At 11:25 p.m., after saying good night to his wife, Galina, Lin Li went alone to the lawn below the villa. His body, after merging with Abu, allowed his brain to sleep more efficiently. Now he needed only two hours of rest each day to shake off all his fatigue.
However, today, after continuously reading the emotions of tens of thousands of people at Times Square, he had felt exhausted for the first time in a long while. Their tangled thoughts had echoed endlessly in his mind, dragging him out of his state of boundless energy and crystal-clear awareness and turning him back into an ordinary person.
Now he could no longer build a three-dimensional picture of his surroundings in his mind, and the loss made him unbearably irritable. After experiencing superhuman senses and control, his ordinary body felt like a clumsy, outdated computer—a piece of junk a hundred years behind the times.
Just then, the smartwatch on his wrist suddenly spoke in a child's voice. "Dump all the memories of other people that you can't handle onto that mascot. It's about time that guy did his job."
The irritation on Lin Li's face vanished in an instant. Following the voice's instructions, he sent all the conflicting, chaotic memories of those tens of thousands of people to Abu. The creature, now reduced to a mascot, accepted them all without the slightest strain.
His expression returned to calm as he carefully recalled the memories in his mind. During the transfer, the chaotic memories, saturated with the emotions of tens of thousands of people, had been compressed into abstract written descriptions. All the complex physical sensations had been dumped onto Abu, leaving only emotionless summaries in his mind.
Before, Lin Li had shared the feelings of those tens of thousands of people. Now, he had merely read a book describing how they had expressed their emotions. The amount of information between the two was different by several orders of magnitude.
With a soft sigh, Lin Li regained his composure and finally escaped the grip of those emotions. His mind began racing, and in an instant, he understood who the voice belonged to. It didn't sound the same, but there was no doubt it was that person.
"Hello, Abu's former owner. We haven't seen each other in a month."
The smartwatch projected a screen of light. In the three-dimensional image was a little boy around five or six years old. Tens of thousands of strands of his hair curled and stretched away from him, seemingly connected to various objects. In front of him, a fat Orange Cat lay on its back, sound asleep.
Li Heng, in the form of a child, cheerfully greeted Lin Li. "Hello! You're quite something. You managed to withstand the emotional memories of tens of thousands of people without going crazy. No wonder I picked you. I think you're even more impressive than I was when I first mutated."
Lin Li raised his eyebrows slightly. He had imagined this person as either a composed, calm individual or an utterly mad one, someone with a broad perspective and a mental age somewhere between twenty and forty.
What he saw before him didn't fit that picture at all. But the other party possessed incomprehensible power and technology, so there was no reason to put on an act in front of him. Or perhaps this was just their sense of humor.
Li Heng saw Lin Li's expression and laughed. "Are you wondering why I'm a kid? Heh, guess for yourself. I'm not telling."
The next second, the child's smirk in the image turned into the composed smile of an adult. The contrast felt strangely familiar to Lin Li. He himself had smiled like that as a child.
Li Heng, still in a child's form, explained, "You've already experienced what it's like to have the emotional memories of tens of thousands of people crash through your mind. Every day, I receive a huge amount of information through the internet. To turn it into memories of my own, I split my consciousness into 8,078 parts."
Why was Li Heng's daily limit only four percent? Because taking in more information than that would let the flood from outside overwhelm his sense of self, eventually turning him into a chaotic, disordered monster.
A person's sense of self wasn't unchanging. Every day, every minute, every second, people learned about the world and absorbed new knowledge. A twenty-year-old adult might think the fifteen-year-old version of themselves had been a childish idiot. At forty, they might look back on their twenty-year-old self as an arrogant fool. At sixty, they might miss the carefree version of themselves at fifteen.
These changes in mindset, happening alongside the body's growth and decline, seemed impossible to resist. But for Li Heng, that wasn't a problem. He could have it all.
Ordinary people had frail bodies that prevented them from retaining all their memories. As they forgot the past, those so-called memories became distorted by the brain, their details processed until they differed greatly from what had really happened.
Li Heng, on the other hand, could clearly remember his entire past. At any time, he could feel as he once had. The five-year-old Li Heng was him; the ten-year-old Li Heng was him, too. So was the twenty-year-old.
He had separated out each day's version of himself, starting from the age of five, eventually forming 8,078 separate consciousnesses. After absorbing vast amounts of information from the internet, those consciousnesses had become even more versions of himself.
An ordinary forty-year-old man could no longer recapture his childhood love of toys, nor feel the fiery passion he had at fifteen.
But Li Heng could love childish toys and dull financial news at the same time. He could like both sweet zongzi and savory ones. The contradictions that ordinary people had to choose between no longer applied to him.
Li Heng raised his right hand. The skin and flesh on its back rippled and reshaped into a tiny Hummingbird. It spoke to Lin Li in a human voice. "I can be a child, or an adult. I can be a man, a woman, neither, or both. These are all just appearances produced by a pile of cells. And now, I'm a hummingbird."
Lin Li pondered the creature's words. This form of life had already surpassed the bounds of ordinary Intelligent Beings. Even he, who had become a Superhuman through symbiosis, was far from its equal. At the very least, he couldn't be an adult and a child at the same time. He still had a human mind that thought in a straight line.
But the astonishing revelation didn't shock him. Instead, he asked another question. "Were my experiences after merging with Abu guided by you?"
Before, Lin Li had thought the person behind it was a scientist or an ambitious schemer with control over advanced biological technology, so the possibility hadn't occurred to him. But after witnessing this person's unbelievable form of life, he began to question everything he had experienced over the past month.
If his adoptive parents could have been genuinely kind to him, how could he have met only hypocrites and scumbags after he gained the ability to read people's minds?
The people at Times Square had been strange, too. Almost all of them belonged to the elite. Now that he was free from the interference of their emotions, he could see what was going on.
Those provocative slogans and ideologies were really aimed at people with lower levels of awareness, the lower and middle classes. Most of them were driven by their own emotions, with the elites' slogans guiding their desires and preferences. How could Times Square have been full of nothing but hypocritical schemers?
The Hummingbird raised its wings to cover its eyes. Li Heng, in the form of a child, sighed helplessly. "Can't you just pretend you don't know? You're making my setup look really clumsy. Aren't you afraid I'll get mad and kill you?"
Just as Lin Li had said, the people he saw had been carefully selected. The bald man who had fought with him at the bar, for instance, had been led there by Li Heng. With his head full of women and his muscles where his brains should be, he was bound to pick a fight after seeing Lin Li flirting with the girls.
As for Galina, she really was a nightclub girl who spent all her time out partying. But a few days earlier, her scumbag boyfriend had come into some money and dumped her to go elsewhere. Downcast, Galina had met a better man in Lin Li, and he had naturally filled the emptiness inside her.
Similarly, the few kindhearted staff members at the orphanage had left because of problems in their own families. That was why no one paid attention to the bullying among the children.
Finally, in the case of Times Square, most of the residents who had planned to attend the rally happened to run into various errands that day, leaving the place full of elites.
Li Heng said, "I did guide the formation of your sense of self, but the people you saw were real. Besides, even if you know I guided you, so what? You'll still hate those malicious people."
Lin Li nodded. That was what emotions did: they affected a person's logical judgment. He understood perfectly well that if he had encountered only kindness, he would have come to love the world. Perhaps he would have become a young tycoon devoted to charity for the rest of his life.
But there was no "if." After seeing all that malice, all he felt for those people was hatred.
Lin Li said calmly, "Besides, what is there as a truly independent will? Just like the elites who control knowledge and the media, this world is really shaped by the will of a few powerful people, which in turn influences the will of the masses. I'm just being guided by the will of someone even more powerful."
The Hummingbird on the back of Li Heng's hand flapped its tiny wings and applauded. "Exactly. What people call free will is limited by the channels through which they receive information. The sheer volume and variety of information means people can only see a limited world."
Whether people shut themselves inside an information bubble to avoid the pain of thinking, or let media-shaped information guide the direction of their thoughts, pure free will didn't exist.
From the very beginning of their deal, Li Heng had never said how he would make Lin Li feel emotions. And now, the man who had once been emotionless had developed feelings—a hatred for the society around him.
A lengthy set of detailed data appeared on the screen of light. The Hummingbird extended an invitation. "Come and be the administrator of a virtual world. The stage is all set. You can experience the thoughts and feelings of a million people in a virtual world, and build the ideal world you've always imagined."
Lin Li looked over the grand plan. This virtual world was free from the clamor and conflict of the outside world, and life within it would have nearly limitless resources. He would become the administrator of this world, its one and only God.
He countered, "No matter how real it feels, it's still all fake. If they gave up their bodies and kept only their brains, then lived in a virtual world, would they really be willing to do that?"
Li Heng chuckled and shook his head. "What's real, and what's fake? The electrical signals their brains receive are no different from the ones they experience through their real hands and feet. For finite lives, once death comes, everything real will become unreal. In the empty darkness, nothing will exist."
"In the real world, they work ten hours a day, live in old, cramped apartments, and watch the rich enjoy the wealth they've squeezed from them, spending it recklessly on hundreds or thousands of beautiful women. Meanwhile, all they can do is accumulate aches and illnesses through endless, repetitive labor, then die in agony and despair in their forties or fifties."
"In the virtual world, everyone can have an entire building to live in. They can also have superpowers and strong, healthy bodies that never get injured, sick, or old—things impossible in the real world. Gold and diamonds are worthless, and handsome, beautiful NPCs serve them with the same devotion as real people."
"No more worrying about work or illness. They can live carefree until their brains reach the limit of their lifespan: a hundred and fifty years."
"Does it really matter what's fake and what's real?"
Before you continue