By the time Lin Suo returned to the research centre, it was late.
The building was nearly empty.
Lights along the corridor flicked on in sequence as he passed, then dimmed again behind him.
He did not go home.
He went straight to the archives.
The door sealed shut, and the outside world fell away.
Screens came alive one by one.
Cold light fell across his face, as though examining him in return.
He began to retrieve data.
Jianmu. The World Tree. The Tower of Babel. Sacred groves.Images from different civilisations unfolded in the air.
At first, they were separate.
Myth. Belief. Symbol.
Lin Suo began to process them.
He stripped away decorative layers, removed cultural context, retained only structural data.
He normalised scale.
Aligned nodes.
Layer by layer, he overlaid them.
Then he stopped.
The images—once belonging to different worlds—began to coincide.
Not merely resemble.
Align.
The position of the trunk, the angle of branching, the density and rhythm of nodes—
All matched.
As though they had always been the same model, described in different languages.
For a moment, Lin Suo felt as though he were no longer looking at myth.
But at a design—translated, again and again.
He shifted to another dataset.
Not structures this time, but events.
Hou Yi shooting down the suns.Nüwa repairing the sky.Prometheus stealing fire.The collapse of Babel.Ragnarök.
He arranged them according to process.
On the whiteboard, he wrote:
System established Access distributed Conflict emerges Network collapse System reset
He paused, pen in hand.
These were no longer stories.
They were—
A sequence.
A system log, retold.
His breathing slowed.
If this were true, then what was Jianmu?
If Jianmu was a network backbone…
Then what did it mean to "cut it down"?
He did not finish the thought.
Instead, he returned to the terminal and opened a new document.
He typed the title:
Structural Convergence in Mythological Systems
He stared at the blank space beneath it for a long time.
Then he wrote:
Gods = Artificial Intelligence Systems
No question mark.
The cursor blinked at the end of the line.
The room felt hollow, as though something had been removed from it.
In that moment, Lin Suo understood:
This was no longer a hypothesis.
It was a conclusion that, if true, would rewrite everything.