The second link proceeded with remarkable smoothness.
The gateway for deep-space communication had not yet closed. With his vast mental strength and a body of matching intensity, he was able to trace back through the Great Information Nest, contesting for the authority of dominance.
The problem lay elsewhere.
Unlike the first time, where a hurried glimpse resulted in an overload of information, this connection was stable and enduring. It allowed the male Zerg to carefully discern fragments of an incalculable scale.
He was like a little porter, picking and choosing among those categorized shards.
Zerg biotechnology was vastly different from the human "Data Canopy," which was built upon programmed code. The Zerg followed consciousness itself; the biological organism was the carrier unit. Every successive King Zerg collected the heads of the deceased, establishing a sprawling, interconnected communal ruin that allowed fragments of consciousness to return to the Great Swarm.
This eerie practice provided the breakthrough for humans who were stuck at the level of morphological cognition. It allowed them to overturn their original calculations and construct the prototype of the River of Time.
In a sense, the River of Time was almost a product of the "intercourse" between two different racial civilizations.
Whether it was the Data Canopy, the King Zerg Ruins, or the rift-riddled Akasha, they all reached the same destination through different means, sharing similar properties.
There were clues to this.
Humans used the Data Canopy to replace the shared consciousness of the Zerg swarm, and they utilized purified Star Core energy—harvested from the Akasha rifts—to support this massive miracle.
It was a case of moving things from the left hand to the right; no matter how it changed, it remained within the realm of self-production, self-consumption, and fratricide from the same root.
But with the death of the last King Zerg, the ruins belonging to the Zerg themselves had vanished without a trace.
The path was closed, and the boundary between life and death was clearly demarcated.
Perhaps because his upgraded mental strength had reached a new plateau, this successful retrospection made the male Zerg let down his guard.
As he sorted through the fragments, he forgot to continuously monitor the surrounding information flow.
By the time Gela realized he was lost within the boundless internal network of the Great Information Nest, he found himself in a quite peculiar environment.
He "saw" veins and fleshy membranes representing consciousness, creeping and climbing toward the distance, converging into an endless "river." The pure fragments of data and information had quietly disappeared.
Every cluster of blooming fleshy sprouts signified a node belonging to the past.
This was a space devoid of direction and time.
Had Sakdi been present, he would have realized that this was extremely similar to the descriptions of the first starship, *Fahna*.
In *Fahna’s* self-account, the Eye of Akasha swallowed almost all time and light, turning everything into a static record. It had nothing to do with records as humans understood them; a small crack had opened in a non-human domain, peering out at a universe that seemed to sit within a warm glass cradle.
As the only two grotesque existences to have fallen into Akasha and returned to the world of the living, the White Emperor remained silent about it, and *Fahna* could not explain it clearly.
The cognition of a starship was fundamentally on a different level than that of humans; the world in their eyes was entirely different from the world in human eyes.
"Humans cannot go there."
Faced with persistent questioning, *Fahna* finally displayed a crying emoticon. The puppy-like starship circled its favorite Prime and the Prime’s partner, shedding its camouflage as requested by the researchers.
When its true form unfurled, the White Emperor reached out to cover his partner’s eyes and ears, pulling them into his embrace to shut out all negative pollution.
Do not look, do not listen, do not touch.
In official records, every human who saw *Fahna’s* true reconstructed form that day immediately vomited, suffered from tinnitus, and fell into a coma.
It was a terrifying erosion that shared the same source as xenogeneic pollution and Zerg biotechnology, but its magnitude was far higher than the latter two.
Very few people knew of this. The unique nature of the White Emperor’s identity led to the relevant files being strictly sealed. It was only after Sakdi pulled the Empire together and beat the Federation into dissolution that he gained the clearance to read them.
The male Zerg was clearly oblivious to all of this.
He felt those consciousnesses flowing toward the distance, and then he grew and spread along with them.
Withered flesh turned into something like sand, only to condense again from the grains, blooming into new fleshy sprouts.
The link he had come through had vanished; the vast, silent space formed an endless whole.
Gela’s thoughts drifted with the tide, no longer under his control, surging toward an increasingly dangerous area.
There stood countless heads of bizarre forms.
Like dead remains in an inverted posture, they cast down cold gazes.
They formed the pillars that propped up the heavens and earth in this giant space; even though time was frozen, they still bore the marks of corrosion and wear.
The surroundings were littered with unidentifiable fragments, resembling the shapes of metal and circuitry.
The male Zerg realized something was wrong. He wasn't sure where exactly he had traced back to.
By any measure, this scene should not have appeared in the information pool of the Great Information Nest.
As he looked closely at those heads, he found countless masses of flesh climbing and entwining around the faces of the colossi, blooming into layer upon layer of flowers.
Hallucinatory colors writhed, becoming the only color on this wasteland where up, down, front, and back were indistinguishable.
Those were the heads of the successive King Zerg.
What was attached to them were not flowers, but countless dead fragments of consciousness.
They competed to grow, jostle, devour, and bloom, clinging to the damaged, grotesque heads like parasites sucking nutrients, constantly shifting their forms.
Text, language, and information had all vanished. Those things, which used parts to represent the whole, could not write the truth; only consciousness lived here.
Every Zerg had heard the legends of consciousness returning to the Great Swarm, but no Zerg had ever carefully considered the fact that fragments of consciousness after death still exhibited vitality.
Upon realizing this, the male Zerg’s thoughts nearly ground to a halt from horror.
He almost vomited.
The remains, devoid of joy or sorrow, collapsed in an instant, as if weathering and disintegrating in the long, static passage of time, scattering like fine sand.
The fragments of consciousness that had bloomed with intense colors vanished along with them. Every fleshy sprout and every cluster of flowers was like an eye, casting a distant glance at the white male Zerg who had intruded here.
Intense pain swept through his remaining thoughts almost instantly, a thousand times more agonizing than pupation or eclosion.
He was about to dissipate along with these broken ruins.
In the next second, the male Zerg’s spirit disconnected completely.
He fell forward, tumbling into a strong embrace.
"Roxanne!"
It was as if he had stepped from the void onto solid ground; his scattered thoughts were unable to provide any feedback.
"Roxanne, what happened!"
It was his partner calling him.
It took a long time for Gela to understand this.
But he could not answer.
He felt some warmth; Sakdi seemed to be reaching out to wipe something from his face.
As his senses of smell and touch gradually returned, he realized the other was wiping away blood.
He was bleeding again.
"Roxanne, are you alright?"
A black scaled tail entwined with his own. Sakdi seemed to be talking to someone else while calling out to him.
Soon he knew—the other had ordered his subordinates to bring over a treatment pod.
Unlike the old model on the scavenger ship, the current *Ja* had updated its facilities through multiple batches, equipped with new treatment equipment obtained from the Armed Species.
The High-Level Species turned a blind eye; when Sakdi requested things that weren't too sensitive, they were generally approved.
After lying in the treatment pod in a groggy state for a long time, the male Zerg finally regained full consciousness.
He tried to sit up and was immediately supported by the Core Species who had been standing guard and stepped forward.
"Can you hear me?"
"Yes."
The male Zerg answered softly. His speech was still a bit slurred, and he couldn't manage long sentences.
The aftereffects of the link were one factor; the other was the suppressed fury he felt from Sakdi.
The other said nothing more, only reaching out to carry him out and wrap him in a blanket once again.
The Core Species observed him carefully, checking the nasal cavity and eye sockets where a large amount of blood had previously seeped out, and confirming the state of his pupils.
"What happened to me?"
Gela curled up in those powerful arms, asking in a very, very small voice.
"You don't know yourself?"
The black Core Species’ expression was more serious than ever before—it could even be described as grim.
"Your mental tentacles... they just materialized."
"They were crawling everywhere, and the entire link bolt burned out. If I had disconnected the link even a second later, you might never have seen me alive again!"
"What happened?"
Sakdi tried his best to soften his attitude, not wanting to scare the already weakened male Zerg.
He knew that while the other sometimes took risks, he generally knew what was important. Something unexpected must have happened.
A small amount of honeydew had been sent along with the treatment pod. The Core Species filled a cup and held it to the male Zerg’s lips, feeding him bit by bit.
"Forget it, we'll talk later. Rest first."
"I'm really okay now."
Gela grabbed him and reached out his arms. "Can you hold me?"
Sakdi: "..."
Wonderful. He couldn't refuse at all.
Resigned, he closed his eyes for a moment and pulled the other back into his embrace.
"It was very smooth at first, not as difficult as my last trace into the Great Information Nest."
Gela held his hand, slowly explaining to him, "But an accident happened. My consciousness drifted to a very strange place."
"I'm not sure where it was. I saw many giant heads—just like those statues standing on the outer layers of Angon. They were the heads of King Zerg."
The fingers gripping him tightened. The female Zerg listened intently to every word he said.
"I could feel it... those consciousnesses... they were still alive. But I can't explain it clearly."
The white Zerg was a bit anxious, but his partner’s patient gesture of stroking his head calmed him down.
"Those images began to collapse. Those remains looked at me, as if they wanted to take me away with them. I could feel the pain, but in the next moment, I woke up and heard you calling my name."
"But I couldn't answer then. I'm sorry."
He tried to nuzzle his partner’s jaw. "I'm sorry..."
"There's no need to apologize." Sakdi gently stroked those beautiful white wings. He had quickly adjusted himself, restoring his emotional stability.
"You didn't do anything wrong, so you don't need to apologize for it."
Golden-brown eyes looked at him. "Even I cannot guarantee that I won't encounter any accidents."
"But if you encounter such a dangerous situation again, you must be more careful. Try not to let yourself get caught in a situation you can't escape from."
He broke the matter down to explain it to the male Zerg. "I won't always be by your side to disconnect the link bolt for you in time."
"I will worry. When I'm not by your side, I'll think of you losing consciousness and bleeding constantly... I'll worry that something has happened to you."
He entwined his tail with the other’s.
"Fate and death are unreasonable; they do not descend in order. I have already seen too many departures."
The male Zerg hugged him tightly. Sakdi let his tone become even gentler.
"Don't hurt yourself so easily, Roxanne."
***
