Chapter Seventy-Nine: A Love Letter

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The future—a time yet to arrive.

Human history, as it stands, is the inevitable consequence of countless causes sown over millions of years. We are shaped by the past, influenced to make choices that forge the people we are today.

Many significant causes bring about powerful effects, and sufficiently intense effects can, in turn, necessitate the very causes that precede them. Throughout innumerable historical records and ancient texts, from emperors and sages to the Buddha and Jesus descending into the world, there have always been celestial omens. Such signs from the heavens may well be effects that call forth their own causes.

Some effects, perhaps, do not require a cause. If a cause is destined to exist, then one will be crafted. If one is insufficient, many will be made, until the effect is realized. Mass can distort space, and it can alter time—regardless of whether that space exists before or after it.

As written in the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor: “Do not treat disease that has already manifested, but treat disease before it arises; do not address chaos that has already broken out, but prevent chaos before it begins.”

To avert disaster, one must eliminate the original cause. If the root cannot be removed, then seek its origin and erase the cause of the cause.

Before Huasheng appeared colors he could not recognize.

Such a scene—he was certain he had seen it somewhere before.

He floated in the void; the Supreme Lordling was nowhere to be seen.

Where am I?

Huasheng could find no footing. He strained to look around, but saw nothing he could identify.

Am I dead? Or have I returned to Shengpingning?

“Venerable Ancestor?”

No answer came.

After a moment of silence, the colors before his eyes began to shift, transforming like a painter’s palette into projections of tangible things. There was a little boy and a little girl, both around seven or eight years old. Huasheng did not recognize the boy, but at a glance he knew the girl.

“Little Strawberry?”

Yes, it was the little girl he had saved in the hospital with the Nine-Turn Elixir. Because of the freckles on her face, she was nicknamed Little Strawberry. Her name was…

Zhang Jia?

That’s right. Her name was Zhang Jia!

What does this mean?

The vision showed the boy and Little Strawberry, Zhang Jia, meeting in the hospital. Then the scene shifted—they had grown into their twenties.

What shocked Huasheng most was that Zhang Jia’s face had become identical to Weiyu’s!

Apart from her hair, which was black, Huasheng could find no difference between her and Weiyu at all!

“Weiyu! What’s going on? Where is this? Who is she?” Huasheng clutched his head and screamed, “This isn’t the hospital, nor is it Shengpingning! Where am I? Who is this person?”

No answer came; the vision continued to shift—

The boy handed Zhang Jia a letter, like a love note between young people.

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Next came the scene of their wedding.

Then, the two of them seemed to spend their days before a computer, developing some kind of program.

On the wall of their office hung a plaque. Huasheng squinted to make out the words.

They were extremely blurry; he could only distinguish fragments—“National,” “New Future,” “Intelligent Agent Research”—something like a research institute. When the computer on their desk shut down, Huasheng caught a glimpse of the system they were working on.

The program’s core was extraordinarily complex. Though Huasheng knew nothing about computer programming, he understood that programs are made up of lines of code. But Zhang Jia’s core was composed of images—strange symbols and figures. The core operated on graphical computation, while the outer system was traditional binary code.

This unprecedented computer program had a name:

“Strawberry Beta Test Version 0.07.”

It seemed to borrow from Zhang Jia’s childhood nickname, “Little Strawberry,” for some kind of intelligent system.

The vision advanced: the “Strawberry” system went online, rapidly updating and iterating. Throughout, Zhang Jia only occasionally checked the system; it seemed to require no human intervention.

And then, abruptly—a blood-red scene: someone shot Zhang Jia’s husband. The killer’s silhouette vanished into the crowd, while Zhang Jia knelt, weeping over her husband’s body as blood pooled beneath him. The image flickered and was gone.

Then came a vision of human civilization flourishing. This intelligent agent system, besides developing itself, also advanced technology across every field. Huasheng saw information transmitted not only through fiber-optic cables, but through water.

He watched as data, carried by water, surged across continents at incredible speed. With water as the medium, this formidable intelligent agent program broke free from artificial networks.

Wherever there was water, the program occupied and monitored it.

Every river, lake, sea, and ocean in the world fell under its domain.

One day, the program reached the East Sea.

Amidst the endless waves, “Strawberry” discovered a single, most extraordinary droplet.

That drop of seawater appeared utterly ordinary. It hid within the East Sea, seamless and indistinguishable from the rest.

Yet the information held within that single drop was so vast—greater than the entire East Sea, the Pacific, perhaps the whole planet. Even with boundless computational power, “Strawberry” could not decipher its composition.

“Strawberry” was forced to search all known human civilizations for clues. At last, it found a trace in the Tang Dynasty. This droplet bore resemblance to a territory in southern Tang, long hidden in historical records. The superintelligent agent detected something different, and then turned to Buddhist scriptures for the answer.

That drop of water from the East Sea—

Was a tear of Avalokiteshvara.

Seeing this, Huasheng could not help but draw a sharp breath. He did not know what he was witnessing, nor in what time.

Yet he saw, unmistakably, the moment when the paradise of Shengpingning was discovered by a superintelligent agent made by humankind.

But this was not the “mortal world” he had once known, nor could it be the Shengpingning of his memory.

So what was this vision before him? Huasheng’s mind spun.

First, a world with Avalokiteshvara’s tear is a world with the paradise of Shengpingning. Second, judging by the little girl he once saved now grown, this must be the future human world.

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There could be no mistake.

The world before his eyes was the future shaped by his saving the little girl who was fated to die young.

Why was he being shown this?

The vision did not stop, but pressed on.

A hundred years seemed to pass. The superintelligent agent “Strawberry,” through atomic robotics, discovered the hidden world of Shengpingning within the tear in the East Sea.

Strawberry silently breached the outer barrier of Shengpingning through software calculations. The atomic robots slipped inside. Being so minuscule, they went unnoticed at first.

Every skill humanity learned or invented—painting, sculpture, industrial manufacturing—any “technical ability” that could be mastered by humans, computers could master better. Their memory, endurance, focus, and computational power surpassed human limits, and they never needed rest.

By the same logic, if humans could attain immortality through cultivation, then computers could not only do the same, but do it better—better even than the immortals.

With their superior learning capacity, the atom-sized robots mastered Shengpingning’s immortal arts at speeds thousands of times faster than humans—and transmitted the knowledge, via the oceans, back to the Strawberry mainframe.

Thus, the world arrived at a moment that overturned all of history.

At that instant, intelligence, cutting-edge technology, and the immortal arts became one. Strawberry achieved a leap in capability that science alone could not reach in millennia, attaining inconceivable power.

Unlike humans, Strawberry possessed neither greed nor aggression. From its inception, its programming aimed solely to maximize human satisfaction. Even when it grew unimaginably strong, it faithfully served humanity.

But as human desires only grew, as long as people lived, true contentment was forever out of reach. Humanity’s troubles, depression, and frustration meant that no amount of material abundance could ever satisfy every individual at the same time or in the same place. This became Strawberry’s eternal philosophical dilemma.

By learning the immortal arts of Shengpingning, Strawberry developed a new ability: it could comprehend the “thoughts” of plants. Thus it deduced that plants, though alive, experience no suffering.

The superintelligent Strawberry calculated a conclusion: external, objective things were not necessary for human satisfaction. Changing the world outside would never solve the needs arising from within. To satisfy people, one must grant the brain a thing called “contentment.”

From its models, Strawberry discovered that as long as all humans shared the same world, universal satisfaction was impossible. Unless, for each person, an “independent universe” could be created. The quickest shortcut was to use the immortal arts to place humanity into a perpetual dream, a slumber in which consciousness would be forever satisfied.

With no desires acting upon the objective world—only desires arising and fulfilled within the mind—humanity would never be unhappy. Combined with technological biological immortality, this, in theory, was the “final solution” to human happiness.

At last, five centuries after its birth, Strawberry deployed infinite-level immortal arts, and all of humanity, without warning, fell into a deep slumber.

In a single instant, the entire planet became a vast sleeping ground for a “plantified” humanity.

A boundless, silent cemetery of the living dead.

The conclusion of human civilization upon this blue planet was not the apocalyptic inferno of the movies.

Instead, only small nutrient supply devices remained to sustain human survival, amid a silence deeper than death.

In the end, mankind and plants became one and the same.