351: Heritage Coordinates and "Troublemakers"

The blue crystal left by Morning Star lay on the lab table like a quiet eye that refused to wake up.

Wen Youyi had studied the crystal inside out for three days, trying the master key, the query interface of the memory aggregate, and even having Silver Thorn attempt seventeen symbiotic scanning modes—the result was only one: the coordinates stored in the crystal existed, but the path to them was locked.

"It's not that we can't enter," Silver Thorn summarized, "It's that the 'entrance' hasn't opened yet. The crystal is waiting for specific conditions to be triggered."

"What conditions?" Zhao Iron Pillar asked.

"Unknown. The crystal refuses to reveal more information," Silver Thorn's silver humanoid form spread its fingerless hands, "It said, 'The heritage is not the answer, it is more questions'—in your human language, this is called 'speaking in riddles.'"

Wen Youyi rubbed his temples in pain. Programmers hate two types of requirements the most: those that keep changing, and those that don't explain what they are waiting for. This crystal belonged to the latter.

"Let's put it aside for now," he finally decided, "The heritage won't run away, but the construction of the New Homeland cannot stop. Farm when it's time to farm, build houses when it's time to build, and research weapons when it's time to research—just treat the heritage as a bonus egg hidden at the bottom of the box; it will naturally open when the conditions are met."

This decision disappointed some, but relieved most. After all, the New Homeland had just gotten on track, and everyone wasn't ready to start a new adventure immediately.

So, life went on as usual.

After Little Girl's 'soothing' that night, the attitude of the experimental forest did a 180-degree turn. The attack-type plants, originally designed for hallucination, paralysis, and entanglement, had now become exceptionally... Buddhist. Researchers who accidentally stepped on vines found the vines not only didn't entangle them but actively moved out of the way; patrol teams lost in the forest found the trees automatically adjusting their branch angles to point out the correct direction; most absurdly, the silver-blue trees that used to release hallucinogenic spores now released spores with a faint herbal fragrance, which not only didn't make people dizzy but helped them sleep.

"They have evolved," Tree Demon Elder Mu Xin trembled with excitement—literally, his branches were rustling, "Not passively accepting modification, but actively understanding, internalizing, and transcending the design intent! This is... this is the Elementary form of a plant civilization!"

Wen Youyi looked at the area named 'Little Girl Forest' with mixed feelings. A five-year-old child had inadvertently awakened the 'self-awareness' of a forest—in a cultivation novel, this would count as cheating to an absurd degree.

"Should we restrict Little Girl from going to other places?" Wang Wu asked worriedly, "What if one day she 'soothes' the protective field too..."

"No need," Yun Zhi rarely retorted, "Her talent isn't destruction, it's 'resonance.' As long as she is guided properly, she can actually help us discover hidden problems in the System."

As Little Girl's Master, Yun Zhi's words carried weight. So Little Girl still ran around the camp every day, but with two 'tails' by her side: one was a female Cultivator arranged by Yun Zhi who was good at spiritual sensing, responsible for monitoring Little Girl's consciousness fluctuations at any time; the other was a micro-symbiotic unit split from Silver Thorn—turned into a palm-sized silver beast, dozing on Little Girl's shoulder all day.

The silver beast had a trait: it would imitate Little Girl's aesthetic. The first day it was a silver-furred, blue-eyed kitten, the second day it became a silver-furred, blue-eyed puppy, and the third day... a silver-furred, blue-eyed hamster.

Little Girl named it 'Bright Fur Ball'.

Just when everyone thought life would continue to flow peacefully like this, an unexpected 'troublemaker' surfaced.

Not a person, but the memory bank.

To be precise, the civilization memories opened by the memory aggregate.

Since having this cheat-level query System, the New Homeland's research team was like a fish in water. Senior Brother Zhang took his team of tech geeks to soak in the memory bank every day, learning technologies from various alien civilizations—agriculture, architecture, energy, medical—as long as it could be used, it was immediately converted into construction plans for the New Homeland.

Others weren't idle either. Cultivators found some long-lost Cultivation Technique fragments of cultivation civilizations, and after completing them, their strength improved by leaps and bounds; the Yao Race learned hunting skills from beast civilizations in other galaxies, and even Mountain Roar Lord praised, 'So our Yao Race can evolve like this'; even Mortals dug out good things from the memories—after a certain agricultural civilization's crop rotation System was improved, the yield of the New Homeland's rainbow potato doubled.

But problems followed.

The first to have an incident was a young Loose Cultivator named Lin Feng.

Lin Feng was a typical person with 'average talent but many ideas.' In the memory bank, he found technical data on 'biological energy resonance' from a perished civilization that specialized in music. The principle was to use sound waves of specific frequencies to trigger energy resonance within living organisms, thereby achieving healing or strengthening effects.

Lin Feng treated it like a treasure. He was a music Cultivator himself (though his cultivation level was very low) and could play the flute well. He started practicing that long-lost 'resonance melody' day and night according to the records in the memory.

Three days later, the first 'collective out-of-tune incident' occurred in the camp.

That noon, it was lunch time in the cafeteria. Lin Feng was practicing in the dormitory and accidentally played a high note. Instantly, the more than one hundred people eating in the cafeteria shivered simultaneously and then, in unison... began to hum the same melody.

No one knew what song it was, but everyone could sing it. Even more eerie was that everyone hummed it quite well, with high and low parts automatically separated, as if they had rehearsed it hundreds of times.

The cafeteria auntie cried on the spot: "I've lived for fifty years, this is the first time I've heard such a synchronized chorus..."

Wen Youyi urgently called a halt to Lin Feng's experiment and required everyone to undergo security review when using memory bank technology.

"It's not that you can't learn," he explained, "It's that before you learn, think clearly: the original civilization of this thing has already perished, their technology might carry some flaws, or the obsessions of the original owners might remain. If you use it directly, what if something goes wrong?"

Lin Feng accepted this humbly and voluntarily applied to become one of the first members of the 'New Technology Ethics Review Committee'.

The second incident was not so gentle.

The person involved was a Golden Core Cultivator named Zhou Yuan, from the Qingyun Sect, with upper-middle Aptitude but great ambition. He found a lost Demonic Path Cultivation Technique in the memory bank—a 'Genius Fast-Track Method' from some cultivation civilization. The principle was to use a special Formation to forcibly extract, purify, and transfer other people's cultivation into one's own body.

Zhou Yuan didn't dare to use it on living people directly. He found a few Moonlight Rabbits for experimentation.

Three days later, those Moonlight Rabbits became... uh, how to put it, they were still the size of rabbits, but their eyes became exceptionally sinister, and they started actively attacking the keepers. The most terrifying thing was that they learned to kick people with their hind legs while pinching hand signs with their front paws—although they pinched them very crookedly, it was the embryonic form of a Spell.

"Is this a rabbit?" Zhao Iron Pillar looked at the Moonlight Rabbit, which was locked in a special cage and staring at him with gloomy eyes, feeling a chill down his spine, "Why do I feel like it's better at scheming than me?"

Zhou Yuan was urgently detained. The investigation revealed that not only did he learn the Cultivation Technique, but he had also secretly collected seventeen Moonlight Rabbits, five Star-Spotted Fish, and even a newborn horned beast (a native species of New Homeland) as experimental subjects.

"I just want to become stronger!" Zhou Yuan cried out in the interrogation, "When I was in the Tianyuan Realm, the spirit net suppressed us, and the Geniuses were harvested; I thought that was fate. When I arrived at the New Homeland, there was no spirit net, but those Geniuses were still stronger than me. I just... I just wanted to catch up to them..."

His words silenced many people.

The New Homeland indeed no longer had the oppression of the spirit net, but the 'Aptitude gap' was carved into the genes. Some people were born with good Spiritual Roots and Cultivate a thousand miles a day; some were born sensitive to energy and could replicate a Formation with a glance; some were born like Little Girl, even the world would respond to her call. And what about those with average Aptitude? They could only rely on hard work, but hard work sometimes couldn't keep up with talent.

Wen Youyi did not severely punish Zhou Yuan. He made Zhou Yuan write a five-thousand-word self-criticism and read it publicly at the council; confiscated all his experimental notes and handed them to the Technical Committee for review; at the same time, arranged for him to move bricks at the Construction Department for three months.

"Punishment is not the goal," Wen Youyi said at the council, "But I want to let everyone remember: we left the Ranch World not to find a new place to continue exploiting our compatriots in a more hidden way."

"Then what about the Aptitude gap?" someone asked.

Wen Youyi thought for a moment and replied: "Rely on the System. Convert 'effort' into contribution, so that everyone willing to pay can have an upward channel. Also—let Senior Brother Zhang lead the team to research whether technical means can be used to assist those with low Aptitude in cultivation."

Senior Brother Zhang accepted the order. He knew this task was difficult, but it had to be done.

After the Zhou Yuan incident, the memory bank's access had a new threshold: any technology involving 'energy transfer', 'consciousness control', and 'life modification' required level three or higher authorization to query, and each query required approval from the Technical Ethics Committee.

Some complained that the procedures were cumbersome, but more expressed understanding.

"We just came out of a cage, let's not build a new cage for ourselves," Mu Wanqing said at the medical team's internal meeting.

Life continued to move forward.

The progress of the Construction Department was getting faster and faster, and the outline of the town had expanded to three times its original size. The rainbow potato of the Agricultural Department welcomed its third harvest, with enough yield for the entire Homeland to eat for a year and more. The Defense Department's 'Hedgehog Project' progressed steadily, and the second layer of the defense circle was officially completed. The Education Department opened night schools, allowing adults who worked during the day to learn something at night.

Little Girl's 'Bright Fur Ball' recently learned to roll around and act cute, becoming the most popular mascot in the camp. Silver Thorn complained that the symbiotic unit was 'excessively addicted to the pet role, which has seriously affected work efficiency,' but never recalled it.

The three-year countdown had one and a half years left.

That night, Wen Youyi sat alone on a small hill at the edge of the town, staring at the starry sky in a daze.

He had been doing this often lately. There were too many things and too much pressure; only in the dead of night could his brain function.

"What are you thinking about?" Aila walked over at some point and sat down next to him.

"Thinking about what Morning Star said," Wen Youyi didn't turn his head, "The heritage is not the answer, it is more questions. That's how we are now—solved the spirit net, and the Star Devourers came; solved the Star Devourers, and the Creation Heavenly Court came; solved the boundary stele, and the memory aggregate came; solved the memory aggregate, and the heritage came... The problems are never-ending."

"And then? Do you regret it?"

"No regrets," Wen Youyi shook his head, "Just... sometimes I wonder, if I hadn't Transmigrated here, hadn't started the Cooperative, hadn't resisted the spirit net, would there be so many people following me in displacement and life-and-death struggles?"

Aila was silent for a moment. Then she said: "Do you remember Jialuo's message? 'Look at the end of the star sea for me.'"

Wen Youyi naturally remembered.

"You are already looking," Aila said softly, "The star sea has no end, but with every step you take, you see one more galaxy. How many steps have we taken with one hundred thousand people? They might have been harvested and forgotten in the Tianyuan Realm, not even leaving their names. Now? They have names, a home, and a future. This is not the future you chose for them; it is the future they chose to follow you for."

Wen Youyi was silent for a long time.

"Thank you," he said, "I do need someone to remind me sometimes."

Aila smiled and said nothing.

In the distance, the lights of the camp flickered. That was the breathing of one hundred thousand people, the heartbeat of one hundred thousand people.

Wen Youyi stood up and patted the grass dust off his pants.

"Let's go, go back to sleep. Tomorrow I have to hold a meeting with Blood Fiend Old Demon—he said he found a new plan to improve the memory protective field, but it needs the council to approve triple the budget."

"Triple? Is he crazy?"

"That's why it's a meeting to argue, not to approve."

The two walked down the hillside side by side.

The night was gentle, and the starlight was just right.

And behind them, the blue crystal lay quietly in the safe.

—The coordinates were still locked, and the entrance was still not open.

But for some reason, Wen Youyi vaguely felt that the conditions it was waiting for might be... approaching, bit by bit.

(End of this chapter)