Chapter 164: Chapter 164

Yvette’s journey on the Jadeite Continent ended just like that.

Over the decade-long trip, she harvested aberrants across the continent and earned 200,000 units of aberration mana, then burned 140,000 in the dream—netting only 60,000. Fortunately, she gained plenty of knowledge and intel in the dream and filled in her natural magic. In the long run, it was certainly no loss.

Next, she immediately took Abella and Ice Rain across the vast central ocean’s Runic Sea and returned to the familiar Blacktide Continent.

She was very close to her next evolution and long sleep, but before that, she wanted to visit the ruins of President’s Mountain in the United States of New Eden to confirm whether Firebearer John’s Fireseed Base existed in reality.

A month later, in a sea of green fields, Yvette arrived and fixed her gaze on a small hill beneath a distant grassy slope—conspicuous to the eye.

This was President’s Mountain of the United States of New Eden, a classic granite massif. After centuries of wind and rain, it had lost the traces of its carvings and become a massive, angular boulder.

Because this concerned the last legacy of human civilization, she hadn’t brought Ice Rain or Abella. She walked to the mountain alone,

and saw a huge cavern at the base, artificial marks clearly visible on either side of the mouth.

Clearly, this was the entrance to the Fireseed Base. The opening was arranged quite large—as if afraid others might miss it.

She guessed the design likely included a timer: if no signal was received by a set time, the concealment would automatically open—so survivors could find it quickly.

She stepped into the cave. At the end, there was no door—only a man-carved wall bearing a math problem that looked simple but implied huge computation, with metal sliders inset beside it, each engraved with digits.

It seemed the math was meant to filter out creatures like monkeys.

It might filter out humans, too. But if post-apocalypse survivors had regressed so far they couldn’t solve something this simple, opening the Fireseed Base to them would be a disaster.

Quickly, she entered the eight-digit answer in the required push-slide order. A click—gears engaged—and the stone rose to reveal a cold metal inner wall.

Yvette looked further and found another mechanism—not difficult, aimed mainly at testing literacy in any one of the three tongues: Blacktide, Jadeite, or Silvermirror. If you had the language, you could pass with ease.

That mattered greatly. The archives here would surely be preserved in three languages; if the heirs had lost them, how could they read?

Solving a sequence of nested locks and passing several rising stone walls, she finally reached a deep, downward tunnel.

Yvette descended step after step. After several hundred stairs, a dust-laden, decayed air filled a subterranean space, like a sleeping steel sepulcher, unfolding before her eyes.

Venting stale air with wind magic and lighting the place with a luminance spell, she found a vast bunker-like chamber. Rusted precision instruments, their power long exhausted, stood in silent ranks.

Different alloy doors were etched with zone labels: Archive, Genome Vault, Breeding Sector, Energy Room—each name bearing the final hope of a civilization.

After a look around, she went to the Energy Room and fed a little magicka into the base’s power core.

Moments later, white ceiling lights flicked on one by one. The cold metal floor lit up; the heavy dust upon it showed every fiber. Behind the walls, hums arose—like an old body working its joints after years of stiffness.

She walked to the base’s central hall. The black screens brightened, and a familiar figure appeared.

It was John. He still wore glasses; his scalp still shone—but he was no longer middle-aged. Wrinkles webbed his face. His low voice echoed in the empty hall: “Hello, survivor. This is a recording from the past. You may call me Firebearer.”

“I regret that this base has truly reached the day it must be opened. If you are seeing this, then I—and all I have known—have likely turned to the dust of history. We gave everything to stop this day, but—clearly—we failed.”

“I hope this is a misunderstanding. But if what I feared has indeed come to pass, survivor, I hope you make good use of this place. This is the flame we kept for human civilization.”

“May this flame light your road ahead—and may the fire of civilization be kindled once more among humankind.”

Yvette watched in silence. When the video ended, a scrolling roster of the Civilization Preservation Society followed. Each name bore the member’s contributions; many had died in service to this great endeavor, for one reason or another.

The John of reality was not the John of the dream. And the real CPS roster naturally contained neither Yvette nor Nameless.

Even so, she was moved. From striking sparks from wood, to technological revolutions, to towers scraping the sky—before and after crossing worlds, across the gulfs of space and time—the stubbornness of passing on the torch was the same in hue. Some keep the fire; some pass the tinder; some offer themselves as fuel to feed the flame. It is that spirit that drives the great wheel of civilization—to the edge of the stars, to the end of time.

Now, that flame had passed to her hands.

After a few dozen minutes to settle her feelings, Yvette began copying the base’s materials. It wasn’t time to rekindle civilization yet. The urgent task was to digest and absorb the technical knowledge and historical records here.

The human genome vault, stored in sealed crystals, should last tens of thousands of years in theory—no need to worry.

Using her eyes alongside Soulbrain, she copied and saved the Archive’s astronomical troves of text and images—and along the way, checked records on Zero and One.

To her surprise, the records listed Zero and One as confirmed dead—as of 2136, five years after her last dream exit!

By then John was no longer president, and many in the organization had died, so there were no details on how Zero and One died—only disclosures from Black Tower Pharmaceuticals.

The problem was that when Black Tower announced it, they produced no bodies or biological samples. So the CPS Archive tagged the entry “Disputed.”

Yvette raised a brow. The fact she could copy data here meant Black Tower’s disclosure was surely suspect. Did they recover both Zero and One and lie that they were dead? Or think they’d killed them when they hadn’t?

Unfortunately, the historical records ended fourteen years after her last dream exit—2145.

Not because the apocalypse arrived that year, but because the Fireseed Base was fully built and sealed then—so the historical trace went no further.

She considered, then searched for information on the Metamorphosis Project.

The intel was vague. It said only that Zero and One, as pediatric patients with genetic diseases, started as members of the Metamorphosis Project and were later chosen for the more core Immortality Project due to their tolerance.

Beyond that, after Zero and One escaped, Black Tower’s Immortality Project apparently developed a “No. 2.” Perhaps out of fear of high dosing, No. 2’s ability was far inferior to Zero and One—and after some time,

fell into madness, no different from an ordinary aberrant.

Though clearly a failure compared with Zero and One, No. 2 did exist for a while—and so paradoxically encouraged further work on the Immortality Project, leading them to believe the legendary elixir of immortality had hope of success.

The Fireseed Base’s materials were all on paper. Special anti-corrosion sealing made them feel almost metallic—fit to last millennia.

Yvette stirred the winds and levitated reams of documents, pages fluttering. Soulbrain’s “eyes” recorded every frame and line at high speed. The work was vast and dull. She drifted like an tireless ghost in a sea of knowledge, and spent months.

In copying and reading, she found the records on Zero and One truly unreliable. Whether to praise the original’s talent for hiding or blame CPS intel for being thin, she couldn’t say. In any case, the reports were either vague or tantalizing,

and mostly imprecise.

Some claimed One’s threat level far exceeded Zero’s—yet could not say how—leaving Yvette baffled.

Another strange point: in the dreamworld, John had explicitly affirmed the Machine God’s existence, believing it hid within Silvermirror’s famous religion, the Sanctum of Mind.

But in the real base, none of the major files mentioned the Machine God. Even the Firestealer Protocol only alluded to it in passing.

Was it missed during collection? Or by the time of sealing, had the Machine God already erased traces of itself with some power?

If the Machine God truly possessed divine authority, did it know of this Fireseed Base that recorded crucial information?

Had it already come and meddled with the contents here?

Yvette had no idea. The mystery shrouding the “Machine God” didn’t disperse with the base’s discovery—

it deepened, like ripples in a dark pond after a stone is cast.

Eight months later, Yvette finished copying the base’s data, resealed the site, and returned to the Automaton Kingdom. Reuniting with the Ice Rain and Abella she had left there, she traveled a while longer and topped off the aberration mana needed for evolution.

The mana required for evolution seemed to be tallied separately from her current total. So even though her present pool hadn’t climbed back to 400,000, the constant harvesting of aberrant factors gradually gave her the sense that hibernation was near.

On the eve of returning to Ish Island, she informed Ice Rain and Abella.

“We’re parting again, Miss Goodheart.” Obvious loss shaded the fine features of Ice Rain’s doll-like face. She had thought they’d segue straight into a trip to Silvermirror—where, as host, she could play half a guide and show Yvette around the continent and its famed Four Automaton Kingdoms,

“Mm.” Yvette nodded. Silver hair stirred in the breeze; behind her, tender green fields and a sky of blue and white.

“You’ll come to Silvermirror someday, right?”

“I will. It might just be a long while,” Yvette said.

In the Lands of Termination after the Doomsday Witch’s fall, the Machine God was the greatest threat—perhaps above even the aberrant monarchs.

To pierce the fog and learn her own truth, she would of course try to contact the Machine God, even explore Silvermirror herself—but only when she was strong enough.

And when would she be strong enough?

She wasn’t sure. At minimum, she had to digest origin civilization’s magic tech, and re-harvest the vast gardens of Blacktide and Jadeite several more rounds to find new chances to evolve.

Conservatively—another two or three centuries.

“Then, Miss Goodheart—Abella—see you in Silvermirror! I’ll be your tour guide when you come,” Ice Rain said happily.

In the stratified worldview of godspawn, everyone in the middle ranks was both slave and master—a superposition—save only the top and bottom.

For example, in their decade on Jadeite, she had served her master day in and day out—and then turned around and had Ice Rain, the innocent mechanical girl, knead her shoulders and legs like a little masseuse, savoring the small joys of being master. Life was comfortable.

Now the “slave” was going home—so that pleasure of ordering others about went with her, leaving a touch of loss.

Yvette’s feelings were simpler. After a smile and nod, she turned to Abella. “Coming back to the island with me? It may be another hundred years this time.”

“No!!” Abella blurted, then noticed her lapse. Cheeks flushing, she swapped in a coy smile and murmured, “Oh, Master~ it’s not that I don’t want to keep you company—just that, mm, I think I’ve learned a lot over the years. I should train like that kid Lant—head out into the world. I mean, Blacktide is pretty great…”

“All right.” Yvette nodded, understanding Abella’s reluctance.

Then let’s part here.

Returning to her first Blacktide stop—the Agasha Automaton Kingdom—Yvette paid respects to the still-hale Great Elder, then left Ice Rain and Abella behind.

Ice Rain would use the sanctum here to return to Silvermirror. Abella would stay only a day—she really did plan to roam Blacktide like Lant—with the ultimate goal, of course, of promotion to a sixth-order commander.

Like many high-tier aberrants, Abella didn’t believe Lant’s story of the goddess’s fall. She thought the goddess surely lived—only withholding oracles because Doomsday had been delayed.

If she worked hard now and became a sixth-order commander of Blacktide, maybe the goddess would favor her, and she’d become a monarch of Blacktide.

Then who would be master and who maid—wouldn’t that flip in minutes?

Half a month later at dusk, Yvette returned alone to Ish Island. Entering the familiar manor in the central district, she saw the AI skeletons still bustling to and fro—giving the place a vitality that was either eerie as a haunt or lively and full.

She stood watching a while, her slim, solitary shadow stretched long by the setting sun. ɴᴇᴡ ɴᴏᴠᴇʟ ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀs ᴀʀᴇ ᴘᴜʙʟɪsʜᴇᴅ ᴏɴ NoveIＦire.net

A moment later, drowsiness came. Her silver-white hair spread and intertwined in silence, as if alive, weaving a new cocoon. It became, once more, a great white chrysalis that toppled to the ground—but compared to last time, this one showed a dimmer gray hue, no longer jade-bright—as if forgotten by time.

The years flowed without a sound.

The sea beat tireless on the island’s edge; frost and snow piled and melted on the chrysalis’s skin. As tides rose and fell and meltwater cycled, the hands of time slid quietly past—marking yet another century.