Chapter 1289 Memory Retrospection

Swimming upstream in Lockmarton's memory was an unpleasant process. A large number of memory fragments from a time so distant it was unimaginable were mixed together, interspersed with all kinds of bizarre phenomena. Some of these phenomena, even a brief glimpse of, would cause great pressure on the soul. It was unknown whether it was because its soul fragments were severely damaged, or because Lockmarton's strange life form caused its perception and memory methods to be different from humans. In short, Hao Ren saw a lot of unidentifiable things in the chaotic information—since the little bit of orderly memory at the deepest point, the rest were mostly chaotic and difficult to distinguish fragments.

But after careful sorting, these chaotic and difficult to distinguish fragments could still provide some information.

According to Hao Ren's judgment, Lockmarton spent an extremely long time with the Goddess of Creation. In the earliest years, the Goddess of Creation was a ignorant existence, and Lockmarton was the same. On the extremely lonely and monotonous primordial Founding Star, they spent a long time allowing their respective minds to grow, and even when they embarked on their first expedition to explore the starry sky, this growth was far from over.

They ventured deep into the universe without being fully prepared.

And this exploration was carried out more than once.

In those most vague and disordered memories, Hao Ren saw Lockmarton and its "mother" flying over the orbit of the Founding Star, and also saw them wandering in the dark and cold space, clumsily trying various ways to quickly travel through the universe. They almost crashed headlong into the sun, or rather, they had already crashed into the sun, but relied on the Goddess of Creation's bizarre and inexplicable divine power to directly modify the cause and effect of this failed event. They also found a semi-solid primordial planet with active geological movements, and the molten crust and dramatically changing planetary structure amazed the Goddess of Creation.

In an earlier space shuttle, Lockmarton also encountered a "mysterious energy storm." It fell ill, and the Goddess of Creation had to take it to a nearby gas giant to recuperate for a thousand years. In order to avoid similar dangers in the future, the Goddess of Creation once again injected her divine power into Lockmarton's body, giving it a soul core that could be immune to most mundane harm.

And the biggest crisis they encountered was during their first attempt at a "super-deep space jump." They leaped across a distance that exceeded their previous imagination. This jump even distorted the space-time rules near the Founding Star, causing its image in three-dimensional space to become a bright spot that could not be expressed in mathematical language—this accident almost prevented them from finding their way home, and it took them thousands of years to return to the Founding Star from the vast universe.

These experiences of exploring the deep space of the universe with its mother were buried deep in Lockmarton's memory, and presented a fragmented and disordered state. Each memory was like a frozen specimen, the picture still existed but the warmth had faded, as if the coldness of the deep space had also frozen Lockmarton's heart—if it had a heart.

However, the Goddess of Creation knew nothing about these changes, or rather, because she had never come into contact with other living individuals, and had no experience of growth herself, the Goddess of Creation did not know what these changes meant.

As time passed, Lockmarton itself was constantly changing, absorbing the divine power of the Goddess of Creation, and absorbing the dark and chaotic primordial energy of the deep space. It became more and more powerful, and its body changed from a small ball of flesh to an indescribable behemoth.

At the end of these fragmented memories, the flow of images became rapid and blurred, and Hao Ren could only barely infer some things from them:

When they were traversing an extremely ancient star region, they found a large number of stellar burnout remnants. The universe's stars were silent and dim, like a tomb of stars. And in the depths of this "tomb," they encountered a group of wonderful "creatures." They had no physical form, and floated in the air like glowing gas clouds, filled with starlight-like glittering spots. It was the first time they had seen life other than themselves after wandering in the universe for so many years. The "mother" seemed unusually excited, and she spent thousands of years with those creatures.

Under the guidance of those mysterious creatures, the Goddess of Creation saw other primitive life forms. Some were like glowing gas clouds, some were like floating rocks that could be seen everywhere in space, and some jumped in the asteroid belt like lightning. Each flicker was a reincarnation of life and death, and countless such lightning bolts came together to form a complete, communicable consciousness.

Almost all of these creatures were very different from the carbon-based life or silicon-based and sulfur-based life forms that Hao Ren was familiar with. Their life forms could be said to be beyond cognition, mostly between energy and matter. It seemed that the ancient life in the primordial universe of the Dream Plane were all like this.

And the living environment of all these life forms when they were discovered was also strikingly similar: they all lived in ancient dark star regions that had already burned out, leaving only the embers of stars. Material resources were almost exhausted, and it was as cold and silent as a tomb.

In any case, this did not seem like a good habitable environment.

Considering the long history of the ancient creatures, it seemed understandable that their homeland had become like this, but every life form that the Goddess of Creation discovered lived in such an environment, and had not shown the slightest desire to go outside, which was a bit suspicious.

However, in Lockmarton's memory, Hao Ren did not find the answer to this question.

Because the subsequent memories became more chaotic and fragmented, and showed signs of serious distortion.

The further back, the more obscure and deformed the images in Lockmarton's memory became. After the colors faded, only cold, icy gray-white remained, and everything seemed to be shrouded in a layer of shaking water curtain lens, presenting a bizarre and strange appearance. At first, the figure of the Goddess of Creation was still clear, but gradually, even the figure of the Goddess of Creation became a beam of jumping dim yellow light.

The earth in its vision became twisted strips.

The stars in its vision burned with pale flames, and countless hideous giant limbs rose to the surface.

The nebula in its vision was like hell, and countless celestial bodies were swallowed and ground, and swallowed by the wriggling light and shadow.

Because these memories themselves did not have emotional residue, Hao Ren could not judge what changes had taken place in Lockmarton's inner world when its vision became like this, but as far as he himself was concerned, these scenes were undoubtedly terrifying.

If this was not a data corruption phenomenon of soul fragments, then these distorted and changed visions were a true memory portrayal. They may symbolize that Lockmarton had been affected by some dark force, and this influence caused the world in its eyes to change.

In the final few pictures, the information that Hao Ren could get was even less, but he could see the end of Lockmarton:

It finally became a dark and terrifying monster, destroying everything in front of it with its powerful force.

It no longer obeyed its mother, but instead confronted her again and again, using the act of destroying everything to fight against the mother's will to protect and create.

It even attacked the first ecological planet that its mother had painstakingly created, and almost completely wiped out the life of the entire planet overnight.

In the end, the Goddess of Creation realized that Lockmarton's madness could not be saved, and she had to personally destroy her first child.

Lockmarton's body was annihilated, its power was extracted, and its soul was severely damaged.

However, the Goddess of Creation could not completely eliminate it. Not only was it difficult to do so, but more importantly, in order to make Lockmarton "grow up healthily," she rashly injected a large amount of divine power into the other party's body, and even created an almost indestructible divine core for it. It was difficult for the Goddess of Creation's own divine power to annihilate it. Even if she used all her strength to forcibly destroy it, the backlash caused would be extremely terrifying, and may even affect every space in the universe that the Goddess of Creation had visited through causal connection.

Faced with this situation, the Goddess of Creation had to choose to deal with this "rebellious son" by means of permanent imprisonment. So she created Coro, and the first twenty-one wardens of the Coro world—that is, the prototype of the later Guardian Giants, the powerful "Old Watchers."

After this memory, there was complete darkness.

Lockmarton's memory of being imprisoned in "Coro," the process of its awakening midway, information about the Godslayer Sword, the fall of the Goddess of Creation, and the information of the ten thousand years after that, these memories that should have existed were all darkness.

Hao Ren suspected that this part of the memory was not erased or shielded by itself, but that Lockmarton's thinking at that time had been alienated and chaotic to a completely indescribable degree, and any rational reading attempt would not yield results.

Accompanied by a burst of dizziness and a sense of dislocation in time and space, the scene in front of him shook and shattered and reorganized into the familiar bridge of the Giant Tortoise Rock Terrace.

Singer Tunara and Great Sage Anthony looked over here curiously from left to right. Noticing that Hao Ren's eyes moved, Tunara couldn't wait to come up: "Did you see it?"

"I saw it," Hao Ren shook his head. The mental damage caused by directly reading Lockmarton's memory was greater than expected. Just now, for a moment, he even felt unsteady on his feet, and he believed that his reading process probably only lasted less than a few seconds in real time. "There is a lot of information, and even some contradictions with some of the information I have already mastered... I need to wait until I have time to sort out these contradictions."

Anthony nodded in understanding: "You sort it out, and if you can, publish it in the public data chain, and we can discuss it together at the next 'mind meeting.'"

Hao Ren nodded: "I will. As for now, I have to go back and clean up the mess."