Alien Hotel.

Chapter 445 Wandering
Real? Or illusory?
Yu Sheng could no longer distinguish between them, and he felt that there was no need to distinguish them anymore.

He stood amidst a bizarre interplay of light and shadow, seemingly surrounded by an endless, shimmering crystal veil. In this ever-changing crystalline spacetime, the concepts of up, down, left, right, cause, effect, and past seemed to have vanished. Ambiguous illusions and indistinct sounds constantly appeared between the veils, and in this space where everything was in constant flux, an old man with white hair and beard stood quietly opposite him.

He was no longer the terrifying figure fused with the deformed crystal, and he also possessed a slightly different "temperament" from the Yun Qingzi that Yu Sheng had seen at Garrison-3.

Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment, then slowly approached the old man's figure, before tentatively breaking the silence: "Yun Qingzi?"

"It's the old man."

"...Which one are you?" Yu Sheng asked again.

The old man laughed: "Is there a difference?"

Yu Sheng didn't speak, but frowned slightly—only then did he belatedly realize that he also had a "body" here, and was not simply a cognitive projection.

“A thousand years, one hundred and twenty-two iterations. The original Yun Qingzi is long dead, but the manifestations of the Great Dao are countless… Yun Qingzi may never have died, and I may have always been here,” Yun Qingzi said slowly with a faint smile on his face. “Compared to my shallow understanding of life and death, aren’t the secrets you, fellow Daoist, hold far greater significance? For example, right now—are you dead or alive?”

Yu Sheng thought for a moment, then spread his hands: "It's possible that it's a little dead."

Yun Qingzi paused for a moment, then burst into laughter.

"Where is this place?" Yu Sheng asked curiously after the other person's smile subsided. "Inside the Star Sphere? Is this place real, or some kind of 'consciousness space'?"

Yun Qingzi gradually stopped smiling and shook her head: "Think whatever you want. For a homeless child from 'outside,' our understanding of time, space, and order is not very meaningful."

"So what exactly is the current state of the Star Evolutionary Formation?" Yu Sheng asked again. "It seems to have broken free from His control—so He is really dying?"

“The Star Derivatives could never be considered ‘alive’ from the beginning, and perhaps the other Dark Angels are the same… They had already died countless years ago when they came to our world,” Yun Qingzi said calmly. “But if you are referring to the ‘activity’ of the Star Derivatives, then they did indeed ‘die’ the moment they left Shuji.”

Yu Sheng frowned.

“That leap out of the atmosphere exhausted His strength,” Yun Qingzi said calmly, looking at Yu Sheng. “Fellow Daoist, you had already succeeded then.”

It was unexpected, but it didn't seem so surprising either.

Yu Sheng slowly raised his head, looking at the space around him where light and shadow were intertwined and the air was filled with a crystalline texture. At the same time, he recalled the voice he had heard in the darkness earlier.

“I just heard a voice,” he broke the silence, “that voice that allowed it to take root and survive. It seems to be the memory of the celestial body? So it’s just a seed? It parasitizes one planet after another, just repeating this process of ‘taking root’ and ‘surviving’?”

“That voice you heard, I have heard it for a thousand years,” Yun Qingzi said, gently shaking his head. “I don’t really understand it either, because the ‘Star Derivation Body’ does not possess clear logic or wisdom—its chaos is beyond your imagination. However…”

He paused for a moment, then turned around and waved his hand gently.

"There are some things here, hidden deep in His memory; perhaps that is the answer you are looking for."

The magnificent crystal curtains before my eyes began to ripple, and within the translucent curtain of light and shadow, some blurry images gradually appeared.

A planet, magnificent and dazzling, shining like a glittering jewel in the sunlight.

A single plant can be more majestic than a mountain, more expansive than an ocean, and more ancient than a civilization.

It is rooted in the planet—for the first hundred thousand years, it was part of the planet, and for the next hundred thousand years, the planet was part of it.

In the days when its branches are at their most lush, it can even open its crown toward the sun, using the stored energy to reheat its somewhat cooled core, or capture nearby celestial bodies to replenish its "garden" with nutrients.

Yes, it had a lush garden—although at first even it didn't know what was in the garden, or even when the garden itself had appeared.

Because it was just a plant, for the first 100,000 years, it didn't even know what "thinking" meant.

But one day, the "garden" appeared out of nowhere. It seemed to be just a small "accident" that happened occasionally during the growth and mutation of the oversized body. Some debris that fell off its body occupied a small space between the crystal branches and then multiplied in that jungle full of living crystals.

The garden became a unique... "ecological patch" on its body.

In this "ecological patch," many strange little things gradually grew out—fragile, small, busy, but clever and capable of thinking.

They carve things from crystal, know how to extract heat from the ground, and can even turn the metal residue left after the "mother vine" is digested into all sorts of gadgets—some of which can fly, some can glow, and some can make noisy noises.

They called this process "creation," and they also created a more abstract concept called civilization.

The giant planetary plant didn't quite understand what "civilization" meant, but it gradually realized... that it was also learning to "think."

It spent nearly a thousand years figuring out how it "thought," and in the process, it referenced the physiological structures of the busy little creatures in the "garden" on its "belly." Ultimately, it concluded that the little creatures in the garden possessed an organ called a "brain," and now it too had a brain—its brain was the "garden" itself. The little creatures thought in the garden, and thus the "mother vine" could think using the garden.

very funny.

Among the small creatures was a group called "scholars," who also found this fascinating. They created even more abstract concepts, such as planetary will and collective intelligence. They argued and debated for centuries, trying to determine whether "the thinking of the race led to the planet's consciousness" or "first there was a sublime and sacred planetary consciousness, and then the Mother Vine of Creation bestowed its 'spirit' upon all living beings."

These discussions were also very interesting.

I wish this world could always be this interesting.

But one day, the star fell down.

That was the day the whole world was swallowed up by red light.

Stars fell continuously, like clumps of abstract and rough graffiti thread, like bizarre celestial bodies imagined by a child's clumsy drawing skills, large and small colorful patches falling to the earth, rising up in multicolored flames.

On the burning earth, countless points of light, large and small, rose from the sea of ​​fire.

Recording devices that store knowledge, metal plates engraved with last words, containers containing biological specimens, and the curled-up remains of the dead.

The forest and rocks rose and swayed in the starlight, the sky tilted and hung on the horizon, and the remaining black images after the stars fell hung on the horizon like extinguished lamps.

The "mother vine" could not understand what was happening—just like 100,000 years ago, it could not understand how a thinking organ called "garden" had suddenly appeared on its body.

At first, it thought this was just part of a growth mutation—just like the strange changes that would happen to its body, the world might suddenly change as well.

What if another interesting garden appears after all the stars fall down?
But soon, it heard a new term from the "scholars": the end of the world.

The end of the world has come.

Everything interesting will disappear, including the garden and the little creatures in it.

The mother vine anxiously asked the clever little creatures what to do, but the little creatures said there was no way.

At the very least, this planet is unlikely to survive.

Then we can only try to preserve the seeds.

With the help of the small creatures, the mother vine remembered—yes, the seed.

It can produce seeds.

The little creatures designed the seed structure for the mother vine in the shortest amount of time, designed the device to launch it into space, and designed the seed's "growth curve"... They actually wanted to design more things, but there wasn't enough time.

In the very end, the mother vine, the garden, the little creatures—this vast, complex, and wondrous symbiotic wisdom only had time to devise a single instruction for the seed—

"Go...find a new home, settle down, and then figure out how to survive..."

If it truly takes root, then find a way to flourish again.

Then a garden will grow—a place to think, to observe, to learn, to…

But there was no suitable new home for it to take root in the endless darkness beyond the world.

Even after arriving in another "world," there was no place left for the uninvited guest in that isolated ark.

The scenes from my memories receded like the tide, and the magnificent crystalline veil reappeared before my eyes.

Yu Sheng blinked and looked at the old man beside him.

“Root, grow, wither, root again, grow again, and wither again,” Yu Sheng slowly began after a moment of contemplation. “I discovered before that the metamorphosis and ascension cycle of the celestial body seems meaningless, because the ‘ascended body’ that it transforms into after accumulating enormous energy is only to transform into the most basic form on the next planet and take root again. From the ‘ascended body’ to the ‘sub-body’, it is essentially a meaningless regression. All the energy is wasted, and its life cycle is ‘idling’.”

"Now, all of this has an answer."

This is a seed that has lost its homeland, drifting on foreign soil where it cannot take root.

(End of this chapter)