60: Chapter 60 Return to the Cradle
The moment the kuafu-2 crossed the Earth's atmosphere, orange-red flames ignited outside the porthole.
Lin Shen gripped the armrests of his seat, feeling the intense g-force caused by the deceleration.
Sarah sat beside him with her eyes closed, but Lin Shen could perceive what she was doing through their consciousness link—she was calculating every detail of the reentry trajectory with microsecond precision.
"Orbital parameters are normal," Nuwa's voice sounded in the cabin. "Estimated landing at Xichang Space Center in seven minutes."
Seven minutes.
Lin Shen looked at the increasingly clear outline of the continent below, complex emotions welling up in his heart.
When they left, Earth still maintained a surface-level peace; upon their return, the entire civilization had entered a state of war—fighting against time, fighting against the ancient guardians, and fighting against the impending judges.
The landing process was disturbingly smooth.
When the kuafu-2 came to a stop at the end of the runway and the hatch opened, they were not greeted by cheering crowds, but by a fully armed quarantine squad.
"Dr. Lin, Dr. Sarah," the leading officer wearing a protective mask said, his voice coming through a loudspeaker. "According to the resolution of the Global Biosafety Committee, you need to undergo quarantine immediately. Dr. Sarah, in particular, your consciousness integration state requires a comprehensive evaluation."
Sarah nodded calmly, as if she had expected this.
Lin Shen wanted to say something, but when he saw Max's figure on the observation tower in the distance, he chose to cooperate.
He understood this caution—Sarah was now not only a human scientist but also a carrier of the Builders Imprint, an unknown variable.
The quarantine zone was set up on the third underground level of the space center.
Through the observation window, Lin Shen could see the busy scene outside: engineers were surrounding the kuafu-2 to dismantle equipment and extract the technical data of the builders they had brought back; experts from all over the world were participating in meetings via holographic projections, and the sound of their arguments could be heard through the glass.
Sarah's quarantine room was next to his.
She was sitting in the center of the room, cooperating with the medical team for testing.
Instruments showed that 37% of her brain activity patterns did not match any known human neural maps, and the signal characteristics of those regions were highly similar to the consciousness fragments in the builders' database.
"She is not dangerous," Lin Shen said to Academician Li Weimin, who had entered his room. "At least, not offensively dangerous."
Li Weimin sighed and handed him a tablet: "This is the situation on Earth after you left. The quantum network shutdown progress has reached 82%, and the global economic scale has shrunk by 15%, but the supply of basic living materials is still relatively stable. The real problem is..."
He pulled up another set of data, "In the past seven days, the Avenger Node has triggered three earthquakes above magnitude 6, all in the Pacific Rim region. It is still learning, learning how to most effectively trigger geological disasters."
The map on the tablet showed three newly appeared crustal cracks, each extending hundreds of kilometers and reaching the mantle in depth.
If these cracks became active simultaneously, the resulting chain reaction would be enough to tear apart the continental plates.
"How is the construction of the Silence Protocol transmitter progressing?" Lin Shen asked.
"Not well," Li Weimin shook his head. "The type of superconducting material needed, the synthesis process comes from the builders' database, but our industrial base cannot keep up. At the current speed, it will take... ninety days to complete one thousand ground stations."
Ninety days.
And the countdown to the reboot of the Avenger Node had only two hundred and thirty-three days left, while the gardener probes would arrive in one hundred and seventy-three days.
The time window was tightening.
At this moment, the door of the quarantine room slid open, and Max walked in.
He was not wearing a protective suit and walked directly to the observation window, looking at Sarah next door.
Sarah sensed his gaze, lifted her head, and smiled through the glass—that smile was still warm, but Max could see the difference: it was too precise, the angle of the corners of her mouth turning up, the degree to which her eyes squinted, all seemed calculated.
"Is she still Sarah?" Max's voice was very low.
"Partially," Lin Shen answered honestly. "She has retained her core memories and emotions, but her thinking patterns have evolved. It's like... it's like after we learned to use calculators, we wouldn't go back to doing all math problems by hand. Her 'calculator' is more advanced."
Max was silent for a long time.
Then he said: "I need to talk to her. Alone."
Sarah's quarantine room, five minutes later.
Max sat opposite Sarah, with a simple metal table between them.
There was only them in the room, and the monitoring equipment was temporarily turned off—this was a privilege Max had secured as a representative of Imperial Aerospace.
"What did you see?" Max asked. "In the tunnel, when you were receiving the imprint."
Sarah reached out her hand, palm up.
Faint geometric light patterns appeared on the surface of her skin, which were signs of excessive neural interface activity and also the external manifestation of the Builders Imprint.
"I saw the final loneliness of a civilization," she said softly. "the builders possessed abilities we cannot imagine, but they feared the silence of the universe. They created the Sower System, just like parents preparing an inheritance for their children, hoping that even if they were not there, their children could continue to exist."
The light patterns combined into a rotating galaxy model in her palm: "But they made a mistake: they thought all 'children' should walk the same path. When some children wanted to walk their own path, the system began to collapse. The Gardener is the product of this collapse—they believe the parents' inheritance has been wasted and want to reclaim and redistribute it."
Max held her hand.
The touch was still warm, a human touch.
"And you are now... carrying a part of that inheritance."
"Yes," Sarah held his hand back, "and also carrying the responsibility to correct that mistake. Max, the Gardener will not listen to human explanations, but they might listen to the voice of the builders. My imprint might be the only key that can make them pause."
"What about the cost?" Max looked straight into her eyes. "Every time you use the imprint, you get closer to them and further away from us. Right?"
Sarah did not deny it: "The consciousness fragment of Archivist-473 told me that the imprint is not static. It will grow, it will integrate, and eventually, it may completely transform me into a builder thinking pattern. But this process can be controlled, it can be delayed. As long as I..."
"As long as what?"
"As long as I have an anchor of humanity." Sarah's fingers tightened. "You, Lin Shen, everyone on Earth, you are the reason I still remember that I am human. So you must help me, not stop me."
Max felt his throat tighten.
He wanted to say this wasn't fair, wanted to say why she had to bear all of this.
But outside the window, the alarm lights suddenly flashed, interrupting his thoughts.
"Emergency!" Nuwa's voice came over the broadcast. "The Avenger Node has released new energy tentacles, targeting—global major seismic monitoring stations! It wants to destroy our early warning system first!"
Global Seismic Monitoring Network Command Center, ten minutes later.
Lin Shen, Sarah (having left the quarantine room under special approval), Max, and Li Weimin stood in front of a giant global map.
On the screen, thirty-seven red dots were flashing, each representing a seismic monitoring station about to be attacked.
"The tentacles are moving at an astonishing speed," the technician reported. "They started from the Mariana Trench and are advancing along the boundaries of the crustal plates. The fastest one has already reached the Japan Trench, only eighty kilometers away from the Tokyo seismic center!"
Sarah walked to the console and placed her hand on the sensor board.
Her eyes turned completely black, with data streams rotating deep in her pupils—she was directly accessing the monitoring network, using the perceptual ability granted by the Builders Imprint to track those energy tentacles.
"I see it," she said softly. "They are not just simple physical attacks. Every tentacle carries an information virus. Once it touches the monitoring equipment, it will rewrite the system program, causing all sensors to report false data. In that case, even if a major earthquake comes, we won't receive a warning."
"Can it be intercepted?" Lin Shen asked.
"We need to create an energy barrier inside the Earth's crust." Sarah pulled up the geological structure map. "But our technology... wait." She suddenly thought of something. "Nuwa, retrieve the 'crust stabilizer' design from the builders' database. A simplified version, just the kind that can block the tentacles for thirty seconds."
The design appeared.
It was an ingenious device: using geothermal power generation to produce acoustic resonance at a specific frequency, forming a temporary energy wall in the rock layers.
The construction materials were ordinary, but it needed to be precisely deployed on the path of the tentacles.
"The problem is we don't know the paths of all the tentacles," Li Weimin frowned.
"I know." Sarah's eyes returned to normal, but sweat seeped from her forehead—the high-intensity perception was extremely consuming. "The imprint allows me to 'see' the energy flow inside the Earth. Give me the locations of global drilling platforms and geological exploration teams, and I can guide them to deploy the stabilizers."
The plan was quickly formed.
Forty-eight deep-drilling platforms around the world received instructions and began drilling down to the specified depths and locations.
Sarah directly commanded each platform through quantum communication, her consciousness processing forty-eight data streams simultaneously, with command precision reaching the centimeter level.
Lin Shen assisted from the side, using the technology tree system to optimize the deployment plan.
Max was responsible for coordinating the cooperation of various countries—this was humanity's first truly global, real-time collaborative operation.
The first stabilizer was activated in the Philippine Trench.
The energy wall generated by acoustic resonance collided with the tentacles of the Avenger Node, and the monitor recorded an artificial earthquake of magnitude 5.3.
The tentacles were blocked for twenty-seven seconds, then bypassed the barrier and continued forward.
"Not enough!" Sarah gritted her teeth. "Need to activate at least six stabilizers simultaneously to form a containment net."
More platforms began operating.
The East China Sea, the South China Sea, the Gulf of Alaska, the Chile Trench... one by one, the stabilizers were deployed and activated.
Sarah's consciousness load reached its limit, and her nostrils began to bleed—a physiological signal of brain overload.
"Sarah, stop!" Max grabbed her shoulders.
"Give me... thirty more seconds." Sarah's voice was trembling. "The last tentacle, it's going to destroy the California seismic network. If it succeeds, the entire west coast of the Americas will lose its early warning capability."
She closed her eyes and outputted commands with all her might.
On the other side of the Pacific, an oil drilling platform near the San Andreas Fault received the instruction, urgently adjusted the drill bit's direction, and injected a resonance generator five kilometers underground.
Countdown: ten, nine, eight...
The tentacle was only three kilometers away from the monitoring station.
Seven, six, five...
Resonance generator activated.
Four, three, two...
Energy wall formed, the tentacle collided with it.
One.
Success.
All tentacles were blocked or deflected.
The Avenger Node's first active attack was neutralized.
A brief cheer erupted in the command center, but it immediately fell silent.
Because Sarah had collapsed.
The medical team rushed in.
Tests showed that her brain had minor hemorrhaging, and the neural interface overload had burned out 17% of the sensors.
More seriously, the activity of the Builders Imprint had increased while she was unconscious—in her brainwaves, the proportion of non-human patterns had risen from 37% to 41%.
"She is evolving," the attending physician said heavily, "in a non-human direction. And this evolution accelerates under pressure."
Lin Shen looked at Sarah on the hospital bed, then looked at the gray sky outside the window.
The gardener probes were approaching, the Avenger Node was preparing for the next round of attacks, and humanity's only "key" was losing its humanity.
He made a decision.
"Nuwa," he said, "initiate the final contingency plan of the kindling plan. If we cannot reach peace before the Gardener arrives, if Sarah completely transforms into a non-human entity... we must have a backup plan."
"The final contingency plan requires your biological key confirmation," Nuwa responded.
Lin Shen pressed his hand on the identifier.
The screen displayed: "The final contingency plan of the kindling plan has been unlocked. Content: Consciousness upload and civilization backup. Goal: Save at least ten million human consciousnesses in quantum storage devices, to be carried away from the Solar System by the kuafu-3. Authorization status: Waiting for Global Committee approval."
This was a desperate plan, an escape scheme that acknowledged the possibility of failure.
But Lin Shen knew they needed this option—not to give up, but to ensure that no matter what happened, the spark of human civilization would not be extinguished.
Just at this moment, Sarah on the hospital bed opened her eyes.
Her pupils were no longer brown, but had turned into a Deep Blue like the starry sky, with starlight twinkling within them.
She said in a terrifyingly calm voice:
"Gardener probe B has just changed course. It is not coming to Earth. It is going to... Europa."
"Why?" Lin Shen asked.
Sarah sat up, the medical equipment sounded an alarm, but she waved her hand and turned them off.
"Because under the ice of Europa," she said, "there is the last complete node of the Sower System. It has not been polluted, has not rebelled, and is still sleeping. The Gardener wants to wake it up, or... destroy it."
A new variable.
If the Gardener obtains a complete sower node, their technology will receive a huge supplement.
But if humanity can get it first...
"We need to go to Europa," Sarah looked at Lin Shen, "before the Gardener."
Countdown recalculated: Time for Gardener probe B to arrive at Europa—sixty-two days.
Humanity's choice: concentrate forces to deal with the Avenger Node on Earth, or divide forces to compete for the node on Europa?
Lin Shen felt the weight of the decision.
But he also knew that this might be the only chance to turn the situation around.
Outside the window, night fell.
On Earth, three billion people did not know how many cliffs they were standing on the edge of.
And in the distant orbit of Jupiter, deep within an icy moon, an existence that had slept for millions of years sensed the approaching visitor for the first time.