Mei Ziqing could hardly believe that the professor she had spent twenty years with was the legendary mentor Nanke, the Great Dream Mentor.
"The trees of the South alone endure the cold, yearning for the arrival of spring..." she murmured, then sighed, "My father's loss to you back then wasn't entirely unjust."
Mei Yiqiu said, "He didn't lose to me; he only lost to himself. Every step in life is taken by oneself, and choosing the right path is sometimes more important than talent and hard work."
"But are you absolutely certain that the path you're taking is the right one?" Mei Ziqing asked.
Mei Yiqiu gazed silently into the distance. From the side, he looked like an old man, showing no signs of leadership.
"I can't be sure," he said. "I'm just sticking to a path that humanity has explored at the cost of an entire era of civilization. If this path is also wrong, then we really have nowhere to go."
"Alright, now, can you tell me where the key to finally activate the Dream Core is?"
"Didn't you already go?"
"It's really with Bi Shenghua?" Although Mei Ziqing had expected it, she still found it hard to believe. "I never thought you would entrust something so important to an ordinary woman."
"She's extraordinary. Absolutely extraordinary!" Mei Yiqiu said. "In this world, there are very, very few people who can stay true to their original aspirations for decades."
"So you've entrusted the fate of billions of people to her?"
Mei Yiqiu nodded without saying a word.
Mei Ziqing then said, "So you're saying that Yu Jianguo and Yao Jingjing were just a cover story you set up to deceive me?"
"I'm not lying to you, I'm just fooling Saladin."
"I understand. You know me too well. You knew I would definitely go to the Mulberry Garden to verify, so you set a trap there. And Saladin would track Yao Jingjing down; Yao Jingjing must have a fake key."
Mei Ziqing sorted out everything and continued to make inferences, " Saladin will use Bian Ziyuan to control the laboratory. After he gets the key, he will unify the entire Dream Guide world and fully connect the Internet Consciousness with the _book_. In this way, an incredibly huge Group Dream will be formed on this earth, composed of five billion people and countless intelligent consciousness nodes on the entire Internet of Things."
This is a completely new world, a completely new universe, Saladin the God of this new world.
But he didn't know that there was a City of Sin here. When Bi Shenghua the key to activate a certain device, the City of Sin would be connected to the Dream Guide, and the new world would collapse rapidly under the influence of gravity, thus forming Mental Black Hole.
If Bi Shenghua seizes the right moment, when Gaia descends, a black hole will form, Gaia will be sucked into the black hole. The Mental Power from the distant nebula will be continuously sent into this black hole until it is exhausted.
Mei Yiqiu laughed and said, "You're too clever; that's basically it."
Mei Ziqing couldn't laugh. She said, "Everyone on Earth wearing Space Box will die."
"Including everyone who happened to be dreaming at the time." Mei Yiqiu's expression darkened. "This is the price humanity has to pay for its self-salvation."
"This price is a bit too high."
"Compared to the era of Itza, the disappearance of an entire civilization is a small price to pay. We are fighting against the Creator!"
"However, even if you successfully kill Gaia, you cannot grant humanity immortality. The universe will eventually face heat death, which is the fundamental reason why Gaia wanted to destroy the life she created."
"Hmm, that's a good question." Mei Yiqiu regained his lab-like demeanor. "Billions of people, plus the Internet, plus Gaia, could almost stabilize the Mental Black Hole. Once the black hole stabilizes, we can use its event horizon to create a mirror image of the real universe, continuously feeding information into it, thereby reducing the entropy of our universe, slowing down the rate of heat death, until humanity breaks through the edge of the universe."
"This doesn't seem to be something you can control."
"But this is what I wanted. And I've made preparations for it. The information transmission port mechanism is already set up in the lab's basement—the place where the ' Ghost ' is imprisoned, where there's a supercomputer. Saladin has long forgotten about that place; he won't care about a tiny clone of consciousness. And I'm using Old Yu to guard the lab; it won't attract anyone's attention."
"But although Old Yu was loyal, he didn't understand computers. Without an engineer involved, who would do the work? Now that Old Yu is dead, the place should be covered in dust by now."
"Isn't there still the ' Ghost '?"
"What? Ghost?" Mei Ziqing was stunned. She had indeed overlooked the existence of this intelligent spirit. "You mean... you were already doing this when you conducted the Turing Test? The purpose of the Turing Test was not to test whether a local area network had intelligence. You already knew that the Internet had consciousness. You are trying to cover up the truth and mislead me and Saladin."
Your goal is to secretly conduct experiments, using supercomputers to transfer information entropy between symmetrical universes. You also took the opportunity to place Bian Ziyuan in the laboratory and openly incorporated Kronos into the Dream Guide, so as to give Saladin the opportunity to invade the Dream Network.
I understand now. The true Dream Network Core is in that basement, not the heavily guarded top-floor laboratory. No wonder Bian Ziyuan couldn't find the entrance.
Mei Ziqing shook her head gently and sighed, "This is a game of chess, and you are even more skilled than the chess master!"
"But in chess, you always need an opponent. And my opponent..." Mei Yiqiu looked up at the sky, "... is not human."
Mei Ziqing said, "I'd like to know, what are your plans after this? You're already dead. Even if you won this game, who will clean up the mess? Humanity has paid such a high price; the world will surely descend into chaos."
"Do you know why I left my inheritance to that little girl? Not only me, but also her father Situ Xingzhi, her maternal grandfather Xia Wenyuan, Old Wolf from Canada, and a whole bunch of other old men—we all left our inheritances to her. Most importantly, I left the laboratory to her."
"Are you trying to entrust the responsibility of restoring order to a little girl?"
"She will be the next leader of the Alliance," Mei Yiqiu said. "If you haven't gone down the wrong path, perhaps I will choose you."
Mei Ziqing chuckled self-deprecatingly and shook her head, saying, "Forget it, I can't shoulder such a great task."
She once thought her dream, or rather her father's dream, was crazy and grand enough, but now she had to admit that it paled in comparison to the professor's plan.
"That's insane!" she exclaimed. "But how can you guarantee the plan will go smoothly? In particular, how can you guarantee that He-Tu-Shu Bi Shenghua will time it perfectly? Have you thought about the consequences if she starts too early or too late?"
Mei Yiqiu, however, said, "Of all the parts, the one I'm least worried about is hers. What I'm worried about is..."
He glanced at the sky. " Gaia is far too powerful, far beyond our comprehension. If she arrives too quickly, and the initial black hole isn't strong enough to swallow her whole, then the consciousness of everyone on Earth will be swept away. Therefore, someone must stop her; we must let her come, but not too quickly..."