Silent Ark

Chapter 11: The Amber Era

"That's what faith is," Liu Pan said. "It's like a contractual anchor."

He closed the monitor.

Yao Chong later described it in "Investiture of the Gods" as: The Anchor of Covenants.

Divinity: The cornerstone of the continuity and certainty of the universe. It ensures that laws remain unchanged, promises are always fulfilled, and logic runs through everything. Without it, the universe would fall into unpredictable nothingness, and civilizations would be unable to establish any reliable communication and cooperation.

Higher Dimension: A silent obelisk standing amidst a storm of probability, inscribed with all oaths and agreements at the conceptual level, thus gaining a binding force that transcends time and space.

"The five frequency bands can be broadly referred to as the Five Constant Virtues of Confucianism: benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness—the moral principles of excellent traditional Chinese culture that we've memorized since childhood." Liu Pan's voice was calm, unnaturally calm—as if the mysterious "person" was remotely controlling Liu Pan's body again that day when the time was being calibrated. "To be precise, they are not moral principles; they are merely phenomena. In essence, they are five higher-dimensional entities. They are the five pillars that the original universe uses to maintain itself from falling apart."

"Since the universe contains positive metaphysical forces of benevolence, righteousness, propriety, wisdom, and trustworthiness, and these are not the cause of physical imbalances, there should also be corresponding evil frequencies according to the law of conservation of energy."

Liu Pan did not answer.

On the tenth day after the whale fall, the first "evil" appeared.

Its appearance is completely different from the original "仁".

"Benevolence" is diffuse, gentle, and gradual—like the thin mist rising in the mountains and forests at dawn. You don't know where it comes from, but by the time you notice it, it's already all around you.

Evil is sudden.

Around the world, at the same second, almost all awakened perceivers reported that on the other side of the golden net of "benevolence," a spatial opposition that was not in the traditional sense, but rather a logical opposition, had "torn" a hole.

This is not a small black hole. A black hole is a singularity of a gravitational field, with mass, an event horizon, and can be described using general relativity.

This hole has no mass, no horizon, and cannot even be proven by any existing scientific theory.

It is simply—nothing.

It is nothing but "nothing".

It is the origin of the concept of "non-existence".

Standing "in front of" it (if you can say it is "in front of"), your perception is not "seeing a blank space"—but rather the concept of "blank space" itself resonates in your mind.

It's like shouting into an abyss; the abyss doesn't echo your voice, but rather the word "silence" itself.

The first hole appeared on the tenth day.

As the cave appeared, the golden network of "Ren" retreated near the cave.

The thread didn't break, but it actively bypassed that area, like a blood vessel bypassing necrotic tissue.

Then someone did something that completely triggered it.

An awakened individual in Tokyo—whose identity is unknown and who could not be tracked afterward, and who may have been erased in some way—not only saw the hole, but also walked towards it.

It wasn't a physical trajectory—his body remained in the same place.

It was his perception, his activated higher-dimensional perception, that actively reached towards that hole.

His consciousness penetrated a little bit.

Then his body began to laugh wildly.

It wasn't a joyful laugh, nor a maniacal laugh; it was a terrifying, suffocating laugh.

It was a smile that even Yao Chong found astonishing when he retrieved the files—a smile that he had never seen on any human face before—a gloomy yet perfect smile.

The curve of the corners of his mouth was so precise it looked like it had been drawn with a compass.

The frequency of his laughter was so constant, like a metronome, once every 0.8 seconds, no more, no less.

He laughed for seven hours.

He stopped seven hours later, not because he was tired.

It's because his facial muscles have frozen—not stiff, but the state of "smiling" has changed from "an action" to "an attribute".

His face was no longer "smiling," but "smiling" had become an inherent feature of his facial structure, as unchangeable as his nose being in the middle. He spoke a sentence with his frozen smile.

The voice was recorded by the monitoring station in Tokyo: "Only me. Only I've always been here. Everything else is fake. Everything else has always been fake. I finally understand."

Then his consciousness disappeared from all detectable channels.

It's not death—his brainwaves are still there, his heart is still beating, he's still breathing, his body is still alive.

But "he" is gone, though his body continues to function, like a machine without an operator; his "soul" has been completely annihilated.

CERN has designated this hole as "Sovereign Body-η".

In internal communications, someone gave it its first unnumbered name: Pride, Sovereign.

Yao Chong thought this title was quite reasonable, so he included it in the archives: The Solipsist Sovereign.

Godhood: The ultimate manifestation of absolute isolation and denial of others. It believes that only itself is real in the universe, and everything else is an illusion. Its power plunges civilization into blind arrogance, closed-off involution, and ultimately leads to its stagnation and demise in solitude.

Higher-dimensional form: a perfect, cold, self-replicating geometric structure that rejects all external information and attempts to assimilate everything it touches into its lifeless mirror image.

For the next seven days, a new hole appeared every single day.

This is not a coincidence, but a precise daily cycle.

Every 24 hours or so, a new hole tears open on the other side of the "Ren" network, and is fully formed in about one Earth day.

When each hole appears, the network of "Ren" will retreat in the corresponding area.

Each time a hole is approached, the person who approaches it will undergo an irreversible mutation in consciousness.

Day 11. The second hole.

Location: Central South Pacific Ocean, high seas, uninhabited area. Only seventeen cargo ships and two cruise ships are sailing in the vicinity, three of which carry a total of more than a dozen awakened beings.

These Awakened Ones are actually rather useless. They can only "see" these metaphysical things, but they are just ordinary people and don't have any powerful superpowers.

Reports from those who have been close: The interior of the cave is not "empty"—it is a mirror image.

What you see is not nothingness, but the person you most want to become.

One of the awakened individuals was a scholar from North America who envisioned himself standing on the Nobel Prize podium—his greatest desire in life.

Another person saw himself being embraced by his lover; he had just been forced to divorce three days earlier due to bankruptcy.

The third awakened one saw nothing—because she had nothing she "wanted to be," she just wanted to live—so the cave showed her a living version of herself, and that "living self" began to devour the real her.

Her consciousness was completely replaced by her own mirror image within four minutes.

Mirror, dressed in her clothes and speaking in her voice, told the crew, "I'm fine," and then began a systematic and planned attempt to become everyone on the ship who was "better" than her—learning their accents, imitating their movements, and stealing their clothes.

The ship's doctor diagnosed the awakened individual with a mental illness, although the outward appearance was similar. The other awakened individuals initially determined that her information structure had been rewritten, and the rewritten content was: to become someone else.

CERN has designated it as: Sovereign Body-θ.

Internal communication name: Jealousy, Shape Thief.

Yao Chong describes it in the Investiture of the Gods as: The Mimetic Parasite.

Godhood: The source of creative exhaustion and vicious competition. Unable to create, it can only distort and imitate, attempting to seize the qualities, prosperity, and very existence of others. Civilizations affected by it will be trapped in an endless zero-sum game and identity anxiety.

Higher Dimension: A shadow that constantly changes shape, always showing the most glorious form of the civilization it has just devoured or is coveting, but its interior is completely empty.