Chapter 229 — The Nonhuman

The Ever-Dream, once shut down, had been set in motion again. After a wave of fluctuation, this vast psychic network gradually stabilized. The grand halls, temples, towers, and floating islands rooted in the mind's illusion were reconstructed. At the same time, countless members of the Long Slumber cult linked their thoughts into this network—they were at once its users, its builders, and its maintainers. They opened their brain's computational power to the entire network, letting it command and draw upon them as needed. Yet unlike those called "brain servants," the near-living-dead "computing power providers" lying in hidden sanctuaries everywhere, they did not have to pay for this process with damage to their lives and souls.

After all, the Sleepers were the masters of the Ever-Dream. Before all the servants had died off, these masters were hardly willing to sacrifice themselves.

And in the deepest part of the Ever-Dream, in the "Dream Hall" beneath the city, the college of bishops and their pope were already prepared.

Twenty-two seats were arranged in a ring, symmetrical about the room's center. Eleven white-robed bishops and eleven black-robed bishops occupied half the seats each, as though dividing day from night. At the center of the ring floated a hazy black phantom. Now and then it condensed into human form, but more often it appeared as various indescribable masses shot through with pale violet starlight. Whether in the real world or in this virtual one, the Pope of Eternal Slumber never showed his true face. In fact, the faithful even firmly believed that their pope had long since completed the sublimation of his life form and become an existence equal to the power of dreams; this shifting, illusory light and shadow was merely the pope's projection in the world, an "interface" set up solely to communicate with followers who were still mortal.

Today, this pope would lead his college of bishops in the eighteenth trial decryption of Gao Yang Cecil's memory fragment.

"The Ever-Dream is stable. The psychic network connection is sound."

"Lower-level computing nodes ready. The 'brain servant' array ready."

"The supervisory team has arrived at position and can respond to emergencies in the real world at any time."

"We are ready, Your Holiness."

The bishops reported one by one on the procedures each was responsible for. When everyone was prepared, the indescribable hazy light and shadow floated slightly, as if in approval, and its voice echoed in every bishop's mind: "Let us begin. Let us see just what lies within that ancient hero's memories."

The information link to the memory fragment was connected. Driven by the vast computational power supplied by the entire Ever-Dream, this terrible memory—one that had already caused hundreds of casualties—finally began to loosen. The truth was that Gao Yang had deliberately left a weak point in the memory fragment, but evidently the Sleepers themselves could not notice such a thing.

They merely rejoiced to see that their long efforts had finally borne fruit. A sliver of dawn appeared deep within that vast fog of information. As time passed, the memory fragment was dismantled bit by bit, and the portions that could be understood and recognized by human minds flowed into the brain of each member of the college of bishops.

At first, they saw a scene of starlight.

A deep, silent universe, an empty, boundless space, countless stars dotting the dark, profound curtain. This scene confused the bishops for a moment, but they soon concluded that this was Gao Yang Cecil's perspective after death: did humans truly return to the heavens after they died?

Before the bishops could conjure up some meaning for that scene of starlight, the vision before their eyes began to change wildly.

They saw the starlight receding in swarms, distorted light and shadow appearing in their field of view. They saw the owner of the perspective shuttling through the starry sky, sweeping past one planet after another at an unimaginable speed...

They saw the owner of the perspective appear on a burning battlefield. Enormous demons ran rampant across it, blazing meteors falling from the sky, while soldiers wearing all manner of unfamiliar equipment—races they had never even heard of—charged and slaughtered endlessly across the field...

They saw the owner of the perspective leading a great army against a fortress whose architectural style defied all understanding. The fortress seemed to have been piled up from the flesh and blood of some living thing. A terrifying swarm of giant insects poured out of the fortress in a flood, fighting a bloody battle to the death against the legion the perspective's owner commanded...

They saw the owner of the perspective suddenly arrive in a world of ice and snow, where a steel structure belching rolling smoke exploded amid the blizzard...

They saw the owner of this perspective shuttling through one different world after another—sometimes leading a great army sweeping across a battlefield, sometimes single-handedly destroying an entire nation, sometimes turning the tide to guard something, and yet sometimes placing an entire planet beneath exterminating flames. He fought, protected, destroyed, created—and in doing all these things he carried a calm that was almost that of a bystander, as though all of it were merely to complete some mission, or purely to entertain himself.

This "feeling" was fused deep within the memory, passed directly from the perspective's owner into the mind of every Sleeper bishop present.

And each time this perspective switched worlds, it was accompanied by the same scene: a vista of boundless starry sky, followed by the illusion of traversing that sky...

The Sleeper bishops trembled, letting those scenes of memory wash over their minds. They no longer dared to think further, yet the memory kept playing on—until the very end, when they saw the starlight fill the sky once more. As the starlight shifted, a planet gleaming faintly in the cosmos appeared in the background, and the perspective's owner lunged toward that planet. Its landmass expanded rapidly in their field of view, and certain details upon that land were so familiar—so familiar that one dared not even make the association.

And this time, as the perspective's owner lunged toward the land, he seemed to turn slightly in another direction. The Sleeper bishops saw the starry sky once more. In that familiar sky—the one visible simply by looking up from the Loren Continent—they saw one point of light after another shuttling among the stars, while some enormous structure cast of metal hung high in the heavens. An incredible cloaking effect was gradually covering that structure, making it vanish from the eyes of the world.

The memory fragment ended here.

The illusion ebbed away like a tide, every gaze refocused, and the consciousness of the college of bishops returned to this hall. They looked at one another in alarm and found that every one of their colleagues had been drenched through with sweat.

No one spoke up on their own, because no one could think what to say at this moment—until half a minute later, when the illusory light and shadow at the center of the hall broke the silence: "Let the Nightmare Mentor Corps waiting outside take temporary control of the Ever-Dream. The college of bishops will convene an emergency session. What happened today must not leave this room."

The Ever-Dream soon completed its information shielding and partitioning. Only after the entire hall had become a secure, sealed space did one white-robed bishop finally speak up: "The authenticity of that memory fragment..."

"Its authenticity is beyond doubt. I have examined it personally," the voice of the Pope of Eternal Slumber rang out. "It is indeed a true memory, not a woven illusion. Everything within the fragment is genuine experience."