A Conversation

In a new city in southern India, in a high-rise bearing the Manohar insignia, Li Heng, still in the form of a child, was discussing the progress of the plan with Lin Li on the twenty-fifth floor.

At the other end of the spacious room, Achilles was getting used to his new body. He had become a sexless angel, without even an excretory tract. The angel's stomach consisted of a section that digested food with strong acid and a high-temperature furnace that turned the remains into basic gases and expelled them. In a way, it was much like a jellyfish or a starfish.

In fact, now that Achilles had an angel's body, human concepts of gender no longer applied to him. This body was incapable of reproduction, and once Hong Alliance and Li Heng found a way to make the human brain continuously produce nerve cells, he might become no different from the angels of legend.

In any case, he, she, they, or it were all just terms for living things. As Li Heng grew more powerful, the boundary between life and nonlife would grow increasingly blurred, just like the distinction between male and female, and might even become something one could change at will. To him, an angel was no different from an intelligent robot with self-awareness.

With a sudden flap of his two wings, Achilles slammed his feet into the heavy metal floor, leaving a massive crater. He charged at Li Heng, who stood some distance away, putting all his strength into the attack. Supposedly, this guy who had made his body was far stronger than Lin Li.

The child, newly gifted with an angel's body, had grown wildly confident. He no longer considered Lin Li a threat. He wanted to see just how powerful the man described as Earth's strongest living being really was.

And then it was over. Without even turning his head, Li Heng swept out an invisible tentacle. Just like the first time he had faced Lin Li, Achilles was torn into several pieces again. His limbs and wings were ripped apart in an instant, leaving only his torso to roll to Li Heng's side.

A transparent tentacle curled around Achilles and pieced him back together while blood still spurted from his wounds. "I let you bleed a little. It should clear your head. You weren't this impulsive before."

Pale from blood loss, Achilles calmed down from his excitement. His new body really had affected his judgment. The sudden acquisition of great power had gone to his head, and the superhuman senses that made him feel as if he had the world in his grasp had sent his confidence soaring.

Still, being torn apart once again without any ability to fight back had shaken him. He wrapped his white wings around his head, covered his face, and ran to a corner to eat snacks. His lifelong hunger to survive had made him obsessed with food, and with his furnace stomach, he could enjoy the equivalent of thousands of people's worth of food in a single day.

Crouched in the corner, Achilles watched the three-eyed child floating in midair. To human eyes, it looked like magic, but his angelic body could see infrared and ultraviolet light, so he knew it was only an illusion. Every vertebra in the child's spine extended into a tentacle. Thirty-three transparent tentacles, each a hundred meters long, twisted and wove together to form a huge chair that carried him, creating this fantastical scene.

Achilles flapped his wings, feeling a little dejected. He rubbed the handsome, gem-studded horns on his head and looked enviously at those twisted, chaotic limbs. Those two had so many tentacles, and the more tentacles you had, the stronger you were. Perhaps he should try switching to a tentacled monster's body someday.

One of Li Heng's tentacles connected to the one behind Lin Li's neck, and a flood of information flowed between them. Having left their human bodies behind, they no longer needed ordinary language to communicate.

Language was an abstract summary of natural phenomena. Its existence greatly improved communication between intelligent beings, allowing knowledge to spread and civilization to grow.

However, because language was compressed, abstract information designed for sharing knowledge, it could not match complex visual information when two people needed to describe something precisely and in detail.

The state of the world's major cities, the control permissions for the Jelly creatures and giant Biological Weapons, the Reborn and that script, and the distribution of human military forces across Eurasia—all that complicated information was understood by Lin Li in a short time.

After digesting it, he asked Li Heng, who was floating in midair, "The Hong Alliance won't necessarily follow that plan. What if they immediately target the Jelly creatures' supposed weakness and break the sea blockade?"

Li Heng shook his head. "That so-called weakness is just a lie. If it were real, how could Ai Liyuan, who took part in the research from beginning to end, not know about it?"

The soldier called Gu Qi knew none of these core secrets. As far as he was concerned, the Jelly creatures had been made by the Immortal Demon alone, and Ai Liyuan was just another person who had been kept in the dark.

But Ji Hong knew the truth. He also understood that the supposed genetic flaw was nonsense.

"The flaw will only appear at the right moment. They won't find a way to deal with the Jelly creatures in advance. Recovering corpses is just a matter of Devouring them and producing more. After all, that flesh is a resource, too."

Only when the world's situation had reached the point where the Hong Alliance and the alien forces were the last powers standing would Li Heng create a flaw in all the Jelly creatures. When exposed to those specially engineered bacteria, they would destroy their own brains. The so-called memory confusion would simply be the Jelly creatures committing mass suicide.

He said to Lin Li:

"Don't worry so much. Everything is out in the open between us and the Hong Alliance. For someone like Ji Hong, all you have to do is show him everything, and he'll find the most rational path, the one that benefits humanity the most. He built the strongest organization on Earth from nothing. He's nothing like those figureheads the Commercial Alliance parades around in public."

The two organizations were structured completely differently. Most of the officials who seemed to hold the most power in the Commercial Alliance were merely spokespeople put forward by certain interest groups.

Lin Li nodded. After all, he wasn't an individual as invincible on Earth as Li Heng. This time, he would have to face the civilization of an entire continent alone. Western Europe and the Hong Alliance were both his enemies. On the surface, he was the one under the most pressure; one wrong move could mean death.

Li Heng smiled at him. "You're starting to fear death now. You used to seem so indifferent to it. Looks like you and Abu merged quite smoothly."

As the emotions of a symbiote and a human gradually intertwined, their consciousness and memories would slowly merge into a single intelligent being, much like the two hemispheres of a human brain. Lin Li and Abu had now become a new, unified consciousness.

He could now think in two different ways at once: one half was the cold, rational Lin Li, while the other was Abu, full of emotion. The unity of these two opposing consciousnesses had created a new self.

Lin Li said, "It feels pretty interesting. From the beginning, you wanted to turn me into a being capable of parallel thought. You hoped to cultivate someone whose thought process was like yours."

If this parallel thinking could keep accumulating, perhaps one day a New Human with thousands of personalities, like Li Heng, would emerge.

Li Heng shook his head. "Matter determines consciousness. Only a brain like mine could produce an individual with the same consciousness. Even now, I still don't know what my brain is made of. It's beyond the elementary particles known to humanity."

Li Heng had once considered using this method to create similar intelligent beings. But when two human brains were connected, their memories would gradually merge amid conflict and confusion. They wouldn't become two consciousnesses. Instead, the boundary between "me" and "someone else" would disappear, leaving a single consciousness with two sets of memories.

Lin Li was special. His genetic mutation had given him an unusual brain, and only in him could a symbiote create a second consciousness capable of parallel thought. For ordinary people, a symbiote wouldn't change their consciousness. The immature new consciousness would take in excess emotions and develop into a new organ closely connected to the amygdala. That was all.

Looking at the huge, twisted armchair woven from tentacles behind Li Heng, invisible to ordinary people, Lin Li considered the plan in its entirety.

In the plan, the Hong Alliance's leadership would become a wholly rational, conflict-free collective consciousness. But people always had their weaknesses. If the Hong Alliance refused to follow the script and chose to resist with all its strength rather than preserve its forces, the chance of success would drop sharply.

Lin Li raised the question. This was what puzzled him most. Even if Ji Hong himself was perfectly rational, the other leaders might not be willing to endure such humiliation.

Li Heng smiled. "Lin Li, you're overlooking the most crucial point. I'm immortal, and the Hong Alliance knows I'm immortal."

The most basic cost behind every human action was time—or, in other words, lifespan.

Behind every effort in this world lay the most important price of all: lifespan.

If you put your effort in the wrong direction, that price could never be recovered. That was why choosing the right path was often more important than hard work.

But for Li Heng, whose lifespan was eternal, making the wrong choice didn't matter. Endless time meant he had endless chances to make mistakes. Even if the Hong Alliance united and revealed all his abilities, even if all of humanity joined forces to temporarily drive back his Biological Weapons and Jelly army—

Li Heng would still win in the end.

Ji Hong would eventually die. The human leadership, now united as one, would die. Even the Hong Alliance would fall apart after hundreds or thousands of years. By then, humanity would have completely forgotten the threat of this Immortal Demon.

For the immortal Li Heng, failure was no great problem. He could fail a hundred or a thousand times. His endless lifespan meant he didn't need to care about the cost of time.

Li Heng said, "That's the difference between me, you, and ordinary humans. Beings with limited lifespans are afraid of making mistakes because it means wasting time. But I'm not afraid of making mistakes. If this plan fails, I can simply try again."

If the plan succeeded, all of humanity would gain a longer lifespan, and he would acquire more information and grow faster.

If the plan failed, he could slowly alter humanity's memories. Once everyone who knew about his powers had died, could the new humans with their twisted thoughts still unite to fight him?

When all was said and done, he was the stronger one. He had revealed all his abilities only so that more of humanity might survive.