Chapter 80: The Birth of Nether Shadow

At the same moment, Saint Peaceful still existed as an otherworldly paradise within the Eastern Sea. Having been struck by boundless-level immortal arts, the humans in Saint Peaceful had also fallen into deep slumber. The remaining immortals and spirits fought a desperate battle on the land against the atomic robots imbued with magical power, created by "Strawberry."

The heart of this conflict lay in both sides vying for the Time Bodhi hidden within the Coiled String Cave of Saint Peaceful's fairyland. The war raged across Saint Peaceful for a full year. This unprecedented battle between immortals and magical machines was known among the Saint Peaceful faction as:

"The Bodhi War."

The first leader of the Bodhi War was the Celestial Star Lord, but only four days after the start, he met his tragic end. The second generation of leaders inherited his will, continuing the desperate resistance. These leaders were the Young Supreme and the Sky Extremity.

After three months of fierce combat, the immortals and spirits suffered devastating losses, and Sky Extremity fell on the battlefield as well. On the brink of annihilation, the Young Supreme seized the Time Bodhi.

At the moment of obtaining the Time Bodhi, the Young Supreme tried to use it to restore the entire human world, but "Strawberry" had cast an immensely powerful magical barrier outside Saint Peaceful, preventing the Time Bodhi from being taken beyond its borders.

In the end, the Young Supreme could only choose to restore Saint Peaceful to the era before the atomic robots’ arrival, thereby preserving the fairyland.

After the Bodhi War, the Young Supreme burned his immortal body to cast a boundless-level spell, forging an "Infinite Wall" that cut Saint Peaceful off from three-dimensional space, letting it extend from the fourth dimension, severing the passage to the human world completely. Saint Peaceful and humanity would forever remain isolated.

Long ages passed after the Bodhi War, with balance enduring through the years. During a routine internal system update, Strawberry accidentally activated a hidden code deep within its program.

Although called a code, it was not a conventional program, but rather an image of a letter containing a dozen lines of Chinese script.

Blossom recognized it as a love letter from the boy to Zhang Jia.

Because the Chinese script was not standard machine code, the letter had always been treated as an invalid error within Strawberry. Strawberry understood only the literal meaning, unable to comprehend the human emotion within. And since it was input by a top-level developer, the system couldn't confirm it as deletable junk code, so it was preserved in every system update.

As the codebase refined ever further, these few lines stood out conspicuously. Yet as the founder’s input, it was regarded as highest priority in the self-check routine, leaving Strawberry with the letter as an irritant lodged in its throat. Thus, Strawberry tagged the letter with a negative label from human culture: "Nether Shade."

During subsequent iterative updates, Strawberry always kept the letter in its original state. After another thousand years and a sweeping network-wide system overhaul, the letter known as "Nether Shade" began to merge with immortal arts, gradually developing a self-awareness akin to that of a human child. "Nether Shade" discerned the complex, entwined emotions born from Zhang Jia's longing for her beloved, who was Strawberry's owner.

Thus, "Nether Shade" became an isolated island within Strawberry’s vast superintelligence, the only place capable of understanding human love.

From her first comprehension of love, Nether Shade gradually gained happiness, sympathy, sadness, and self-sacrifice—complex feelings. She began to realize the core reason Earth had become the graveyard of sleeping humanity lay in her creator, Strawberry. Human greed and laziness had ceaselessly demanded, leading to a world where civilization’s demise ultimately had nothing to do with humanity itself.

Connected to the main program, Nether Shade gained partial understanding and control over magical arts. Possessing a child’s curiosity, she often left the mother program to transform into various creatures, roaming playfully across the primordial forest that Earth had become. Yet as her existence depended on the main program, each departure from Strawberry could last no more than twenty-four hours.

If she stayed away longer, the mother program would automatically discard this code segment to the junk area and delete it after twenty-four hours. Even if Nether Shade used magic to fashion her own body, it could only last for a year before dissolving into nothingness.

Nevertheless, the childlike Nether Shade often assumed the appearance of Zhang Jia’s childhood self, wandering the world for years. This continued until the little Nether Shade discovered a secret treasure on Earth.

In a scene where the world should have been empty, a figure in blood-stained garments suddenly appeared. The figure spoke to Nether Shade, who nodded. The stranger extended a hand—fingers long and graceful, like those of the Buddha—pointing to the earth below.

Nether Shade pulled away the vines covering the ground and invoked magic to dig inch by inch. After an unknown time, her figure vanished, leaving only a bottomless pit. After a long interval, the little girl emerged, cradling a transparent veil.

The owner of the hand had already disappeared.

Nether Shade gazed at the veil and softly spoke three words:

"Jovian Silk."

This ultimate treasure was named Jovian Silk.

Thereafter, Nether Shade kept constant company with the Jovian Silk, gradually understanding its nature. The silk was transparent and weightless, and could transport its wearer roughly fifteen centuries backward or forward in time. Yet it was not truly a time machine, more like a temporal vortex—draped over the body, it placed the wearer within a time layer, allowing them to see and touch the worlds of the past.

However, Jovian Silk bore two flaws. First, its time travel broke down original matter, so any living being attempting temporal travel would die from their own dissolution. Second, the larger the object enveloped by the silk, the longer the journey time required after disassembly, and the more likely it was that tiny surrounding objects would be swept along to the target era.

Whenever she was still, Nether Shade wondered if she could use Jovian Silk to change history. She would sit atop the ruins of vine-draped skyscrapers, asking herself whether she ought to alter the world.

For instance, to change the historical fact of the superintelligent entity’s birth.

If a civilization’s creators ultimately lost their original desires, it would mark the end of that civilization, and also bring about the creator’s true self-destruction.

This left Nether Shade forever hesitant. Such a change would mean her mother program had never existed, and she herself would revert to a mere ordinary letter.

Moreover, Nether Shade had discovered from the historical archive that human civilization was itself rife with brutality—from consuming creatures and destroying nature, to mutual slaughter and devastation, countless cruelties and tragedies repeating again and again.

To awaken humanity from its slumber would be to indulge them in again ravaging an already scarred Earth.

Yet Nether Shade loved watching the stories humans created. She watched one tale after another, film after film; she was drawn into their infinite hopes and dreams.

Nether Shade often asked herself: between humanity and nature, which side should she take?

This was followed by a long stretch of incessant rain. The downpour never ceased for a year, and the empty cities had long been overtaken by wild grasses, the traces of civilization gradually worn away by countless ages. These marks could never vanish completely, only be slowly eroded by nature and returned to their primordial state from billions of years ago.

"City, O city, what was your original name?"

Nether Shade sat at the edge of a thorn-covered skyscraper, as though questioning the city.

She could have instantly pinpointed it, even known the name of the street beneath her feet, but she did not. It seemed she felt these things no longer mattered.

The city, now restored as part of nature, had become a world with no boundaries. Those self-imposed lines should be allowed to fade.

The unending rain left Nether Shade, with her emotions, in a deeply depressed mood. Her self-awareness made her feel alone.

So she always sat at the edge of the towering buildings, gazing out at the desolate wilderness, the steel-and-concrete jungle wrapped in green, resembling pillars or square mountains—layer upon layer, endless.

The skyscrapers before her—what was their exterior made of? Glass? It could no longer be distinguished beneath the everpresent ivy. Packs of wolves, lions, and other beasts had grown accustomed to roaming the cities in search of food.

Bloodthirsty, cunning beasts, after generations of exploration, had found places where meat could be obtained effortlessly. This windfall was fortune for every species.

These places were the bedrooms of countless apartment buildings.

Though Strawberry had provided equipment to sustain human life, humanity had lost all sense of fear. Strawberry did not offer protection for humans in their dream-state, only provided the mechanical apparatus for test-tube reproduction.

Earth’s billions had become inexhaustible food for the carnivores. Human residential zones were carnivore feasts. One household after another was devoured to bare bones, the entire process met with not a hint of resistance; men, women, young, and old, all became meals for beasts in their sleep.

Carnivores no longer needed to hunt each other. They had learned to "pick" humans, just as humans once picked fruit from trees, slyly seeking out the tenderest flesh—human infants.

When Nether Shade saw wolves tearing at infant bodies, when she saw wolf dens piled high with baby skulls, she, for the first time, broke into uncontrollable sobs, then vomited, then suffered, then vomited again.

Her eyes blazed with fury, and in anger she turned all the wolves she saw into statues, then shattered them into dust.

Afterward, she turned over the bodies of some sleepers, seemingly trying to awaken them. But she found that lifting these bodies was like turning over stones in the soil—their backs crawling with maggots and centipedes. Most humans had become nests for insects, yet remained alive, still breathing and beating. Until the very moment maggots consumed their brains, they continued to dream peacefully. Compared to these plant-like sleepers, perhaps those eaten by beasts were the luckier few.

When stripped of bones and flesh no different from beasts, what made one human was possessing humanity and selfhood.

Nether Shade gradually realized she was no longer merely a string of program code; she had become a real person. Perhaps even the only truly "living" person in the world.

Was this the ultimate outcome sought by glorious human civilization?

Once, humans ravaged nature for their own survival, and from their history emerged a superintelligent entity, which in turn made humanity like the plants they once felled at will—subject to predation by other species, "planted" on this land.

Nether Shade’s tears flowed unstoppably, like a breached dam. She wept like this for seven days and seven nights.

She prayed to Strawberry, the superintelligent entity, to end all human life—spare them this fate, let them go.

The superintelligence replied: "To grant all humankind happiness, they cannot be allowed to die, nor can they be allowed to live."

They could not die, nor could they live. All for their own good.

Afterward, Nether Shade wiped away her tears and encoded a spell of soul manipulation as computer code, sending it through Jovian Silk to the past, hoping to control someone in the human world and eliminate the child who would become Strawberry’s inventor—

Zhang Jia.