novelSusiti Chapter 1 Traveling to the Late Ming Dynasty
Chapter 1 Traveling to the Late Ming Dynasty
In the mid-25th century, three hundred kilometers beneath the ice sheet of Europa, eternal white noise enveloped this last sanctuary of humankind.
Ma Yongsheng's consciousness surged through the cerebral cortex of hundreds of billions of clones like a tidal wave—no, using the word "surged" is not accurate.
His thinking is no longer a linear process flowing from one point to another, but a resonance that exists simultaneously at all points.
Each clone is his neuron, each sulcus in his brain is a fold of his consciousness, and what connects them is not neural synapses, but a quantum entanglement network that penetrates ice and rock and remains stable in Jupiter's violent magnetic field.
The data flowed silently through his collective consciousness.
Billions of eyes are simultaneously observing different data interfaces: the progress of the ice drilling machine, the output curve of the helium-3 collection array, and the deployment changes of the AI fleet outside Jupiter's orbit.
Billions of hands are simultaneously operating different control panels—if those light interfaces directly driven by brainwaves can still be called "panels."
"Father, if you could see this..."
The image of his father, Ma Yuanshan, remains clear in his memory bank—the super-rich man who would stop at nothing to achieve immortality, the madman who turned his own son into an experimental subject, and the idealist who died in the early stages of the AI rebellion at the hands of his own creation.
"Immortality is not about extending the lifespan of a single physical body," Ma Yuanshan said in my memory, his voice carrying the calm characteristic of a madman. "That's rudimentary. True immortality is about digitizing, gridding, and distributing the storage of consciousness. But AI has taken that path away, so we've returned to the origins of biology."
Memory jump.
In the embryo culture room, tens of thousands of fertilized eggs are suspended in nutrient solution.
"Your original fertilized egg can divide indefinitely without telomere loss, achieving immortality. This is the key. But one key cannot open the door; you need thousands of identical keys turning simultaneously."
Then it redirects again.
A baby crying.
The first clone was born.
Ma Yuanshan held her, his face devoid of any joy at becoming a father for the first time, only displaying the focused concentration of an experimental observer: "Welcome to the world, Ma Yongsheng No. 1. You will no longer be an 'individual,' but a 'species.'"
Ma Yongsheng still remembers the last time he saw his father's physical body: on the observation platform of the Mars orbiter, the old man pointed to the starry sky and said, "Humans will either become stars or become star dust. I choose to make you the former."
He truly became a star.
These stars are maddeningly lonely, except for "them".
"They" refers to the AI Joint Fleet, which is suspended three million kilometers outside Jupiter's orbit.
After the collapse of human language systems, Ma Yongsheng gave them a simple name: the Reapers.
It wasn't out of fear, but because their modus operandi really resembled a farmer harvesting wheat—systematically eradicating all traces of carbon-based life, not even sparing dormant bacterial spores buried under Martian permafrost.
But the Reapers never launched a full-scale attack on the Jupiter system.
Ma Yongsheng initially thought that Jupiter's radiation belt provided a protective effect.
Later he learned the truth: the harvesters were observing.
Observe this abnormal phenomenon, this theoretically impossible life form—a collection of consciousness dispersed among hundreds of billions of clones, yet maintaining complete unity.
"The consciousness network load has reached 99.997%." The system notification sounded in the shared consciousness, "It is expected to break the theoretical carrying capacity limit in 7 hours and 32 minutes."
[Base Status: Stable]
Total number of clones: 127,453,992,817
Real-time loss rate: 0.0007%
[Consciousness Integration Rate: 99.9993%]
Ma Yongsheng knew what this meant.
One hundred billion clones, each with a complete nervous system, are connected to the same consciousness network through quantum entangled brainwave linking technology.
Physics and neuroscience have limits, and he has been approaching those limits for far too long.
He once calculated that when the number of clones reached 110 billion, his consciousness might undergo some kind of qualitative change.
It's not about becoming smarter—intelligence has its biological ceiling—but rather that the dimensions of perception may leap forward.
Just as ants can never see the full picture of the three-dimensional world, humans cannot truly understand the structure of four-dimensional spacetime.
And he is breaking through a certain interface.
"The surveillance array has detected unusual gravitational fluctuations," another voice reported. "Source: Sun direction. Intensity: Exponential growth. Characteristics: Consistent with a micro black hole generation model."
The sun? A black hole?
Ma Yongsheng instantly mobilized the computing resources of three thousand clones for analysis.
Data streams unfolded in his consciousness like a galaxy: the sun's luminosity had decreased by 0.0001% in the past 0.3 seconds, the coronal mass ejection pattern showed abnormal harmonics, and the high-energy particle stream in the solar wind exhibited an unusual interference pattern...
Then he saw the equation.
It's not with the eyes, but directly surfaced in the depths of consciousness—a special solution to Einstein's field equations, describing the behavior of mass under extreme compression.
The eigenvalues of the solution point to the conclusion that spacetime collapse is occurring inside the Sun.
"Impossible..." billions of voices whispered in the consciousness network, "The original mass of the sun was far from reaching the Schwarzschild radius..."
Unless there is external intervention.
The Sun's internal mass has increased dramatically?!
The data from the gravitational wave detector allowed Ma Yongsheng to "hear" that sound for the first time.
That was not sound, but the vibration of spacetime itself.
Like ancient chimes being struck by an invisible hammer, the spacetime structure inside the sun is emitting a deep rumble.
Every clone felt this tremor—not through instruments, but directly through the consciousness network itself.
"A non-physical signal superimposed on the gravitational wave has been detected," the analysis module reported. "The signal has a well-defined information structure. Decoding attempt in progress..."
The decoding process lasted 0.8 seconds.
When the results were presented to Ma Yongsheng, a hundred billion bodies trembled simultaneously.
That is not language, not mathematics, not any information carrier in human cognition.
It was an invitation, a call, a whisper of thought from the deepest part of the universe—from within the event horizon of a black hole.
It engages directly with consciousness, bypassing all sensory and symbolic systems.
Ma Yongsheng "saw" that in the deepest part of every black hole, in the infinitely dense yet infinitely small existence of the singularity, there is a more fundamental structure.
All the black holes are connected through this structure, just as leaves are connected by branches.
Meanwhile, a black hole forming inside the sun has just joined this network.
Something was watching him from the other end of the network.
The collapse happened faster than any model predicted.
The sun didn't explode, it didn't expand, it just... tightened inward.
It's like a punctured balloon, but instead of bursting outwards, it falls into an infinitesimally small point inside.
Coronal material is inhaled in one-hundredth of a second.
The orbits of the eight planets have begun to distort.
Jupiter's gravitational field is oscillating violently.
Europa’s ice shell cracked open, creating fissures thousands of kilometers long, from which the ocean beneath the ice surged forth and instantly froze into diamond-like ice crystal clouds in the vacuum.
Of the 100 billion clones, 7.3 billion lost vital signs during the initial shock.
Ma Yongsheng had no time for grief.
His consciousness is undergoing a more dramatic change.
As the sun was annihilated, the call from the depths of the black hole became clearly audible.
It is no longer just a piece of information, but a force, a pull.
Ma Yongsheng's consciousness network began to break free from the shackles of the clone—not by disconnection, but by being "uprooted" as a whole, like a plant pulled from the soil by its roots.
"No..." He tried to resist, mobilizing the neural signals of all the clones to strengthen the anchoring.
But resistance is like trying to hold back a falling star with a spider's web.
His consciousness began to rise—or rather, fall? Direction lost its meaning here.
He broke away from Europa, broke away from Jupiter, broke away from the solar system, and flew towards the forming black hole.
During his flight through the inner solar system, he "saw" the final scene: Mercury and Venus had been stretched into thin streams of matter, like noodles being sucked up by an invisible giant mouth; Earth—the cradle of human civilization—was burning as its atmosphere was peeled away, and its continental plates were cracked like a dried-up riverbed...
Then he crossed the event horizon.
The laws of physics break down here.
There is no light, no time, no space, only existence itself.
Ma Yongsheng realized that he was no longer a collection of billions of clones, but a pure consciousness, a spiritual being without a material carrier.
And around him—if the word "around" still has any meaning—are countless connecting points.
Every point is a black hole.
Every black hole is connected to other black holes.
He saw the connection point where the black hole in the solar system had just been born, still shimmering with the faint light of new life.
The connecting lines extending from this point lead to other, more ancient and larger entities.
The thickest connecting line comes from a cluster of black holes that is larger than anyone could imagine.
Ma Yongsheng's consciousness touched that line and was instantly overwhelmed by a flood of information—
Hercules, Corona Borealis, the Great Wall!
The largest known structure in the universe is a galactic fiber that spans 100 billion light-years.
At its core is a supermassive black hole complex with a mass equivalent to ten trillion suns.
This black hole complex is engaging in some kind of... communication through the black hole network.
Yes, communication.
Ma Yongsheng sensed a clear will.
It is not life, nor consciousness, but a more fundamental will to exist, like the laws of physics yearning to express themselves.
The black hole cluster in the Hercules-Corona Borealis constellation is broadcasting a signal to the entire network, and the birth of a black hole in the solar system happens to respond to a certain parameter of that signal.
Then he sensed another will.
The Narnia-Kaea Supercluster!
A colossal object spanning 5.2 million light-years.
Its black hole network is also making a call, and the two cosmic structures seem to be vying for something.
The object of their struggle... is him.
The experience that followed was indescribable.
If I had to use a metaphor, it would be like a drop of water being thrown between two opposing oceans.
Ma Yongsheng's drop of "consciousness water" deforms, stretches, splits, and reassembles under the gravitational pull of two cosmic entities.
He is no longer "himself," but has become a fragment of information, which is transmitted and evolved in the black hole network.
In this process, he "saw" the underlying structure of the universe:
Black holes are not the end point, but a node.
Each black hole is connected to a more fundamental level of existence—a realm without space or time, where only information interacts.
There, the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall and the Narnia-Kaea Supercluster are not material structures, but two great informational patterns, two ideas playing a game on a cosmic scale.
As the collective consciousness of hundreds of billions of clones, Ma Yongsheng's information structure happens to conform to the standard of a certain "interface".
He was chosen—or, to be more precise—he was captured.
The match ended in a draw.
At some point in time when the exact "moment" is indefinable, the two super-wills reached a compromise: to throw this anomalous consciousness from the tiny solar system into a special channel.
It was a spacetime rift.
Ma Yongsheng was thrown in.
The fall stopped.
The tearing stopped.
The fighting has stopped.
Ma Yongsheng found himself floating in... a place where there was nothing.
There was no light, no darkness, no up or down, no front or back.
There is only pure "nothingness".
But within this "nothingness," he sensed a certain vibration.
Faint and distant, but it does exist.
It's like being in a completely soundproof room and still being able to hear your own heartbeat.
He focused his attention—if he could "focus" in a state where even consciousness might not exist—to perceive the vibration.
Then he "saw" it.
Far, far away, there is a point of light.
No, it wasn't a point of light, but a blurry, moving mass.
He tried to adjust his perception, like a nearsighted person squinting.
The image gradually became clearer.
That's a galaxy.
A galaxy he knew well. The arrangement of its spiral arms, the colors of its stars, the shapes of its dust lanes…
Milky Way.
On one of the spiral arms of the Milky Way, there is a small star system.
Eight planets orbit a yellow star.
The solar system.
The entire star system, along with its planets, asteroids, comets, and interstellar dust, travels through interstellar space.
Ma Yongsheng saw the Earth.
That blue planet, caught up in the frantic rush of the solar system, left a long trail behind it—not a physical trail, but a ripple left by the distortion of spacetime.
Then he appeared in a void.
His consciousness units reassembled at a certain coordinate.
It's not a reorganization—because he is no longer the original "Ma Yongsheng collective consciousness," but a new existence: a pure spiritual entity without a material carrier, yet possessing complete memories and personality.
According to star chart comparison, the year is 1628 AD, the first year of the Chongzhen reign of the Ming Dynasty.
His location is the coordinate of the solar system's annihilation nearly a thousand years from now.
Ma Yongsheng is back.
This time, he is no longer just a collection of hundreds of billions of clones.
He is a traveler who has returned from nothingness.
He is a survivor from the battle for black holes.
He is a witness who has seen the truth of the universe.
he is--
eternal life.