sa Qu, seated beside the bed, sighed softly and spoke in a trembling voice.

“…The prophecy has come to pass after all.”

Flames, corpses, death…

That was the revelation he had received when he connected with the Insof Tree, and he had seen it even before the war began.

And so it all had indeed come to pass.

The omniscient and omnipotent One seemed to pierce through causality—or rather, It was causality itself!

Terrified by that dreadful karma, Sa Qu pressed his left hand to his chest, pinched a pinch of beast bone ash with his right, and cast it into the fire, muttering incantations as he confessed and prayed to the great Insof Tree and the Progenitor.

Tun Nan, who had been half-squinting, suddenly opened his eyes. On his angular, weakened face, a rare trace of piety emerged.

“I see the Insof Tree… It is calling me.”

Hearing this, Sa Qu’s face changed drastically. He grasped the young leader’s hand, his voice tinged with pleading.

“Please do not abandon us.”

Tun Nan sighed, his breath faint as he spoke slowly.

“I do not wish to, but my time is short… Not heeding the Progenitor’s counsel was the greatest mistake I ever made. The descendants of Domar City must remember this profound lesson.”

As he spoke, a flush of rosy luster suddenly suffused his weak face.

Like a final flicker of life, he raised his arm and gripped Sa Qu’s wrist.

“I must return to Domar City. Take me before the Progenitor… I want to apologize to him in person.”

That was his final wish, the revelation he had seen through the Insof Tree.

It was the last thing he could do for his people.

Seeing the piety and resolve in those eyes, Sa Qu choked back tears and nodded, agreeing to the dying chieftain.

“Very well.”

Escorted by three hundred remaining soldiers, the warriors of the Domar tribe traveled day and night, finally bringing Tun Nan—barely half-alive—back to Domar City before the sun set for the third time.

And at that moment, outside the temple at the roots of the sacred tree, devout worshippers lay prostrate beside the mountain-thick roots.

Tens of thousands of fireflies swirled beneath the vast, rustling canopy, turning night into day and gilding every leaf in gold.

Seeing this incredible sight, the tribal warriors returning from the front lines widened their eyes, and the priests who had accompanied the army wore expressions of utter disbelief.

Even Tun Nan, who possessed the strongest “spiritual energy” in their tribe, could never have summoned so many “sacred light insects.”

An ordinary tribesman who had awakened his spiritual energy could only command a few dozen or a few hundred at most.

But the “sacred light insects” now swirling here illuminated the entire sacred tree!

Their numbers had grown too vast for the language of the Insof Tree’s children to describe!

“The Golden Tree…”

Sa Qu murmured to himself, staring fixedly at the canopy that seemed to glow.

He recalled an ancient legend.

It was said that in the distant dawn of the barbaric age, when all the people of this land still dwelt in the forbidden forest valley, the first sacred tree that sheltered all living things had shone exactly like this!

Now that long-vanished vision had once again descended upon this forest—and upon the sacred tree of the Domar tribe.

Overflowing with ecstasy, Sa Qu felt more confusion than joy.

What had happened?!

Just then, he saw the temple maiden kneeling at the entrance of the sanctuary—

Dora, who delivered prophecies on behalf of the Progenitor.

With trembling steps, he hurried over the winding roots and quickly reached the temple entrance.

Kneeling beside her, the old man clasped his hands in prayer and established a spiritual connection to ask.

“What has happened here?”

Dora kept her eyes closed, her devout face utterly serene, her heart as calm as a lake stirring silent echoes.

“…The Insof Tree has manifested a miracle. The Progenitor has heard Its voice once more.”

Sa Qu was stunned, then his expression suddenly changed.

“Is the Progenitor still inside?”

Dora nodded gently.

“We begged him to come out, but he refused…”

Sa Qu stood frozen in bewilderment. Coming to his senses, he rose from the ground and strode toward the temple entrance.

Dora did not stop him; she merely opened her eyes and watched his back disappear into the sanctuary.

Not long after, the aged priest emerged from the temple again, his eyes vacant.

His face was etched with confusion, astonishment… and gradually turned to panic and fear.

He had clearly walked deep into the temple! Yet, as he walked, he found himself back at the entrance!

Dora looked at him and spoke in that silent language.

“No one can enter the temple…”

“Without his permission.”

Before this, she had already tried many, many times...

...

Outside the temple it was as bright as day, and within, the same brilliant illumination reigned.

Sitting upon that bed of tangled vines, Ye Shi quietly gazed at the murals on the wall, feeling his spiritual world enriched as never before.

It was a wondrous sensation.

As if one had logged into two alternate accounts on the same computer, and one of them had just entered a dungeon instance.

Once before, while traveling through the hyperspace lane, he had caught a fleeting glimpse of this marvelous feeling, though he had been forced to leave it behind in a hurry before he could truly savor it.

Now, as he submerged his consciousness into the surroundings and allowed his dispersing mental perception to ripple outward, that sense of awareness traversing time and space returned to him once more!

And unlike before, his consciousness within the "prime world" did not fall into slumber this time; rather, it remained wide awake simultaneously with the consciousness inside the instance.

By contrast, however, he could touch nothing within this vision; he could only watch through a shifting, flickering fog as the events behind the mist silently unfolded.

This, most likely, was "psionic power."

At first, Ye Shi had felt somewhat helpless and lost in the face of such a bizarre phenomenon, but by now he had grown adept at controlling this ability, capable of choosing his connection targets at will.

As he did at this very moment, linking his mind to the Sacred Tree of Doma City, allowing a fragment of his consciousness to journey back more than 150 years through the growth rings carved at the base of its roots—back to the time when this towering titan had first been planted in this forest.

Just as he had surmised, the Sacred Tree in the forest had indeed been planted by the crew of the Gemini.

And that was not all—

After a series of trials, Ye Shi discovered to his pleasant surprise that he could not only forge a spiritual link with the murals at the roots of the Sacred Tree, but he could even manifest his ability further while inside the vision, using the target within the instance as a "springboard" to leap into yet another memory!

In other words, he could drag the "progress bar" even further back! Back to more than 200 years ago, before this Sacred Tree had ever been planted!

Of course, this iteration could not continue indefinitely.

Once he used the target within the instance as a stepping stone to enter the new memory, the things he could perceive became exceedingly blurred, as if a thicker shroud of fog had settled over the existing mist.

Through that ethereal haze, he could discern only vague shadows, and the only sounds left were occasional, disjointed words, leaving him completely unable to search for a new "springboard."

Even so, to hear and see even a few scattered fragments was remarkable enough.

At least for Ye Shi, it was sufficient to help him piece together the history of this planet over the past 200 years, combining them with the information on the murals!

Near the end of the Three Years' War, the Gemini and the Orion had each received orders regarding the "Final War" initiative.

Just as Captain Zhao Tianhe had foretold in his premonition, they and their sister ship, the Gemini, had received entirely contradictory commands.

The Orion was the executioner of the Final War plan, tasked with rebooting Earth's ecological environment and thoroughly cleansing the lingering perils of the Seeds of Gaia, all to help the shelters better reconstruct the order of the Human Federation era.

As for the Gemini, whose ammunition reserves were running low, it was designated as the overseer of the plan, tasked with monitoring the Orion's execution of the order.

From the very beginning, neither side truly had a choice.

Particularly since the Gemini was well aware that the Orion would in all probability refuse to carry out the mission; if they wanted to survive, they had to strike first.

Yet even with a preemptive strike, their chances of survival were abysmally low, amounting at best to a mutual destruction where both sides perished together.

Such a victory would be meaningless, perhaps even worse than defeat.

And so, Song Yuchuan, the captain of the Gemini, made an exceedingly risky and audacious decision—

To upload the minds of the entire crew onto circuit boards!

They would kill themselves before their opponent could do so, and after perishing alongside their enemy, they would resurrect, continuing to execute their orders in the guise of androids.

This was the optimal solution they could devise.

Between the survivors and the Human Federation, they chose the Federation without a single shred of hesitation.

The plan won the approval of the majority; after all, they had no better alternative to begin with, and besides, most of their families were inside the shelters.

However, a small faction believed that uploading one's thoughts to a circuit board was no different from suicide, and that the "Final War" plan formulated by the Lagrange point space station was the height of folly.

The correct path should have been to negotiate with the Orion; they believed there had to be a way for everyone to live.

As for how this dispute erupted and how it eventually concluded, Ye Shi could see no further details.

Through the ethereal mist, this was all the history of 200 years ago he could discern.

After all, for the Sacred Tree above his head, truly comprehending this memory "belonging to the heavens" was no easy feat.

Furthermore, the crew member who had planted it clearly harbored no desire to reminisce about those matters of the "Old Era."

Seventeen crew members were ultimately sealed into hibernation pods, packed into a landing craft, and launched into a synchronous orbit.

What transpired after that required no explanation; it was essentially identical to what Ye Shi had witnessed in the hyperspace lane and among the wreckage of the Orion.

The Gemini fired the landing craft containing the neutron bombs and the "souls" of its entire crew toward the Orion, while the Orion, a mere instant before plunging into the hyperspace lane, unleashed its neutron torpedoes at the former.

The wreckage of the Gemini remained drifting in the orbit of Planet Gaia, while the Orion, carrying its crew who existed in a superimposed state of life and death, leapt toward a destination five light-years away.

As for the seventeen "exiled" crew members lying within the hibernation pods, they slept in synchronous orbit for nearly forty to fifty years, finally awakening at the twilight of the Savage Age.

They descended to Planet Gaia aboard the landing craft, discovering the descendants of the colonists upon the world—the green-skinned Gaian people.

Through their research and observation of these Gaians, they gradually realized that the Human Federation's understanding of Planet Gaia had been skewed.

It had been entirely erroneous!

Whether this error stemmed from deliberate misdirection by the colony's "radical factions," or from the Federation's own condescending arrogance and prejudice, was now impossible to know.

After studying the living habits and cultural customs of the Gaians, the seventeen crew members finally arrived at a conclusion—

An infinitely prosperous civilization had once existed upon this planet.

And unlike the Human Federation, which had only just stepped into the starry canopy.

The prosperity of this advanced civilization was far from confined to the Alpha Centauri system; its footprints had reached far beyond the boundaries of human comprehension!

As for Gaia—

It was nothing more than an "ecological maintenance system" left behind on this planet by that very civilization.

It had to be said that this discovery was utterly fascinating.

Whether it was the existence of that advanced civilization itself, or where they had ultimately vanished to.

After all, if even these "Forerunners," whose achievements far eclipsed those of human civilization, could not escape the ultimate fate of self-destruction, the decline and fall of humanity seemed nothing to weep over.

All things move from life to death, and from death to life; it was naught but a predestined fate.

Harboring curiosity for the "pioneers" and a yearning to unveil the "universal truths," the seventeen crew members temporarily abandoned their plans to return home, utilizing their limited tools to launch a series of investigations into the Gaians and their Sacred Trees.

And through a tortuous sequence of explorations fraught with twists and turns, they finally discovered His existence!

That occurred on the eve of the "Age of Awakening," and the one who first discovered Him was Qiu Shiye, a physicist from the Fifth Department.

These fellows, who usually seemed of little practical use, always managed to prove in the most inexplicable places that they were not quite as useless as they appeared—their utility was simply not very obvious.

In short, over the course of more than a decade of research, he finally deciphered the "psionic power" possessed by the Gaians, and upon awakening his own psionics, discovered the existence of the "Tree of Ein Sof," subsequently explaining it through dimensional theory!

All of this was information left upon the temple murals.

Once Ye Shi understood the contents of the murals, he naturally inherited these clues, and just like that Qiu Shiye who had once "succeeded once before," he entered into a direct dialogue with "Him"...

And it was precisely that dialogue that drove Dr. Qiu Shiye completely insane, plunging him into a state of hysterical madness.

Or to put it another way, he had become utterly consumed by his own inner demons.

He learned from the Pioneer that this universe has a "Creator," and that everything in it, including himself, is merely a character in some book or a mural on some wall.

To seize fate in one's own hands, one must break the "Window of the Horizon!"

That is, to break the fourth wall!

In Dr. Qiu's view, that was the destiny all civilizations must ultimately face—they would one day confront their Creator!

And before him stood a living example—the "Pioneer" that once existed in this universe had already succeeded, shattering the barrier between them and their Creator!

To achieve this goal, he needed the reactor aboard the Gemini-class missile cruiser for further experiments, which required dismantling the reactor and moving it to the ground.

As for this mad plan, the other sixteen crew members naturally objected, for it was their only hope of returning home.

In the eyes of the other sixteen, they had already excavated the entire ruin, and it was time to leave.

Not to mention they had all suffered at the hands of a madman and had been kicked off the ship for it.

To prevent this black sheep from pulling off something outrageous, they tried to lock him up, but unfortunately, he escaped into the forest with his followers.

And these people became the "Qiu People"—those "materialist" natives who could not perceive psionics.

What happened next was the "Second Judgment Day," known to all natives of this forest—

The burning palace fell to the ground!

It is worth noting that the murals in the temple of Doma City were not left by Dr. Qiu, but by one of the other sixteen crew members.

They brought the seeds of the Sacred Tree into the forest, nurtured a new Sacred Tree with the help of the natives who had awakened psionics, and recorded this history at the roots of the Sacred Tree.

For this reason, the information in the murals was heavily subjective.

Standing from a third-party perspective, Ye Shi tried to unravel the clues in the murals and suddenly realized with astonishment how similar this history was!

The seventeen crew members had split over whether to follow the "Pioneer's" path, and came to blows.

Qiu Shiye, who led the "sinful people" to conquer the Forbidden Forest Valley, had undoubtedly won, but also undoubtedly failed utterly.

If the fourth wall were so easy to break, the "Pioneer" civilization would not have gone to such trouble.

Though the murals did not record it, Ye Shi had guessed what came next.

Just like himself.

That Dr. Qiu Shiye eventually discovered the final truth.

"He" had indeed broken the fourth wall, but did not become the "omnipotent" Creator that he, as a materialist, had fantasized about.

And the voice he heard was not from "Him" as a "predecessor Creator," but merely an echo left by "Him" in this universe.

He had never truly spoken with "Him."

He had only greeted the shadow "He" left behind in this world...

"Damn! Isn't this just like the 'First Judgment Day'?"

The survivors of the Three-Year War, for the truth they believed in, fought another battle on the Gaia planet after the war ended, using the weapons they had left.

History is like a circle; events repeat themselves over and over, even turning another round right before his eyes.

Thinking of the rain that had brought joy to all the natives and that clever fool Tunnan, Ye Shi felt a mix of laughter and tears, and finally understood the meaningful mockery in "His" eyes when they first met—

You are always like this.

"My apologies."