I Will Teach You How to Hunt Gods

Chapter 724 - 24: Origin of the Sequence

"October 24th, 2345...?"

Seeing this date, Yun You was obviously startled.

The era she was currently in was the year 2079 AD, and this year 2345 did not seem too far off, although there appeared to be some discrepancies in the calendar.

"Could this be the future?"

Yun You subconsciously thought.

But something felt off because although the screen displayed a year close to modern times, it also mentioned the so-called "400th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations..."

From the scale of this celebration, it seemed that the Earth United Nations in this era held significant importance and couldn’t possibly be some underground organization.

By calculating the time, this organization should have been founded on October 24, 1945.

This presented a problem.

An organization with such vast influence, founded in 1945, which was nearly a century and a half before Yun You’s time, how could it remain unheard of?

In any case, Yun You had never heard of such an organization, which was entirely illogical.

After pondering for a moment, the young woman chose not to dwell further on these details and continued to observe this era from a macro perspective.

As she predicted, no matter how many years human civilization had endured, it still appeared as corrupt and stagnant as ever.

The motivation for progress had been replaced by hedonism, the pursuit of stars and the sea had proven to be unattainable and meaningless, and the ice of social conflict could not be melted by technology, leading to despair that slowly bred more madness.

But... fortunately, there were still those who hadn’t given up hope.

While countless individuals indulged in virtual dreams or chemical numbness, a small group of the topmost visionary scientists turned their attention from the vast universe to humanity itself.

"Shua——"

In an instant, Yun You’s "perspective" skimmed over countless secret laboratories.

To avoid surveillance and suppression, scientists resorted to every conceivable strategy.

Some buried their labs deep within Mars’ core magma, others hovered at the edge of Jupiter’s raging atmosphere, and some even hid within the energy nodes of Dyson spheres.

Yun You also saw scientists employing all sorts of unimaginable methods—bombarding subjects with star-level energy to impact their spiritual force field; uploading consciousness into quantum networks for extreme deduction; forcibly unlocking the brain through genetic editing.

Some even attempted to merge with fragments of consciousness from deep space.

The number of sacrifices was countless, with some experiments failing, resulting in mental pollution spreading like a plague, creating countless warped monsters and frenzied spiritual force fields, becoming new sources of terror in that era, with corpses piled high and data vast as smoke... yet the breakthrough remained elusive.

What exactly is the nature of humanity? This question seemed to be eternally bound by an indestructible shackle.

Until—

In an incredibly rudimentary underground research facility that didn’t even resemble a scientific outpost.

Without the energy support of Dyson spheres or the assistance of quantum supercomputers, there were only the most basic instruments and mountains of notebooks.

The owner of this place was an old scholar long forgotten by the mainstream scientific community, his name lost to history’s currents.

He hunched his back, his hair white and sparse, hands covered in age spots yet tremblingly but resolutely writing on paper.

Strangely enough, this era also mastered genetic alteration surgeries, and even ordinary people could surpass the millennial age threshold, with two or three hundred years being a normal youthful state.

However, this old scholar, appearing through Yun You’s perception to be only in his seventies, had aged into this state.

Evidently, he had refused all genetic alteration surgeries.

And what surprised Yun You even more was that this old scholar’s eyes did not have the near-obsessive madness of other scientists, but rather a tranquility that came from understanding some truth.

His research project was not on mental stimulation or genetic alteration, but... the soul.

He believed the root of human consciousness was an elusive soul, and although this power had never manifested in past history, it truly existed, influencing and changing the entire world without humanity even realizing it.

He spent his life attempting to find that soul node.

And then... perseverance paid off.

On a stormy night, the old scholar successfully captured that fleeting energy.

Without hesitation, he activated this trace of energy, allowing it to permeate his body, which was long past its prime.

There was no earth-shattering energy explosion, no dazzling brilliance.

The space around the old scholar simply rippled silently like a pebble dropped in water.

Then, he slowly opened his eyes.

...

At that moment, time seemed to stand still.

In that instant, Yun You’s consciousness felt an unprecedented shiver; she seemed to see countless human souls within the Solar System illuminate simultaneously, as if summoned like stars!

Countless faint points of light transcended physical boundaries, class distinctions, and even the limits of life and death, converging into streams of light that ultimately flowed into the skinny old man’s body.

He became a vessel.

A vessel that held the entire human race’s soul energy.

Following that...

A familiar power erupted from the old man.

It was both cold and unexpectedly warm, giving a sense of death, yet full of vitality.