Xiang Qian slowly opened his eyes. He had seen this sight countless times, ever since he was six—over twenty years ago.
It was a stretch of space shrouded in darkness, vast and boundless. Countless distant stars dotted the void, gathering into a galaxy. Behind Xiang Qian hung a blue main-sequence star. Huge plumes of coronal mass occasionally burst from its scorching surface, blossoming in splendid colors.
Xiang Qian turned around and, as he had done countless times before, spread his arms toward the pale blue star. It was an unstable main-sequence star. Its fierce solar winds almost never let up, strong enough to kill any creature that came near—but Xiang Qian was unharmed.
Every kind of energy pouring from the star—whether powerful electromagnetic radiation or violent streams of plasma—converged on Xiang Qian. The energy was wild, but the moment it touched him, it became docile, gathering obediently at his chest. As more and more energy collected there, a dazzling light began to shine from his heart.
Behind the brilliant light, a phantom silver dragon rose up. After swimming through the air for a brief moment, it coiled around Xiang Qian's body. Soon, the dragon dispersed into countless specks of light, which suddenly gathered into a fierce tiger. Two faint human figures hovered behind it. The illusory yet lifelike shadows drifted above Xiang Qian's head for a long while before gradually fading away. The totems of Kunlun and Kamar-Taj, two great sanctuaries, drove the light around Xiang Qian to gradually outshine the nearby star. But just then, Xiang Qian furrowed his brow.
"Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. For now, this is as far as I can go."
Xiang Qian seemed to be muttering to himself. After all, this was the void; there wasn't even a medium to carry sound, so who could he be talking to? Yet as soon as the words left his mouth, a voice answered, as if replying to him. "Too much of a good thing? What counts as too much? For your body, it is indeed too much. The frail human body can't contain such immense energy. But why are you so determined to keep your human form?"
A faint smile tugged at Xiang Qian's lips. "Trying to persuade me to stop being human again?"
"What's so great about being human? A human body, human thoughts, human emotions—they're nothing but shackles to you." The voice in the void rang out, ethereal and distant, like the empty reaches of space. "Cast aside these pointless attachments, and you can break your chains. You can become the ruler of this universe."
Xiang Qian gave a disdainful snort. "Can't I rule this universe already?" As if to prove his power, he raised a hand and pushed. The enormous blue star vanished in an instant, like a baseball struck hard by a bat, disappearing from sight.
The voice in the void was unmoved by Xiang Qian's display. Instead, it took on a note of mockery. "You haven't mastered the full authority of a ruler. Deep down, you know that perfectly well. You haven't truly become a ruler."
Xiang Qian impatiently rolled his eyes, then casually snapped his fingers. A pure white planet suddenly appeared in the far distance and sped toward him.
"So what? A ruler's authority is like household necessities: having enough is all that matters. A toilet encrusted with gold and diamonds still has to sit in the bathroom, doesn't it?" Xiang Qian retorted as he descended toward the white planet.
The voice in the void let out a cackling laugh, pouring its mockery into Xiang Qian's ears without restraint. "You're fooling yourself! You know why you refuse. There's only one reason—you're afraid! You once came into contact with supreme authority. You saw the ruler's unrivaled power, but what you saw terrified you. You backed down, like a cowardly hedgehog curling into a ball, turning your human body into a shelter from the storm—as if a turtle retreating into its—" The voice grew more and more grating. Xiang Qian swept his hand sharply, as if flipping a switch, and all the noise abruptly fell silent.
Xiang Qian descended at great speed. As he drew closer, the white planet's true appearance grew clearer. From afar, it looked like an irregular sphere split into two halves. Up close, though, its surface was crisscrossed with furrows; even the areas without furrows were uneven. Not a single spot was flat. Anyone who had paid attention in biology class could easily recognize it: the planet looked exactly like a human brain.
Xiang Qian landed where the two halves of the brain met, among enormous nerve fibers. Once on the ground, he headed toward the deepest fissure with practiced ease. Deep inside, the scene was utterly different from the gray-white surface outside. The cliff walls were covered in bubbles that glimmered with starlight. There were as many as the stars, packed tightly from the bottom of the ravine to its summit. Their faint lights gathered into a radiance as brilliant as the Milky Way.
Xiang Qian looked up. One of the bubbles he gazed at drifted toward him of its own accord. Text appeared across its surface, line by line, followed by images, videos, and all kinds of information, presented swiftly and in full. Xiang Qian didn't need to make a move. At his thoughts, starlight began to flow across the bubble's surface, then scattered outward in clusters. Each point of light trailed a beam that connected to another bubble on the cliff wall.
Every bubble on this planet was a vessel for stored information, sorted into categories according to its contents. The beams of light radiating from the bubbles represented their associations: any other bubble linked by a beam of starlight was bound to hold closely related information. At Xiang Qian's direction, related bubbles detached one by one from the cliff wall and followed the beams toward him. More information surged in like a tide.
Time trickled by. Processing such a vast amount of information took a long while, but Xiang Qian wasn't in a hurry. He controlled not only this planet, but time itself, because this place was the home of his thoughts and soul. This "Brain Planet" was the "Memory Planet" deep within his mind. The palace method of memory, spoken of as something miraculous in the ordinary world, seemed laughable by comparison. How could building a palace to store memories compare with building an entire planet?
Xiang Qian calmly sifted through the vast sea of information, extracting what he needed. The human brain was indeed remarkable. It could store more information than any computer terminal in the real world, and it could process and retrieve information even faster. But it was also more prone to crashing. Fortunately, that was never a problem for Xiang Qian. He kept his brain running at full speed until a long-sealed file from the real world appeared before him.
"February 14, 1991."
Seeing the date at the top of the file, Xiang Qian felt a tempest stir inside him. His previously calm expression changed, too. Just then, the voice from the void—the one he loathed—spoke again, as if reminding him that he wasn't alone in this expanse. "This is it. One of the goals you're so determined to pursue began on this date. It's also the greatest shackle on you, or at least one of them." The owner of the voice seemed able to see the secrets in Xiang Qian's heart. Or perhaps the turmoil in Xiang Qian's heart had given it another chance to break through the barrier and speak to him.
Xiang Qian didn't respond to the taunt. He expressionlessly skipped over the file and continued processing other information. The voice from the void seemed to realize its efforts were wasted, and fell silent. It didn't make another sound before Xiang Qian left.
There was no sense of time in the endless void. Perhaps a long time passed, or perhaps only the blink of an eye. Xiang Qian had extracted all the information he needed. Just as he was about to leave, however, he suddenly stopped. The memory bubbles drawn over by starlight were flying back to their original places one by one, but a beam of light still swayed gently above the first bubble. At the other end of the beam, deep in the ravine, a bubble glimmered with a unique golden light. It remained in place, unmoved by the beam's pull.
Xiang Qian hesitated for a long time, but in the end, he couldn't resist walking toward the golden bubble. It shone more brightly than any other. Xiang Qian reached out and gently tapped it. Ripples spread across its surface like waves, and scene after scene appeared in turn. Sometimes, a young woman played with a chubby baby. Sometimes, a thin-faced man solemnly pressed the acupoints and meridians on the baby's body. Sometimes, a little girl of four or five pinched the baby's nose to make him cry. The scenes always centered on a baby who looked a little chubby and rather listless. As the scenes changed, the baby grew older. He learned to walk and to talk, and all kinds of voices began to ring out:
"Mom, what's a doctor?"
"Mom, am I sick? Why do I keep going to the doctor?"
"Dad, can you blow wind through your fingers? Can you blow wind into my belly?"
"Mom, when I was sleeping, I saw a little black dot going around me in circles. My head felt so dizzy."
"Bad sister, go away! Get away from me! Ow..."
"Mom, Dad, I dreamed about that little black dot again yesterday. There was also a bright gust of wind. The wind blew over, and the black dot exploded..."
"The little black dot is gone. It turned into so many stars..."
With a look of nostalgia in his eyes, Xiang Qian raised his head and gazed beyond the ravine, toward the vast expanse of space. That was the brilliant galaxy created when the little black dot exploded.
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