The Gate of Stars was not a passage, but a mirror.
When Xiaoman's consciousness touched the swirling vortex of starlight, he felt none of the weightlessness of crossing over. Instead, he was like a drop of water merging into the ocean. Jiu Zhou's lamplight, the apprentices' breathing, the ancient lighthouse's hum—all those familiar sensations were stripped away in an instant, leaving only a pure dialogue between "light" and "shadow." He seemed to have been broken down into the most primal semantic units and cast into an immense consciousness furnace.
When he opened his eyes, he was no longer on the Starfall Continent.
Beneath his feet lay no solid stellar land, but a "sea of semantics" paved with flowing starlight. What its surface reflected was not the starry sky, but countless fragments of civilizations being born and dying—he saw Jiu Zhou's ancestors gaze up at the stars and carve the first inscription in Lamp Language; he also saw silicon-based life in distant galaxies singing in stellar winds; and he saw those long-annihilated Lamp Guarder civilizations reduced to dust by strikes from the dark forest, yet stubbornly launching their last flame seeds into the void.
"Welcome home, child who has returned so late."
The voice did not come from outside. It sounded directly in the deepest reaches of his soul, bearing a tenderness and an age-worn weight that spanned dimensions.
Xiaoman looked up and saw the "Other Shore."
It was neither a city nor a planet, but a "collective of light" suspended across the stellar abyss. It consisted of countless tiny points of light, each like a faint lamp flickering at a different frequency. Those points were not still. They constantly separated, gathered, collided, and dispersed, like an unending dance of stars.
It was the sum of all Lamp Guarders' memories.
"Who...