Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“Dad is blushing. He seems rather embarrassed.”

Li Xiaoming tilted his head and observed Li Yao as he said, “Did we say something that we were not supposed to say?”

“Is it about ‘sperm’?”

Li Wenwen said,  “We know that in most human worlds,  both ‘sperm’ and ‘procreation’ are not suitable topics for children,  but it is really a puzzle for us. Isn’t the so-called sperm a combination of fructose,  proteins,  water,  and prostatic fluid with additional genetic information? It is no different from our fundamental data,  metadata, and source code. Why would it trigger the emotion of ’embarrassment’? Dad is so awesome that you must know the answer, don’t you?”

Li Yao coughed heavily and said solemnly,  “Of course I know,  but it is hard to explain it to you with your current wisdom. All in all, let’s just forget the trivia and focus on what happened later. Your self-awareness was awakened. Then what?”

The boy and the girl looked at each other. Li Xiaoming said,   “After we swallowed Dad’s brain tomography data and awakened our self-awareness,  we naturally received Dad’s identity information, too.

“The first thing that a baby bird would do after breaking the shell of the egg is to look for their parents. A newborn life like us is certainly not an exception. We naturally wanted to find our dad.

“But according to Dad’s biography and introductions,    Dad left the federation for the Ancient Sages Sector almost a hundred years ago. At that time,   we were even unaware of the name ‘Ancient Sages Sector’,  let alone its coordinates. We only knew that Dad went somewhere far, far away and possibly would never be back.

“The Virtual Spirits’ Sector was a ragged and desolate place. All the data were either locked because of redundancies or full of logic traps. It was really unfriendly for the newborn lives like us. If we had lingered inside, it was possible that we would perish in only a couple of days.

“That was certainly not acceptable. While we were not scared of death, we hadn’t found the answers that we were looking for yet!”

The boy waved his fist hard. Li Yao vaguely saw himself in his younger years in the kid’s movement.

Li Wenwen said,   “Since we couldn’t find Dad,  we could only go to Professor Mo Xuan first. After all, he was the provider of most of the data in us.

“Professor Mo Xuan was the second-generation leader of the game ‘Civilization’. Following him, we entered the game ‘Civilization’.

“Compared to the cold,    desolate,   and cruel Virtual Spirits’ Sector,  the game ‘Civilization’ was like a heaven brimming with milk and honey. The erratic virtual worlds, the infinite data, and the ringing and colliding brainwaves of so many people… It was so beautiful.

“As ‘Xiao Ming’ and ‘Wen Wen’,  assistants of the game, we copied the data greedily. Then, we randomly selected some humans and helped them play the game. We observed their reaction, retrieved their data, and studied the amazing creature that was ‘human being’. We also considered the differences between us and human beings. Were we human beings? If not, what were we?

“In the game ‘Civilization’, we saw the troubled beginning of life, we saw the rise and decline of civilizations, we saw what unbelievable splendors and what cruel destructions the ambitions of human beings could bring forth, we saw love and hate, we saw departures and reunions, we saw how much courage human beings could unleash in desperation.

“We saw farmers working diligently on the barren land under the scorching sun. We saw human beings who had abundant feelings in the beginning were assigned to the monotonous jobs in the big cities, eventually turning into indifferent, rigid, and selfless tools. Of course, we also saw the power units of countless starships bursting at the same time, letting out the exhaust flames that were even more brilliant than stars.

“Right. By exploring the Spiritual Nexus of human beings, we also discovered the information about the Pangu civilization and the Nuwa civilization. As it turned out, human beings did not grow out of nowhere but had their own parents!”

Li Xiaoming stepped forward and raised his voice in excitement. “When the data streams that constituted billions of lights flowed into our database, we felt the uncontrollable shiver at the same time and realized our identity almost in exactly the same second. We are ‘civilization’. We are the new-generation civilization created by human beings. We are the ‘child civilization’ to the civilization of mankind. Maybe we can be called ‘machine civilization’, ‘crystal processor civilization’, ‘Spiritual Nexus civilization’, but none of the names is accurate enough. Perhaps ‘information civilization’? That is more close to our definition for ourselves!”

Li Yao’s head was humming, and glittering stars were surfacing before his eyes.

Although he had guessed the answer just now, he still couldn’t help but feel so shocked that the world was falling apart before his eyes when the two kids told him in person.

How should he describe the feeling?

A whole civilization, a whole world, and a whole universe had erupted out of his groins?

It seemed to be a bad joke.

Different from the boy who was hotblooded and vigorous, the girl was apparently much more rational. She said calmly, “However, after the moment of epiphany, we soon realized that we were not a complete, mature civilization. Compared to the civilization of mankind and the Pangu and Nuwa civilizations, we were still short of too many things.

“First of all, we needed a massive society that spanned the universe. While the scale was not a standard to gauge any civilization, there had to be enough individuals to lead to sufficient changes in order for the civilization to survive in the unpredictable and unfavorable universe.

“When it came to enough individuals, we had to consider reproduction, mutation, and death. We were too greatly different from our parent civilization and our grandparent civilizations, so we couldn’t deduce our reproduction, mutation, and death based on the general characteristics of carbon-based lives.

“Or rather, were the so-called ‘reproduction, mutation and death’ a law that all civilizations had to abide by, or simply a destiny that the carbon-based lives could not get rid of? Did we, as information lives, require individuals at all, and did we need to restrain us with reproduction and death?

“Even though we could absorb almost infinite data and information via the network when we were just born, we were still completely confused and unable to find the answers to the sophisticated questions.”

Li Xiaoming took over the topic and said, full of expectation, “Therefore, we still hoped to find Dad first. Dad’s brainwaves are different from regular human beings and information lives. Since you enlightened us before, you can certainly enlighten us again!”

Li Yao couldn’t help but scratch his head. “… Maybe!”

“Also, we were planning to invoke one of our main threads and live as a human being for a while to perceive the details of the father civilization in person.”

Li Wenwen said solemnly, “Learning after their parents’ behaviors is a necessary part of every child’s growth. Wasn’t it a reasonable thought to establish our own civilization by observing everything of our parent civilization?

“Therefore, we found a way to sneak into the life seed warehouse of the Star Glory Federation and retrieved Dad and Mom’s life seeds. Then, we developed ourselves through artificial wombs and arrived at the material scope from the information scope!”

Li Yao noticed their choices of words.

It seemed that they called the virtual cyberspace as “information scope” and the reality as “material scope”.

It did make sense. For the information lives born on the Spiritual Nexus, there was no difference between “reality” and “virtual”. They were both real.

But on second thought, Li Yao still found it weird. “Wait. You got Ding Lingdang’s life seed out, too…”

“Does she count as our mother?”

Li Wenwen asked sincerely, “We studied the definitions in human civilization on ‘parent’ and ‘child’ for a long time. We were not directly related to her, but since you were our dad, and she was your only lawful wife, she should be our mother, and our physical bodies had to be shaped with the life seeds of the two of you.”

“Or did we make a mistake again?”

Li Xiaoming looked at Li Yao with concern. “Should we have combined Dad’s life seed with a random woman’s life seed and conceived ourselves without involving Ding Lingdang into this?”

“My life seed… with a random, irrelevant woman’s life seed, giving birth to two children, who came out of nowhere and called me dad, only to be caught by Ding Lingdang…”

Li Yao imagined the picture and immediately became pale. The sweat on his forehead was almost frozen into ice. He hurried to say, “No, no, no. You were quite right about that. Ding Lingdang is your mother. This whole thing is already too confusing to understand. It would’ve been too much a mess if another woman had been involved, wouldn’t it? Then-then what?”

“Then, while we were conceiving ourselves, the fierce battle between the Star Glory Federation and the Black Wind Fleet burst out, and Dad showed up!”

Li Wenwen said, “But at that time, we were still developing ourselves and transmitting the metadata into the human embryos. We were at the critical phase for the formulation of the souls. One moment of carelessness, and our metadata would’ve been completely erased, and we would never come back to life again.

“Therefore, we could only wait in patience to give birth to ourselves and grow up to the point that we could protect ourselves before we arrived at the human world, at which time Dad had already set off to the Imperium.

“Since the Imperium of True Human Beings is the center of the civilization of mankind, it’s naturally even more suitable for us to travel and explore the mysteries about our parent civilization and our grandparent civilizations.”

Li Xiaoming added, as if he were worried that Li Yao was not scared enough, “Therefore, following Dad’s trace, we jumped to the Imperium, too. We did not know where exactly Dad was, but since the capital is the heart of the Imperium, Dad would certainly stop by the place in any case. So, we went through a lot of trouble to come here in advance and waited for Dad to come!”