The Soul

To do all this, Huang Si would have to act personally. If he sent a little robot or an artificial intelligence, it would be far too late. Only his Mental Force Field could reach them in an instant and ensure the Ape-man didn't die right away.

But that would mean Huang Si himself had to appear before them as a god.

Huang Si ignored anything that served no purpose.

He had no interest in playing god to these Ape-men like the artificial intelligence, saving lives and healing the wounded. But Shu Zi was the new leader of the Ape-man Tribe and had accomplished a great deal. He deserved some compensation for losing his beloved just like that.

These thoughts passed through Huang Si's mind only briefly before he made his decision.

In an instant, his consciousness pierced Xiao Hua's body and extracted several cells. He protected them with his mental power, sealing them off from the outside world.

His plan was to preserve a small number of cells, then use cloning technology to create a woman identical to Xiao Hua and give her to Shu Zi as compensation.

Whether Shu Zi would accept a copy was none of Huang Si's concern.

Seeing that Xiao Hua wasn't quite dead yet, Huang Si focused his attention and condensed his Mental Force Field. Like a CT scan, he examined her entire body, layer by layer.

He wanted to record her while he was at it. After all, she was the victim of the first murder in the world. It would be a shame to let her die without a record.

He had recorded plants before, but an Ape-man was no tiny Dreamy Flower.

A single Ape-man was made up of tens of trillions of cells. If Huang Si had to decipher the makeup of every cell in Xiao Hua's body and record it in the book before she died, he wasn't sure he could manage it.

Fortunately, Xiao Hua hadn't injured her head.

Huang Si used his mental power to block the artery she was bleeding from, delaying her death.

Only when Xiao Hua's life had completely faded did Huang Si just barely finish recording all her data.

The pages of the Creation Book turned on their own, though there was no wind. Huang Si entered Xiao Hua's data into it, taking up nearly a whole page.

Huang Si: "??? Why does my data take up 102 pages?"

But before Huang Si could argue with the Creation Book, he sensed something strange.

Maybe his Mental Force Field had changed somehow after sweeping over Xiao Hua's body again and again. The moment she died, Huang Si detected an incredibly faint fluctuation.

It was like a magnetic field, but fundamentally different.

A biological magnetic field?

Huang Si immediately tried to catch the fluctuation with his consciousness. He sensed something that was neither energy nor matter. It seemed to want to fly away, but Huang Si trapped it with his Mental Force Field.

After enduring countless trials in the Dark Space storm, Huang Si's Mental Force Field, when condensed, had become so dense that nothing he knew of—neither matter nor energy—could break through it.

This strange thing, neither matter nor energy, couldn't either.

Huang Si circled around the thing for a while, then sensed that something was off. Did it have a consciousness of its own?

A living thing? No, that couldn't be. What kind of living thing was like this?

Could it be...?

Considering where and when it had appeared, Huang Si suddenly came up with a bold guess.

"Could this thing be that Ape-man's soul?"

The soul was a mysterious subject. Huang Si had lived in this world for so many years, and aside from understanding his own soul, he had never seen anyone else's.

At first, Huang Si had thought it was because other species lacked higher intelligence. Now it seemed that wasn't the case. A soul's fluctuation was simply so faint that he had never noticed it before.

Since it was a soul, could he try talking to it?

Huang Si softly called to the soul with his consciousness.

A long, long time passed before the soul finally stirred.

A faint thought came from within it. "Who's calling me?"

Huang Si replied with a thought. "I just saved you. Do you know who you are?"

After a while, the soul weakly replied, "I don't know..."

Huang Si frowned. Souls really weren't bound to memories. This one was like a blank sheet of paper. Aside from basic self-awareness and the ability to think, it knew almost nothing.

What use was a soul with no memories?

He couldn't even give it to Shu Zi so he could reunite with his wife on ghost night.

But then the soul spoke again, slowly. "But I want to go back. I don't want to leave. Go back..."

After that, the word "back" echoed again and again through Huang Si's consciousness.

Huang Si was speechless. The soul couldn't even remember who it was, yet it still remembered wanting to go back. Just how determined was it?

"If you want to go back that badly, take a look at the corpse below. That's your body. Now try going back into it."

Huang Si wasn't mocking it. He was just curious. If a disembodied soul returned to its body like in Earth's folk tales, could it suddenly spring back to life or something?

But his words only confused the soul. A thought came from it. "I don't know where... I can't see..."

Huang Si was at a loss. All right, so the soul had no eyes. But did it have any other way to perceive things?

Huang Si's consciousness circled around the soul, but apart from its own nature, it had nothing like Huang Si's Mental Force Field for sensing the world. The whole thing was extremely weak.

If Huang Si hadn't been protecting it with his mental power the whole time, a gust of wind would probably have scattered it.

After a while, the soul seemed to realize something and asked, "You... who... are you?"

Huang Si replied, "The person who saved your life."

He hadn't saved its body, but Huang Si figured saving its soul counted too. He still didn't know what to do with it.

The soul's fluctuation was so weak that if Huang Si hadn't protected it with his Mental Force Field right away, even a strong gust of wind might have scattered it.

The soul sounded confused. "Am I dead? No, I can't die yet. I have to go back..."

Its thoughts poured toward Huang Si without pause. "Please, save me. Let me go back. Please, please..."

The soul was pestering Huang Si so relentlessly that he hurriedly tried to stop it. "Stop, stop, stop!..."

The soul didn't stop. It kept begging.

Huang Si couldn't take it anymore. "For god's sake, give it a rest!"

This time, his will carried a trace of mental pressure. The soul shuddered, nearly blown apart by the fluctuations in Huang Si's emotions.

It was instinctively frightened and fell silent at once.

At last, the soul had quieted down. Huang Si calmed himself and thought about what to do.

He had never seen a soul before. This was the first time he had ever seen someone else's.

The soul looked transparent. It didn't seem to have any weight or physical volume, and only mental power could sense its fluctuations.

Suddenly, Huang Si had a bold idea. Could a soul be recorded?

Huang Si's style was to act as soon as an idea came to him. He gently covered the soul with his consciousness, taking care not to hurt it, and switched to a microscopic view.

In the microscopic world,

Huang Si's consciousness drew closer to the soul. Sure enough, in this world, the soul was no longer formless and intangible.

Even when enlarged, the originally transparent soul remained transparent. Huang Si saw tiny little crosses floating inside it. They were far smaller than molecules. He couldn't tell if they had internal structures; they seemed to be single, indivisible units.

The crosses were transparent. If Huang Si had been looking with his eyes instead of his consciousness, he would hardly have been able to see them.

Was this the microscopic structure of a soul? Huang Si was skeptical. Why had he never seen anything like this when he looked at his own soul?

Oh, right. He had never seen his own soul at the microscopic level either. He could sense the state of his soul directly, just as a person knew where their body hurt or felt uncomfortable. There was no need to look, and he couldn't look anyway.

But could he really not look?

Huang Si's thoughts wandered. Driven by curiosity, he reversed his microscopic view, turning his perspective around to look at himself.

Then Huang Si saw a terrifying scene.

Before his eyes stretched an endless mass of densely packed Golden Spheres. There were so many of them that they made his head spin.

Huang Si still hadn't realized the danger. He tried to enlarge one of the spheres with his consciousness. But when it suddenly grew larger, what appeared before him was an endlessly subdividing microscopic structure, like a fractal in mathematics.

He zoomed in again and again. The sphere seemed capable of growing infinitely large.

Before long, Huang Si's body collapsed to the floor with a thud.

As Huang Si fell, the Creation Book in the living room suddenly turned its pages again, though there was no wind.

The pain of hitting his head on the ground finally brought Huang Si back to his senses. The moment he woke, he received new memories transmitted from the Creation Book.

Mo Xia had been frightened and hurried over to check what had happened to Huang Si.

Huang Si sat up and waved his hand to show that he was fine. As soon as he regained consciousness, the first thing he did was turn his Mental Force Field into a stream of data and hurry through the passage back to the Green World to check whether the soul was still there.

To be safe, Huang Si immediately sent his Mental Force Field to the spot where the soul had been, covering an area with a one-kilometer radius as he searched for it.

Fortunately, the soul hadn't dispersed or drifted away. It was still wandering in the same place, its consciousness repeating, "Save me. Let me go back. Save me..."

Huang Si was relieved to find it. This was a precious experimental specimen. If he lost it, there was no telling whether the next person to die would yield another one.

Now, he could test the new memories.

Huang Si silently examined the new memories the Creation Book had just placed in his consciousness. Assimilation, huh? Let's try it.

The soul was still begging nonstop.

Huang Si said to it, "I'll help you. So come here."

The soul received Huang Si's reply, and a faint emotional fluctuation stirred in it, as if it were delighted.

Huang Si drew the soul closer with his consciousness and shifted to a microscopic view.

"Golden Sphere. Where's that Golden Sphere from before? Let's try another one."

Almost unconsciously, Huang Si drew on it, and a brilliant golden sphere appeared in front of him. It was actually minuscule, but it had a nearly infinite microscopic structure that was impossible to analyze. Trying to force an analysis would exhaust Huang Si's mental power and make him pass out.

Just like before.

Fortunately, the Creation Book had already given Huang Si the relevant knowledge and instructions for using it.

Having learned his lesson, Huang Si tried not to look at the sphere. Instead, he controlled it with his consciousness and gently touched one of the transparent crosses inside the soul.

A formless halo burst from the point where the Golden Sphere touched the soul. Like dye spreading through water, countless tiny crosses all changed to the same color in an instant.

The soul before him turned completely golden.

At the same moment, Huang Si gained complete control over the soul.

From its consciousness and subconscious to its traits and obsessions, nothing was hidden from him. The soul stood completely exposed before Huang Si.

All its subjective desires and objective concepts, all its knowledge, emotions, and beliefs, were now under his control.