Mr. Ne was the greatest and most powerful man in the world. Alice firmly believed this, even though people here were permitted to speak of that being in distant Huaxia who was considered invincible under heaven.
*But Mr. Ne is first and foremost a scientist,* Alice had always thought back then. *The strongest warrior plus the world's greatest scientist is obviously superior to another warrior who is merely the strongest. What a simple math problem.*
Sometimes she voiced her thoughts aloud.
Once, when she said that, Mr. Ne smiled. He sat down and said gently:
"No, Alice. When you know one person's story, you must never assume another person has none. The Legion Commander walks an entirely different path from mine. He is perhaps the human standing at the highest sequence to this day."
It was on that very day that Alice heard the word "Yanxiu" for the first time.
Gradually, she learned more.
That invincible Legion Commander in distant Huaxia was not a Yanxiu.
Mr. Ne, however, was. Moreover, he was the first and, to this day, the only fully matured Yanxiu in human history.
His Yanxiu had come from direct inheritance.
The one from whom he inherited it was named Nikola.
Nikola came from another world, from a civilization founded on source energy martial might. It was the master of this colossal dreadnought.
A long voyage through the sea of stars and the eventual crash landing had buried all of its subordinates, but it had survived, living on the Azure planet as a human for over two hundred years.
During that time, Nikola collected and buried nearly all the Yanxiu remains on this "graveyard" of a planet, missing only one—its own.
"It may have died suddenly," Alice still remembered Ne telling her once, in a conversation that had seemed unimportant at the time.
Because its death had been sudden, Nikola had not had time to bury itself. It left behind many things, including its own Yanxiu, its skeletal remains, and a vast amount of records it had not managed to destroy.
Mr. Ne spent a great deal of time studying those records with dedicated, fanatical obsession. With brilliant intellect, he bridged the barrier of alien language and script, falling madly in love with that era belonging to the Yanxiu.
"True science should not be limited by petty concepts like planets and species. I will attempt to forge a brand-new era."
When Alice finally learned one day that the organization Mr. Ne established was intended to welcome the arrival of an alien civilization's invasion, gambling the fate of all humanity to do so...
That was what he told her.
***
Mr. Ne's pursuit of his ideal had begun long before Alice was born, continuing until one day, when Alice was nineteen, it was abruptly interrupted by an experiment.
What happened that day proved that even Mr. Ne could make mistakes. He had misjudged something beforehand—Nikola had not died suddenly. All of it had been a conspiracy.
This super Great Spike, who had once reached the Puda'er level, had itself evolved into a Yanxiu. In the final, waning stages of its life, it had laid a trap, waiting across the finite time that followed for someone possessing both sufficient strength and wisdom, and for an opportunity with a probability infinitely approaching zero.
Mr. Ne wanted to create an era of human Yanxiu. In those years, he had searched tirelessly for those buried remains, but ultimately found nothing.
There were no remains at the burial sites indicated in the records. Ne speculated that Nikola had moved them before the end, or that the records were incomplete.
And so, he decided to take a risk and use the methods of the Great Spike civilization, attempting to pry into whether any residual fragments of Nikola's consciousness still lingered. To do this, he had to relinquish his own self-awareness, allowing the Yanxiu's will to fully awaken and return.
This was something only Ne could accomplish; the act of willingly giving up self-awareness alone was something no one else could do. Although Nikola had formulated this method by integrating human science, it remained purely theoretical, and countless prior attempts had all ended in failure. After all, humans themselves knew extraordinarily little about their own brains.
When Mr. Ne did this, only Alice was present.
During the experiment... the consciousness of Nikola lingering within the Yanxiu's will invaded him, suddenly beginning to devour Ne's own consciousness.
If all went according to plan, it would achieve resurrection through this.
However, its target, Mr. Ne, happened to be the being with the strongest consciousness in this world.
In the final choice, Ne voluntarily severed his body's vital functions. Using the instant when the Yanxiu's will tore free upon human death, he ripped his own consciousness apart...
He halted the final completion of that devouring, using every conceivable method in a desperate struggle to keep himself from dying completely.
When the silent tempest subsided, Alice woke from her faint. Her first sensation was joy: *Mr. Ne, you're all right. That's wonderful.*
Her consciousness told Alice with certainty that Mr. Ne was still alive, lying right there on the ground.
Yet when she opened her eyes and rose to search for him, she could not find any trace of Mr. Ne. Even his corpse upon the glass platform had vanished.
*Mr. Ne clearly just stood up, and he's walking around,* Alice thought in confusion.
Eventually, Alice realized that she had become Mr. Ne—or rather, half of Mr. Ne. The Mr. Ne who lived in her awareness, who stood up and walked, was herself.
Nikola had also revived, half-alive. The other half of Mr. Ne's consciousness was with it, merged into one with it, floating together in the void.
This was a condition humanity had likely never conceived of or imagined, nor had the Great Spike civilization.
Through fumbling and trial, everything was slowly pieced together:
Consciousness could re-fuse. When Alice and Nikola's consciousnesses merged together, Mr. Ne would reappear. Of course, he was simultaneously constrained by both sides and could involuntarily vanish at any moment.
What filled Alice with admiration was that Mr. Ne himself quickly accepted this with calm composure. He was even filled with curiosity regarding this state, promptly throwing himself into research and contemplation.
At the same time, Nikola underwent changes as well. Its rebirth truly seemed like a brand-new birth, like the newborn emergence of an alien infant. In its own understanding: on that day, a new species had been born.
Nikola began to realize that it was no longer a Great Spike; nor, of course, was it human.
Among the three, Alice was undeniably the weakest in consciousness. In the beginning, she was constantly bullied and threatened. However, among the three, she was also the only one who truly possessed life.
Three consciousnesses were parasitic upon a single living vessel. Two of those powerful consciousnesses had already once hovered on the brink of dispersal or been torn apart. If this living vessel died, all three would perish.
Mr. Ne had not explicitly told Alice this; it was simply that once his research yielded this conclusion, Alice knew it automatically.
Consequently, she gradually secured her standing and grew insolent.
Later, Mr. Ne reached another conclusion through his research: among the three, Nikola would ultimately triumph, seizing everything.
To counter this, he continued his investigations and devised a method that held a faint possibility of freeing Alice from this predicament.
Put another way: Ne was already doomed; the ultimate outcome among the three, setting aside dying together, had an overwhelming probability of Nikola consuming everything; only with an infinitesimal probability could Alice end up surviving alone, returning to herself.
The conditions required by that method were extremely harsh. It first required a fully matured Yanxiu whom Alice could completely trust, and the unique trait of that Yanxiu had to be oriented toward attacking consciousness...
This prompted Alice to throw herself wholeheartedly into the faction searching for the remains, standing alongside Mr. Ne.
Unfortunately, Nikola was in no hurry to do so. It kept information regarding the relocated burial ground strictly sealed. The condition it proposed was to welcome the arrival of the subsequent Great Spike host.
Then, using Great Spikes and humans alike, it would forge an eternal Yanxiu race belonging entirely to itself.
***
The time that followed stretched from days into years, spanning four full years. Like an impartial mediator, Mr. Ne calmly and painstakingly bought time for research.
Nikola, meanwhile, grew increasingly irritable and bizarre. It completely ceased to regard itself as a Great Spike, and certainly not as human. Viewing itself as the creator of a new, magnificent race, it constantly urged Ne and Alice to join "together" with it, to forge the eternity and glory of this new kind.
As for Alice, she did not even know what else she could do—until one day, when she encountered an amusing incident, and an amusing person.
Chapter 729