Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Li Yao held a handful of black seawater in his hands, only to discover that the seawater was like a combination of mucus and sand. It slid through his fingers in a very weird form.

It seemed that the collapse of the Virtual Spirits Sector had affected the fundamental logic layer. Even the dynamic model of the ocean could not be kept steady anymore, which resulted in all those uncanny changes.

It was a cold and quiet world. Li Yao did not sense much vigorous auras of life.

Walking along the beach for a long time, Li Yao discovered that the only thing that could be called ‘life’ was the weird creatures everywhere to be seen on the beach, which were combinations of crabs and jellyfish, like airless balloons with countless tentacles growing out.

All the weird crabs were absolutely still and emitted the most insufferable stench of putrefaction. There was no telling whether they were dead or ‘alive’.

Of course, they were not virtual life generated by the Virtual Spirits Sector by itself but the artificial intelligence added when the Virtual Spirits Sector was constructed. The original plan was to use them to modify the primitive ocean, monitor the data changes of the virtual water, and accelerate the birth of virtual life.

However, because of the collapse of the Virtual Spirits Sector, the virtual life was never born, and even the core databases of the artificial intelligence became long and redundant. They were caught in infinite loops because of data overflow and could not perform any operations anymore.

Boom… Boom… Boom…

In the purple sky, the dark clouds were rolling sluggishly and rumbling every now and then. But the thunder had only the former half but not the latter half, like roosters whose necks were grabbed. The noises that came to an abrupt halt halfway were most discomforting.

On the other side of the beach was a boundless metropolis. Li Yao observed despite the long distance, only to discover that the modern city seemed to have suffered the most severe earthquake and meteor shower. Traces of collapsed buildings, explosions, and furious fire could be found everywhere, making it look even more desperate and soundless than the black ocean.

“Hello!”

The Virtual Spirits Sector gave him a very uncomfortable feeling.

It was almost like the collapsed world was the only thing left in the entire universe, and he was the only one left in the collapsed world.

He could not help but shrink his neck and shout aloud.

Long Yangjun, Wei Qingqing, Professor Xie Wufeng, and other members of the inspection team had actually landed on the beach not far away from him, but none of them replied to his calling.

When Li Yao finally found his teammates, wondering why they did not respond, he discovered that Long Yangjun of mysterious origins, Professor Xie Wufeng who had seen and experienced a lot, Wei Qingqing as a Spiriter herself, and all the members of the inspection team were all in a daze before the beach.

Li Yao craned his head and looked at the beach. His mouth slowly opened, too.

He saw a long scroll, or rather, hundreds of sand drawings, from one side of the beach to the other.

The sand drawings at the beginning were drawn in a very juvenile way, as if a child had picked up a random twig and smeared on the beach randomly. There was no telling what was drawn at all. It was just a bunch of messy lines.

Gradually, the sand drawings had their own content and framework. Although they still looked rather naïve, they did give the feeling of primitive beauty that reminded Li Yao of the murals that the cavemen left deep inside their caves.

The content of the sand drawings seemed to be the depths of a primitive ocean, where all kinds of bizarre creatures such as fungi blanket, unicellular algae, nautili, and trilobites could be found.

As the primitive ocean creatures gradually evolved, the sand drawings grew more and more sophisticated, and the arrangement of the content was more and more delicate. The long scroll of the evolution of creatures was depicted vividly in a lifelike way with the tiny grains of sand.

Ocean creatures, reptiles, mammals, primates, enlightenment of the Pangu Civilization, birth of modern human beings, division of mankind, wars, and development. The scale of the sand drawings became larger and larger, and the structure was more and more complicated, rising from a plane to a 3D object. In the end, it was no longer a ‘drawing’ but a statue of an enormous scale. Two lovely little kids, a boy and a girl, were sitting on the surface of a planet that was scarred by dents and damage alone, holding their cheeks with their tiny hands, as if they were watching the starry sky.

In front of them, on the other hand, were dense tombstones—the tombstones of human beings.

There was not the slightest brightness in the eyes of the two little kids that were made of sand. They showed no sadness, delight, fright, or fury at the tombstones that had drowned the entire world.

Li Yao swallowed hard. He somehow felt that such a long scroll of drawings looked familiar, as if he had seen it from somewhere else before.

Right. Was it not exactly a sand-drawing version of the vivid Half-Step Grand Illusionary Land in front of the gate of the Tinder Base?

However, at the end of the ‘road of evolution’ that Professor Mo Xuan built, what replaced human beings were giant silver balls made of liquid metal that were similar to him.

At the end of this scroll, on the other hand, despite a whole planet of tombstones of human beings, there were still two little kids raising their heads watching the starry sky. What was that supposed to mean?

Li Yao somehow felt that his mouth was dry. He asked Xie Wufeng softly, “Professor Xie, what is the meaning of this? Who left the sand drawings here? Professor Mo Xuan?”

“I have no idea, but it… doesn’t make any sense.” Professor Xie Wufeng hesitated for a moment and replied, “Everything in the Virtual Spirits Sector is calculated in real time. It changes constantly like the real world. Look at the rising and ebbing tides. Although they are feeble and slow, they certainly still exist. Also, judging from the form of the beach, the tides were much more violent than right now a while back, and the ocean should’ve drowned the sand drawings during the tide rising.”

“Exactly,” Wei Qingqing added. “Although the Virtual Spirits Sector collapsed in the past, it never came to a complete halt. Instead, it operated more chaotically without any pattern to follow. It was a world with earthquakes, thunderstorms, blowing winds, and raging tides. If the sand drawings were left at that time, they would’ve certainly been erased or ‘deleted’.”

“It means that…” Li Yao considered carefully for a moment and asked, “The sand drawings were left not that long ago, when the ‘vitality’ of the Virtual Spirits Sector ran dry, turning it into a dying and stagnant world?

“That was about the most critical moment when Professor Mo Xuan was ready to activate his final plan. Why did he bother to leave such weird marks in this place back then? If he felt the urge to ‘express’ something, the Grand Illusionary Land in the Tinder Base should’ve been enough for him to illustrate his ideology.

“Besides, such naïve and crude strokes do not look like Professor Mo Xuan’s style. They seem to have been painted by innocent children.

“Here comes the question. Is there somebody else in the Virtual Spirits Sector other than Professor Mo Xuan? Could they have left such drawings?”

“Strokes and styles can all be simulated,” Professor Xie Wufeng said. “Constructing such a scroll of sand drawings is not a complicated task. It is a piece of cake in terms of technology and computational ability. As long as the database is large enough, the job can be completed immediately after the instruction is inputted into the crystal processor.

“The key problem is, who gave whom this ‘instruction’ and for what purpose?”

His question rendered everybody silent. Every member of the inspection team felt cold at the back of their head, as if two pairs of glittering little eyes were grimacing at them while hiding amid the sand.

On one knee, Li Yao observed the sand drawings carefully. Somehow, they gave them a strong feeling of weirdness, as if he were familiar with the sand drawings for no good reason.

Feeble electric currents swept across his body, making him feel numb from his eyelids to his lips. It was hard for him to say whether it was joyful or uncomfortable.

How should he put it? It suddenly occurred to him that the sand drawings seemed to have been made by himself. Or rather, if he were asked to depict the road of evolution of life, the final result would be very familiar to the sand drawings.

Li Yao was greatly alarmed. Calming himself down, he continued asking, “Did you find the pieces of ‘No. 17’ and ‘No. 18’?”

“Not yet,” Professor Xie Wufeng said. “They are a bunch of broken, unsubstantial pieces of runes and data in the first place. It would come as no surprise even if they have been completely eradicated by the Virtual Spirits Sector.

“What? Are you suspicious that the sand drawings were left by ‘No. 17’ and ‘No. 18’? It is also a possibility. Assuming that Professor Mo Xuan embedded a certain snippet of instructions about the sand drawings into their bodies, which would be activated automatically on certain conditions to drive them to leave such stuff, well, this is a rather plausible explanation.

“Let’s head into the town and take a look.”

Along the stairs that were full of cracks and weeds, the inspection team entered the metropolis by the sea, which used to be magnificent but had nothing but desolation right now.

Li Yao realized that the city was an amalgamation of all the cities that mankind had ever built throughout history. The vintage towers and pavilions and the modern skyscrapers with glass walls were closely combined.

On one side of the city were beautiful mountains and running waterfalls. On another side were vacuum rails that protruded to the sky and an underground square that spanned hundreds of meters.

However, after the collapse of the Virtual Spirits Sector, the ‘city of ten thousand cities’ had been completely reduced to debris. Both the pavilions and towers and the skyscrapers were tied up by weeds and vines. The waterfalls had dried, the tubes had broken, and the underground square was filed with remnants and dust, like a grave for the civilization of mankind.

“Professor Mo Xuan once talked with me about his designs of virtual life.”

Looking at the empty streets and the city rife with desolation, Professor Xie Wufeng remarked with mixed feelings, “At that time, Professor Mo Xuan firmly believed in the eventual birth of a brand-new virtual life. But he did not want to create a virtual life that humans could not understand or that could not understand humans and might even turn against humans.

“How should I put it? He was more hoping to create a virtual life that shared the ideology and feelings of mankind, acknowledged the morals and values of mankind, and even considered itself a ‘child of mankind’, or rather an evolved version of mankind.

“Therefore, when he created the ‘virtual primitive ocean’, he also established the glorious city here, in which the essence of the civilization of mankind—including our technology, laws, morals, arts and the soul-stirring legends of heroes—was condensed.

“You can consider the city a combination of a history museum and a grand library that contained our whole civilization. The virtual life was supposed to be fertilized, born, and evolved under the radiance of the ‘city of civilization’ so that they could grow into a ‘good kid’.”