In the cramped library, you slowly leaf through the book, but the pages have been devoured by worms. The million defenders of the Battle of Yolanda happen to be ravaged by the bookworms. In that case, how could they withstand the onslaught of the True Sting? Furiously, you turn to the next chapter and find, much to your chagrin, that Nevado's death is falsely written. The chapter claims that he is still alive, and he is merely hiding in the shadows of a small asteroid belt.
That is outright absurd! You've decided to fix these memories, filling up the gaps by seeking the truth in the sepia past. Then, you will cut away the twisted and fabricated chapters to set the records straight. Finally, you mend the wounds of the tattered book and wait until the bleeding stops before you smooth the pages and put it back in the library and archives.
You are the repairman of history who fills in the missing holes and purges the tainted past.
Do you like listening to stories? The thrilling adventures and epic love stories of others are akin to the stalactites in a cave, as they are invaluable treasures formed b the drip of memories. An elderly lady lets out a guffaw — she was once hit by a meteor rain during her voyage in the Unicorn Nebula but ran into a long-lost friend on the rescue ship. A general is in tears — his fleet suffered a crushing defeat in the deciding battle in the Yellow Citrus Nebula due to his erroneous judgment. Having lost three arms, he also can no longer fly with his huge scale wings. You write down their stories, laughing and crying with them.
Who doesn't know you? You're a biographer from New Londinium. Shush, listen carefully — the next story is coming.
How to unearth the past from the sand? The three-horned Bor Leviathans have faded into the sea formed from melted mountain ranges. The one-eyed cannibal polyps have vanished in the glow of the colony ships. The scanner meticulously takes in every bone and imprint, leaving nothing behind. They build in tattered fragments, waiting for you to sort them out.
The stones contain the records of the past, and you see a sea of flowers within the granular fruits. The Dauniets eat the fruits and scatter them to the other end of the continent during their migratory flight. Web-like towers erected on the edges of the continent evolve into golden plants that grow in the crevices of the soil. Then, the heatwave comes, followed by the algal bloom that brings the ancient cycle to an end.
You gather the carbonized past and narrate the secrets of bygone days in the present.
You gently stir the ends of memory, extracting a strand of pain and then throwing it into an abandoned Memory Bubble tank. Having experienced separation from his beloved family in the Great Evacuation and the death of his long-kept intellitail songbird in the cage following a contaminent leak in the Kuvida Nebula, a depressed young man became withdrawn to the whole world and came to you, hoping to have his whole life deleted.
You open the backup memory bank. Warriors heading to the battlefield and travelers on an expedition gave you their memories in return for your treatment. Meticulously, you select the suitable medicine and mix them according to the correct proportion. An unbreakable promise, the determination to rebuild broken homes, and insignificant changes are enough to embolden a person to overcome reality. As he embarks on the journey to reunite with his family, you close the door and take a short break.
This is such a long story… You immerse in the coolant as data passes through the pipe.
In the era where the stars were in their past positions and the entire universe was cold and silent, the greedy scholars built enormous eyes in the darkness in an attempt to view all the colors of the future. Their future turned out to be much shorter than imagined, but those eyes remembered everything.
You predicted the birth and death of the stars. The changes took place quickly — they were devoured by ancient beasts and visited by the Swarm. Soon, the surroundings became quiet again, and only the eyes remembered the changes. Without you realizing it, the nomads who wandered here established a new nation on your body. They were once ambitious until their idealistic nation was drowned by war… Only you remember it.
For the royals and nobles of court, as well as the luminaries with their masteries, their deeds are known throughout the universe, to all who hear their tales. But to you, this is the most banal story of them all. How would youngsters aboard subspace warp jump ships even imagine that in the gloomy underground, there are min-digging Tellarians who have never even linked up with the Interastral Peace Network before? Those ostentatious merchants sipping on fine wine at Pier Point, they could never hear the lamentations of the Hyper-distant Delivery porters.
Their voices are too meek, like the snow in early winter, never fully formed before they melt. You will howl in the stead of those muted throats, to let the universe hear the voices of the dust. You will infiltrate the pitch-black nocturne, to tell the people not to go quietly in the night. You are recording the joys in the dirt treated with spite by others, recording the tragedies and evils on the battlefields of dictators and butchers.
If all of humanity has lost its voice, then you will become their final tongue.
In a flourishing world of opulence, never before set foot upon by Memokeepers, you weave a brand-new visage — not too young, not too old, a face not even a mirror can capture, only in the eyes of people, as you elegantly stroll along the alleyways. You trade candy for a night of adventure from the songs of a shepherd boy and pluck a distant lover from the eyes of a sorrowful youngster. You retrieve a comrade's countenance for a wizened man, and he gifts you with the tragic war campaign of when the heavenly tower was toppled.
Intelligent life — nothing more than mayflies in the folds of the universe. From faraway grasslands to warp jump stations that occupy half a city, their builders have experienced long stings of life. But these barely compare to the time it took for Redfeather Wolves to evolve. You know that the stories before you will eventually fade away, but in the paradise that transcends the physical, there are memories that remain immortal.
You fall to the ground intentionally and, as he helps you to your feet, his fingertips brush past your neck like a sickle, severing the memories lurking deep in your subconscious. Toxic data, like thick, black blood. He had glimpsed these stories in the after-midnight internet. They silently take root in the host's mind and quietly wait for the host to become insane in the corrosion. But now, they have been reduced to no more than ashes in the palm of a hand.
Stowaway electronic lifeforms, an infectious memetic virus. They tarnish the sacred memories and lurk in the cracks of consciousness that even the sun cannot perceive. You transform into Death and walk among the masses, joining these beings in a game of cat-and-mouse, uprooting the filth immediately and locking them away in jail. In this world, there are things that must not be done, as well as memories that must not be retained.
There is a word that even the wealthiest merchants of Pier Point will happily drop into a joke to lighten the air. There is a story that spreads throughout the Aether Network, and hackers happily talk about it before spreading it far and wide throughout the universe.
You cast aside your cumbersome body and compile all of your information into a meme. Whenever someone taps to play, a new copy of you is born in their language center. Their brain decodes modern slang and stores it in their data, where a new self takes root in their cognition. Like a worm attached onto words and jokes, it crawls along the trails of the Synesthesia Beacon towards the conscious being that accepted the infection.
There is a meme that lurks within the fashionable, swims in the current of the popular, and silently becomes a parasite in the memories of humankind.
Nothing is permanent, not even permanence itself. People's bodies decay, stories fade away, and the third death named “forgotten” will always lie in wait. You recall the great tree that stood in front of your gate as a child. Its branches broke, its sap flowed like weeping pus, then it made a full recovery. That repulsive scar will remain with it for eternity, until the soil becomes poison and the buildings collapse to the ground one after one.
You want to leave a scar on the universe too, too make it suffer and remember your name. The pulverized stars burst into brilliant light and the destructive scene is bored into the eyes of all living beings, ensuring that the fear of this day is passed down to every generation for eternity. The call of death advances toward the end of the world. Endless millennia later, when even the amber that constructs the walls crumbles, there will still be those on distant shores who can see the delayed death rays.
The hands of time have stopped, and your moment is no more. Only the scars of havoc still carry its stories of the past, told between nightmares in song.
A child, stunned by the sight of the Antimatter Legion's battle, loses his mind forever. An old man, enchanted by the miracles of Yaoshi, sets out on a relentless quest for immortality. Consciousness births pain, and memory begets sorrow. If there is anything that gives rise to the suffering of reality, it is the tainted past of sapient minds.
You erase the memory of happiness, so that no one may ever feel the sting of pain. You shatter the memory of prosperity, so that decay is never known again. Passing by planet after planet steeped in sorrow, you silence their cries. You obliterate the disappointed yesterdays, so that they may become weightless. The second-purest thing in this world is the newborn child, untouched by knowledge. But the first are the stones by the river, for they exist beyond the reach of cognition.
How many stories fade into oblivion, as if they never existed? You have watched a fleet loaded with energy storage receptacles plunge into the depths of the Interstellar Energy War, never to return — your friends, your loved ones. You have roamed a crystalline planet where cloudbirds soared with their ion-combed feathers, only to see it vanish from existence — your hometown, your home planet.
How many hardships and heroes have faded into the annals of time, as if they never arrived or made an effort? You must pierce the blackened memoria, fishing for the memory fragments it has consumed, and inscribe them on the pages of history. You will prove their footprints in the empty bowels of nihility.
Your body has been eroded to the point where distinguishing reality from dreams is impossible. Yet, you must continue to pen books for the universe!