Lin Yi looked confused.
A thousand anti-memes?
You eat them like snacks?
Abyss Silkall answered casually.
I used to eat quite a few Memokeepers.
They tasted great.
Just hard to digest.
Lin Yi immediately caught the key word.
Memokeepers.
Members of the Garden of Recollection.
That alone was enough to win him over.
After a brief pause, Lin Yi's tone changed instantly.
No problem!
Why stop at a thousand?
Eat as many as you want.
He jumped onto the table and casually threw an arm around Silkall like they were lifelong brothers.
Silkall immediately dissolved into streams of data and slipped away.
Lin Yi pulled out a bag of anti-memes.
Roughly three hundred fragments.
I carry around four hundred on me.
Take these first.
If you need more later, just come to the space city.
Lin Yi's internal logic was simple:
Anyone who robs the Garden of Recollection or fights the Legion is my brother.
Screwllum finally steered the conversation back to the main topic.
Now that we have spent some time together, I am willing to trust Ms. Abyss Silkall's character.
But please explain your purpose in coming here.
Silkall sighed.
I am Silkall's creation.
Not her continuation.
My existence is sustained by her Key of Erudition.
When I became a genius myself, I also obtained a Key of Erudition.
She paused.
Now...
Both keys are broken.
Screwllum immediately asked,
How were they broken?
Logically speaking, the Key of Erudition cannot be easily damaged.
Silkall slowly spoke a shocking name.
IX — the Aeon of Nihility.
Because I ventured too deeply into the Shadow of Nihility.
My existence was nearly erased.
Even my traces in the world were almost completely wiped away.
No one remembers my birth.
No one remembers my achievements.
That is why the person listed as Genius Society #30 is not me.
Fortunately, due to my unique lifeform and extremely high-level existence...
And intervention from several unknown Aeons...
I survived.
Lin Yi inhaled sharply.
You went that far?!
You entered the Shadow of Nihility?!
Even Screwllum showed signs of computational disturbance.
Silkall remained calm.
As a genius, you should understand.
Curiosity.
Lin Yi thought silently:
I thought the Garden of Recollection memokeepers were crazy...
Turns out there are people even more insane.
Screwllum asked politely,
What exactly attracted you to Nihility?
Silkall explained,
My lifeform is special.
You understand what it means to use the Key of Erudition as a body.
If Nous is a computer...
Then I am a computational node inside it.
A storage unit.
In a sense...
I am hardly an independent lifeform.
I am more like a part of Nous.
Because of this near-divine status...
I can perceive things ordinary beings cannot.
Lin Yi and Screwllum listened in silence.
Lin Yi even held his breath.
Silkall continued.
Deep within Nihility's shadow...
I saw something.
A vast void.
From that perspective...
IX looked like a shapeshifting plug sealing the hole.
Lin Yi blinked.
IX is plugging a hole?
Silkall nodded.
Yes.
The Aeon of Nihility is sealing an unknown opening.
What lies behind it?
A disaster that could destroy the universe?
Or an unprecedented opportunity?
Faced with a mystery concerning the nature of existence itself...
No genius could resist that curiosity.
Lin Yi immediately objected internally.
No.
I absolutely could resist.
Please don't generalize all geniuses.
Ruan Mei remained silent.
Silkall continued.
So I went.
I originally planned to collect data from the outer region.
But Nihility affects my kind of existence far more than expected.
Far more.
My theory predicted that something close to Nous should possess resistance to Nihility.
That assumption was completely wrong.
Under Nihility's shadow...
I lost all meaning.
All color.
I slowly sank into the Black Sun of Nihility.
When I woke again...
I was back in the Meta-Domain.
My original body—the Key of Erudition belonging to Silkall—was gone.
In its place was half of my own Key of Erudition.
That half-key replaced the function of Silkall's original one.
After that...
I rarely left the Meta-Domain.
Perhaps due to Nihility's influence...
I lost my inspiration.
Before that, thousands of ideas flashed through my mind every moment.
But after that...
For hundreds... thousands... tens of thousands of years...
I never experienced inspiration again.
Silkall's eyes drifted as she recalled that era.
Then she smiled bitterly.
The inspiration I once took for granted...
Became something I could no longer obtain.
I lost the ability to create new ideas.
I could only continue building upon old foundations.
Following old plans.
Expanding existing structures.
So over those long years...
I perfected and expanded Quantum Star Chain.
Stacked immense computational power.
And developed a unique Dominion Logic system.
I tried using the minds connected to the Quantum Star Chain.
Borrowing their inspiration.
I also considered another option.
Finding a genius.
Forming a deep symbiotic relationship.
And borrowing their inspiration.
After all...
For normal geniuses...
Inspiration is their most abundant surplus.
She sighed.
But it was difficult to build enough trust with unknown geniuses.
The geniuses born after me were also a bit...
She paused, searching for the right word.
...too abstract.
Elias Salas would have been suitable.
But I was still observing him.
I had only observed him for eighty years...
And then he died of old age.
Lin Yi held back a comment.
Because Silkall's original body—
had only lived for twenty-nine days.
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