Chapter 61 — What is a “soul”?
They wandered around for a long time until the blue ball had tasted enough, only then did he reluctantly spit out Bai Ruogu.
Bai Ruogu calmly straightened his clothes and began to observe his surroundings.
It was unknown how long he had stayed inside the blue ball’s stomach, but when he emerged, the outside world had drastically changed. The surroundings were desolate. There were no buildings, not even a trace of ruins.
What puzzled Bai Ruogu even more was that the sky, which had been clear just moments ago, was now covered with dark clouds.
Bai Ruogu looked up at the sky with a frown, his many years of intuition telling him something was wrong.
At that moment, his heart skipped a beat, followed by a feeling of chest tightness and shortness of breath. It was as if something in the air was compressing, directly affecting his body.
There was definitely something wrong with the location!
He keenly sensed the anomaly. To better investigate, he endured the discomfort and walked around every corner of the area.
In some places, the oppressive feeling was noticeably heavy. Before he could speculate further, his smart brain started flashing a red warning light.
[Warning! Warning! Severe magnetic field disorder detected. It is likely to harm the human body. Please evacuate immediately!]
[Warning! Warn…]
Before the second warning could come through, the sound was cut off due to the magnetic field’s interference.
The location was now very clear.
Supporting himself, Bai Ruogu raised his eyelids and looked around with deep eyes.
Was this a coincidence?
Based on his current speculation, that person’s achievements were significant. She could use the magnetic field to interfere with others’ searches and naturally wouldn’t be easily found due to the magnetic field’s intensity.
Bai Ruogu rubbed his temples as he looked at the intact and deserted surroundings. It was clear that this place hadn’t been damaged by the enemy.
The enemy wasn’t foolish. How could they not pay attention to the different magnetic field intensities? The answer was obvious: before this, the magnetic field here was no different from elsewhere, perhaps even more ordinary, lower-profile, and harder to detect.
Bai Ruogu lightly furrowed his brow, a doubt rising in his mind.
If this was indeed the entrance, given the creator’s intellect, she wouldn’t want to be easily found, so there shouldn’t be such a significant magnetic field change here…
Pressing his fingers to his brow, Bai Ruogu thought.
If there were no surprises, there must be something important here that the creator wanted to be discovered, rather than buried.
Having made up his mind, Bai Ruogu started looking for the entrance.
As peers, they seemed to have a natural understanding of each other. Bai Ruogu tried calculating the location using the “technological code” he had left behind. It seemed the other person was also well-acquainted with Bai Ruogu, having indeed used the “technological code” to conceal the entrance to the laboratory.
In less than 20 minutes, there was a creaking sound, and a circular piece of land about 50 centimeters in diameter sank.
An elevator? Bai Ruogu raised an eyebrow, thought for a moment, and then walked towards the circular patch of land.
The blue ball tilted his head, stretched himself vertically into a long strip, and followed closely behind Bai Ruogu.
Black shoes and a blue “pole” stepped onto the slightly damp land. The area below seemed to sense the appropriate weight, and the soil’s color began to lighten.
With a humming sound, the circular land rapidly descended. When the tips of their hair were level with the ground, the surrounding land seemed to sense it, and straight boards, appearing like the earth, folded over from both sides, tightly sealing together without a gap.
From the outside, the land looked just as damp as before, with no visible difference.
The elevator continued to descend, surrounded by protective steel plates. Bai Ruogu couldn’t see outside, and his fingers curled slightly.
Who knew how deep this laboratory was, the indicator light inside the elevator kept flashing.
As time passed, Bai Ruogu’s initially tense heart gradually relaxed.
The elevator light dimmed, and just as it was about to go out completely, there was a ding, and the elevator stopped descending.
As the elevator doors slowly opened, the sounds outside became noisy.
Bright lights shone in, revealing a large, high-tech laboratory.
A half-dissected unidentified creature’s corpse was soaking in formalin, neatly arranged in rows.
At the forefront of the vast space, a massive display screen lit up. Even without anyone operating it, countless data points were continuously being calculated on it.
To its right, a slightly smaller but still large screen was also displaying data, only its update rate was faster, suggesting a more significant amount of computation.
The two screens had a clear hierarchy, though to the experienced Bai Ruogu, the data on the right screen was evidently more important.
Bai Ruogu walked towards the control panel, seeing several “fresh” corpses with wires inserted into their brains lying on the experiment tables.
He glanced at them briefly. The corpses were likely preserved by injecting a new type of agent.
The other end of the wires connected to the equipment of the side screen. If he guessed correctly, the side screen was conducting experiments related to brain consciousness.
Finally, Bai Ruogu reached the screen.
His dark eyes reflected the flickering data, but the information on it was unfamiliar to him.
His lips moved slightly, and his eyes deepened.
These were two unpublished studies…
He touched the control panel with his hand, but his fingers got stuck.
Bai Ruogu lowered his head to look and found two books and a yellowing notebook.
He used his fingers to push them aside, and the covers of the two books came into view.
“The Sun” and “The Mysterious Solar System.”
The books had been flipped through so many times that they were wrinkled. Bai Ruogu’s flipping was too forceful, and the covers came off, revealing the title pages.
The black handwriting on the pages was extremely meticulous, and the writer had used so much force it seemed as if they wanted to pierce the paper.
“I spent my whole life chasing you, and just when I thought I could get close, a new river separated us.”
“I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. Others at least have deceased lovers to remember, but I don’t even dare to think of you, because it’s a delusion.”
Signed —— Li Luosi.
Bai Ruogu wiped his fingers over these lines, pondering what kind of person the owner of this lab, Li Luosi, liked.
Suddenly, it was as if a current passed through him. Bai Ruogu shuddered and realized something.
He looked up at the main screen, and the data was still fluctuating.
Following his previous line of thought, he examined the data. Sure enough, the more he looked, the more familiar it seemed, aligning perfectly with his expectations.
His lips parted slightly, his pupils reflecting the screen’s glow.
Could it really be as he thought?
The data before him was neither biased nor inaccurate, it was accurately… simulating the sun.
The sun’s motion cycle time, accurate to the millisecond. The sun’s position in the universe, the temperatures across its surface, its history and formation… Everything about the sun that could be calculated was recorded in this device.
The more Bai Ruogu confirmed the content, the more his heart raced, until it was pounding uncontrollably. He couldn’t help but mutter, “Madman!”
He closed his eyes for a long time, a sigh lingering in the air.
With slender fingers, he picked up the notebook, his eyelids lifting slightly as if he had anticipated this. He gently opened the notebook…
“Am I ultimately like Kuafu1 chasing the sun or a moth flying into the flame? —— Li Luosi.”
The girl had been locked in the basement for a long time.
Her face was dirty, but her eyes glimmered with a faint light of longing and hope as she looked at the ray of sunlight filtering through the crack in the wall.
She had forgotten who she was or why she was there. She only remembered that she was accompanied by darkness and spent a long, long time in darkness.
This beam of light was the only different existence in this pitch-black place. It seemed like a small stone had fallen that day, and since then, the light appeared.
The light was the only thing she longed for, the only thing she cared about. However, the light would come and go, reappearing after a lifetime.
Without the light, she was still submerged in the abyss of darkness, filled with nothing but despair.
Later, the planet Ketan Police rescued a genius girl with SSS-level mental power from a damp, dark basement.
It was learned that the girl had been locked in the basement for nearly two years, kept alive by nightly injections of nutrients and sedatives administered by the perpetrators to prevent malnutrition.
The purpose of the criminal group was to artificially “create stars,” and the girl was their only successful experiment.
The girl was rescued, and the once quiet world became explosively noisy. She was pulled from the basement by many people, but she didn’t want to leave.
The light was still there, it was her heart.
She couldn’t speak, only feeling wetness on her face as if something was flowing down.
She was dragged to an unfamiliar place, resisting with all her might. The surroundings were too strange.
Until——
Until she emerged from the basement, and the intense sunlight bathed her whole body, the scorching touch dispelling the cold that had lingered for who knew how long.
Familiar light, so much of it, all around.
She looked up at the sky, astonished, as if she had discovered a great treasure.
“Quick! Stop her! Her eyes will go blind!” someone shouted loudly.
She felt her eyes sting, her vision turning white.
She perversely enjoyed this sensation. It was white! Not darkness, but white!
From then on, no matter where people took her, she did everything possible to run into the sunlight.
Originally, she wouldn’t listen to anything anyone said. Until one day, someone suddenly asked her.
“Do you like the sun?”
She turned her head sharply and stared at the person.
The person continued, “In that case, let’s make a deal.”
This deal would last a lifetime.
Li Luosi spent her entire life doing scientific research, always for the sun.
[Dr. Li, if you can complete this research, the planet is willing to allocate 30 million in funding for your study of the sun.]
[Professor Li, if you complete this project, the planet is willing to build you a research lab dedicated to the sun.]
[Recently, the planet has acquired another batch of data about the sun…]
She felt both confused and content, as if she was bound to the sun.
At some point, she realized her feelings for the sun.
She loved the sun, like a lover.
Whenever she had free time, she would think about what the sun would be like if it were a person. What kind of personality would it have? In reality, she shouldn’t have imagined it as a person.
She began to wonder what it would be like for a person and a star to live together. Her and a giant ball of fire?
Li Luosi laughed.
Later, when she got old, walking became difficult, yet she had never truly touched the sun.
She lay in a recliner, squinting at the sun, as the cold and darkness of the past swept over her again.
She was old, and she wanted to be with the lover she had looked up to all her life.
Ignoring everyone’s objections, she built the spaceship she had designed her entire life.
She trembled as she boarded it, and the spaceship headed for the universe.
She spent her life searching for high melting point materials, and finally, after synthesis and processing, the spaceship’s outer shell could withstand temperatures of 52,000 degrees.
The spaceship headed for the hottest place, and at the moment it plunged into light and fire, a small black dot instantly melted…
She was perhaps the closest human being to the sun.
Bai Ruogu stared at the notebook, his mind filled with complex emotions that spread throughout his body.
He looked down at the date below. It was only a few months after Li Luosi had boarded the spaceship.
He thought, maybe the spaceship didn’t necessarily melt. It could have been that the engine melted early halfway, becoming a shooting star in some people’s lives.
He put aside his disappointment and turned his attention to another device.
The side screen, connected to so many wires, made it easy to determine the direction, and fortunately, there was a thick manual placed beside it.
Bai Ruogu picked it up and started flipping through it. Just seeing the first page stunned him.
His fingers trembled slightly, and a look of astonishment flashed in his eyes.
[What is a ‘soul’?]
- 夸父 (kuā fù) Kuafu is a mythological figure recorded in the Classic of Mountains and Seas and Liezi. He was determined to chase the sun , but never caught up with it and died of thirst on the way. This is a mythological story of sun worship . ↩︎