Chapter 1707: Village Teacher
Li Yao had a lot of mixed feelings after hearing Wei Qingqing's words. He felt that he saw the free and joyful green bird from a hundred years ago again.
She had always been such a person, always willing to pursue the tiniest happiness even if she had suffered the greatest misfortune.
"That explains a lot," Li Yao mumbled. "Is that why you volunteered to join the Tinder Plan?"
"Yes. I am the best candidate," Wei Qingqing said with a smile. "At first, the Tinder Plan aimed to launch a bunch of Cosmos Rings that store the old grandpas. However, as you have seen, the old grandpa right now can only serve as an educational tool for human beings. If it is an unknown life form that is the opposite of mankind, say not a mammal and not even made of flesh and blood, the old grandpa will be rendered helpless. Even the tenth generation of the old grandpa can hardly teach a fish, not to mention a bizarre metal life form, magnetic life form, or energy life form.
"It will take a long time to improve the old grandpa. Maybe the subject of the old grandpa's teachings can only be universally indiscriminate after hundreds of years of development. But we cannot afford to wait that long now because the expedition army of the Imperium is arriving anytime. If we don't launch the tinder, we may never get to launch it.
"Later, we also thought of launching a hibernating person, but the hibernation technology of the federation was our bottleneck, too. We are not talking about a hibernation of decades or hundreds of years but millions of years or even longer! Even the Pangu Clan and the Nuwa Clan might not have had such hibernation technology, considering that our parent civilizations have only been gone for less than a million years so far!
"A hibernation of less than a million years greatly impinged on the hibernating individual, to the point that a member of the Pangu Clan was even killed by our hero Li Yao after it woke up from hibernation. While the incident proves the invincibility of Li Yao, it also indirectly suggests the unreliableness of the Pangu Clan's hibernation technology. If the member of the Pangu Clan had hibernated for millions of years, it's possible that it would've rotted and died without any foreign interference.
"After much deliberation, we concluded that if someone must be launched, spectral Cultivators such as myself are the best choice because spectral Cultivators are not burdened by fleshly bodies. All we have is just an unsubstantial soul, which is almost weightless and consumes little energy.
"The specialists in the Tinder Base have produced a very powerful and stable silicon chip with an amazing material excavated from the seventeenth mining planet in the Water Crystal Sector known as 'Silicon 41'. The shortcoming of common silicon elements that they are easy to break is overcome. Theoretically speaking, once the structure of the new element is stabilized, it will not change for a hundred million years!
"My soul will be melted into the silicon chip and sealed with special barriers. Then, I will enter a prolonged sleep like the hibernation for other people before I march toward the depths of the universe!
"This is the most energy-conserving solution that can last the longest time. Due to the limited time, this is the best we can do for the first batch of 'tinder' now. If we can defeat the expedition army of the Imperium, we can take our time to develop more advanced tinder!"
Li Yao had hibernated for a hundred years himself and understood the feeling of loneliness and insignificance very well. He could not help but grow respectful of Wei Qingqing. Almost blurting out 'Sister Qingqing', he quickly shut his mouth and calmed himself down before he asked, "Miss Wei, you will be launched into the vast universe for a journey of millions of years by yourself in a tiny chip. Do you not feel that... it may be lonely?"
"Lonely? I don't think so. I've tasted the feeling of being sealed by the barriers. It's equivalent to sleep. You close your eyes, you have a long dream, and millions of years will have passed. Besides—"
Looking at somewhere far, far away, Wei Qingqing smiled. "I grew up in a mountain village in the Heaven's Origin Sector. For the people living in the information age with a highly-developed, grand-unified Spiritual Nexus, it might be hard for them to imagine that there was once such a secluded place in the universe.
"You couldn't find a second village within dozens of kilometers of my hometown. Many people never left the mountains in their entire life. Even light beam projectors were rare. Had it not been for my teacher, who was a Cultivator from a major city and volunteered to teach in the village, I might never have been able to leave the place or know that so many people outside were living such a wonderful life!
"After I witnessed the great world out there that is full of wonders and possibilities, when I recalled my childhood in the small mountain village, I realized how lonely I had been before!
"So, after I graduated from the Sky Fantasia Academy, I became a village teacher like my teacher in the past. I worked in the Heaven's Origin Sector first and then went to the Blood Demon Sector after the New Federation was founded. Later, I went to the Water Crystal Sector, the Forest Ocean Sector, the Nether World Sector, and the mines in the Uranian Ring Sector, to all the places that were as remote and secluded as my hometown. I told the children there how big the world outside was and that they were not lonely even if they were living on a tiny oasis in the middle of a vast desert.
"I lived such a life for almost a hundred years. I introduced the outside world to the isolated villages, and I brought a lot of children on the lone islands out and helped them find a greater and more wonderful world. But then, I gradually grew dissatisfied.
"For both the civilization of mankind and the alien species that probably exist in the depths of the universe billions of lightyears away, if we are forever trapped in every corner of the dark mists, blocked by our prudency and suspicion of each other, and never have the courage to talk to each other, won't we be too lonely? Compared to be solitude of an individual, I think that this is the real loneliness. The eternal great loneliness.
"I want to break the loneliness. I want to find our own kind in the depths of the dark forest. If there aren't any, we will create some to make the cold and grave universe livelier. Hehe. Allow me to brag about myself a little bit. I consider myself as a 'village teacher' that the civilization of mankind will send into the universe. I'm sure that a lot of 'children' will be waiting for me in the future. I almost can't wait to meet them. Why should I feel lonely?"
Li Yao sighed with complicated feelings. Then he said, "Miss Wei, this is the first launch of the tinder after all. The performance of the so-called 'super stable silicon chip' is purely theoretical, too. Nobody can guarantee that it can persist for a hundred million years. Have you ever considered that... you might die?"
"Of course, death is a possibility." Wei Qingqing blinked. "However, I should have died a hundred years ago on the train north to the Grand Desolate Plateau. I am unbelievably lucky to have transformed into a spectral Cultivator and lived another hundred years. During the hundred years, I flew over mountains and rivers in the seven Sectors, enjoyed countless splendid landscapes, heard many soul-stirring stories, made friends with a lot of very interesting people, and tasted the best feelings in the human world. Everything is perfect. Just let me walk into the dream with hope. Even if everything comes to an abrupt end in the dream, what's there to be regretful about?"
Wei Qingqing stopped. Without them knowing it, they had arrived before a silver gate, which stood on the lawn in quite an out-of-place way. At first glance, there was nothing behind the gate except for the boundless grass and hills.
Li Yao extended his hand to the air next to the silver gate, but his hand was immediately pushed back gently but firmly.
It appeared that the lawn and hills far away were all illusions. A certain enormous building must be standing there, but it was covered by some sort of brilliant 3D light beam and Grand Illusionary Land to create the illusion of a great natural scene.
"Now, do you understand the true significance of the Tinder Plan? It is not a plan of absolute pessimism and nihilism as many people in the outside world say," Wei Qingqing said with a smile. "The Tinder Plan is as glorious as the Heavenly Road Plan, the mainstream space exploration project in the federation today. The main focus of the Heavenly Road Plan is to explore the greater universe from the perspective of space, while the Tinder Plan is trying to explore from the perspective of time and to march billions of years into the future so that the civilization of mankind can defeat time itself!
"Alright. Please come in. Professor Mo Xuan is waiting for you!"
The silver gate seemed to be made of liquid metal. Ripples spread out as it faded away.
Li Yao and Long Yangjun looked at each other. Together with Ling Xiaole, the three of them entered the research and launch center of the Tinder Plan under Wei Qingqing's lead.
At the same time, the last Immortal Cultivator in the Core Formation Stage in the Black Wind Fleet had been awakened. He was absorbing spiritual energy crazily, nurturing his veins and nerves that had withered from decades of hibernation. The final war preparations were finished.
At this moment, there were twenty-one hours, thirty-three minutes, and fifty-nine seconds to go before the Black Wind Fleet jumped to the Heaven's Origin Sector.
...
The silver hall of the R&D center of the Tinder Plan was similar to the lobby of the game center of 'Civilization'. Ball-shaped light beams were flashing in midair, in which a myriad of small worlds were blossoming like illusionary lotus flowers. The content of the small worlds were the episodes on the history of evolution as they had witnessed when they passed the 'time channel' a moment ago.
Ancient fungi were struggling in the boiling ocean. Trilobites and nautili dominated the ocean. The first batch of fish crawled on the muddy seashore. Dinosaurs, tigers, wolves, and monkeys claimed the continent in turn. Ancestors of human beings were picked and enlightened by the Pangu Clan, eventually growing into a vigorous, glorious civilization that occupied the three thousand Sectors.
The billions of years of development of life were highly summarized by the hundreds of small worlds.
They were not games that required real-time computation but mere videos. Therefore, they did not take much space. The hundreds of video clips could be stored in a tiny chip and launched together with Wei Qingqing.
For the alien species millions of years later, even if they could not understand the language of mankind or communicate with Wei Qingqing, as long as they boasted 'vision', they would be able to get the gist of 'mankind' as a civilization from the videos that depicted the evolution of life.
If the alien species were not very developed yet, it was possible that they would be fascinated by the skyscrapers, flying shuttles, and blazing lights in the videos and consider it a miracle demonstrated by the gods. Then, they might mimic certain things on the light beam and become the heir of mankind without them knowing it.