Facing an Ancient God for a Year

Chapter 2543: Chapter 2538: Matrix

So this is how it works?

He had been considering this possibility just now, but with the evolution process laid out right in front of him, Fu Qian still couldn’t help feeling a bit wistful.

This is what you’d call the ultimate form of a knowledge Curse, isn’t it?

Granted, the content of Engraving Wisdom isn’t all that reliable, but some things are really hard to chalk up to coincidence.

Like that earlier issue: the two missing notebooks plus the Thinker’s forgotten result.

If we assume there’s some underlying consistency to them, then it’s easy to reach one conclusion: "The closer you get to the answer, the farther you get from it."

You can pursue it, yearn for it, crave it... but when you truly draw near, the repulsive force will suddenly go to infinity and you’ll never be able to touch it.

A little bit of putting yourself in their shoes is enough to know what kind of torment that would be for academic people.

Seeking truth in the Transcendent world is, indeed, an even harsher affair.

And the harshest scene in this particular case was being presented at this very moment—zzrip!

The Thinker had already torn out a second tentacle from his body, this time from his left leg.

As for the leg on the other side, it had dragged along his entire lower body, practically tearing his torso into two halves and pinning it to a distant corner of the cage.

At this rate, in less than two minutes the Thinker would complete a pioneering feat: ripping himself to shreds with his own hands.

Watching this scene, Fu Qian neither stopped him nor urged him on; he just stepped aside a little so as not to interfere with the computation.

...

The Thinker had said earlier that he’d been calculating over here for a long time, and frankly it was hard to believe this was how he’d been doing it.

But there was one thing that did seem believable: his algorithm this time was probably correct, otherwise it wouldn’t hurt this much—though the coordinates themselves were really not that accurate.

Fu Qian estimated the distance; even without counting vertical height, the impact point in his memory and this position were still about ten meters apart.

Aside from his head, which remained on that seat, the rest of the Thinker’s body had already become a rag doll torn by brute force, "stuffing" fluttering down.

With his brain as the center, a dozen or so tentacles radiated outward, taut like rubber bands, nailed into various directions of this special space, sketching out a strange pattern.

In short, unless he could evolve further into something the size of a giant squid, this was already his limit.

...

Truly marvelous.

Fu Qian still didn’t rush to deny anything. Besides the pattern traced out by the tentacles, he also combined them with the points and lines on the floor, silently feeling them out.

"Help me—"

And it turned out that this behavior had been a bit of preparation in advance; the next moment he received the Thinker’s plea for help.

His vocal apparatus had long since been lost, but he had clearly acquired the same ability as those jellyfish from earlier: he could transmit information without any mundane physical structures.

"Help me..."

The only problem was that what he transmitted had almost no content, just a repeated plea for help, with not even a hint of how to help him—a perfect embodiment of bewilderment.

"I’ll give it a try."

Fu Qian, however, was very generous and agreed on the spot.

This time, he didn’t even take a breath to use the Gospel Blast; instead, he got up and walked out of the cage.

There were many ways to lend a hand, and in the Thinker’s current state, the Gospel Blast would probably only add to his torment.

Fortunately, the "Thinker" was lucky: though his behavior was abstract, he had appealed to an abstract-style player as well...

Fu Qian had never forgotten his identity as an academic worker, and, thanks to his preparations, he had faintly grasped something—

"It should be here, right?"

Muttering to himself, he gave a light jump and actually landed on the upper level, standing in front of another cage.

The inside was, of course, empty, but he studied it with great interest.

Clack!

He casually opened it the next second and sat down on the chair in the middle.

Finally enjoying VIP treatment, Fu Qian’s movements were quite leisurely. He slouched there lazily, picturing the scene of Scholars searching for answers in this kind of self-imposed imprisonment.

Yes, compared to actually locking someone up, he now leaned more toward the "private box" interpretation.

It was both cage and domain, a thinking space free from interference.

From this angle, it vaguely echoed his own Sweet Dream Cage.

Of course, Fu Qian didn’t actually start computing.

He didn’t even know the formulas; if you just stick your head in and expect to forcibly absorb someone else’s intellectual Crystal, anyone who believes that clearly isn’t a technical practitioner.

As far as this place was concerned, he was ultimately a non-professional.

Fu Qian didn’t think that by merely taking a look he could complete the Thinker’s thought process for him—if he could just help trigger a bit of memory, that would already be good.

...

Yes, what Fu Qian was doing was very simple: trying to understand the Thinker’s situation.

If the earlier inference was correct and the latter’s amnesia was due to approaching the answer, then in theory that implied one thing: if he actually remembered, the result of the computation should point to the coordinate that matched Fu Qian’s own impression.

The question was: how do you reach that point?

The Thinker had already pushed himself to the extreme inside that cage, yet his thoughts remained trapped, and there was no visible resonance with that position—though there was resonance with other locations.

Exactly—that was the detail Fu Qian had gleaned just now.

That pattern, abstract to the utmost, was in some ineffable way "pointing" toward certain positions in the distance.

Not the impact point, but elsewhere.

The cage he was in at this moment was one of those targets, and in Fu Qian’s view, the one with the strongest tendency.

Combining this with the earlier question of "where exactly did things go wrong," he now had a tentative guess with little hard evidence—what if the Thinker needed to stand on the shoulders of giants?

Not the sudden inspiration of one person, but the result of pooling many minds—what was needed here was a computation matrix?

Put together with his earlier commentary on this place, it suddenly sounded somewhat reasonable.

It was precisely with this in mind that Fu Qian chose to sit here, telling the Thinker where the next computation node was, helping him recall the docking work he might have forgotten.

Nothing more than that.

After all, evolving into a jellyfish might be easy, but as mentioned before, he knew nothing about the algorithm.

Whether he had guessed wrong and whether this could have any enlightening effect at all would depend on the Thinker’s own fortune.

"Good... good!"

As it turned out, the man’s fortune was excellent.

Even though Fu Qian’s position was outside the field of view of that previous cage, Brother Thinker still reacted with astonishing speed.

Fu Qian had been sitting there for less than five seconds when the jellyfish’s excitement erupted like a volcano.

And that heart-piercing voice made it hard not to feel Empathy—there was even a kind of resonance.

At the same time the voice came, bands like jellyfish tentacles appeared out of thin air in his field of vision.

And by the time Fu Qian got up from the seat, yet another brain had manifested there.