Protecting Endangered Animals

Across the aisle, Jiang Xueming hesitated for a moment before finally asking, "This is the 'most exciting part' you were talking about?"

Bu Liuxing's big, watery eyes were full of innocence. "Yeah! What else?"

Jiang Xueming pressed him. "You and her didn't talk about anything else?"

A Xing said, "We did."

Jiang Xueming asked, "Like what?"

A Xing said, "I've forgotten most of it."

Jiang Xueming said nothing.

The [Phantom Sun] outside the window shone on Bu Liuxing's face, making the kid look especially guileless. With those thick eyebrows and big eyes, he seemed utterly innocent.

Jiang Xueming took a deep breath, got his expression under control, and patiently continued questioning him.

"Think carefully, A Xing. Try to remember. I know things were chaotic at the time. You said the Faceless Lady stuck her tentacles right into your face, like plugging a USB cable into your cheek to transfer data. So think it over carefully."

"Got it! Got it!" A Xing propped his chin on his hand and began to rack his brains.

Jiang Xueming said, "How about I give you a few hints? Help you get in the mood?"

A Xing asked eagerly, "Then why don't you hold me? Like the Faceless Lady held me. Without recreating the scene, I can't get a feel for it."

"Sir, please behave yourself. I'm not some young lady from an ancient civilization."

"Fine, don't hold me." Bu Liuxing pouted, looking aggrieved. "Why are you being so mean?"

After a long while, A Xing finally began to slowly and seriously recount what he remembered.

"To be honest, I really can't remember those jumbled bits of information. They all flooded into my head in an instant—

"—Ming Ge, when we were kids, we learned to read and write by moving up a grade every year, taking it one step at a time, and reading one book after another. That's how it works, right?"

Jiang Xueming said, "Mm."

Bu Liuxing covered his forehead, struggling to remember.

"But the information the Faceless Lady transferred to me through that USB in my head was all out of order, with no logic to it. I can't say I understood it, and I didn't remember much."

As he spoke, A Xing's nose began to bleed.

Jiang Xueming felt conflicted. He kindly handed him a packet of tissues. "Thanks for the effort, A Xing. A capillary in your nose has burst. Don't be too nervous. This kind of symptom is common in psychiatry. If your hippocampus and cerebral cortex undergo drastic changes in a short time, making you remember or forget a lot of things, all that intense brain activity can make your nose bleed too."

"Do you go to the psychiatric department a lot, Ming Ge?" A Xing took the tissues and wiped his nose.

Jiang Xueming sat back down beside Bu Liuxing. "I just know a little."

A Xing continued, "That's not why my nose is bleeding. You got it wrong. Just now, while I was trying to remember, I thought about the Faceless Lady's smooth legs, and then..."

Jiang Xueming moved back across the aisle to the little table.

A Xing asked, "Why did you move so far away again?"

Xue Ming replied, "Keep going. Have a drink if you're thirsty."

"Ah, let me sort out my thoughts." Bu Liuxing rubbed his temples, striking a pose like the clever monk Yixiu. Suddenly, the sixteen-watt bulb in his brain lit up. "I've got it!"

Xue Ming said nothing, simply taking notes in his notebook.

He heard A Xing's voice suddenly grow somber, as if he were earnestly describing events from long ago.

"In a very, very distant age, almost earlier than the age of the dinosaurs, ninety-six golden eggs fell from the sky."

The sunlight glimmered in A Xing's eyes as he calmly described the jumbled images in his mind.

"These golden eggs came from Procyon in Canis Minor. Their home star was dying. Procyon went from being the brightest light of its civilization to a dark red fireball that brought death."

"Khanna Koli Keran."

"It's hard to pronounce that name with human vocal organs. That was the name of the Faceless Lady's homeworld species."

"In those muddled memories, she told me to call her Canaan, and to use that name for her and her people."

"These Canaanites fled from Canis Minor to Earth, hoping to build a new home on this world."

"But their physical bodies couldn't withstand Earth's environment. The pressure and gravity were bad enough, let alone the ancient viruses that had evolved alongside the biosphere."

"The Canaanites could only protect their fragile bodies by maintaining their original golden-egg form."

"Wait." Jiang Xueming interrupted him. "Are you saying those egg-like things weren't spaceships? They were the aliens themselves?"

Bu Liuxing nodded. "Their physical bodies were originally extremely fragile, like cells in a petri dish."

"Let me put it this way: if we looked at the human body, every inch of skin and every strand of hair would count as a life, and each one could think and express emotions. These Canaan creatures had countless cilia, light-sensitive cells, and organs that detected electrical signals. They were like living [water], gathering together into all kinds of shapes. Some individuals contained Canaan communities numbering in the tens of billions, while others were solitary Canaanites who acted alone."

Bu Liuxing took a sip of coffee and explained at an unhurried pace.

"When Canaan civilization faced annihilation, they decided to pack their entire civilization into thousands upon thousands of golden eggs. They hadn't mastered faster-than-light travel at all. Their home star was short on energy, and they hadn't developed thermonuclear technology."

"The 'golden eggs' they used were actually products of their own mimicry. Because Canaan creatures were so tiny, they imitated other organisms in their homeworld's biosphere. They used their own bodies to create shells that were ceramic-like, heat-resistant, and airtight. Then they set off to wander the universe."

"Eventually, after a long journey, ninety-six golden eggs grew solar sails for wings and used the gravity of various celestial bodies to slingshot themselves forward. Like stubborn snails, they somehow made their way to Earth."

"The Faceless Lady we saw once contained more than fifty-five million little Canaanites."

"Once did?"

"These Canaanite golden eggs had been on Earth for countless ages." Bu Liuxing murmured, "When the Canaanites arrived, Earth was in the midst of turmoil. They already had trouble adapting to this unfamiliar star, the Sun. On top of that, Earth's vegetation kept upsetting the carbon-oxygen balance, and extreme climate events happened every million years or so."

"After emerging from suspended animation following their journey through space, the Canaanites immediately hid on the relatively stable deep-sea floor and went back to sleep, hoping for a more stable environment."

"During the Carnian Pluvial Event, the entire Earth became a water world. It rained for a million years. Before that, insects had also begun to curb the rampant growth of plants, and Earth's environment finally stabilized."

"In the unfathomably deep ocean, the Canaanites endured hundreds of thousands of generations. They survived the disasters of continental shelves and plate movements, and escaped earthquakes, volcanoes, and changes in water temperature. They seemed to have finally reached better times, but things weren't that simple."

"They rested and multiplied inside the golden eggs, and the organisms in the shells had long since been replaced. Unlike the original Canaanites of Procyon, who existed as beings that were half energy and half matter, energy beings couldn't withstand Earth's harsh magnetic field or its unusual solar activity."

"To adapt to the environment, when the new generation of Canaanites left their eggs, they used their mimetic talent to become purely carbon-based Earth species. They looked a lot like brilliantly colored sea slugs. But..."

Bu Liuxing's tone shifted.

"Having stable physical bodies also meant that these new-generation Canaanites could never return to their eggs. It was a one-way evolution, an irreversible process. After the Carnian Pluvial Event ended, these new-generation Canaanites became fossil specimens of certain mysterious creatures in human history textbooks. Mother Earth's unpredictable temper was like that of a cold stepmother; she wasn't going to take special care of these intelligent outsiders."

"The Canaanites who stayed in their eggs followed Earth's geological timeline. After one extinction event after another, the last group to emerge from the eggs and retain carbon-based bodies were the Faceless Lady of Fang Feng Settlement and its residents."

Jiang Xueming frowned. "If these Canaanites were intelligent, why did they look like that?"

"Because their civilization had been severed. To be precise, the things that hatched from the golden eggs weren't really Canaanites anymore." Bu Liuxing explained, "The Canaanites of Procyon originally had bodies that were half energy and half matter. They reproduced by exchanging information and matter, creating an effect where one plus one was far greater than two."

A Xing snapped his fingers.

"For example, when two communities of these creatures exchanged some of their members, they could immediately draw energy from their natural surroundings and multiply, producing more Canaanites. It was like creating something from nothing, a gift their homeworld's rich natural environment had given them."

"Likewise, they didn't need any medium to preserve history. They didn't need writing, books, or music. Their half-energy, half-matter bodies were the perfect information-storage tools, like biological computers, while the vast communities of Canaanites formed a network of computer clusters."

"But the rules on Earth were different. A little over a hundred years ago, when the last group of new-generation Canaanites emerged from the golden eggs and settled into fixed physical forms, they lost their energy bodies and completely forgot their species' history. Only a tiny number of individuals still remembered the history of the stars, which stretched back tens of millions of years."

"The Faceless Lady was one of the few relatively intact ancient Canaan communities. She chose to leave her egg during the first human Industrial Revolution, and took on a human form for her physical body, hoping to interact with humans."

"She went to London to study human history and culture. She used her species' natural ability to influence the brains of people around her, making herself seem ordinary and inconspicuous enough."

"Her transformation was incomplete so she could preserve her memories. That left her with most of her ancient consciousness, and she could change her physical form at will, like a mass of viscous cells. She paid a terrible price for it: seventy percent of the Canaan community inside her died. She also had to keep avoiding sunlight and strong magnetic and electrical fields. If she went out in broad daylight, she had to carry a black umbrella and wrap herself up from head to toe."

"She learned human customs and tried to marry another Canaanite from her people, having a child with a double-helix genetic sequence. But unfortunately, after her husband left his egg, he accidentally contracted the Vita Imprint. Amputating one leg didn't help; his illness kept getting worse. In the end, in the mansion, afraid he would infect the Faceless Lady, he killed himself by exposing himself to a powerful ultraviolet lamp. He died right in front of his workbench. We saw his prosthetic leg."

"No wonder I couldn't find any books." Jiang Xueming said with understanding. "There were only a few photos on the wall. They never needed writing in the first place."

"Come to think of it, it's pretty romantic." Bu Liuxing smiled. "The Faceless Lady seemed very happy when she told me about those photos. To the Canaanites, a fixed life form was meaningless. They couldn't understand how an intelligent being could spend its whole life trapped in the prison of a physical body. But when she and her husband had their picture taken, they had to stand in front of the camera for thirty seconds without moving before the magnesium flash went off."

"That thirty seconds together felt like a priceless treasure to her, because her husband was about to leave her and return to the embrace of the astral realm."

"When Canaan creatures died, they said that their energy and thoughts had returned to the astral realm, going from nothing to something, and from something back to nothing. In the photo, she could see the reflection she and her late husband had left behind in this world. What made her ecstatic was that she was like a thief, stealing sweet memories from the astral realm without returning them completely."

Jiang Xueming thought again of the residents of Fang Feng Settlement.

"What about those residents of the settlement, the ones with vacant stares who seemed like primitive humans?"

Bu Liuxing thought for a moment, sorted through his muddled memories, then answered.

"The Faceless Lady is looking after them. She made the clothes on these human-shaped creatures stitch by stitch with her nimble tentacles. A little over a hundred years ago, she spent enormous resources coming underground and hid the remaining golden eggs on this deep-sea floor with its sweet sea breeze. The environment here was very similar to the one she was born in. There was volcanic activity and geothermal heat to provide the eggs with relatively stable warmth, making it a good nursery. It was rainy here all year round, with no strong sunlight. The husband she'd imagined also hatched here, and then fell ill."

"Later, she decided that Earth's environment still needed to evolve. It was too soon for the planet to become habitable for her compatriots in the eggs. But it was strange: with the Faceless Lady as their model, when the station's construction crew arrived, they also awakened some of the Canaanites in the eggs."

"They followed her example and tried to be 'born' in human form. They weren't quite as meek and docile either. But as Canaan creatures, these new-generation young ones were far too young. Once freed from their eggs and the support of their collective consciousness, they lost their energy and their physical forms became fixed. Then they lost all their memories."

"The result was what we saw. They were like apes with undeveloped minds. Aside from having a constitution similar to the Faceless Lady's, they might as well have been a new species. The Faceless Lady plugged a USB into them a few times too, just as she did to me. But the interface wasn't compatible with these infants. So we saw the residents speak in all sorts of languages, but they struggled to express any complete, concrete ideas."

"Deep-sea blood still flowed through their bodies: blood rich in copper ions, like that of mimetic marine life. In other words, the blue blood we saw. Simply put, these aliens could no longer be called aliens. To keep living on Earth, they'd paid the price of near-total civilizational extinction, forcibly and irreversibly transforming themselves into native Earth life made entirely of carbon. They're protected animals."

"And then?" Jiang Xueming raised his coffee to his lips and asked curiously. "Did she really tell you all that? What happened after?"

Bu Liuxing said, "I slept with her."

"Pfft—!" Xue Ming sprayed coffee all over A Xing's face.

Bu Liuxing wiped his face and explained as if nothing had happened, "She made the first move. I was very reserved, and I'd just learned a grappling technique last month. It would've been a shame not to use it. But seriously, that was all she asked for. To adapt to human society and help her people get better mimetic bodies, she needed more DNA samples."

Jiang Xueming held back for a long moment, feeling like he couldn't quite find the words to respond.

At last, he managed to say, "Is this how you treat protected animals?"