Hao Ren felt a little helpless when he heard the news; the First Born, which was the server, could no longer hold up at this critical moment. He glanced at the large ganglion. The giant living tissue was still emitting a faint red light, pulsing. But, there was a noise in the pulsation; the ancient creature was moaning in pain as the star toasted the planet.
Hao Ren stunned for a moment before he came to his senses and quickly said to Nolan, “Ask it to hold on!”
“Ask who?” Nolan could not make head or tail of what Hao Ren meant.
“It doesn’t matter. If you can hear its voices, it should be able to hear yours too. Try to communicate with it; don’t give up no matter what, even if it is just for a few hours! We are about to find the organ that stores the memory.”
He did not know if Nolan understood these abstract and chaotic things, but the determination of the girl came through the comm. “I have no clue what you meant but I will try my best!”
Hearing the conversation, Y’zaks came over and asked, “What happened?”
“The First Born is about to give up,” Hao Ren replied. “It is going to end the nightmare.”
“That is to say…”
“The soul of more than a billion people of Zorm will perish in the wake of the dream. Now I can only let Nolan try to cheer up the First Born, hopefully, it would hang on for a little longer. I’m not sure if the First Born could really hear Nolan’s voice and I haven’t figured out what kind of person Nolan is, but I can hope for the best. Oh, by the way, have you found the location of the brain?”
But, it was Lily answering. “Not yet. The nerve signal became more chaotic the nearer it gets to a ganglion. The MDT says this is because of the mutation of the First Born. The connection between its brain and the ganglia has changed in order to become a server.”
Hao Ren looked at the huge organ in the centre of the cave. The strange piece of meat intertwining with vines was weakening rapidly. The faint red light in the organ was dimmer and dimmer. The throbs of the heart was slowing down as it began to lose vitality even before the sea of fire reached into the interior. This confirmed the sound that Nolan heard in the virtual world: The First Born had lost its will; it was giving up after enduring the roasting from the sun for over two thousand years. I had been doing its best protecting the human soul in its body, but now it realised everything was coming to an end, it hoped to give the people of Zorm a painless death before the eventual collapse set in.
Perhaps it did not know there was a group of people trying to save its brain. The sun had burned its sensory organs, and the underground part was used to maintain the virtual world, it had no spare ability to know what Hao Ren and his team was up to.
“Nolan may have failed,” Y’zaks’ eyebrows twisted together. “I can feel this ancient creature is killing itself.”
Hao Ren ran silently up to the ganglion, and placed his hand on the greyish white tissue as he tried hard to activate his ability that allowed him to connect with the will of other guardians. He kept repeating the calls in his mind. “Can you hear me? We are trying to help in the real world. We have a spaceship parked above you; we have the ability to transfer your brain out of here. As long as you stay awake before we start the removal procedure. It’s not the time to giving up…”
He repeated the call several times, but there was no response. The First Born was still weakening. A voice sounded through the comm, it was the horrified and desperate voice of Nolan. “The sky has turned dark… the stars are disappearing, people on the streets suddenly fell asleep… they have strange smiles on their faces…”
The Petrachelys above Zorm slowly climbed. The MDT hoped to get a better angle to perform a comprehensive scan of the planet. Just as the spacecraft climbed higher, a terror image showed up on the monitor.
The sunny side of Planet Zorm was rapidly turning into a sea of fire under the extreme heat of the sun. Torrents of magma spurted and flew on the surface and the planet’s crust bulged under the pull of the sun’s gravity. Suddenly, it crossed the tipping point; a fissure the size of the Himalayas cracked open on the surface of the planet and quickly spread along the sun’s path.
The extreme temperature had weakened the rock formation, which had become a fatal breakpoint.
The strong gravity of the sun ripped one third of the surface of the planet away instantaneously as tens of millions of rock fragments were pulled out into space towards the sun, tearing the huge chasm into an ugly scar the size of a moon.
Those people on the flight deck watched in shock. The MDT screamed into the comm. “Buddies! The sun has reached its peak!”
While the earth-shattering quake was ripping across the planet, Hao Ren suddenly became cool, calm, and collected as an inexplicable thought crossed his mind. He asked Nolan a strange question, “Haven’t you slept?”
The virtual world was ushering in its last dream as it slowly entered into the darkness and human beings will be euthanised in their dreams. At this time, Nolan was probably the only person in the world who was still awake. But, Hao Ren’s question stunned her. She realised something was wrong. “I… I am still awake! I don’t know what happened, I seem to be fine.”
Hao Ren hung up on the comm and ran quickly to the black equipment that he had fiddled with before. This equipment held the information about the construction of the virtual world and the transformation of the First Born. As this bunker was really strong and was protected by the First Born, the equipment still worked.
Hao Ren called up the search function and keyed in ‘Nolan’ with no hesitation.
The searched returned a result. Hao Ren looked at it, he had to do a double take, as he could not believe his eyes. “This is…”
Vivian and Lily darted over to check out what Hao Ren had seen. They were all rooted to the spot. Then Hao Ren sighed slowly. “No wonder, I knew there have been something so unusual about her, I’ve been wondering about her true identity, but I just didn’t expect…”
Lily cut in. “She is the only NPC—non-player character in the world.”
“Saying that she is a NPC is not quite correct; more accurately, she is another part of the virtual world that corresponds to the First Born,” Hao Ren said, as he weighted plans quickly in his mind, and sent the information the Imperial Admiral, MDT, I need some technical support.”
“Technical support? How many TNT?”
“I mean real technical support,” Hao Ren snapped. “Tell me, is the information useful?”
The MDT realised it had mistaken his meaning. It quickly checked the information again and quickly came out with a solution before the real identity of Nolan could surprise it. “According to the information, Nolan is the consciousness representative of the mechanical part of the ‘server’?”
“Saying that she’s a representative of consciousness isn’t that accurate; she doesn’t know it. She is just a monitoring program of the virtual system. Her own will is nothing to do with this task. Her job is only to live in the virtual world so that the machine outside could judge the system stability,” Hao Ren explained. “Now she has no influence over the system. In fact, she did not have influence from the beginning… After all, she was just a set of monitoring code.”
“That’s not important. The most important thing is she has a place in the system registry. A line inside her connects her directly to the consciousness of the First Born. Even if she doesn’t aware about, this connection is still useful,” said the MDT, expounding its own thought. “I can establish a translation program where you can talk to Nolan while I will find out the connection rules of Nolan and the system, and then uses her as a springboard to connect your mind directly to the First Born’s. You could not only keep the First Born awake, but also get the location of the brain this way. Then the rest be very simple.”
Hao Ren was elated. “All right, let’s give it a shot.”
“Are you sure? The mental strength of the First Born is simply too strong. You will probably go insane by just hearing its whisper.”
Hao Ren smiled and said, “But this one is a good boy, isn’t it? Let’s cut the cackle and tell me how to go about it.”