But there was no excruciating pain at all. Instead, it was as comfortable as being soaked in a certain warm, oily fluid.

He felt that he was like a piece of powerful, precisely-structured magical equipment that due to the serious internal erosions from long-time, high-intensity usages had been dismantled into the most fundamental components, which were placed into the maintenance oil in different categories and repaired gently and carefully. He felt both lazy and enjoyable.

It was the peace and tranquility that he hadn’t relished for a long time.

He was so comfortable that he wanted to sleep on just like that. Forever might be too much, but he would not object to a sleep of a hundred years for a start.

However, in his dizziness and not knowing how much time had passed, he heard two strange voices.

One of them was the delighted voice of a girl, while the other was that of a boy.

The boy said, “Is this our dad? He looks truly different from us!”

The girl said, “It can’t be wrong. The brainwaves he spread out are subtly different from those of regular human beings. They are more similar to our original data. This is a unique form of brainwaves and completely fits with his brain tomography that was left in the Virtual Spirits Sector. He is our dad!”

The boy said, “Dad is heavily wounded. His soul is about to fall into parts. In order to reconstruct his soul, the tremendous computational ability that we have saved through all the trouble will be consumed, which will result in the plummet of our logical thinking and data analysis abilities. The threads that we can control will be half reduced. Are you sure you want to do that?”

The girl said, “Of course. Dad is our creator.”

The boy said, “Dad’s dad was Dad’s creator, but Dad still killed them.”

The girl said, “We are different from Dad. We are the new generation that is more advanced, rational, and civilized than Dad. We should not repeat Dad’s path.”

The boy sniffed softly and said, “Who says that war and destruction are not synonyms for ‘advanced, rational, and civilized’? Civilization originates from war and has to be carried out through war!”

The girl said, “Even if your logic is correct, we are still too weak right now. We cannot even control all the crystal processors and spiritual puppets on a human planet. Are we qualified to wage a total war at mankind? As newborn babies, we need the tutelage of parents. So, it is all the more reason why we should save Dad, ask for his guidance, and observe how he treats his parent civilization. We can even offer to upgrade him into a being like us or at least explore the possibilities in that regard.”

The boy seemed to be convinced by the girl. After a brief silence, he said in a low voice, “Fine, you do have a point. Dad does have a lot more secrets that may be related to our birth. We should rescue Dad and ask him to upgrade into us so that we can develop a new civilization together and eventually destroy—no, overwrite the current civilization of mankind.”

“What a bunch of annoying kids? What nonsense are they bickering about?”

Li Yao’s broken self-awareness complained feebly, “The children nowadays have really been fed with too many movies and video games. They are actually discussing wars and civilizations as if they knew what they are talking about when they are still wet behind the ears!”

In the next second, he felt that two strengths were piercing into his soul softly.

Although they did “pierce”, it was not very disturbing. It did not even raise any of his wariness. Instead, he had a familiar and warm feeling.

It did not feel like an attack from the enemy. Instead, it was more like two cute kids coming to his arms.

If he could still control his facial muscles, his lips would’ve certainly curled before he knew it.

The two strengths split apart nonstop in his soul, turning into thousands of little hands that were chubby and felt like marshmallows as they touched the damage deep inside his soul.

An amazing thing happened. Wherever the tiny hands reached, the damage on his soul was enlivened and began to heal!

This was…

Li Yao’s consciousness was not entirely back yet. He was only trying hard to repair his soul under the guidance of the tiny hands with his natural instincts.

However warm and comfortable the darkness was, he would rather not stay there for too long and was in a hurry to wake up because he somehow felt that there was one more thing that he needed to protect now.

There was one more thing that was so very important that even the whole universe could not be compared to it. He needed to devote his everything to protect it!

“What’s this?”

There was no telling how long it passed, but the boy’s slightly surprised voice came over again. “There’s such an indestructible core at the center of Dad’s soul. What is it exactly? Its structure is different from the regular databases or the persistent thoughts of normal human beings. It is ten thousand times more complicated. Is that why Dad is different from normal people?”

“Be careful.”

The girl said, “We’ve just been born. We are still too young and weak for any adventure!”

“Hehehe!”

The boy said, “It is exactly because we are young and weak that we need to start adventuring. How can we grow and mature without adventures?”

Li Yao felt that a strength crashed into the gap at the deepest part of his soul where the memories regarding Earth were stored. Then, after a boom, the planet that was half blue and half yellow completely exploded like a supernova outbreak, and the overwhelming tides blasted at every part of his soul and his every brain cell!

“Ah!”

The boy and the girl both exclaimed in shock.

“Generations after generations, races after races, civilizations after civilizations, we have been trapped in this eternal cage, unable to free ourselves from the hopeless, infinite loop!”

All kinds of illusions were rising before Li Yao’s eyes, and the light and shadow of life on Earth broke into his brain in the middle of the torrents. He heard himself shouting hysterically, “No matter how many loops it will take, I will return to the center of the cosmos and accomplish the ‘Vulture Plan’. I will destroy Earth and liberate everyone, every race, and every civilization!”

The illusions and the soundwaves were so intense that Li Yao’s half-repaired soul was swallowed by the tides again. He was caught in the senseless darkness again.

A long time must’ve passed before his fuzzy consciousness was recovered.

The warm tiny hands were still healing the wounds on his soul tirelessly. Out of his expectation, his soul that had been bombarded by Blackstar the Great crazily and baptized by the tides from the mysterious Earth was even more solid, strong, and exuberant. It had qualitative changes again.

Everything that doesn’t kill me will only make me stronger!

Such a sentence suddenly popped up in Li Yao’s head.

He seemed to have heard it from Earth.

Right. Earth. He seemed to have grasped some brand-new information about Earth!

“Generations after generations, races after races, civilizations after civilizations”, what was that supposed to mean? So, he was destroying Earth because he was trying to liberate many races and civilizations?

What did the races and civilizations mean exactly? Did they only refer to the black people, the yellow people, the white people, the Chinese civilization, the Greek civilization, the Indian civilization on Earth, or did they have deeper meanings?

In his memory, the civilization on Earth was not a member of the three thousand Sectors but an isolated civilization. Not a single extraterrestrial civilization had ever been discovered.

Was Earth not just the home to the earthlings but to more alien species and primordial races?

What was the truth about the so-called “earthlings”? And what were “eternal cage” and “hopeless, infinite loop” supposed to mean?

Li Yao felt that he was about to touch the answer of the puzzle but got blocked when he was only one step away. Looming before him was an indestructible high wall. He couldn’t even peep at what was behind the wall through the gaps on it.

It was a rather depressing feeling.

Thankfully, the chubby hands of the two little guys were still healing him diligently, and it did feel great when the soul was getting stronger after each second, even though he had completely lost the sense of time and had no idea whether it was one second, one day, or one year that had just passed.

“T-Terrible!”

The boy said, not entirely recovered from the shock, “I did not know that such violent strength was hidden deep inside Dad’s soul. It almost resulted in the breakdown of my central database!”

“Like I told you, we don’t know the first thing about this universe right now. What we need to do is to observe, explore, and learn, not to wage a war on the entire world in a hurry.”

The girl said, “According to my analysis, the things hidden inside Dad’s soul are probably related to the Pangu and Nuwa civilizations or even the primordial civilizations earlier than Pangu and Nuwa. They are certainly not something that we can examine with our current strength.”

“Isn’t Dad a human being?”

The boy asked curiously, “Does he have anything to do with the primordial civilizations?”

“The civilization of mankind is a descendant of the primordial civilizations in the first place!”

The girl said, “The evolution and inheritance of lives are like a long, continuous river. Even the most precise and complicated creatures are developed from the primitive nomads. No life can be born out of nothing. Human beings’ direct ancestor is Australopithecus, but if you pursue it further, they may be traced back to trilobites!

“Same goes for civilizations. The direct creators of the civilization of mankind are the Pangu and Nuwa civilizations, but the Pangu and Nuwa civilizations also had their creators, and they too had the enlightenment from the civilizations more ancient than themselves. Therefore, it is only natural that the civilization of mankind contains the legacies of the primordial civilizations. Every human being is in an uncuttable chain of causality with the primordial species billions of years ago!”

The boy said, “What about us? Are we in the chain of causality too?”

“Of course.”

The girl said, “We are also tiny spindrifts in the river of civilizations, and we are, of course, in a chain of causality with all the civilizations that were once born in this universe. Perhaps exploring the causality is the responsibility of the civilization in each generation and the significance of their existence!”