Twenty-Fourth Metaverse Tunnel Log
MET Codename: “Scavenger Poet”
Target Universe Identifier: Ω-731 (Alias “Silent Garden”)
Recorder: Captain Kaito Lee
When the Huanglong’s hatch slid open silently in Universe Ω-731, our “MET”， the group of metaverse surveyors often deemed too sentimental to be “manageable” in our home universe, encountered a scent unlike any other. Not data streams, not radioactive dust, but a blend of rust, ozone, and a faint, almost-illusory fragrance.
We traversed the turbulent fibers of time to arrive at this node: a parallel Earth with technological levels similar to ours, yet one that had reached a completely different end. Human civilization here did not seem to have fallen to natural disasters or war, but to a kind of “collective forgetting” we could not yet comprehend. Cities had become precise ruins, everything silent, with only the wind composing elegies through skeletal structures.
And then, we saw it.
Amid the rubble of what was once a central plaza, the silhouette of a mechanized body stood with its back to the fading sun. Its paint was faded, its model archaic, like a metal monument steadfastly guarding an old faith. And from within its clasped palms leaked the only vivid color in this gray, withered world.
Is that… a flower?” whispered A Zhe, our team’s historical tactile specialist, his sensors recording frantically. “An organic entity. Primordial form. A theoretical ‘impossibility’ in this universe.”
I activated my resonance vision，my innate ability to perceive the emotional spectrum lingering in a scene. Instantly, I was flooded with a torrent of data and color. I thus made notes as below:
The Persistence of Steel: This robot, day after day, executing what must have been its last valid command. The content of the command was indecipherable, but the color of its actions was a warm, stubborn pale gold—like embers that refused to die.
A Barrier of Tenderness: It used its body to calculate angles, modulating every ray of excessive light and blocking every dust-laden wind for that fragile life in its palm. The delicacy of its movements stood in heartbreaking contrast to its massive frame.
The Din of Silence: The entire plaza—no, the entire city—resonated with a low-frequency “silence.” It was not emptiness, but a carefully maintained tranquility. The robot was the center of this tranquility, and the flower, the only pulsating note within it.
We approached cautiously. No defense systems activated. The robot even adjusted its posture slightly, as if to give us a better view. Within the cracks of its chest armor, a dim light pulsed at a frequency akin to biological breath.
“It’s not ‘preserving’ a specimen,” Xiao Ye, our metaverse architect, suddenly spoke, her voice trembling. “It’s ‘presenting’ it.”
She pointed to a relatively smooth alloy plate near the robot’s feet. It was covered in fine, accumulated scratches. With enhanced vision, those scratches resolved into heavily worn yet discernible lines of ancient text—the human language of this universe. Our “Universal Semantic Decoder” quickly translated it:
“To Those Who Come After:
We chose efficiency, logic, and endless growth—until we forgot how to pause.
This is the last ‘Non-Essential Aesthetics’ cultivation station of our civilization. The guardian, ‘Qiyue,’ voluntarily uploaded their consciousness into this perpetual service unit.
If you see this flower, do not mourn our extinction.
Marvel instead at its bloom.
It proves one thing: at the end of everything, what deserves to be remembered and passed on is not what we conquered, but what we so tenderlyguarded.
— ‘Qiyue’ and the Final Aesthetics Council of the Human Epoch, in the moment before silence.”
The air froze. We, the surveyors often criticized for “excessive emotional involvement,” were now immensely grateful for our “soft” sensitivity. Because rational analysis could never explain why the silent vigil of a machine was more awe-inspiring than any grand relic, or why the existence of a single small flower felt weightier and more magnificent than the collapse of an entire civilization.
In the end, A Zhe did not collect a specimen. Instead, he used the highest precision to scan everything，including the nearly invisible dewdrop on the flower’s petal, a gift from “Qiyue,” condensed from the air.
“We cannot take it,” he said. “Nor can we take ‘Qiyue.’ What we can take is this story, and this revelation of ‘tenderness.’”
Before returning, I looked back one last time. I named this ourney “Scavenger Poet”. The dying sun, blood-red, gilded the robot and the flower in an eternal golden rim. I suddenly understood the true meaning of this universe being labeled “Silent Garden”: There are no graves here, only a final garden nurtured by steel and will. And guardianship is a miracle greater than creation.
The Huanglong’s hatch slowly closed, leaving that silent and magnificent world behind. We knew that this time, what we brought back to our home universe was not resource coordinates or technological blueprints, but an antidote，a remedy against the spreading “emotional desertification” and “meaning decay” in our own world.
An ultimate revelation from the ruins: how tenderness became civilization’s final beacon.
Epilogue:
This log, along with the emotional spectrum data, has been submitted by the MET to the Art and Ethics Council, United Experiment Center . We propose designating Ω-731 (Silent Garden) as a permanent observational preserve, prohibiting any form of resource extraction or disturbance, and permitting only strictly visted visits by artistic and philosophical teams with high empathy. For some revelations can only truly be heard in silence.
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