Jiang Lijin stared at the colossal pillar-like object, pacing two circles around it.
“Xiao Yi,” she called out in her mind.
Xiao Yi’s electronic voice emerged, crackling with obvious static that buzzed incessantly, making Jiang Lijin’s brain tingle.
“…I’m here. I’m here.”
Jiang Lijin stopped and tucked her hands into the pockets of her coat.
“Go take a look.”
Xiao Yi’s voice came in fragments, mixed with interference.
“Alright… Host, I’ll… I’ll try.”
In her mind, Jiang Lijin gave it a rare compliment.
“Not bad, you’ve improved. Before, you couldn’t even touch its edge without getting knocked out by the data stream. Now you can stand right in front of this thing and stay conscious—making progress.”
Xiao Yi stuttered badly, its pronunciation strained.
“No… it’s not that I’ve gotten stronger. It’s that it… it didn’t reject me this time. Host, I’ve connected to the peripheral port, but… when I talk to it, it doesn’t respond. I’ll try… try again.”
Jiang Lijin didn’t press it, letting the AI fumble on its own. The server room was freezing; her breath instantly turned to white mist. Beside her, Saien was still rambling. The old dean harbored an almost fanatical devotion to the mainframe, his wrinkled face relaxing as he spoke of it.
Saien stepped forward, his withered hand patting the console casing.
“Just the routine maintenance on this device consumes two-thirds of the entire Science Academy’s energy budget. Its cooling system connects to an underground river, yet even so, the server room must remain below freezing year-round. Look at the craftsmanship, the materials—we still can’t analyze the alloy composition of the main pillar’s shell. It’s compression-resistant, corrosion-proof, and most absurdly, it has an extremely high conductivity for psychic energy.”
Chiron stood half a step behind Jiang Lijin, listening quietly without interrupting. Only when she stopped did he subtly shift forward half an inch, blocking the cold air from the vent for her.
Saien paused after talking for a while, turned around, and faced Jiang Lijin with his wrinkled visage.
“Your Highness, you came all the way to this icebox—surely not just to hear an old man drone on about parameters?”
His murky yet piercing eyes fixed on her.
“The way you look at it… not like a machine, but like a person.”
Jiang Lijin didn’t take his bait. From a few paces away, her gaze returned to the main pillar, where the lights flickered on and off with machine-like regularity.
“Dean, who actually invented this thing?”
Her voice carried an echo in the empty server room.
Saien’s smile deepened. He pulled over a metal folding chair from the console, sat down slowly, and pointed toward the imperial palace.
“History is too ancient to verify. The official royal account claims the first emperor built it with his own hands. They say he was a great scientist who exhausted his life’s work to create this super AI for the empire’s eternal glory.”
Jiang Lijin snorted.
“That’s just royal propaganda to solidify power—a lie that only fools the commoners.”
Saien spread his hands, a hint of mockery in his tone.
“Who says it isn’t? The absurdity of these last few emperors, who couldn’t even solve a basic physics equation—ridiculous.”
He sighed, his gaze drifting back to the main pillar. His earlier flippancy faded, replaced by the awe of an academic facing the unknown.
“If the mainframe was truly invented by some great scientist, that person absolutely does not belong to this world.”
Jiang Lijin turned to him.
“Centuries have passed, technology has advanced, and the starscape has expanded, but we haven’t even touched the boundaries of the mainframe’s computing power, let alone surpassed it. It doesn’t feel like a creation of this dimension—it was forced into our civilization. We’re only using it, no—we’re not even using it. We’re just begging for the scraps of its processing power.”
The old man’s words carried a deep sense of helplessness and the frustration of a researcher.
Jiang Lijin understood. This shrewd old dean, from the moment he said she looked at the mainframe like a person, had been carefully trying to gauge her. She hated beating around the bush. Looking straight into Saien’s eyes, she cut to the chase.
“Dean, you think it’s not from this world, don’t you?”
Saien met her gaze without flinching, offering a gentle smile.
“I don’t know for sure. But when I was a child, my grandfather told me a story.”
He stood up, walked over to the main pillar, and traced the flowing lights in the air, lowering his voice.
“He said the mainframe wasn’t built at all—it was dug up from beneath a fringe planet.”
“Dug up?”
Jiang Lijin’s eyelid twitched. She repeated the word, her tone rising.
Saien nodded.
“He said an exploration team drilled well over a hundred thousand meters deep, searching for new energy sources. They didn’t find any energy, but the drill got stuck on something hard. It took them three months to clear away the surrounding rock layers. That’s how they got this thing out.”
His voice echoed in the empty server room.
“At first, they thought it was a massive meteorite. But after cleaning off the dirt, they discovered the metal casing and the light flowing inside. It had been buried underground for who knows how many eons, yet it was still running.”
Jiang Lijin stared at those points of light. Buried underground for countless millennia—if the mainframe were really Xiao Er, or that lofty main system, the timeline wouldn’t match up at all. She had been in this world for less than a year.
Unless…
An absurd thought began to form in her mind.
Unless, when Xiao Er sent her here, it had not only crossed space but also time. It had fallen into this universe’s distant, primordial past, buried deep beneath the earth, spending an incalculable age in the darkness of the rock layers.
It had waited to be discovered. It had waited for the empire to rise. It had waited until the entire interstellar computing network was laid out, its rules, matchmaking mechanisms, and even the social structure shaped bit by bit into what they are now.
All so that, the moment she descended, it would have paved every step of her path.
To give her an absolutely safe, absolutely privileged beginning.
