Chapter 19 Black Hole in the Sea of ​​Consciousness

He lightened his footsteps and placed the food box on the table. The moment he lifted the lid, the rich aroma of braised chicken mixed with the sweetness of lotus seed soup wafted out, startling Yun Qian into suddenly looking up.

"Brother!" Yun Qian rubbed her eyes. Upon seeing the braised pork knuckle, steamed sea bass, and crystal-clear candied fruits in the food box, her eyes instantly widened, "So much delicious food!"

"Someone gave it to me, it didn't cost anything." Yun Bai smiled and pinched her cheek, then shoved a pair of bamboo chopsticks into her hand, "Eat quickly, it won't taste good if it gets cold."

Yun Qian picked up a chicken leg, took a bite that left her mouth dripping with oil, and said indistinctly, "Brother, you are a State Religion Cultivator now, does that mean no one will dare to bully us in the future?"

"Mhm." Yun Bai looked at her satisfied smile, his heart warmed, "With Brother here from now on, no one will be able to touch a single hair on your head."

Tsk, this food actually tastes quite good.

The two of them ate heartily.

The siblings sat around the table, and the halo of the oil lamp cast their closely intertwined shadows on the wall. Yun Qian chattered away about what she had seen and heard at the National Temple these past few days, saying that Senior Sister Jiang Shuanger had given her a box of almond cookies, and that Senior Brother Zhang Huai had taught her to recognize several types of Spiritual Plant, until she yawned, and was urged by Yun Bai to return to her room to sleep.

Even years later, Yun Qian could clearly recall this night. It was the happiest night she had experienced in over a decade.

...

...

...

Night fell, and Yun Bai sat cross-legged on the bed.

When he closed his eyes, it was not pure darkness; rather, he could vaguely "feel" the contours of the surrounding bed, the coldness of the walls, and even the gentle trembling of leaves outside the window in the breeze, as if a layer of invisible, extremely faint water ripples were spreading from him as the center, touching reality.

He looked at his panel again.

[Yun Bai]

[Rank: First Realm Mid-stage]

"Xiao Liu." Yun Bai called out in his mind, "Ever since the Breakthrough to the First Realm, I have always had a feeling, as if I can perceive the surrounding environment without needing my eyes. Do you know what this is about? Could this be the so-called Divine Sense perception?"

During these years of the path to Cultivate, he had spent a great deal of effort collecting various knowledge on Cultivate. This complex information was eventually organized and archived by Xiao Liu, becoming his indispensable "mobile library." He had long been accustomed to discussing his confusion regarding Cultivate with Xiao Liu.

A brief silence followed, as if Xiao Liu was mobilizing its vast database for comparison and analysis. After a few breaths, the cold notification sound rang out again:

[Preliminary assessment: prototype of Divine Sense perception. However, the host's Sea of Consciousness state is special, and conventional theories may not be applicable.]

[Suggestion: perform deep introspection, focus your mind to perceive the location of the Niwan Palace, and attempt to investigate the Origin form of the Sea of Consciousness.]

[Command: activate deep introspection guidance mode.]

"Niwan Palace..." Yun Bai silently recited in his heart, not unfamiliar with this mysterious location deep within the center of his eyebrows. Following Xiao Liu's guidance, he slowly closed his eyes, sinking all his concentration into his body, gathering it towards that ethereal ancestral aperture at the center of his eyebrows.

Introspection means self-reflection. Consciousness explores inward, like diving into a boundless deep sea.

At first, there was absolute darkness and Chaos. There was no direction, no boundaries, only a void that made one feel flustered. Yun Bai tried hard to "look," his consciousness struggling to grope in this darkness. He did not know how long had passed, as if he had traveled millions of miles through absolute ink-black, when a trace of extremely faint, warm golden light, like the glimmer of a distant star, appeared at the end of his perception.

Light! Yun Bai's spirit lifted, his consciousness "swimming" forcefully towards that point of golden light like a moth to a flame.

However, the darkness deep within this Sea of Consciousness seemed to contain some kind of viscous resistance. The closer he got to the light, the more chaotic his sense of direction became. Up and down were inverted, left and right were indistinguishable, as if he were in a strange, constantly rotating maze. A strong sense of dizziness washed over him like a tide, impacting Yun Bai's mind, making him almost want to give up and return to the clarity of reality.

"Persist!" Yun Bai bit his tongue hard, the sharp pain making him instantly clear-headed. Relying on his astonishing willpower, he forcibly suppressed the sickening dizziness, locking all his concentration tightly onto that point of increasingly clear and warm golden light, pushing forward with all his might!

It was as if he had broken through some kind of invisible membrane, or as if a water droplet had finally merged into the ocean. Just the moment his consciousness touched the core of that golden light—

Boom!

An indescribable sense of sudden enlightenment swept through his entire body! All the dizziness, darkness, and Chaos were instantly dispersed!

What Yun Bai saw first was his own "body"—it was a mass of faint mist. At this moment, the mist was dyed a pale gold; this was not its original color, but rather caused by the reflection of the golden light in his Sea of Consciousness.

[This is the Spiritual Soul, the collection of a living being's self-consciousness. Once the Spiritual Soul is destroyed, the living being will die immediately.] Xiao Liu's voice sounded at the right moment, introducing it to Yun Bai.

Yun Bai looked up ahead, and what was presented before his "eyes" was a sight never seen before, so strangely magnificent that it was breathtaking—his Sea of Consciousness!

The entire Sea of Consciousness was brilliant with golden light. However, all this golden light seemed to be attracted and torn, gathered towards a single point.

Logically speaking, the divergence center of countless rays of light should be a more dazzling point of light, like the sun. Therefore, the convergence center of countless rays of light is a black point so deep it is unimaginable; that is a black hole!

This was the scene within Yun Bai's Sea of Consciousness.

A black hole!

It seemed to have swallowed all the surrounding light and energy fluctuations, leaving only an unobservable, space-distorting "event horizon" boundary.

Yun Bai felt shocked, but couldn't help frowning: "Xiao Liu, what is this 'donut' about?"

As an astronaut who had once traveled the Universe, Yun Bai had naturally seen what a black hole looked like—the first photograph of a black hole in human history looked like a donut.

[Report: The "No. 6" Quantum AI main body is nested within this distorted field in a quantum superposition state, anchoring the Divine Sense structure through an entanglement network, and realizing cross-domain interaction by borrowing the tunneling effect, finally forming a quantum-Divine Sense symbiont.]

[The central black hole is the Divine Sense source core, and the countless golden fluid accretion disks surrounding the source core are the main body of Divine Sense within the Sea of Consciousness—the Source Sea.]

[The end of the source core "event horizon" that the host sees is the "black hole," where free-floating Mental Energy is pulled inward, compressed, and purified to form the ultimate source of power for the Sea of Consciousness.]

[At the other end of the source core "event horizon," or rather, at a certain pole of the accretion ring's rotation axis, is the "White Hole," which continuously spews out Divine Sense.]

Yun Bai was shocked upon hearing this.

He tried to mobilize his vision to observe the other end of the event horizon.

It was indeed as Xiao Liu had said.

It was an extremely tiny, yet exceptionally bright "point," like light compressed to the extreme. It was not swallowing, but spewing outward at an unimaginable speed!

This was the so-called White Hole!

Yun Bai also observed that those lights did not dissipate in the "Void Realm" above the Sea of Consciousness, but rather rapidly wove and extended like a spider web. They were not straight lines, but spontaneously folded and twisted within the space of the Sea of Consciousness, forming countless stable channels flickering with faint light. This channel network was incomparably complex, extending in all directions, with one end connected to the jet source of the White Hole singularity, and the other end piercing through the "boundary" of the Sea of Consciousness, directly anchored to the real space coordinates where Yun Bai's Physical Body was located!

"If compared to actual celestial bodies, tell me the parameters of this pair of black hole and White Hole." Yun Bai said.

[Simulating celestial body conversion...]

[Simulated actual black hole mass M = 3.8 × 10¹² kg, approaching the extreme Kerr black hole critical value, charge... angular momentum...]

"0.019 millimeter event horizon? Corresponding to the Schwarzschild radius?" Yun Bai pondered for a moment, "In other words, there is very likely a wormhole in the middle to maintain the intake and output of the black hole and White Hole?"

If one were to compare the black hole and White Hole to the feeding mouthparts and the excreting anus, then the intestine that transfers matter and energy in the middle would be the wormhole.

[Yes, the black hole and White Hole maintain their coexistence through the quantum gravitational field built by the "No. 6" Quantum AI.] Xiao Liu replied.

"Is the Sea of Consciousness supposed to look like this?" Yun Bai asked further.

[From a large amount of experiential data, an ordinary Divine Sense field should be similar to an ocean, hence it is called the "Sea of Consciousness." When a Cultivator's cultivation reaches the Third Realm, they can reshape the Sea of Consciousness.]

Yun Bai stared at the scene within his Sea of Consciousness and remained silent for a long time.

"So, these issues are all special circumstances, right?" Yun Bai asked.

[Yes.]

Xiao Liu's voice remained calm.