The cat tail did not completely placate Song Zang.
Song Zang insisted on checking Yin Chen’s injury and chased him all the way into the Dark World, where he hugged Yin Chen’s injured, semitransparent true body and felt him all over.
He sounded perfectly righteous about it, but in reality he was deliberately bullying him.
The enormous entity that looked horrifying and uncanny was tormented by Song Zang until its whole body flushed a pretty pale pink. The sticky tentacles sprawling everywhere tightened and curled inward, not daring to let Song Zang touch their soft suction cups again.
Yin Chen truly was barely injured, with only a tiny break in the skin. The damage might not even have been as severe as the bloody mark Song Zang had left at the corner of his lips.
The two of them lazily went home, showered, and collapsed onto the sofa bed Song Zang had specially ordered, too tired to even want to talk.
“Song Zang, you’ve gotten stronger.”
Yin Chen’s voice was slightly hoarse. He found a comfortable position with his head on Song Zang’s thigh and suddenly offered the sober assessment.
“Mm. Too much good food.” Song Zang looked down at Yin Chen and answered meaningfully.
After all, every trace of Yin Chen’s true body contained terrifying amounts of unimaginable energy. A normal person would die from eating it. Song Zang ate it… and became overnourished.
If he did not insist on training and running every morning, Yin Chen’s flesh would have fed him into a ball long ago.
Yin Chen pretended not to hear. Calmly, he rolled over, lifted Song Zang’s soft white T-shirt, and pressed his face against Song Zang’s stomach.
The sudden warmth made Song Zang blush violently. He bit his lip and did not dare move. Honestly, this man. If his head shifted a little farther, he would touch somewhere he should not.
Outside certain environments and situations, Song Zang was always more reserved than Yin Chen and much easier to embarrass.
Having successfully made Song Zang stay quiet, Yin Chen casually brought up Song Lan Jing again and suggested taking Song Zang for a trip along the river of time too.
Yin Chen still wanted to keep investigating this bizarre incident involving his mother traveling through time. But before doing that, he needed Song Zang’s opinion.
If Yin Chen got hurt again, Song Zang would definitely be furious enough to kill him.
Sure enough, Song Zang was worried about safety. His hand rested in Yin Chen’s slightly damp, soft black hair and unconsciously ruffled it into a mess.
“Baby, can you promise you won’t get hurt? I didn’t expect my mom to attack you either.”
“She didn’t recognize me at first. A few seconds later she stopped and even smiled at me. She should know who I am.”
Song Zang narrowed his eyes. “Never thought I’d see the day when you defended someone else.”
“She’s your mom.” Yin Chen raised his phoenix eyes and slowly scanned Song Zang’s face inch by inch. “It’s fascinating. You look like you were carved from the same mold. I don’t dislike her.”
“But she never raised me. I want a mother’s love, but I’ve always had this knot in my heart too… That’s why I never went looking for her myself.”
“If she could figure out who I was, that means she knows what you’ve been through. Maybe she had her reasons.”
“Yin Chen, you’ve really changed.”
Yin Chen did not deny it. “Running away is meaningless. You need a truth, an answer, and some kind of reconciliation.”
Song Zang fell silent for a moment, then hugged Yin Chen tightly in emotion. “Baby!”
“Mm?”
“Baby, let’s do it again.”
“…”
＊
Song Zang agreed to a second journey in search of his mother.
At his forceful insistence, Yin Chen put him inside his “abdomen.”
It was a pure vacuum with no oxygen, scorching and damp. All sorts of soft, bizarre structures that resembled organs kept disappearing, then growing and reorganizing themselves again.
Yin Chen said Song Zang had grown stronger, but Yin Chen himself had also been growing stronger all along.
The survival mechanism his true body had possessed from birth placed him nearly at the summit of all things. At every moment, he absorbed the enormous energy released by the universe and the world, drawing it into his body to cycle repeatedly, continuously making himself denser, more refined, and more overwhelming.
Song Zang did not dare stare for too long because it made him dizzy. He carefully put on an oxygen mask and hugged the tentacle wrapped around his waist.
Yes, Yin Chen’s tentacles could reach into otherworldly spaces and could also extend freely into the abdomen of his own body. Song Zang tried not to think too hard about how that worked. Safety came first.
As the true body rose into the air and floated through a strange space adjacent to Earth, Song Zang saw an almost invisible barrier surrounding the entire star system. Ordinary celestial bodies and fragments of space debris could pass through freely, but when Yin Chen approached, a faint repulsive force pushed against him.
“Earth is a very special place.”
Yin Chen had said that before. Song Zang remembered.
Time was not something the naked eye should have been able to see, but from a higher-dimensional perspective, it resembled endless film or a perfectly straight river.
Inside Yin Chen’s body, Song Zang could see it with incomparable clarity. If he looked closely enough, he could even see every frame of every kind of life in the world.
Song Zang had no interest in sightseeing. His gaze turned toward the not-so-distant future.
At the coordinates Yin Chen remembered stood an empty tea room. They searched through thousands of frames flowing along the river, yet Song Lan Jing, who had once sat there drinking tea, was nowhere to be found.
A note written in elegant handwriting lay beneath the teacup.
【Song Zang, I love you. Don’t come looking for me.】
Clearly, Song Lan Jing did not want them to find her again and had deliberately avoided a second encounter.
Song Zang found it difficult to describe his complicated emotions. It was not as though they had gained nothing.
At least his biological mother was alive and well five hundred years in the future, healthy and safe, and… she said she loved him.
That alone counted as a clear enough answer.
Song Zang said nothing, his gaze still fixed on the gentle, comfortable tea room. Then he suddenly froze.
“…Yin Chen, do you see those fine threads along the edge of the river of time?”
They were like strands of fuzz quietly separating and stretching away from a knitted sweater. They had once been almost impossible to notice, but now they absolutely could not be ignored.
These were branches of the future!
“I see them. Come on. Let’s take a look.”
Yin Chen placed a damp tentacle on top of Song Zang’s head, rubbed it, then turned and carried Song Zang swiftly forward.
They did not stop to look directly at the people and things flowing within the river. Instead, they headed straight for its end at high speed.
What lay in the future?
Dead silence.
Absolute dead silence with no room for reversal. Get too close and there was even a risk of being assimilated and swallowed by that dead silence, reduced completely to nothingness.
Yin Chen’s mood grew slightly grave. He cautiously tested it with a discarded tentacle and discovered that this dead future actually had a causal connection to him as well.
Of course, the Collective’s share of that causal weight was far greater.
Yin Chen thought for a long moment, then suddenly understood. His voice lowered. “Song Zang, this is a future where Earth was devoured and completely destroyed. Maybe not just Earth, but the entire spacetime we’re in.
“But it’s already invalid. It only left behind a tiny branch as a record.”
Human civilization might once have been destined for total extinction, and not in some distant age either, but only five hundred years in the future.
Compared with humanity’s history of thousands upon thousands of years, the possibility of extinction in a mere five centuries was genuinely chilling.
Fortunately, fortunately, this branch was already invalid and no longer the main course of the river of time. Otherwise Song Zang definitely would not sleep tonight. He would toss and turn until he invented some method of saving Earth…
Song Zang fell into deep thought in silence.
Known fact: the Infinite Game was very likely a human invention, neutral in position, with its ultimate purpose still unclear.
Known fact: after giving birth to Song Zang, Song Lan Jing had mysteriously vanished from reality, inexplicably appeared at a critical point five hundred years in the future, and possessed supernatural power sufficient to injure Yin Chen.
Maybe Song Lan Jing had known all along that humanity was very likely to face ultimate extinction in the near future.
She lacked neither money nor love, and she loved her child. In that case, what could possibly matter more than protecting her own little home?
Protecting humanity’s home?
Song Zang stayed silent so long that Yin Chen spoke softly to reassure him. “Don’t be afraid. Our future is bright.”
As Yin Chen spoke, he stuck soft, damp suction cups against Song Zang and kneaded him back and forth.
“…Baby, we’re here to investigate, not to go on a date.”
Song Zang coughed lightly. If Yin Chen rubbed him a few more times, the nature of the situation was going to change.
Yin Chen said casually, “Near the void, no one can see us.”
“Is it possible my mom is secretly watching?” Song Zang hesitated. “If she could see you the first time, she can see you the second time.”
“…That makes a lot of sense.” Yin Chen was momentarily speechless.
For no particular reason, the two of them sat awkwardly silent for a while, staring at each other before realizing that their current position really was rather suggestive.
Song Zang was half-reclined inside Yin Chen’s abdomen, leaning against a strange organ curled into a round ball behind him like a cloud-shaped cushion. Semitransparent tentacles lay all over him, naturally slipping beneath Song Zang’s T-shirt and doing nothing more than resting against his stomach.
His cool summer lounge shorts were very loose. The soft fabric had been pushed partly aside, leaving his exposed pale skin gradually coated in mucus.
And Yin Chen had him wrapped so tightly…
Whether or not they were actually doing anything indecent, being seen in this position by his mother would be mortifying.
Even Yin Chen, unusually, felt a strange flicker of guilt.
Yin Chen spoke gloomily. “Baby, we shouldn’t stay here long.”
Song Zang nodded repeatedly. “Baby, you’re right.”
The mystery was still unresolved, but with Song Lan Jing deliberately refusing to meet them, they could not recklessly break into other spacetimes.
One careless move could cause sweeping changes to history and bring about an even more terrifying disaster.
Simply standing above the river of time to spy on and survey the future was already an extraordinarily bold risk.
So Yin Chen thought for a moment and left behind a unique means of contact in the void.
A small piece of his own true body’s skin.
It contained linguistic information that only humans could decipher, along with traces of special code recognizable as belonging to the Infinite Game.
If Song Lan Jing wanted to learn more about her son’s situation and the current state of the Infinite Game, she could come to them herself or communicate through some more discreet method. There was no need to meet in person.
But even if Song Lan Jing refused to reveal any secrets, the information Yin Chen had gathered himself, combined with the reality laid openly before them, already contained many obvious truths.
The Infinite Game world had been invented to overturn humanity’s extinction. From the looks of things, it had succeeded.
Those bizarre, terrifying, deadly instance worlds and the existence of one 【false god】 after another were very likely all crises humanity would encounter in the future.
Even more frightening was the thought of what would have happened if Song Zang had never interrupted the Collective’s plan…
“The culprit behind the extinction branch was the Collective, right? Was it really that powerful?”
Yin Chen nodded. “Before I was forcibly split apart, the Collective needed only eighty years to devour an 【unprotected】 Milky Way.”
Eighty years sounded long, but to a terrifying being with endless life, it was nothing more than the blink of an eye.
Not to mention that the Collective could keep growing stronger. In the future, it would only become even more impossible to defeat.
At humanity’s current technological level, they would certainly be able to detect in advance that their galaxy was being shattered piece by piece.
But against such a terrifying alien life-form, the most they could do was flee as far away as possible. They would have no power to fight back.
That hopeless, pitch-black future had nearly descended upon the world, and had even left behind a frightening expanse of empty dead silence within the river of time…
If Song Lan Jing had abandoned him so cruelly in order to change that ending, it was understandable. Song Zang would find it difficult to grow close to her, but he would not hold much resentment.
If Earth itself could not even be preserved, then staying in that era to raise a child would indeed have seemed rather meaningless.
Song Zang was not asking to cultivate a relationship with her, but he was still deeply curious about Song Lan Jing’s experiences.
Had they been magnificent? Full of extraordinary adventures? Had she escaped the grip of fate and obtained the life she herself wanted?
And… did his name actually have some other meaning?
He had taken his mother’s surname. Was that because his father’s existence had not mattered?
The road to finding his mother had reached a dead end, but his father, who had died far from home long ago, was worth looking into. Perhaps his grandparents were still alive.
Song Zang’s curiosity was fully roused, and he followed the trail all the way to his biological father’s hometown.
Sen City, the old district, once the most prosperous center of the city.
The two elderly people really were still alive, but the neighbors described them as extremely strange, wealthy old people.
They kept themselves shut inside all day, never cooked, and piled discarded delivery and takeout packaging throughout the corridor outside.
Some mischievous children had gone there to “explore” and been frightened into running fevers for three days. They never dared act up again.
Something was wrong.
Very wrong.