Alien Hotel.

Chapter 546 The Long End

A sudden feeling of falling washed over me, fragments of light and shadow swept across my vision like a storm, and a massive torrent of information flooded my mind before roaring and whistling away.

Yu Sheng didn't know how long he had been "falling" in the chaos. He only felt as if he had experienced countless switching between life and death in an instant, but it also seemed as if his consciousness had simply been disturbed and he had lost his perception of life and death. Then, his consciousness finally stopped this almost eternal fall and floated away, as if he had been "sent" to some place.

He opened his eyes in the darkness and saw a city with towering spires that seemed to be trying to support the sky. The spires were connected by endless chains, all dyed black, mimicking the shape of a spider web.

Above the city, the sky was overcast, the stars were sparse, and the strange dome covered with fine scarlet stripes was like a thick and oppressive shell, enveloping the entire world.

Then he saw a group of people gathered in a huge building, surrounding some kind of huge computing device. The crowd moved back and forth in the hall, busy and tense. They had no faces, only hazy shadows, and their features were indistinguishable.

Finally, he saw a mountain, an extremely high mountain—soaring as if reaching for the stars.

The city at the foot of the mountain stretches endlessly, with towering pagodas dotting the landscape; the temples atop the mountain are magnificent and awe-inspiring, adorned with spiderweb-like markings.

Long steps stretched from the foot of the mountain to its summit. Dark-colored flags fluttered on the platform in front of the temple. Monks gathered on the platform, seemingly surrounding some kind of observation device. A voice was shouting, a hoarse and indistinct voice repeating itself several times before Yu Sheng could barely understand the meaning of the sentence—

"They succeeded! Those nearby... they built a sun, reshaping their habitat with the remaining mass and information of the world... Ashes can endure!"

Yu Sheng's consciousness drifted and drifted, and he landed in front of the temple without knowing when. He passed through the shouting figure and heard the whispers of the crowd around him—they were discussing a certain shelter, ashes, anchor points, the observer effect, and the continuation of the world.

But suddenly, all the sounds disappeared, and the whole world froze in that moment.

Yu Sheng subconsciously looked up and saw that the temple gate in front of him was open, and the inside was dark and chaotic. A huge shadow was watching him from the depths of the darkness. He could not see the shadow's appearance, but he could see that it had a spider-like lower body and a female body, with scarlet eyes... the same color as the fine and strange stripes in the sky.

A voice suddenly rang in Yu Sheng's mind—

"It wasn't until much later that I learned... that not every apocalypse lasts that long."

Yu Sheng calmed down. Instead of entering the temple, he sat down on the stone slab in front of the gate and looked at the pair of scarlet eyes in the shadows: "Does the end of the world even have a difference in duration?"

“Some,” the voice sounded gentle and patient, “sometimes very quickly, the red scars instantly spreading across the entire world, and before anyone even realizes the end is near, it’s all over; some are a little slower, they still have time to mourn and fear, to weep bitterly, or to send out a team to save the world, to make a futile but not long struggle; some are even slower, they can plan a dignified farewell, to find peace after the weeping and chaos, or to make some… hopeless but meaningful attempts.”

Yu Sheng hesitated for a moment: "Then... what about you?"

“Ours was slower,” the gentle voice said softly, “lasting for six thousand six hundred and sixty years—starting precisely when we first observed space, and continuing throughout the entire course of our civilization.”

Yu Sheng took a light breath.

But the voice continued as if it didn't care.

"Therefore, from the day civilization began, the end of all things has been a countdown before us—no need for any vague prophecies, no need for any endless conspiracy theories and disputes, it is right above us, slowly, really, advancing little by little each day..."

"The observable universe is collapsing, collapsing very, very slowly... and we are almost at its very center."

"Scholars say that the universe was once stable because beautiful traces remain in the noise of background radiation. They say that in those times, the stars were abundant, the scale of space was incredibly large, and there were no scarlet stripes representing countdowns among the stars, but only a tranquil and peaceful deep black. The people who lived in that era were blessed; they didn't even know when the end of the world would come, so much so that they might have needed to fabricate some horror stories about the end of the world to scare themselves..."

"But we didn't live to see those good days."

A sharp, hard sound came from the darkness as Yu Sheng saw a long, segmented limb slowly emerge from the temple gate—covered in a jet-black carapace with fine, intricate, and elegant patterns that inspired awe, yet seemed to radiate some indescribable…sacredness.

The arthropod stopped beside Yu Sheng.

There was no malicious intent.

“No wonder a group would believe in ‘ominous signs’ and build its entire worldview and belief system around them,” Yu Sheng said thoughtfully, his gaze fixed on the frozen figures in front of the temple. “But it seems that those who created you… don’t want to just accept their fate.”

"Survival is a biological instinct. In the years leading up to the apocalypse, the vulnerable will die first, while those who remain will especially want to live."

“…Calculation?” Yu Sheng suddenly thought of something—the densely packed formulas in the ward of Jinglin Sanatorium, the “puppet” constantly calculating in the Black Stone Space Station, the ultimate truth pursued by the Black Dot Group, “…Are you trying to find a solution to the ‘Creator’s Equation’?”

"We've tried many things, and we've been divided, fought civil wars, and even nearly faced extinction before the end of the world. Some moved forward while others retreated; some sought truth while others embraced folly. Much blood has been shed before this temple, and what you call 'calculation'... is merely one of the paths to eventual victory. "But at least most people have reached a consensus on this path—to understand 'destruction,' one must understand 'creation.'"

Yu Sheng: "Creation?"

The slender segmented limb gently rose, pointing towards the frozen figures in the temple square.

A gentle voice echoed in Yu Sheng's mind.

"In the third millennium of the apocalypse, we observed that the 'walls' of the world were becoming thinner, and this phenomenon became more and more obvious as the observable universe continued to collapse and shrink. Gradually, scholars even discovered that they could capture some 'information' that seemed to not belong to this world through specific methods."

"So we built a lot of observation devices in the hope of being able to observe what was happening beyond that scarlet layer."

"But the initial observations...almost crushed even the strongest and most optimistic among us."

"What did you observe?" Yu Sheng asked instinctively.

"The wreckage, the corpses of the universe, the howl of destruction echoes among the millions of corpses of ended universes, turning into a maddening noise," the slender limbs uneasily scratched the ground, as if the fear and despair felt by the believers when they first observed the "outside" were still imprinted in the memory of this deity, "It's all over, beyond the world, there are only embers."

The immense shock left Yu Sheng speechless for a moment, and what came to mind next was the memory of Ankaela and the celestial body—and the scene he had seen in the illusion, surrounded by a row of dark angels.

After several seconds, he suddenly realized: "But it seems you observed something else later..."

"Yes, there are always people who don't give up—so after one deadly madness and aberration after another, we finally discovered a... 'survivor settlement'."

"survivor?"

“A pile of embers, the remains of several worlds destroyed, piled together. Someone rekindled a fire in those embers, and a new sun rose,” the slender limbs tapped gently on the ground. “The information we obtained from observation was vague, and it was impossible to establish communication with it. After several attempts, we only obtained a very limited amount of information, and a name…”

"'Boundless Sea'."

"This is the name they gave to their shelter."

The gentle voice paused for a moment before continuing, "Despite the limited information, this greatly encourages us because the existence of the 'Boundless Sea' sanctuary proves one thing—that 'recreation' is possible after the end of the world."

“Creation…” Yu Sheng repeated the word subconsciously.

He felt he had already guessed what the shelter "they" had observed was all about.

Bai Liqing once said that before the "second singularity explosion", the previous era of this universe, namely the "old world", was called the Deep Sea Era.

"And so our calculations began—for the 'recreation' after the end of all things," the ancient Outer God said softly. "We don't have as many gathered embers, nor do we have the many opportunities they had to try and fail. The only one who could possibly provide shelter and act as a 'stabilizing anchor for the observer effect' is a single 'god'..."

"The opportunity only comes once, and the moment is fleeting, so we dare not make any mistakes. We began to set up a large number of observation devices in the remaining space of the universe to accurately measure the shift in spacetime and summarize the laws of the transformation of the birth and death of all things. The believers carefully adjusted the process and doctrine of the religious rituals so that I could understand their intentions and prepare for the new world..."

"Scholars calculate day after day, searching for the final solution to the Creator's equation, while engineers begin building a massive engine deep within our home planet—when that final day arrives, the engine will be triggered by the apocalypse, creating our own sanctuary..."

"This continued for more than three thousand years until finally, everything was ready."

"Then, we solved the Creator Equation."

"After such a long struggle, we have finally obtained all the data needed for the embers to reignite and reached the final conclusion—"

Yu Sheng unconsciously held his breath. He seemed to have thought of something, but still subconsciously spoke up: "The conclusion is..."

The slender segment gently rested on Yu Sheng's hand.

"The universe doesn't have enough mass."

(End of this chapter)