My Notoriety Spreads Throughout the World

Chapter 572 - 497: The Only Possibility

A brief silence ensued, Evergreen Ivy wanted to say something, but Tiger Tail Orchid placed a hand on his shoulder and shook his head. The former fell silent and said no more.

"How is Angelina doing?" Xu Xiaoyou asked.

Ever since Angelina showed symptoms of entropy change, Xu Xiaoyou hurried back to Dragonfly Town without stopping, and she sent Angelina to Daylight City, the headquarters of the Dawn Society, where the most advanced medical technology in the world is available.

"Her condition is somewhat complex," Evergreen Ivy said. "Her self-repair abilities are strong, the injuries left by that Scale Horned Whale King are not much to her, and she’s not experiencing entropy change of the physical body due to the Sea of Consciousness deviation. It’s more like some kind of integration between her Sea of Consciousness and the Oasis."

"To simplify the difference between the two, the former is more like being slowly devoured, unable to resist, while the latter is relatively mild symbiosis carried out subconsciously. We’ve tried many methods to separate her from that immersion chamber, but her subconscious seems resistant to the idea."

"Every time we attempt a separation, her heart becomes agitated. The cost of forcing a separation is still unknown, and we’ve already had two researchers injured because of it." Evergreen Ivy sighed softly.

"Therefore, we finally abandoned the idea of forcibly separating the Abyssal White Flower from the immersion chamber, opting to replace the damaged parts of the chamber to ensure it does not cease operation. We filled it with stable life-sustaining biomass to ensure her body functions remain stable."

Evergreen Ivy’s gaze turned heavy,

"Queen of Hearts, you must understand, all of this relies on nothing unforeseen occurring."

"Although we’ve been monitoring the status of the Abyssal White Flower throughout, if her heart goes into upheaval again causing the immersion chamber to stop, whether her consciousness can return to that body remains unknown."

"Then where would she be?" Xu Xiaoyou asked.

"No one knows." Evergreen Ivy shook his head. "Would you like to know the truth about the Oasis?"

"Of course."

"The essence of Oasis is not a virtual world; it is a third space beyond reality and the ’mysterious’. Its energy is inexhaustible, enough to accommodate and preserve all the knowledge humanity has amassed thus far..."

"Have you seen ’Interstellar’? A classic science fiction film from the early Silver Era."

"Do not go gentle into that good night." Xu Xiaoyou’s eyes were calm, "Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

She had long known that many cultural films of this world highly coincide with those of her era, especially early Silver Era films and literary works, something she has explored extensively but to no avail.

A leap from one era to the next inevitably comes with a major event, whether it be a natural disaster or a man-made catastrophe, perhaps a total war, or the rampage of the mysterious.

A major event implies a knowledge gap emerges, and people mostly are only aware of that era’s knowledge’s existence, but not its process or cause.

It’s as if unseen hands turn history to the next page, the surface of past pages churned with gray-white mist that neither disperses nor clears, obscuring its true appearance.

"There’s a scene where the protagonist, after crossing a black hole, is thrown into a space resembling a library, where the concepts of time and space are blurred, stored like books in a small space, overlapped and repeated in countless small spaces to achieve infinity."

"Oasis is exactly like that."

"It’s such an abrupt space, as abrupt as when an ’Interstellar Cruise’ passes by and a ’passenger’ throws an ’apple’ into the Star Sea, that ’apple’ being the Oasis, floating in the vast Star Sea at coordinate position."

"In the early Silver Era, about four thousand years ago, during the rise of giant companies mastering core technology and competing for interests, there were already records related to the Oasis. Then came a knowledge gap, until later when Nighttime Dreams obtained the coordinates to Oasis, promoting it under the flag of Virtual Nest City, known widely by the public as the ’Oasis’."

"Yes, Nighttime Dreams merely hold the coordinates, not the Oasis itself."

"And only Mr. Manchester knew how to connect to this coordinate and perform remote control. This is the ’Key’, the sword in his hand."

"The Order Court’s permissions within the Oasis are merely about issuing directives to EVA through the central adjudication machine, which EVA then implements via pre-programmed execution methods. Hence, they cannot perform actions beyond their authority, such as flipping through player data or directly erasing a player."

"They only possess enforcement power."

"Existing archaeological evidence is insufficient to form an evidential chain of the reason for Oasis’s existence. What follows is our Dawn Society’s speculation on the cause of Oasis’s existence based on some archaeological evidence. If Queen of Hearts is interested, just take it as a bizarre little story to hear."

"The existence of Oasis likely dates back to the Cradle Era, long before the birth of strange tales, when a Pioneer, gazing at the starry sky’s mysteries above, had foreseen the calamity that the mysterious would wreak upon this world. We might as well call this Pioneer by the name Adam."

"He knew that when the catastrophe comes, everything would return to nothingness, like the universe after thermal death, so Adam created such a space, attempting to place all ’possibilities’ within and calculate the only data."

"When a supercomputer knows all possibilities of the universe, masters all operational rules of the world, accommodates all data, it would be able to analyze everything, including the mysterious, and surely calculate the only way out."

"Evidently, even that Pioneer could not complete such a grand project. He failed, and the space he created faded into the river of time, not to be recovered until much later."

"That doesn’t sound like the ’apple’ casually thrown off from the ’Interstellar Cruise,’" Xu Xiaoyou said.

"I never said that Adam was a native of the Cradle Era." Evergreen Ivy’s face remained calm, his tone turning earnest.

"The Key is extremely important to us."

"We need to obtain it, at least we must not let it fall into the hands of outsiders."

"I am one of you, there’s no need for such roundabout discussions." Xu Xiaoyou said.

Evergreen Ivy and Tiger Tail Orchid exchanged a glance, confirming the answer in the latter’s eyes, he took a deep breath and said:

"We, like that Adam, harbor an unrealistic ideal in the eyes of others."

"We cannot transcend this starlit sky, existence beyond dimensions has long set a countdown to our civilization. This countdown may be long or short, but no matter what, when the pointer returns to zero, everything of civilization will return to nothingness."

"A civilization may perish internally or be destroyed by others, and both come with a ’choice’ process, it can be the ruler’s fatal mistake, or the long-time deep-rooted flaws."

"But it cannot be like now, where clearly people haven’t made any choices, yet the outcome was already determined by others from the start."

"We want to hand the fate of whether civilization perishes or not into the hands of future generations."

"We want to consider everything and calculate the only way out for civilization."