My Dream Connects to 3000 Years in the Future

“…” What could Chu Bamboo say to that?

Forcibly suppressing the myriad thoughts in her mind, Guan Qianyu suddenly remembered something, her voice taking on an urgent tone. “Wait, what time did you get here?”

“…I woke up at six in the morning. It took me about an hour and a half to get to the base after that. Then, I waited here for you to be unfrozen for maybe another two or three hours?” Chu Bamboo estimated.

“I see,” Guan Qianyu calculated internally for a moment before sighing in relief. “Then you probably weren’t discovered.”

“What do you mean?” Chu Bamboo’s pupils contracted.

“The enemy seems to have… set up a global surveillance system on the Moon?” Miss Guan’s voice held a note of uncertainty.

“And Shanghai is a key surveillance area. Hmm, they usually conduct a full sweep between eleven and twelve o’clock,” Guan Qianyu said, her expression grim. “But… since you’re already here, that doesn’t matter anymore. And one more thing—don’t read too much into it. If our world were still dominated by humanity, the Moon would never have been transformed like this.”

Chu Bamboo: “…”

Miss Guan paused, offering a smile tinged with self-deprecation. She continued, “Human civilization was destroyed by genetic collapse, but Transcendents were unaffected by the Genetic Modification project.”

“At the time, there were one hundred and ten thousand Transcendents. Ten thousand of them were sent to the future by Chief Designer Lin… I mean Lin Xin Bamboo, under the pretense of a ‘Support the Future’ initiative.”

“Of those, a total of one hundred and eleven members of the Time Club knew the truth. Any of them who survived were under orders to find you and tell you the specific, effective solution to the apocalypse.”

Chu Bamboo said nothing, listening quietly.

“First, the solution regarding the Prophet,” Guan Qianyu said, her eyes deepening. “According to you… I mean, according to the verifications and speculations of another you… the Prophet’s visions of the future actually exist in a state of quantum superposition.”

“…Quantum superposition?” Chu Bamboo mulled over the term, a faint realization dawning on him.

“Yes,” Guan Qianyu organized her thoughts before asking, “Ah Zhu, do you think the future is set in stone?”

Chu Bamboo thought for a moment and shook his head. He had changed the future far too many times.

“Then that leads to a second question. If the enemy Prophet sees a future and then interferes, will the future they saw change?”

“Obviously, it has to change…” Chu Bamboo paused, his brow furrowing. “You mean…”

“Yes.” Guan Qianyu nodded and gave a bitter smile. “Your plans for the future were defined far too clearly.”

“Perhaps it’s because of your… ability. You know exactly what to do and how the future will turn out. For you, everything is perfectly clear.”

“But that created a problem. As you did everything in your power to control the future, the future in the Prophet’s eyes also became crystal clear.”

Although Miss Guan was being a bit long-winded, she did her best to put it in simple terms. “It’s like the infinite possible futures collapsed in your hands, leaving only a few finite possibilities.”

Chu Bamboo’s eyes slowly widened. A storm brewed within him as he finally understood the crux of the matter.

Originally, the Prophet could see hundreds of thousands, millions, or even more possible futures. The sheer volume of information from these non-static futures would have been enough to overload the Prophet’s mind.

But Chu Bamboo was too powerful.

As he grew stronger and his influence over human civilization grew, he eventually guided the people of the Human Empire Line to survive the apocalypse. The grand trajectory of the future had been locked in place!

The future would now march only to the beat of Chu Bamboo’s will.

For human civilization, this wasn’t a bad thing! The problem was… there was also an enemy Prophet from an extraterrestrial power to consider.

In turn, this meant the Prophet no longer needed to determine which was the true future. By focusing on these few, limited timelines… it became incredibly easy for them to lay plans to destroy humanity.

Chu Bamboo gave a bitter smile. ‘So the source of the problem was me all along…’

Being too strong led to humanity’s destruction.

That was truly… a hell of a joke.

“Essentially, it’s just like the lottery,” Miss Guan summarized with a long sigh. “Normally, even if the Prophet can see the future, they can’t guarantee the future they see is the one that will actually happen. It’s like buying a lottery ticket—you might have a vision, but it’s not a sure thing. But now, you’ve become the boss of the lottery commission. The Prophet is just someone peeking over your shoulder and seeing the winning numbers you’ve already picked! However, your ability to travel back and forth is like… you can check the central computer at any time to see if someone else has the winning ticket, and if they do, you just change the numbers?”

“…” Chu Bamboo was starting to lose it. The analogy was surprisingly accurate, but he felt there was just so much to unpack and ridicule.

Taking a deep breath, Chu Bamboo decided not to argue the point and instead asked, “So, the solution is…?”

“Yes.” Guan Qianyu nodded, her face expressionless. “Let me be clear. The following are your exact words—the other you’s. I never fully understood what he meant, so to avoid any misinterpretation, I won’t add any commentary or embellishment.”

“He said: ‘Whether you seal your memories or hypnotize yourself, you must come up with a brand-new plan every single day. Use your memory abilities to make yourself firmly believe that this new plan is the one you’re following. The next day, unseal your memories and create another new plan. Also, don’t decide from the outset what the final path for this world will be. You only need to ensure that whatever the final path is, ‘I’ can accept it.’”

“In short: don’t seek certainty, but rather, use uncertainty. Artificially scramble the future timelines.”

At this, Miss Guan’s lip twitched. ‘What I don’t understand is this,’ she thought. ‘A new plan every day? Considering your immense power, won’t you just end up tearing human civilization apart? The whole thing just sounds… chaotic!’

‘If you’ve already decided to embrace chaos and not set a definite path for the future, how can you be sure the outcome will be one you can accept?’

‘It feels like saying, ‘I’ll just gamble randomly, but I’m certain the result will be exactly what I want in the end.” In any case, Miss Guan had been pondering that sentence for many years, and she still couldn’t make sense of it.

Chu Bamboo: “…”

Chu Bamboo’s initial reaction was also confusion, but he quickly grasped the underlying meaning, a thoughtful expression appearing on his face.

‘I see,’ he thought. ‘My other self’s plan is to have every version of me in every timeline exist in this seemingly psychotic state of quantum superposition. This will, in turn, disrupt the futures the Prophet can see.’

‘As for me… the original, I don’t actually need to do that.’

‘The original just needs to keep accumulating power until I’m strong enough. I’ll gather enough information, confront the enemy, and then steamroll them.’

‘In other words, my other self was actually separating the countless timelines inhabited by my future selves from the main timeline where my original self resides—’

‘He’s using the countless timelines of my other selves as bait, or rather, as chaff… to throw the Prophet off course as much as possible!’

“…I understand.” Chu Bamboo breathed a sigh of relief. Now that he had a solution, the pressure was off. ‘Still,’ he thought, ‘this is going to be a real pain for my other selves in the future…’

Just thinking about it gave Chu Bamboo a headache. ‘Scrambling the future while simultaneously guiding it toward an outcome useful to the ‘original Chu Bamboo’—that would require an incredible amount of skill…’

‘No, this is beyond difficult! It’s like dancing on a tightrope… while performing ballet!’

‘It’s the classic case of wanting to have your cake and eat it, too… and then some.’

For a moment, Chu Bamboo had no idea how to even begin. He mulled it over and realized he’d probably have to sacrifice a few of his other selves just to figure out the basics.

“But that alone isn’t a foolproof plan,” Guan Qianyu said after a moment of hesitation. “So, you prepared another one. This second plan, however, was also designed to target… another enemy!”

Chu Bamboo instantly deduced that the second enemy was the Great Divine Power User of memory. ‘But can this plan really target the Prophet at the same time?’

One against two?!

At this thought, his interest was fully piqued. He stared intently at Guan Qianyu and said, “Spit it out.”