Pressure from the Stars

"Grandpa, get some rest."

"How could something like this happen to someone as kind as Doctor Liang? You don't even faint when you look at the moon anymore, all thanks to her care."

"Good things happen to good people. She'll be all right."

"Ah. You get some rest too, Xu'er."

"I will. I'll wash the dishes and go to bed."

Huang Ji was already home. When his grandfather learned from him that Doctor Liang had been kidnapped, the old man grew agitated, bewildered, and worried.

But worrying would do no good. The police would investigate, and all the old man could do was pray for Doctor Liang's safe return.

Huang Ji fetched water for his grandfather to wash his feet, helped him into bed, then went to clear the dishes from the kitchen.

When he finished, he stepped into the courtyard and looked up at the sky. His grandfather was already snoring.

The old man had fallen asleep in the time it took him to wash the dishes.

"Why... did I have to sense so much...?"

Huang Ji gazed at the moon. His expression grew complicated, full of helplessness and despair, with a trace of relief beneath it all.

He had never worn an expression like that back when he was mildly intellectually disabled.

His mind had awakened.

Ever since he fainted three days ago, his intelligence had returned to a normal level.

Perhaps he had never had a developmental disability at all.

For as long as he could remember, he had seen the world differently from everyone else.

The world before his eyes was like a vast repository of information! Complex information lay everywhere. Some of it stayed constant, while some changed without pause.

He had no idea what any of it was. Every flower and tree, every bird and insect, every breeze and cup of clear water laid itself bare to him, as though revealing every scrap of data it contained.

But he could not understand it.

Information did not automatically explain concepts he did not know. The age of a tree, for example, was a blur to him until he understood what "age" meant.

Only after Huang Ji understood age, years and months and days, that a tree had an age, and that time had passed since it was a seed—

Only then could he sense a small part of that tree's information as "Age: seven years, three months, twenty days, nine hours, forty-four minutes, and one second..."

That information changed every moment.

The same went for the tree's species, volume, mass, and the number of molecules it contained at that instant. How much water had it absorbed? How many fruits had it borne? He could sense when it was planted, when it first sprouted, and every time it bore fruit, as if reading a historical record.

There was far too much information like that to count.

He could even learn who had planted the tree, how many people had touched it, and how many insects had gnawed on it—strange details of every kind.

It was precisely this extraordinary ability, one he had been born with, that had made him intellectually disabled...

Yes. An ability that seemed almost like omniscience had instead left him impaired for sixteen years.

That was because how much specific information he could perceive depended on what he already understood.

At birth, he had understood nothing. The whole world was unknown to him, a chaos of countless pieces of information he could not comprehend.

His perception was too powerful. For an infant, it was unbearably cruel.

Countless baffling, incomprehensible pieces of information flooded his senses and thoughts.

Under that strain, his thinking grew sluggish, his memory became terrible, and his eyesight seemed poor.

Or rather, his supposedly poor eyesight came from the sheer amount of information obscuring his vision: a chaotic, tangled mass of indescribable things...

He stumbled through intelligence and reaction tests, too confused even to know what the doctors wanted him to do. To them, that looked like an intellectual disability.

In truth, he was remarkably clever. By four or five, he had grasped the concept of "parents," understood that he ought to learn to speak, and realized that what he saw differed from what others saw...

Yes, grasping all that by four or five had been a miracle.

Teach an ordinary child what "Dad," "Mom," "drinking milk," "white," and "yellow" meant, and with a little patience and repetition, the child would learn.

Humans were simply that smart.

But for someone like him, it was much harder. Dad? Mom?

One blurry mass of information pointed at another and said, "That's Mom," then pointed at yet another and said, "That's Grandpa"...

It was a miracle he understood any of it.

When a person saw a different world from everyone else, learning about that world became incredibly difficult.

It was like teaching a blind person what purple was... or red...

At first, Huang Ji was little different from a blind person.

Fortunately, as his body and brain developed, his control over his ability grew.

At four, he began learning to draw in the information spreading before him, shielding himself by default from the things he could not understand.

He could block only a small portion, of course, but at least he could now glimpse the world as others saw it.

As his body matured, he could block more and more.

And as Huang Ji's understanding broadened, he could shield himself from information he already understood, as well as information he did not.

That was why, when he saw a doctor at four and a half, he scored fifty on an IQ test.

Yes, if the old man had not believed the fortune-teller and had taken him to a doctor at one, the result would have been much worse than an IQ of fifty and a diagnosis of mild intellectual disability...

He would have seemed profoundly impaired...

And his visual acuity would not have been 0.2. He would have seemed blind... or nearly blind, with only a faint sense of light.

Conversely, scoring fifty despite the flood of information dulling his thoughts, and being able to converse at five, might have meant he was a genius...

There had never been anything wrong with his eyesight, either.

The beginning was the hardest part. The more concepts he learned, the more of the world he understood, the more his body matured, and the stronger his control became.

As he kept drawing in the information, Huang Ji's intelligence gradually recovered, and his mind grew clearer.

By junior high, his IQ had actually risen to sixty, and the pace of his recovery was accelerating.

His grades were terrible because forcing himself to think through the flood of information overtaxed his brain. His head would ache as though it were splitting apart, leaving him unable to study and sometimes making him faint.

In fact, he loved learning, because knowledge eased his symptoms.

The more he understood, the more information he could actively block, freeing space in his mind that useless data had occupied.

After giving up on the Junior High School Entrance Examination and returning home, he was free of a heavy school workload and could choose what to learn.

He observed the world and tried to understand it. He sat thinking in the fields, listened to casual chatter by the roadside, and watched all sorts of concepts explained on television.

That gave him more time to absorb and organize simple common knowledge.

Yes, common knowledge! Things most other people understood when they were only a few years old.

He had to learn the basics of reasoning before he could study anything more.

Those six idle months at home had been the most important months of his return to normal.

Now, after waking from his last fainting spell, he could finally block most of the information ordinary people could neither see nor sense.

His physical development determined how much incomprehensible information he could draw in and shield himself from.

His understanding determined how much comprehensible information he could draw in.

With so much less data battering and suppressing his mind, Huang Ji's intelligence had returned to normal. Perhaps it was even better than normal.

Now he could open or close himself to the information in all things. If he wanted to know something he was capable of understanding, he could search for it directly in his mind.

When he did not search, the earth and village before him, the people, mountains, and rivers, looked much as they did to anyone else.

"Except for the stars..." Huang Ji sighed.

Besides seeing information, he could experience it through hearing, touch, and smell.

Together, these formed a unique perception he called Information Sense.

For now, Huang Ji could shield himself only from the many kinds of information found in human society. The moment he raised his head to look at the stars, a vast flood of information struck his mind.

That was why looking at the stars had always given him splitting headaches or even made him faint.

Every star contained an immense amount of information. He could block ordinary information about stars. The sun, for instance, was a fairly simple celestial body, and he had been able to shield himself from its information since he was six.

But even now, at sixteen, Huang Ji could not block the information from stars that harbored civilizations...

Yes... civilizations!

There were countless civilizations among the stars. From what he could sense, some could even live on stars!

Light from stars that held life and civilizations reached Earth and entered his eyes, carrying information far more complex than sunlight!

More importantly, even after he blocked everything that matched his understanding of the sun, the stars still held a great deal he could not comprehend.

Fortunately, he was receiving only the weakened light from those civilization-bearing stars, not looking directly at the civilizations up close.

So once Huang Ji understood what stars, civilizations, and aliens were, he could shut out most of the information from the night sky.

But at sixteen, he still could not block it all. The stars continued to lay before him far too much that he could not understand.

Perhaps he needed to keep growing, to develop a stronger body and a more advanced brain.

In other words, his mind was still being held back. Every thought he formed remained under pressure from that information.

Even by day, his Double Pupils could sense information from the stars. It was merely much fainter than at night.

The entire starry sky pressed down on Huang Ji's intelligence!

Even now, his mind was not yet at its clearest.