The representatives of the other civilizations arrived in succession.
The first to arrive was Kepler-22b.
Their transit-fields were cold blue—different from Earth's pale gold. Sharper. More precise, like the light of a surgical blade. Four humanoid silhouettes emerged from the blue light. Their outer forms were extremely close to human—two legs, two arms, a face—but their bone density was visibly greater, their shoulders wider, their movements carrying a deliberately controlled fluidity. That fluidity was not the ease of training, but the restraint of calculation—every inch of motion had been computed. They did not waste a single erg of effort, even in walking.
The leader swept a glance over the basin, then looked at the four-person Earth team. His gaze was even. Not curious. Not hostile. An assessment. Like a hunter walking into a new forest, first locating where the prey was, where the threat. His eyes paused on Gu Yuanzheng for an instant, then moved on. That instant was long enough for Gu Yuanzheng to see: this man's pupils were very pale, so pale that everything he looked at seemed to be seen through a layer of frost—not cold, but the absence of any intention to invest excess attention in anything.
"Kepler-22b," Léon said quietly to Gu Yuanzheng. "The Dark Forest doctrine. They wrote the chain of suspicion into their constitution."
"I know," Gu Yuanzheng said. "Don't make contact first. Let them assess."
Then the Translucents. Four blobs of gelatinous, semi-transparent matter, suspended in the air, with no fixed form. Within each blob, the ripple of electromagnetic waves was clearly visible—their thought processes were broadcast in real time. No secrets. No concealment. As they drifted across the basin, the ripples on the surface of the gel grew dense—they were seeing, perceiving the environment with their entire bodies. That perception was omnidirectional, like taking the entire basin into the mouth and tasting it, missing nothing, not even the humidity in the air.
The Abyssal and the Hive arrived almost simultaneously. The former were four elongated, worm-like bodies, perceiving everything around them through vibration waves. The latter were four mobile entities with a blend of animal and plant characteristics, the connections between them invisible to the eye but palpable—they were different nodes of a distributed consciousness. When the Hive's four bodies landed, they turned their heads in unison to scan the surroundings, the motion synchronized with the precision of a single machine—even the angle of the neck turn was identical.
Five civilizations. Twenty people. Standing in the tomb of a destroyed civilization.
Gu Yuanzheng looked around. The Keplerians stood coldly, their gazes sweeping across everyone. The Translucents pulsed slowly. The Abyssal pressed against the ground and vibrated. The Hive's four bodies turned their heads in unison toward the same direction. Only them—the four from Earth—were still digesting what was in front of them. The other civilizations acted as if they were accustomed to standing on other people's ruins.
This is the universe, he thought. Not the Dark Forest—at least, not yet. More like a waiting room. Everyone is waiting for the same bus, but no one knows where the bus is going. Where the bus is going decides who here is the prey and who is the hunter—and at this moment, everyone thinks he is the hunter.
A voice descended from directly above the basin.
Not a sound wave—information that appeared directly in consciousness. The mode of communication used by R. Each civilization heard its own language, but the content of the information was exactly identical.
[Hollow-Husk Protocol initiated. Members of each delegation, enter the transfer array in sequence. Consciousness will be mapped to pre-set war-husks. The husks have been standardized; physical performance metrics have been calibrated to a unified standard. The transfer process is irreversible.]
"Irreversible," Léon repeated. His finger had already begun to trace a formula in the air.
"Consciousness mapping," Nadia said, her brow creasing slightly. "They are going to put our consciousness into other bodies."
"R's war-husks," Gu Yuanzheng said. "Provided by them."
"Whose war-husks?" Nadia asked.
The announcement had not said.
In the center of the basin, the ground cracked open. Not an earthquake—some force-field rose from below, pushing the rock to either side. From the crack, pale-gold light surged up—the same color as the transit-field. The column of light shot from the crack straight into the sky, dispersing in the murky atmosphere, like a glowing pillar driven into the floor of a graveyard.
Inside the light-column, there were things.
Twenty humanoid bodies, suspended in the light. Their eyes were closed, their limbs slack, as if they were sleeping. On the surface of each body, there were extremely faint patterns—not tattoos, not scars, but lines grown from inside the skin, so fine they could barely be discerned by the naked eye. Gu Yuanzheng squinted to look more closely, but the patterns seemed alive—when the angle of the light changed, they retreated back beneath the skin.
"These war-husks—" Nadia stared at the patterns. Her voice had changed. She crouched, trying to see the shape of the patterns from a distance. The scanner in her hand buzzed—a buzz she had not dialed up. The instrument had made the sound on its own, like a tuning fork that had encountered something at the same frequency and begun to vibrate along with it.
"What is it?" Gu Yuanzheng asked.
"The patterns," she said. "Not decoration. They're like—encoding. Some kind of information has been written into the tissue structure of these husks."
"R's encoding?"
She shook her head. "I recognize R's scanning frequency. This—isn't. The frequency is lower, denser, like—" She paused, searching for the precise word. She tried another phrasing, her voice slow. "Like a stratum. Layer upon layer. Very old." What she did not say was: every archaeological stratum she had ever scanned was dead. But the low-frequency density in these patterns carried a quality she did not yet dare to name as alive—as if something pressed within the stratum had not yet fully died.
Gu Yuanzheng looked at her, then at the twenty bodies suspended in the column. They floated there quietly, the patterns that could not be seen flickering in and out of the golden light.
"Which one do we pick?" Erik asked. He was already standing at the edge of the light-column. His face was expressionless.
"Do you choose your own, or is it assigned?" Léon asked.
The voice of the announcement descended again: [War-husk assignment is randomly designated by the system. Members of each delegation, please enter the position corresponding to the array.]
Twenty circles of light appeared on the ground, each corresponding to one of the suspended bodies. The Earth four-person team's position was on the east side of the basin. Four circles of light. Four husks.
Gu Yuanzheng walked to the first circle. His war-husk floated above his head—male, half a head taller than his original body, broad shoulders. Eyes closed. Features calm. The patterns on its surface were concentrated on the palm and forearm—extremely fine lines, faintly reddening in the light.
He stood in the circle, looking up at the war-husk. It, too, seemed to be looking at him—although its eyes were closed.
A strange feeling rose from the base of his spine. Not fear. More like standing in front of a mirror, but the person in the mirror was not himself—rather, someone you had never met, yet somehow felt you knew. Like the back of a figure in a dream you had had over and over. You had chased that figure countless times in the dream. This time, it had finally stopped, turned around, and was standing there, waiting.
"Are we ready?" he asked the people behind him.
"No," Léon said. "But that won't stop me from entering the array."
Erik said nothing. He was already standing in his own circle. His war-husk was thinner than the other three—gaunt, like a blade that had been honed down. The patterns on its surface were concentrated on the palm and back of the hand, bluer, whiter, like frost-flowers in the golden light. Erik stared at those frost-flowers for a long time—they reminded him of the frost that condensed on his porthole, of the thing the veterans used to say. He was suddenly unsure whether this war-husk had been made by R, or whether it had once been alive. It was too much like him. A little too much, for comfort.
Nadia was the last to enter the array. Of the four husks, hers was the smallest in build. The patterns on hers were distributed along the spine and the back of the neck—she could not see her own war-husk's patterns, but when she stood in the circle, her scanner gave a short beep.
"Is there something?" Gu Yuanzheng asked.
Nadia looked down at the reading on her scanner. Then she looked up.
"Yes," she said. "But I don't know what it is." Her voice was steady, but the fingertips of the hand holding the scanner were, just barely, white.
[Transfer begins. Countdown: 10. 9. 8—]
Gu Yuanzheng felt the circle of light at his feet brighten. The radiance climbed from the soles of his feet, wrapping his legs, his waist, his chest. Warm. Not painful. Like soaking in warm water.
[7. 6. 5—]
He saw Léon's finger trace the last formula in the air. Saw Erik close his eyes. Saw Nadia look down at her scanner, her lips moving slightly, as if reading something.
[4. 3. 2—]
The light swallowed him. The last sensation was not the loss of consciousness—consciousness was poured into another container. Like water poured from one cup into another. The shape changed, but the water was still the same water.
Only he did not know whether the inner walls of that other cup were clean, or whether they had already been used by someone and still held the temperature of the previous owner. He did not have time to think about it. The water had already been poured.
Then everything returned to darkness.