Chapter 60.2: Kindergarten
Inside the visitation room, the little Long-Tendril was still sitting in its bucket. Its teacher gently carried it in.
The moment it saw them, its big eyes widened ever so slightly, and its whiskers slapped happily against the water’s surface.
“Bo-bo!!”
The sound that came out was still the same familiar bo-bo chirping.
But this time, Ji Anze and the others instantly understood what it meant.
It was calling for its mother.
“Bo-bo! Bo-bo!”
As it happily cried “Mama,” the teacher placed the little Long-Tendril into Ji Anze’s arms.
Its whiskers deftly reached out to brush against the faces of Ji Anze and the others.
They could hear it saying:
“Kiss… kiss!”
“Baby…”
Ji Anze’s heart melted.
He rubbed his cheek against the soft whiskers.
“I’m Daddy. Can you understand what Daddy’s saying?”
“Bo!”
The little Long-Tendril became visibly excited.
It turned to look at the teacher, then looked back at its blood relatives.
Although it didn’t make another bo-bo sound, Ji Anze clearly heard a young, childish voice calling out:
“Mama! Mama!”
Before this, the little Long-Tendril had already heard its teacher and classmates speaking. Now that its own family could speak with it too, it was overjoyed.
“Mama! Love me!”
Smiling, the teacher explained to the parents,
“After receiving the divine decree, the teachers all tried communicating with Baby. It’s still very young and can only speak simple words and short phrases—roughly equivalent to a one-year-old human child.”
“In Baby’s understanding of the world, all of you are its ‘mamas.'”
“It seems Long-Tendril civilization possesses a degree of inherited memory. They’re born knowing how to communicate through their whiskers, and they can also exchange simple messages through their bo-bo vocalizations.”
“For short sentences, it uses the bo-bo sounds. For anything more complicated, it presses its whiskers against us, and we hear the meaning directly.”
“The communication ability our God has granted us is truly remarkable,” the teacher continued.
“In Baby’s culture, there isn’t a clear concept of gender. The word it’s using definitely isn’t mother, but the blessing automatically translates it into the closest equivalent in Blue Sea’s language.”
“Since Baby is still so young, I wouldn’t recommend correcting it to Daddy just yet. It probably wouldn’t understand.”
The squad barely heard a word she said.
One after another, the parents eagerly leaned their faces closer, letting the little Long-Tendril press its whiskers against them, just so they could hear it call them “Mama” and happily chatter away.
Watching from the side, the teacher thought for a moment before deciding not to mention something.
The little Long-Tendril only needed its whiskers to touch a person’s skin to communicate.
In fact, it could connect multiple whiskers to multiple people at the same time.
Earlier that day in the classroom, it had linked itself to more than a dozen classmates all at once, and the children had excitedly run around the room hugging it.
In the past, seeing something like that would have worried the teacher. She would have been afraid the children might accidentally knock the little Long-Tendril out of its bucket.
But today, she could hear its joyful laughter through the cheerful bo-bo sounds.
So she hadn’t stopped them.
Long-Tendrils were, by nature, an emotionally expressive civilization.
They loved being with their blood relatives and their life partners, gently swaying together with their whiskers linked.
They cherished the feeling of pressing their whiskers together and sensing the affection flowing back from the other person.
Before today, however, the little Long-Tendril had never been able to feel that love from its own family.
Everyone it touched had only transmitted a cold, empty void.
Sometimes, it had felt lonely.
But because its family was always by its side, the loneliness would ease a little.
It had thought it simply wasn’t well-behaved enough.
That was why no one wanted to talk with it.
Why no one wanted to touch whiskers with it.
Now…
Its family and its companions had finally accepted it.
Today was the happiest day of the little Long-Tendril’s life.
So…
Its name was Baby.
Everyone suddenly wanted to come close to it.
Everyone was willing to communicate with it.
And the little ones who had always been with it…
They were its classmates.
Its classmates were finally talking to it.
It could feel how much everyone liked it.
They spoke so many words it still couldn’t quite understand. There were simply too many sentences for someone its age to comprehend.
But whenever their whiskers—or in the humans’ case, their skin—made contact, it could feel the warmth behind them.
Their joy.
Their closeness.
Their affection.
Baby was so happy.
With its tiny, inexperienced tendrils, it tried its best to tell its family how happy it was.
“Mama… love me… Mama… I’m good…”
“Oh, Great God…”
Listening through the tendril connection as Baby called them Mama, told them it was happy, and clumsily tried to explain what a good child it had been, Ji Anze and the others felt their eyes sting with tears.
“Baby, we love you.”
“We’ve always loved you.”
“You couldn’t feel it before because Daddy… because your mamas couldn’t speak your language. But that’s over now. We can finally talk to you. Can you feel it?”
The little Long-Tendril couldn’t fully understand such a long sentence.
But it could feel the overwhelming love flowing toward it.
Mixed within that love was another powerful emotion—one of joy, reverence, and deep devotion.
Again and again, it heard the same heartfelt cry.
“Great God… thank You!”
Baby tilted its head in confusion.
It could clearly sense the profound feelings its family held toward the “Great God.”
Was the Great God one of its relatives too?
It tried hard to imitate the unfamiliar words.
“Great… God…”
“That’s right, Baby. The Great God is our deity—our wonderful God. It was the Great God who allowed us to raise you and who granted us the ability to communicate with you. Thank the Great God! I never realized… I never knew you thought we didn’t love you.”
Those were the feelings carried through Mama’s “tendrils.”
And beyond those feelings stretched an endless sea of warmth.
The little Long-Tendril let out a series of happy bo-bo chirps.
“Great… God…”
It possessed very few inherited memories of Long-Tendril civilization.
But one instinct remained.
Among Long-Tendrils, blood relatives trusted one another without question.
Bathed in the immense love flowing from its family—so much love that it almost made it dizzy—the little Long-Tendril happily swayed in its bucket.
“Great God~”
Mama liked the Great God.
So it wanted to like the Great God too.
—
Cheng Qisheng felt a new chain of faith form.
It looked much like the faith chains belonging to her other followers.
The only difference was its owner.
It belonged to the little Long-Tendril.
The moment the little Long-Tendril became one of her believers, Cheng Qisheng gained access to fragments of the knowledge inherited by Long-Tendril civilization.
The child itself was still too young to understand any of it.
But Cheng Qisheng could comprehend it all.
Just as the elder Long-Tendril had once indicated.
Long-Tendrils inherited certain ancestral memories.
For example, they instinctively knew how to communicate with one another, how to protect themselves…
…and how to reproduce.
At last, one of Cheng Qisheng’s lingering questions had been answered.
The elder Long-Tendril and the little Long-Tendril were different individuals.
When Long-Tendril civilization had flourished, they reproduced sexually between two separate individuals.
Two Long-Tendrils would press their eyes together, exchanging their genetic information. Then, whichever of the two possessed the stronger genes would consume a large amount of food before producing two or three offspring carrying the genetic traits of both parents.
The process of giving birth…
…was as effortless as squeezing out a few teardrops.
Yes.
When a little Long-Tendril was first born, it was shaped like a droplet of water and was incapable of feeding itself.
Its blood relatives would then work together, using their tendrils to transfer a special form of Long-Tendril “energy” into it.
The child would rapidly grow into the tendriled form it possessed now.
However, when the environment became hostile and no mate was available, a Long-Tendril could also reproduce alone.
But without other members of its species to help nourish the newborn, allowing the child to survive required the parent to expend every last bit of energy within its own body.
In other words…
It was a one-for-one exchange.
Cheng Qisheng suspected that this was exactly how the elder Long-Tendril had come into existence.
The elder Long-Tendril had once gestured that, from the moment it was born, it had been alone in a Safe City, with no others of its kind nearby.
Perhaps Long-Tendril civilization had suffered some terrible catastrophe.
One survivor had remained alive, but had lost all of its companions.
In the end, it had sacrificed its own life to reproduce alone…
…bringing the elder Long-Tendril into the world.
The elder Long-Tendril had then reproduced on its own as well, giving birth to the little Long-Tendril.
At last, Cheng Qisheng had a faint idea of why Long-Tendril civilization had declined.
Its people had indeed been incredibly powerful.
But that power depended on an enormous supply of food and resources.
If a Long-Tendril only needed to support itself, it required roughly three times as much food as a human.
That was a lot, but still manageable.
The real problem came when they wanted to reproduce.
A Long-Tendril needed an immense amount of food to produce offspring, and after giving birth—having exhausted most of its energy—it then required another huge quantity of food to recover.
Safe Cities only descended into apocalyptic worlds.
And in an apocalypse, where would there be abundant food waiting for a civilization to harvest?
On top of that, Long-Tendrils could communicate only through their tendrils.
They also placed extraordinary importance on emotional communion among their own kind.
From birth until death, every Long-Tendril expressed its emotions openly, passionately, and sincerely. Negative emotions were exceedingly rare.
Members of other civilizations, however, found it almost impossible to achieve that same level of emotional openness.
As a result, Long-Tendril civilization was highly insular.
They almost never accepted survivors from other civilizations as residents.
During their golden age, that wasn’t a problem.
Long-Tendrils could consume vast amounts of food and produce multiple offspring, allowing their population to maintain a constant advantage.
But if they experienced several worlds where food was desperately scarce…
…or suffered a devastating Safe City war…
…their greatest strength would instantly become their greatest weakness.
Unable to replenish their population with people from other civilizations, and unable to produce children without enough food, they would become trapped in a downward spiral.
They couldn’t even begin to reverse their decline.
Cheng Qisheng couldn’t help feeling emotional.
Her Blue Sea civilization actually shared many similarities with Long-Tendril civilization.
The Long-Tendrils achieved unity of purpose through emotional communion.
Blue Sea achieved unity because it had her—the Creator God.
The Long-Tendrils had once possessed a vast population.
Blue Sea, too, was home to a great many people.
The difference was that the Long-Tendrils’ “insularity” was rooted in biology.
Blue Sea, on the other hand, could absorb survivors from other civilizations.
Once the Long-Tendrils’ reproduction failed, gaps inevitably appeared in their population.
As for Blue Sea, the number of new residents it took in had always been relatively low compared to other Safe Cities.
Cheng Qisheng found herself thinking of the towering trees she had seen within the Long-Tendrils’ inherited memories.
And of the starships that drifted freely through the galaxy.
No wonder Blue Sea’s Research Institute had never been able to figure out how the Long-Tendril Fruit was supposed to become a spaceship.
Because it had never been a spaceship at all.
It was an external exosuit.
Its function was somewhat similar to the flight wings Ruo Buyan had previously developed, though it also incorporated technologies unique to Long-Tendril civilization.
Those technologies themselves hadn’t been preserved in the inherited memories.
But Cheng Qisheng could at least pass along everything she had seen to Blue Sea’s Research Institute.
Whether they could reverse-engineer it would be up to them.
The Long-Tendrils connected their long tendrils directly to these exosuits, surrounding themselves with a protective mechanical shell.
Then, because each Long-Tendril’s tendrils could link together with those of others, individual exosuits merged into one enormous interconnected structure.
From the outside…
…it looked like a starship.
In reality, every single component of that “starship” was being piloted by an individual Long-Tendril.
If the “ship” was broken apart in battle, each section immediately became an independent combat unit once more.
For a very long time, this had made Long-Tendril civilization virtually invincible on the battlefield.
The more Cheng Qisheng watched, the brighter her eyes became.
This system…
…was practically tailor-made for Blue Sea.
The greatest benefit she had gained from glimpsing the Long-Tendrils’ inherited memories was this extraordinary “starship.”
And the greatest lesson she had learned was that Blue Sea had to recruit as many new residents as possible—
lest it one day follow the same path as Long-Tendril civilization.
She randomly selected the viewpoint of one of her followers and gazed out across the endless snowy night of Dazzling Star.
Whenever Cheng Qisheng shifted her perspective between followers, she always did so gradually, one person at a time.
But the speed at which the people of Dazzling Star were becoming believers…
…was astonishingly fast.
The Great Creator God considered the three available choices for a moment.
Then she decisively chose the Pope.
“The language barrier is no longer an issue.”
“Send people out to spread the faith.”
“It’s time for the number of believers… to expand dramatically.”
Ever since Dark Star’s destruction, when the entire population had moved into the Divine Temple, the Pope had rarely had a chance to make his presence felt.
Now, he slowly raised his head.
“Yes, my God.”
He bowed deeply.
His bright, dark eyes overflowed with fanatical devotion and reverence.
“Tianxing shall faithfully carry out Your divine will.”
