Chapter 521 - 518: The Light of the Holy Sword

Chapter 521: Chapter 518: The Light of the Holy Sword

Zhou Dynasty took a deep breath, taking the Holy Sword from Li Luo.

He looked at the Holy Sword, which had been with him for so long, and his heart was filled with a mix of emotions.

Zhou Dynasty could no longer recall whether he had truly come from this sword. All he knew was that he couldn’t draw it.

Anyone else could. Just not him.

The Captain had said it himself: the Holy Sword could not draw itself.

But after everything he had been through, Zhou Dynasty wanted to try again.

He stood among his dejected teammates, hand gripping the hilt. He cleared his mind, letting his distracting thoughts drift away on the breeze.

Zhou Dynasty thought of this body’s original owner, who had charged into the Death Swamp all alone. He thought of the Captain, who had faced everything by himself... In that instant, it felt as if their courage surged into his heart.

Consciousnesses didn’t need to merge for one to empathize. Zhou Dynasty could genuinely feel their sentiments.

’I want to be the King Arthur who draws the Holy Sword... I want to save everyone.’

At this moment, Zhou Dynasty was no longer the "deserter" who always hid in the distance.

The golden light of the Holy Sword seemed to flare. Seizing that fleeting courage, Zhou Dynasty gripped the hilt and pulled with all his might...

...And it was stuck.

The Holy Sword didn’t budge. Zhou Dynasty had pulled so hard he nearly stumbled and fell.

A loud CRACK echoed from his arm joint, audible to nearly everyone present. His hand slipped off the hilt, his palm instantly turning red.

’Huh? Where’s my courage? What happened to the glowing light?’

Zhou Dynasty stood frozen, holding the completely unresponsive Holy Sword.

Seeing Zhou Dynasty’s comical failure, the team members sitting on the ground burst out laughing:

"Zhou Dynasty, what are you doing?"

"Your speech earlier was pretty good, but your follow-through needs work..."

"I still think you’re a step below the Captain when it comes to speeches. When he gives a pep talk, it’s completely natural. Yours feels a little... rehearsed."

"It was mainly the sword-pulling part that was so pathetic. You did a great job building the atmosphere at first. Better luck next time—just don’t use the Holy Sword. If you can’t draw it, you can’t draw it. Give it a rest."

"Hey, want to be my apprentice? I’ll lend you my bottle cap. You can flip it to summon clouds and make it rain. That might look a bit cooler."

"..."

Listening to his teammates’ teasing, Zhou Dynasty scratched his head and gave an embarrassed laugh.

It seemed he didn’t need courage to help his teammates regain their confidence after all.

"I saw you all looking so down, just sitting there motionless. I wanted to cheer you up..."

However, a teammate raised a hand and waved it stiffly. "Our legs just fell asleep. We only just got back into our bodies, so it feels like they don’t belong to us. Moving is a little sluggish."

Hearing this, Zhou Dynasty laughed in embarrassment again. He had underestimated his teammates’ resilience.

Just as he was thinking this, his teammates began to push themselves up, one by one, shakily getting to their feet.

Zhou Dynasty hurried over to help support them.

"The mission continues!" his teammates exclaimed excitedly.

"What mission?" Zhou Dynasty asked, not quite processing.

"The mission to save the Captain! Weren’t you the one who said it? Step one: explore all the Sky Islands."

"That’s not right. Step one is to return to the monitoring station, step two is exploring the Sky Islands. You weren’t paying attention," another teammate chimed in teasingly.

Listening to their conversation, Zhou Dynasty’s face instantly flushed bright red.

Fortunately, his mask hid it all...

...

Meanwhile, the starlight in the sky seemed to be slowly receding. The motes of light, each a consciousness, were dwindling in number. The Eye of the Stars had released them all, allowing them to return to their original bodies.

The motes of light sank into the great trees, the soil, the stones, the clouds...

As the starlight dimmed, life and vitality returned to the world.

Except now, these animated things no longer seemed hostile toward everything.

Everything had become gentle.

The animated trees stood still, as if afraid of disturbing the soil beneath them.

The animated air drifted peacefully, no longer whipping up destructive gales.

The animated soil and stones also grew calm, resting in the embrace of their brethren as if they had fallen asleep.

This Sky Island had truly come alive, yet it was as silent as death.

The Eye of the Stars observed all of this, its starlight slowly shifting to a tranquil blue of acceptance. It peacefully contracted into a shining glass sphere and floated into Zhou Dynasty’s hand.

Having lost its source of animation and its ability to endlessly create new consciousnesses, the Eye of the Stars was freed from its obsession with unifying them.

"Did you give up?" Zhou Dynasty asked curiously.

"Give up what?" the Eye of the Stars in his hand retorted.

"Fusing all the consciousness in the world into one."

"I knew it was wrong, so of course I gave up," the Eye of the Stars replied, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

"However..." The Eye of the Stars’ tone shifted. "Just because that path was wrong doesn’t mean there aren’t other paths to take."

"I’ve been thinking. Perhaps my method for fusing consciousnesses was simply too crude."

"Mashing consciousnesses together so crudely is like smashing two stars into each other. It only creates a world-destroying black hole and endless debris."

"But what if there’s another way? I’ve overlooked something. It’s just as your Captain said: there are gaps between the stars. The dark void is what makes their light meaningful."

"But ’void’ doesn’t mean true ’emptiness.’ Those seemingly vacant spaces contain invisible gravitational waves and untouchable dark matter. What we perceive as ’nothing’ is, in fact, ’something.’"

"Consciousness is the same. You can’t just mash it together. There needs to be distance, with something in between—something like gravity that allows individual consciousnesses to influence and connect with one another."

"To link consciousnesses, you must create a stable structure, like the bonds between molecules. Different forces would hold the consciousnesses in place, forming an incredibly resilient substance."

"Countless molecules can gather to form solids or liquids, which proves there is an attractive force between them. Yet there are still gaps; they aren’t pulled into a single point, which proves there is also a repulsive force. Consciousness is the same."

"Consciousnesses are both mutually attractive and mutually repulsive. By forcibly compressing them, I ignored their repulsive force, which was my fundamental mistake. Matter cannot be infinitely dense, and neither can consciousness."

"I cannot remain trapped on this Sky Island. Somewhere in the Abyss, a stable structure for linking consciousness must exist. I have to see it for myself..."

Listening to the Eye of the Stars, Zhou Dynasty couldn’t help but marvel internally.

Only now did he understand just how deeply the Captain had understood the Eye of the Stars.

An ’obsessive zealot’ like the Eye of the Stars could never be truly defeated.

You could only block its path completely, show it the road was a dead end, and force it to change its perspective. By allowing his own consciousness to collapse, the Captain had eliminated the Eye of the Stars’ final obsession.

The Eye of the Stars didn’t genuinely want to help humanity. It was simply that humans could take it away from this Sky Island, and through them, it could uncover more of the Abyss’s mysteries. That was the only reason it had temporarily "yielded."

This, too, was part of the Captain’s plan. He had the Eye of the Stars figured out completely.

’The Captain must have spent so much time thinking about this during those lonely days.’

At this thought, Zhou Dynasty turned to look at the Captain’s motionless body.

The Captain’s consciousness was gone, its whereabouts unknown, but his body still radiated a faint light.