The Only Possibility

After a brief silence, Ivy wanted to say something more, but Tiger Tail Orchid placed a hand on his shoulder and shook her head, causing him to fall silent and speak no further.

"How is Angelina's condition?" Xu Xiaoyou asked.

Since Angelina began showing symptoms of entropy change, Xu Xiaoyou had hurried back to Dragonfly Town without a moment's rest; she then sent Angelina to Daybreak City, for as the headquarters of the Dawn Society, it possessed the most advanced medical technology in the world.

"Her situation is quite complex," Ivy said.

"Her self-healing ability is very strong, so the injuries left by that tusk whale king were nothing to her."

"She didn't experience the entropy change of her physical body due to a consciousness sea offset; rather, it's as if her consciousness sea has undergone some form of fusion with Oasis."

"To put the difference simply, the former is akin to being slowly consumed without the ability to resist, while the latter is an unconscious, relatively gentle symbiosis."

"We tried many methods to separate her from that immersion tank, but her subconscious seems to be resisting the attempt."

"Whenever we try to separate them, the state of that heart becomes manic."

"The cost of a forced separation is still unknown, and two of our researchers have already been injured because of it." Ivy sighed softly.

"So, we ultimately abandoned the idea of forcibly separating the Abyssal White Flower from the immersion tank."

"Instead, we replaced the damaged components of the tank to ensure it doesn't stop running and filled it with stable biological maintenance substances to keep her bodily functions steady."

Ivy looked over, his expression turning solemn.

"Queen of Hearts, you must understand that all of this is built on the assumption that no accidents occur."

"Although we are monitoring the condition of the Abyssal White Flower at all times, if that heart riots again and causes the immersion tank to stop functioning, it's unknown whether her consciousness can return to that body."

"Where would she be then?" Xu Xiaoyou asked.

"No one knows." Ivy shook his head.

"Do you want to know the truth about Oasis?"

"Of course."

"Essentially, Oasis is not a virtual world; it is a third space that transcends both reality and 'mystery.'"

"Its energy is infinite, enough to accommodate and store all the knowledge of mankind to date..."

"Have you seen Interstellar? An old sci-fi movie from the early Silver Age."

"Do not go gentle into that good night," Xu Xiaoyou said, her eyes calm.

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light."

She had known for a long time that many cultural films in this world highly overlapped with those of her own era, especially the film and literary works of the early Silver Age.

She had investigated this point many times but always came up empty-handed.

A leap from one era to the next was inevitably accompanied by major events—natural disasters, man-made calamities, perhaps an all-out war, or the ravages of mystery.

Major events meant a gap in knowledge; most people knew of the knowledge from that era's existence, but they did not know the process or reasons for it.

It was as if a pair of hands were turning history to the next page, while the surfaces of the past pages were swirled in a gray-white mist that could not be parted or brushed away, preventing anyone from seeing its true face.

"There is a scene where the protagonist is thrown into a library-like space after passing through a black hole."

"There, the concepts of time and space are blurred, stored in tiny spaces like books, and then superposed by countless tiny spaces to reach infinity."

"Oasis is just like that."

"It is a space so abrupt, as if when a starship passed by, a passenger casually tossed an apple into the star sea."

"That apple is Oasis, and its floating position in the boundless star sea is its coordinate."

"In the early Silver Age, roughly four thousand years ago—an era when giant companies began to master core technologies and rose to fight for interests—there were already records of Oasis."

"Later, another gap appeared, and eventually, Into the Night Dreams obtained the coordinates of Oasis."

"Under the banner of a virtual hive city, they launched the Oasis that is widely known to the public."

"Yes, what Into the Night Dreams possesses is only the coordinate, not Oasis itself."

"And as for old Mr. Manchester, he alone knew how to connect with this coordinate and the method for remote control; that is the Sovereign Key, the sword he holds in his hand."

"The Order Court's authority in Oasis is merely giving instructions to EVA through the Central Arbiter Machine, which EVA then implements through pre-input execution methods."

"That is why they cannot do things outside their authority, such as browsing a player's data or directly obliterating a player."

"What they possess is merely the power of law enforcement."

"Existing archaeological evidence is not enough to form a chain of proof for why Oasis exists."

"What follows is the Dawn Society's speculation based on some archaeological evidence regarding the reason for Oasis's existence."

"If you are interested, Queen of Hearts, just listen to it as a strange little story."

"The time Oasis has existed probably traces back to the Cradle Age."

"Long before the birth of urban legends, a pioneer, while gazing at the mystery above the starry sky, already knew the catastrophe that mystery would bring to this world."

"Let us tentatively call this pioneer Adam."

"He knew that when the catastrophe arrived, everything would return to nothingness, much like the universe after heat death."

"So Adam created this space, attempting to put all 'possibilities' into it and calculate the only set of data."

"When a supercomputer knows all the possibilities of the universe, masters all the laws of world operations, accommodates all data, and can analyze everything including mystery, it can certainly calculate the only way out."

"Obviously, even that pioneer could not complete such a magnificent project; he failed."

"He vanished into the long river of time along with the space he created, only to be salvaged by us in later generations."

"That doesn't sound like an apple casually tossed away by a passenger on a starship," Xu Xiaoyou said.

"I never said that Adam was a native of the Cradle Age," Ivy said, his face calm and his tone turning sincere.

"The Sovereign Key is very important to us."

"We must obtain it, or at the very least, we must never let it fall into the hands of outsiders."

"I am one of you as well; there's no need to beat around the bush," Xu Xiaoyou said.

Ivy and Tiger Tail Orchid looked at each other, and upon receiving an affirmative answer in the latter's eyes, he took a deep breath.

"Like Adam, we harbor an ideal that outsiders might consider impractical."

"We cannot transcend this starry sky; beings above our dimension have already pressed the countdown for our civilization."

"Whether this countdown is long or short, no matter what, when the hand returns to the end, everything of our civilization will return to nothingness."

"A civilization either perishes from within or is destroyed by others, both of which are accompanied by a process of 'choice.'"

"It could be a fatal mistake by rulers, or a long-standing erosion like ants in a nest."

"But it cannot be like this, where people have clearly made no choice, yet the ending was decided by others from the very start."

"We want to put the right to decide whether civilization perishes into the hands of future generations."

"We want to calculate everything and find the only way out for civilization."