Chapter 615

"Oh my, it seems the previous foreshadowing was all in vain. Who told you? Did you read the relevant entry?"

"No, actually, I have never seen this place. I just guessed it."

"You look a bit embarrassed now," Ma Ma Liang said.

"Is it because you guessed the answer thirty minutes ahead of schedule, feeling like you are showing off to me, right? Moreno, look at me."

Moreno did as she was told.

Ma Ma Liang: "Continue to maintain this level, don't slow down because of me or anyone else, this is crucial."

Getting praise from her superior, the nervousness in Moreno's heart disappeared, and she took a step forward:

"Then can you tell me why we came here?"

At the same time, a logical reasoning concerning life and death quietly started in a corner of her heart.

"……Can you tell me why we came here?"

Listening to Ma Ma Liang's question, Bai Bai Xuan remained silent for a moment.

She stood atop this black tombstone, gazing out at the vast forest. The sea of trees, lush and green under the sunlight, now displayed colors reminiscent of Prussian military uniforms.

Amidst the increasingly dense sound of rain, an indescribable silence was rendered, along with a formless, heavy pressure.

The despair and struggle of the long-extinct, never spoken aloud, found an outlet in the rain, tightly surrounding the two of them, silently observing.

In the driving rain, Bai Bai Xuan spoke:

"The problem is that everyone in this world who can reliably access high-level memory-reinforcement medical treatment is here, yet the human resources of the Anti-Memetics Division remain stretched thin."

"We have forty colleagues in total, including you and me, but these forty pairs of eyes can hardly cover every corner of the world."

"There are too many parts of this world that have never been correctly understood by humanity, which is undoubtedly a heavy shackle for all anti-memetic research."

"Anti-memetic biology, anti-memetic paleontology, anti-memetic cosmology, anti-memetic archaeology... these disciplines remain blank slates to this day."

"Fortunately, we have discovered one or two city ruins of this civilization."

"These cities have become ruins on a physical level, and are wrapped in heavy anti-memetic effects, making them almost impossible to study, even for us."

"Those massive and simple existences, like this boulder, although relatively well-preserved, we speculate that this may be one of the last creations they made before heading toward extinction."

"Huge, simple things, like this stone, are better preserved, but even so... we believe this stone is among the last things they built before extinction."

"They were once human, perhaps possessing advanced technology surpassing our own, living tens of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of years ago; we do not know the exact time."

"They were once human. They may have possessed more advanced technology than we do. They existed tens of thousands of years ago; perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago, we cannot be sure."

"It is particularly difficult to accurately judge what kind of disaster they encountered, because their entire cultural memetic spectrum suffered devastating irradiation."

"Their core cultural concepts, the things they created, their symbolic meanings, and the values they held dear can never be known or proclaimed again."

"We speculate that some kind of concept invaded their civilization, and they were powerless to resist—a complex ideological composite, a memetic-composite world-ending scenario."

Bai Bai Xuan paused, letting the rain continue to beat against the earth.

In the brief stillness, one could almost hear the whispers of that ancient civilization.

"So, we just forgot like that?" Ma Ma Liang asked.

"The rest of us, who survived that catastrophe, evolved into modern humans—you, me, and every individual living in the present..."

"We just shift our gaze, just like that, and 'move on' with such understatement?"

"That's right."

Bai Bai Xuan's answer was as sharp as a knife.

This is a war, an endless war between humanity and the anomalous.

In every individual battle, there will always be some who die early, and some who manage to survive.

But the living are by no means cowardly; together with all those who have perished, they strive to protect their civilization, to protect 'normality.'

Ma Ma Liang's figure swayed slightly; a sudden wave of dizziness, conversely, brought a moment of relief to her heart.

After recovering slightly, she also walked to the edge of the tombstone, looking at the stern-faced forest below.

"So... we can easily forget those who died? Is this what you wanted to show me? You want me to remember all of this?"

Bai Bai Xuan: "That's right, remember it all. This is the first lesson you need to learn today—humans can forget anything."

"Forgetting some things is nothing, because we will all die one day; humans are always limited in the face of the universe."

"But some things must be remembered. Our memory is crucial. You must record some things so that you can remember them yourself."

Ma Ma Liang nodded solemnly.

The torrential rain forced her to take shelter under a canopy, using the tabletop as a temporary workstation.

Despite this, a few raindrops leaped over the barrier, dampening her notes.

She wrote furiously, her handwriting messy and complex, with no shortage of large-scale erasures and deletions. She was pondering how she would react if she were reading these words for the first time.

A moment later, Bai Bai Xuan also came under the canopy to escape the rain.

Ma Ma Liang's eyes were fixed on her notes, her heart seemingly not yet ready to accept the answer, and she asked Bai Bai Xuan a follow-up question:

"Then, what about the second thing?"

Bai Bai Xuan said:

"Perhaps, in their civilization, there existed an organization similar to our Foundation, perhaps even possessing a branch like the Anti-Memetics Division."

"If that were true, their Foundation and their Anti-Memetics Division failed to successfully protect their world."

"This is a massive reality. This is a massive Foundation."

"There are countless Keter-class projects here waiting to be solved, and various Keter-class scenarios appear frequently. Therefore, doomsday crises might be even more troublesome for other departments."

"Most of the work we hire you to do will be basic research, including safe laboratory work... and, indeed, this state has persisted for thousands of years, perhaps even longer."

"But the future may not necessarily be so stable. This crisis might eventually become our challenge."

"Returning to the initial question, we know that anti-memetic wars have occurred, and perhaps there are more we are not yet aware of."

"And now, undoubtedly, a new anti-memetic war is brewing."

Facing Bai Bai Xuan's words, Ma Ma Liang was speechless for a moment, her face showing shock and collapse.

To this, Bai Bai Xuan did not feel surprised, because every new member of the Anti-Memetics Division experiences a similar emotional impact when learning the truth.

This heavy responsibility is often difficult for newcomers to bear, but it should be so.

"Welcome to the Anti-Memetics Division," Bai Bai Xuan said calmly. "This is your first day here."

Ma Ma Liang buried her head in writing for a long time, while Bai Bai Xuan waited in silence nearby. The rain was heavy, showing no signs of stopping.

Ma Ma Liang finally broke the silence and asked: "But what is that? What is that concept?"

"9429-A," Bai Bai Xuan said.

"As early as the seventies, we isolated this memetic composite and placed it on a stone slab in a room on the second basement level in Vegas."

"Nowadays, it has basically become harmless because its heterogeneity in contemporary human culture is too strong to produce significant influence. You can imagine it like ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs."

"I'll show it to you another day."

Ma Ma Liang frowned: "You mean, it's impossible for it to regain its original influence?"

"In that primitive form, the possibility is minimal."

Suddenly, Ma Ma Liang seemed to see something.

She raised her hand and pointed to a spot in the distant sky. Bai Bai Xuan followed her finger, but there was only a gloomy sky and continuous rain.

"What do you see? It is said that under high doses of memory reinforcement, some people claim to see ghosts."

"But I personally reserve judgment on the veracity of these statements..."

Ma Ma Liang said in a tense tone:

"No, that's not what a ghost looks like."

"It looks more like... a gaunt, large beast, a monster, or a huge pillar made of spiders, at least twice the height of this stone."

"It's coming toward us. Is this normal?"

"No." Bai Bai Xuan quickly opened the checklist.

"What is that thing?"

"It's not clear yet."

"Is this just a means to scare new employees?"

"No, I assure you, I am absolutely not lying to you."

When an anti-memetic shielding entity has the hideous appearance Ma Ma Liang described, the possibility of it harboring goodwill toward humans is almost zero.

They need support!

However, Bai Bai Xuan discovered that her phone had lost signal, and the only way to communicate seemed to be through written messages.