Chapter 1

Beneath the chaotic yet straightforward material world lies a multitude of things far beyond human comprehension; what the naked eye sees is merely the most insignificant disguise of this world. In the soul's vision, this world is far more complex than it appears.

Ever since Tana-Gus was swept by a disaster beyond reality, this planet has been completely transformed. Its material aspect may be formidable enough, but its hidden ethereal part is even more terrifying. Countless restless ancient souls roam this planet, and the energy and information tides caused by the Firstborn have surged across the land for ten thousand years, leaving behind countless visible or invisible supernatural legacies. The memories of the Tana people have detached from their bodies, drifting across this planet with the tides, entangled and distorted with countless other pieces of information into indescribable monsters. But at certain nodes, it is still possible to access those ancient souls who can still think—as long as the contactor possesses some suitable talent.

As Hao Ren reached out towards that twisted, transparent air, he felt his consciousness momentarily pulled away from his body, as if a massive mental power had surged into his brain, severing his perception of the outside world. He felt as if he were standing in a vast void, surrounded by countless chaotic grey-white mists, and one... or countless overlapping phantoms stood in the depths of those mists, watching him.

Hao Ren awoke from his momentary shock and subconsciously tried to concentrate and break free from this state—having experienced many transcendental experiences, he now knew how to use mental power to resist this kind of supernatural intrusion. But just as he was about to act, a voice suddenly came from the direction of those phantoms: "Please don't be nervous, stranger, we mean no harm."

"Who are you?" Hao Ren asked as he looked down at his body. Unsurprisingly, he was drifting in this chaos in a purely conscious form. He could feel that his body was still in the real world, but he couldn't connect to it temporarily: this reminded him of his experience with that giant brain.

"We are the original inhabitants of this planet," the phantom behind the mist said. It was neither male nor female, and it was impossible to tell how far away it was, or even whether it was a single shadow or countless shadows overlapping. When it spoke, Hao Ren only felt a buzzing echo mixed in, "We are the Tana people."

Hao Ren was stunned for a moment, then oh-ed noncommittally: "Oh, as expected. I thought this planet only had those insane Wrathful Spirits."

"Indeed, there are only insane souls here," the phantom said unhurriedly, "All the spirits have lost their self. Strictly speaking, the 'we' in front of you is just a set of data. We can no longer call ourselves any form of life… We are the crystallized memories of all the Tana people."

"I know about your transformation of life forms," Hao Ren did not dwell on the difference between "crystallized memories" and "souls." He sensed that his connection with this chaotic realm was weakening. Perhaps the Tana people's psychic abilities were not very good at connecting to the minds of Earthlings. "What went wrong back then? How did you still fail to escape the calamity after you transformed your life form? How did you become those irrational… monsters?"

"We thought that by getting rid of our flesh and blood bodies, we could escape the ecological disaster, but we didn't expect that the slaughter in the material world was only the mildest aspect of the entire disaster. After leaving the material world, we faced even more terrifying distortions and chaos," the phantom floated slightly, and Hao Ren felt another mental force spreading towards him. "Stranger, please see for yourself."

This mental force was not invasive; it was merely showing a memory, so after confirming that it was safe, Hao Ren calmed down and watched the ancient memory from ten thousand years ago.

In a daze, he found himself standing on a magnificent city wall, surrounded by a splendid city built of what looked like gold. He heard the whistling of the wind, and countless translucent, tall figures ran around him, shouting loudly: "The No. 3 defensive wall has been cracked! The robots can't stop those tentacles!" "Medics, we need medics here! The wounded who retreated from the defensive wall need treatment…" "Earthquake, another earthquake!" "The tentacles have penetrated the foundations, the defensive wall is cracking…"

Hao Ren realized that this was a scene from more than ten thousand years ago. He was watching all this from the perspective of a soldier who was standing on the city wall at that time.

He found that "his" perspective was slowly scanning the city wall, and with a violent tremor, he looked in the direction outside the city. This tremor revealed an unspeakable fear.

Outside the city, the earth was cracked, and huge mountains surged and rolled like living things—they were real living things, because that mountain range was part of the Firstborn's tentacles!

The entire world seemed to be covered by those tentacles and giant trees. The boundless body of the Firstborn surged, devouring everything, and in the gaps between those tentacles, one could see dark red liquid slowly flowing, a substance extremely similar to "Source Blood" decomposing the last bit of life residue outside the shelter. And the shelter was the last remaining glimmer of light in this hellish world: it was tottering, insignificant. The Firstborn angrily lashed at Alamanda's last two or three layers of defensive walls, and the geological structure of the entire city was constantly shaking. Even a large number of tentacles crossed the walls and spread onto the city's energy shield, almost completely burying the city's last glimmer of light.

For ordinary people, even a single glance at this bizarre hellscape would be terrifying.

Then Hao Ren felt his perspective shift again, and immediately afterwards he saw the scene of the "Ascension" ceremony of that year.

The last surviving Tana people gathered in the square near the Tower of Ascension, and floated into the sky under the support of some inexplicable force. The golden tower released nebula-like lightning, and the Tana people's innate soul power was sublimated in resonance. Their spirits were extracted and materialized, while their bodies gradually disintegrated into countless points of light—the Tana people finally realized at the last moment of the apocalypse that the tentacles spreading across the earth were tracking life reactions, so they even had to completely abandon their corpses, otherwise the tentacles' strangulation of the city would not stop.

As the last batch of their people were sublimated into spirits, brilliant light descended from the dome of Alamanda, which was a deadly radioactive ray, the "final life-cleansing order" set by the Tana people. All conventional organisms in the entire city would die quickly in the radiation, including even the most tenacious single-celled organisms.

Only by completely erasing the aura of life could the Firstborn's pursuit be stopped.

From that moment on, there was only one being left on the planet Tana-Gus: the Firstborn, who had already grown to an unprecedented size. It had covered the entire globe.

Hao Ren's consciousness continued forward with the external memory, and he finally experienced the perspective of the Tana people after they became spiritual beings. He "saw" himself gradually ascending into the sky, with countless translucent souls floating around him. The owner of this memory was looking at the material world and the soul world from a new perspective. After adapting to the new "body," he looked towards the horizon, at that surging mass of tentacles and the vast, bizarre, indescribable biological tissue within the tentacles.

Intense terror surged from the memory.

An unprecedentedly terrifying shadow floated above those tentacles, and a large amount of frantic mental power rapidly spread from the gaps between the tentacles, growing into a dark tide that enveloped the entire planet. The Firstborn's tentacles waved wildly in that dark, chaotic mud, seemingly mocking the Tana people who thought they could escape the calamity by transforming their life form.

No one had ever seen such a thing lurking around the Firstborn—it was not until the Tana people became spirits that they realized that their enemy was far more terrifying than they had imagined.

In the soul's vision, the Firstborn's soul form was far more insurmountable than its material form.

"It possesses unparalleled soul power, even more powerful than its tentacles and red tides—unfortunately, we only realized this after we became spirits. This transformation was a one-time, irreversible event. Time was tight, and we didn't even have time to let some people transform first and then determine the situation. We encountered a catastrophic disaster," Hao Ren's consciousness broke away from that terrifying memory, and he heard the Tana people's "aggregate of dead souls" speaking to him, "It shattered the 'self' of every Tana person. It must have been a terrible electromagnetic storm. All the souls were mixed together in the storm. The thoughts, memories, and personalities of millions of people were forcibly merged, and ultimately turned into…"

"Wrathful Spirits," Hao Ren finally understood completely, "In essence, it's a kind of scrambled code."

"Everything is over. In the end, only we survived," the phantom said calmly, "We are memory banks endowed with false personalities, a copy of the Tana-Gus civilization. Perhaps that destructive force didn't consider us to be any form of life: neither material beings nor energy beings, so we have continued to exist to this day."

Hao Ren sighed, "Is there anything I can help with?"