Chapter 181

The low hum of the shuttle engine trembled in the pre-dawn silence, it was not a mechanical roar but a resonance frequency somewhere between heartbeat and string tone. Inside the cabin, Li Xiaofeng lay flat on the modified consciousness interface platform, his body enveloped by semi-transparent energy conduits—on the left connected to Selan's silver nerve bundles, on the right connected to the seven-colored roots of the plant network.

"Synchronization rate at 43%, steadily rising." Han Qing stared at the holographic monitoring interface, rainbow patterns like living circuitry extended from his fingertips to the console, "But his consciousness fluctuations are intensifying. Selan's formatting protocol is resisting connection, the human part...... is in fear."

In the image, Li Xiaofeng's left eye's silver-white area began to spread, like ink diffusing in clear water, slowly eroding the brown of his right iris. But his right fingertips twitched slightly— that was the human nervous system's instinctive resistance to 'losing self.'

"Can we stop it?" Su Yu's hand rested on the organ, ready to cut the connection at any moment.

"Once it starts, forcibly stopping will cause consciousness to tear apart." Han Qing shook his head. "Now we can only rely on him himself… to find the balance point."

At that moment, Li Xiaofeng's lips moved. There was no sound, but the images on the surfaces of all the Sylan wounded inside the cabin changed simultaneously— showing a scene from deep in his consciousness: a five-year-old child hiding behind his father, staring at a strange huge machine, both afraid and curious.

Lao Zhao stood outside the cabin, separated by a layer of observation window.

He didn't go in, just standing there, holding an old wrench— the first tool Li Xiaofeng used when learning to repair cars, its handle still bearing the faint marks of a child's small hand gripping it for a long time. The wrench's metal surface reflected the flowing light inside the cabin, at times icy silver-white, at times warm seven-colored.

"When he was little," Lao Zhao suddenly spoke, his voice soft, as if talking to himself, "The first time I took him down the mine, seeing the stalactites in the underground cavern, he asked me: 'Dad, do stones grow too?'"

Kaiwen was recording data nearby; hearing this, he looked up.

"I said it would, but it's slow— so slow that a person in a lifetime can only see it grow one millimeter." Lao Zhao's fingers rubbed the wrench handle, "He just squatted there watching it the whole afternoon, and finally said: 'Then it must be lonely, growing this slow, with no one to keep it company.'"

Inside the cabin, the brown in Li Xiaofeng's right eye suddenly stopped receding, even pushing back the silver-white by a millimeter.

Han Qing's monitoring data fluctuated: "Human consciousness anchor point stabilized! He found… a memory node to serve as a fulcrum against formatting."

Lao Zhao looked at his son, eyes reddening, yet he smiled: "You little brat, your memory is surprisingly good."

When the synchronization rate broke through 60%, an accident occurred.

The purification system in the direction of the Sylan homeworld detected this abnormal interstellar consciousness link. An invisible 'cognitive filter' surged backward along the connection channel— not an attack, but a more lethal 'standardization': it sought to forcibly 'classify' Li Xiaofeng's consciousness, either fully Sylan-ized or fully human-ized, eliminating the intermediate 'unstable state'.

Li Xiaofeng's body began to convulse violently.

The energy conduits on left and right emitted alarms of different frequencies: the left silver nerve bundle was transmitting formatting commands, while the right seven-colored tendrils were delivering emotional support. His consciousness felt like driftwood torn between two torrents.

"The filter's strength exceeds expectations!" Kaiwen's voice tightened, "The vulnerability data from Order is delayed; the purification system has already upgraded its protocol!"

Su Yu's fingers fell on the keys, but she didn't know what to play— too much support would interfere with the connection's precision, too little would fail to ward off the filter.

At that moment, the three Sylan wounded suddenly made a request in unison.

On the surface of the shifting-image sphere, a line of text appeared: 'Let us… become a 'buffer zone'.'

There was no time to hesitate.

Han Qing quickly adjusted the connection, plugging the three wounded into the middle layer of the bridge channel. Their consciousness intensity was far inferior to Li Xiaofeng's, but precisely because they were 'incomplete', they could undergo 'fuzzy processing' in the filter's standardization classification— they were neither purely Sylan nor purely human, an 'intermediate state'; when the filter encountered them, it would experience a brief logical confusion.

The first wounded— the one with bark-like surface cracks— was the first to make contact with the filter.

Its consciousness fragments exploded in the channel, not destruction but an active split into hundreds of even smaller 'cognitive particles', each carrying a bit of emotional memory: the spin angle of a vortex blue flower, the third echo of Lao Zhao striking a pot lid, the tone curve of Xiao Yu asking 'Will the stars be cold?'…

The filter tried to classify these particles, but they were too trivial, too 'inefficient', causing the classification algorithm to fall into an infinite loop.

The second wounded— the one with light-seeping cracks— then entered.

It did not split, but turned itself into a 'problem maze': each crack was an unanswered emotional question, and each time the filter attempted to classify a question, it would trigger three new ones. This was a tactic taught by the conjugate, 'using questions to counter answers'.

When the third wounded— the shifting-image sphere— was about to connect, Li Xiaofeng's left eye suddenly turned completely silver-white.

Sylanization was imminent.

At that moment, Lao Zhao did something no one expected.

He pushed open the cabin door, walked to his son's side, touched no equipment, merely squatted down and gently placed the old wrench in Li Xiaofeng's right palm.

Then he began to speak—not to his son, but to the Sylan consciousness invading his son:

"Listen, no matter what you are now, this person you occupy— at five he could fix a bicycle chain, at seven he helped me tighten screws, at twelve he built himself a little walking robot— though it fell apart after three steps."

Li Xiaofeng's right-hand twitching stopped; his fingers slowly curled, gripping the wrench.

"At sixteen he argued with me, saying my car-repair skills were outdated, then left home for three years. When he returned, he said nothing, went into the workshop and fixed my old engine— making it work better than I could."

The silver-white in his left eye began to ripple, like a water surface struck by a pebble.

"Now he wants to be whatever bridge, I can't stop him. But if you want to take him, you must take these along— the scar from his first welding burn on the web of his left hand, the girl he once secretly loved named Lin Xiaoyue, his favorite being the cured-meat porridge I cook, though he complains I put too much salt…"

Lao Zhao's voice was flat, like reciting a maintenance checklist. Yet each word carried weight, pressing heavily on Li Xiaofeng's consciousness as it drifted away.

"If you want him, you must take these 'extra' things. Take away any one, and he is no longer himself."

The silver-white erosion ceased completely.

Then it began to slowly, firmly, retreat.

Li Xiaofeng's right eye returned to clear brown, while the silver-white center of his left eye, that rainbow fissure suddenly burst open— not a rupture, but growth, like a spring welling up beneath ice, instantly spreading across the entire silver-white area, dyeing it a pale gold.

The synchronization rate stabilized at 78%.

The consciousness bridge was successfully established during the filter's 'logic chaos' period. An extremely fine yet incredibly tough seven-colored light filament extended from the shuttle into deep space, crossing a distance of 4.3 light-years, anchoring on a flickering pale-blue light point on the Sylan homeworld— the first safehouse established before 'logic' dispersed.

All three wounded exhausted their consciousness energy; the sphere's surface dimmed, but they did not die, instead entering a kind of 'cocooned' state— its surface coated with translucent crystal, inside a faint light pulsed slowly, as if incubating a new form.

Li Xiaofeng opened his eyes.

His left eye bore a gold base with rainbow patterns, his right eye a brown base with silver threads— not a split, but a fusion. He raised his hand, looked at the old wrench in his palm, and said softly, 'Salt really was too much, Dad. But now… I want to have it again.'

Outside the cabin, the three hovering Sylan warships suddenly adjusted their posture in unison.

Not an attack, but… forming a line.

The flagship of the Order commander gradually descended to the same height as the shuttle, the spiderweb cracks on its sphere surface having spread to one-third of its area. It sent a brief message to the vegetative network:

"The bridge has been confirmed established. Purification operation countdown: forty-eight hours."

"Recommendation: transmit via the bridge the 'indelible evidence'. Not data, but… experience."

"We need to learn… 'why it is worth being preserved'."

Han Qing looked at Su Yu: 'He is demanding… emotional education.'

Su Yu nodded, her fingers lightly brushing the keys. The phantoms of three hundred tuners appeared slowly within the Resonance dome; Aeon raised his star-string harp, its strings flowing with the 'final memories' of three thousand civilizations— not painful, but the most beautiful moments those civilizations chose to preserve in their last instants.

A symphony never before performed in the universe began, flowing along the consciousness bridge toward the civilization 4.3 light-years away that was preparing to purge itself.

And at the bridge's other end, the first to receive this melody was a newly awakened Sylan individual— its surface still bore the silver coating of the formatting program, but beneath it had sprouted a tiny patch of extremely pale green, like a newborn leaf bud.

It used a raw frequency to send back to Earth the first question:

"This piece... will it hurt?"

Xiao Yu's wrist light seal lit up, and it automatically responded:

"Yes. But after the pain, you will remember why it hurt."

"This is 'living'."