Buddha-like Rebirth

Fu Zhiyu covered his eyes, feeling that the sudden light was stinging painfully. He slowly rubbed his eyes for a long time before he could see everything in front of him clearly.

Sure enough, it was the Lord God’s space.

“…Why did I come back here again?” He looked around, looked down at his hands and feet and muttered to himself, “What happened?”

“You were supposed to be here,” the Lord God said. It was usually strict with actors and systems, but it was much softer towards Fu Zhiyu, “Zhiyu, come with me, I have something to tell you.”

Fu Zhiyu could only follow the Lord God, his mind gradually regaining its clarity. Walking in this space, he felt both familiar and unfamiliar. After a while, he couldn’t help but ask: “Then, how is the world of ‘His Name Will Live On in History’?”

“After you and Xie Ke left that world, it returned to normal,” the Lord God said. “It should have returned to normal a long time ago, but there was a delay.”

Fu Zhiyu knew that it was originally a mission world that had been completed. If Xie Ke hadn’t rebooted it, it should have returned to its proper track and developed freely and uncontrollably in the future.

“Of course, there are still some changes,” the Lord God said, “The changes you made to that world are different from the original book. Maybe there will be new developments in that world, but these are minor issues.”

Fu Zhiyu remembered that the Lord God had described the world as a time-bomb before, and he couldn’t help but ask one more question: “Isn’t it a threat to the stability of the system?”

“Not for a long time,” the voice of the Lord God was very calm, “Don’t worry, come with me, I will explain it to you.”

After listening to this sentence, Fu Zhiyu felt a little relieved. He lowered his head while thinking; he couldn’t help feeling a little sad, but he also knew in his heart that everything should have had an end.

They finally walked to the small room where the master brain was, the Lord God stopped, then let Fu Zhiyu sit down, and suddenly asked him: “Do you have any knowledge of this world?”

Knowledge?

Fu Zhiyu’s knowledge of this entire acting world came from the Lord God and Xie Ke, and he didn’t know much about the rest.

“What do you think is the top level of this world?” The Lord God felt that Fu Zhiyu didn’t seem to be able to answer well, so it changed the question.

Fu Zhiyu thought for a while, then hesitantly said: “You?”

The Lord God smiled.

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“No, Zhiyu, you have to know that although this world is composed of novels, it has developed to such an extent that it is no longer possible to distinguish between real and false. It can be even said that it is no different from the original world that produced these books. Even if we were its derivatives at the beginning, but over time, many things changed,” the Lord God said, “Outside of this world is the World Consciousness that is running all of this, and the World Consciousness is much higher than us. I and those systems, as well as actors, and many people inside the worlds, are actually the same. We are not superior or inferior, and no one is more noble than anyone else. For the World Consciousness, we are ants, worker bees. I am just its hired worker, too. We can’t even communicate directly with the World Consciousness. Because we are at two different levels, when I sometimes communicate with the World Consciousness, it is very difficult, and it is always only a few words. These few words are mostly instructions, and there are not many explanations.”

Speaking of this, the Lord God paused for a while, and then said: “Most of the information transmitted by the World Consciousness during this period of time was about you.”

“About me?”

“Yes,” the Lord God asked him again, “Zhiyu, do you think you are just a piece of data that can’t be deleted?”

Fu Zhiyu nodded calmly. He had tried to find the reason when he was in the system space before, but he didn’t have a clue. This kind of thing couldn’t be worked out, so he stopped thinking about it, just seeing it as the reality of the situation.

“I originally thought that too, but then I found out that you were not not, and it was the World Consciousness that reminded me of that.”

The Lord God recalled what it had experienced, only to feel that the running programs in its mind were about to get stuck.

In fact, the Lord God had always been aware of its status as a senior employee. Although the name “Lord God” sounded nice, in fact, it only assumed management responsibilities, and sometimes it was just a loudspeaker. Its actual power was not very great, otherwise it would be impossible to be troubled by the actors for a long time and only rely on patches one by one to deal with them. If the Lord God really dominated everything, why would there be need for such trouble?

In theory, the Lord God was the closest to the World Consciousness, except for one moment, when Xie Ke got the authority as the highest actor. At that time Xie Ke was the closest to the World Consciousness;

Because his authority was not given by the Lord God; it was directly given to him by the World Consciousness.

However, after that incident, strange things followed.

First, there was a Fu Zhiyu that couldn’t be deleted. When the Lord God transmitted this abnormal information to the World Consciousness, there was no response and there was no intention to solve the problem, so Fu Zhiyu’s matter dragged on like this, and nothing could be done.

Even though Fu Zhiyu was here, he was quite well-behaved. He stayed in the space, was just given some information to read usually, and was very easy to control and very obedient.

But this was not the case with Xie Ke. After taking the authority, he was like crazy, making trouble everywhere. Although the Lord God was overwhelmed by him, it also found something wrong when dealing with him.

Xie Ke’s authority was incomplete; it had flaws, otherwise he wouldn’t need to go to so much trouble. According to the understanding of the Lord God, Xie Ke’s authority could have directly rebooted the world. But he didn’t, because he couldn’t do it. Instead, he struggled hard.

…What was the World Consciousness doing?

Only after Xie Ke got what he wanted and rebooted the world did the Lord God receive a reply from the World Consciousness.

This time the reply was longer than the previous one, as if to make up for the previous silence.

It was also a long story for the World Consciousness.

It had actually discovered a long time ago that there was a certain problem with the mechanism by which the actors now worked.

This world was composed of books. The layout was completely created by the people of the source world. The playing worlds naturally followed the original books step by step at the beginning, and after the plot of the original books was completed, these worlds were relegated to the free worlds and left to their own devices. But while the plot of the original book was followed, accidents occasionally occurred, and actors appeared at this time to make up for the mistakes of the world.

In the past, there had been no problems with this mechanism, but after the World Consciousness had watched it for a long time, it found that the worlds of the books were changing. This change was not that one or two people deviated from the plot, but that the whole changed.

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The people in the worlds of the books were no longer two-dimensional paper people like they were at the beginning. They were getting more and more individual, had more and more ideas, and were more and more like real people, not even different from the people of the source world anymore.

It was not hard to understand. Novels were originally projections of the real world. Every novel was more or less the shadow of the real world, and so were the characters in it. But the authors wouldn’t spend effort on every character, not to mention that not every novel was a perfect novel.

But the worlds were getting more and more real, so the two-dimensional characters in the novel were beginning to become flesh and blood.

A normal person was inherently contradictory. There were few pure bad guys and pure good people. Among the “villains” in the book, some people would hesitate, some people would be in pain, and some people would even give up when they were about to do something. And some “decent” people occasionally had evil thoughts, not as flawless as the book said.

For example, the vicious female character in a certain world had been bullying the little white flower heroine throughout the book. In fact, they only had a misunderstanding at the beginning. The vicious female character mistakenly thought that the heroine stole her things and hated her. Because of this misunderstanding, other contradictions occurred, and the two became incompatible. But in this world, when it actually happened, the villainess found out that the things she lost had actually fallen into the space between the bed and the wall because of a small accident.

The initial misunderstanding was resolved; the villainess was still arrogant. She couldn’t bow her head to apologise, but then, she didn’t go crazy to harm the heroine either.

This villainess was indeed of a bad character. She was very selfish and egotistical. She had never shown the slightest sign of becoming a good person because of this incident. After that, she still had a very bad attitude towards the heroine, and she hadn’t even given the explanation about the theft. But she wouldn’t do anything more excessive.

The biggest difference between a person and a paper person was probably this. In the real world, no one would follow the rules, everyone would have changes and have their own ideas.

The worlds in the book had also begun to produce the independent logic and emotions that they should have.

Was this a bug?

The World Consciousness said “no”.

Of course, the reality was not as extreme as the above example. The actions of a large part of people had not changed, otherwise the world would be in a mess, and no matter how many actors were involved, they couldn’t save it. The vast majority of changes were in the way that made the emotions of the people more real.

What the Lord God saw was that the actors were out of control, but what the World Consciousness saw was more. It felt that the worlds had changed, but the mechanisms of the actors had remained the same, and that this wasn’t the way to go on.

The World Consciousness was trying to find the reason. Perhaps there were too many completed mission worlds; after they became free, this uncontrolled consciousness infected the whole universe. But whatever the reason, the change was irreversible and the World Consciousness had to adapt to it.

In this process, it saw some of the actors’ coping methods, forcibly correcting the plot. Even if the bad guy wanted to be good, he wasn’t allowed to be good, and the actor deliberately guided him to do evil like in the original book. Even if the good man was evil, the actor would do everything possible to cover him up.

Because the people in the book were set up like this, and the book was written like this. If the actors didn’t do this, there would be a risk of points deduction. They might be at fault, but it seemed that they couldn’t be blamed.

In the world of “His Name Will Live On in History”, the original difficulty setting was advanced. It had to be carefully calculated but it wasn’t particularly difficult for an advanced task. The reason why it became a super-advanced task, and also Xie Ke’s highest authority upgrade task, was because it was the test world of the Lord God, mainly to deal with this new situation.

On the one hand, the World Consciousness wanted to see what the actors would do in response to this situation, and on the other hand, it wanted to see if its ideas were correct.

But an accident happened.

The World Consciousness didn’t expect such an accident. As soon as Xie Ke entered that world, things were out of its control.