"You should get some rest, Grandpa."
"Dr. Liang is such a good person. How could something like this happen to her? The only reason you don't faint at the sight of the moon anymore is because she took such good care of you."
"Good people are rewarded. I'm sure she'll be okay."
"Sigh. You get some rest too, Xu'er."
"I will. I'll go to sleep as soon as I wash the dishes."
Elias was home. His grandfather, having learned from him that Dr. Liang had been kidnapped, was overcome with a helpless mix of anxiety and confusion. All he could do was pray for her safe return while the police handled the investigation. Elias helped his grandfather wash his feet and get into bed, then went to the kitchen to clean up.
By the time he was done, he could already hear the old man's snores. He had fallen asleep in minutes.
Elias walked into the courtyard and looked up at the night sky.
"Why… why was I made to perceive so much?"
He stared at the moon, his expression a complex storm of resignation, despair, and a faint flicker of relief. It was a look his "mildly disabled" self had never worn before.
He had awakened.
Ever since he had fainted three days ago, his intellect had returned to that of a normal person. Perhaps it had never been a true developmental disability at all.
From birth, the world he saw was different. It was a colossal library of information. Everything around him was a torrent of complex data, some static, some in constant flux. He didn't understand what it was. A flower, a tree, a bird, an insect, a breath of wind, a glass of water—each one revealed itself to him, laying bare the totality of its data.
But he couldn't read it.
The information didn't automatically grant him understanding. For concepts he didn't grasp, the data was just chaos. Take a tree's age, for instance. Before he understood the concept of "age," any information related to it was a meaningless jumble. Only after he learned the concepts of 'year,' 'month,' and 'day,' and understood that a tree should have an age—a measure of time since it was a seed—could he begin to parse that specific data stream.
Only then, when looking at the tree, could a tiny fraction of the information be perceived as: "Age: seven years, three months, twenty days, nine hours, forty-four minutes, one second…"
And that number was changing, every single moment.
By extension, he could perceive everything else: the tree's species, its volume, its mass, the exact number of molecules it contained at that instant. How much water had it absorbed? How many fruits had it borne? He could perceive its entire history, from the moment it was planted to the precise second it first sprouted.
The flood of information was endless. He could even access bizarre data, like who had planted the tree, how many people had touched it, or how many insects had nibbled on its leaves.
It was this extraordinary, innate ability that had branded him as intellectually disabled. Yes, a power that bordered on omniscience had sentenced him to sixteen years as a "dummy."
The reason was simple: the amount of specific information he could perceive was determined by the scope of his own knowledge.
As a newborn, he understood nothing. The world was a completely unknown, chaotic storm of incomprehensible data. For an infant's mind, this perceptive power was an unspeakable cruelty. Countless streams of meaningless information flooded his senses and thoughts, rendering him sluggish, dulling his mind, and crippling his memory. Even his vision was poor, not because of a physical defect, but because his sight was obscured by the chaotic, indescribable data that layered his view of the world.
During intelligence tests, he was utterly lost. He didn't even know what the doctors wanted him to do. In their eyes, it was a clear sign of a cognitive deficit.
In reality, he was brilliant. So brilliant that by age four or five, he had managed to grasp the concept of 'parents' and understood that he needed to learn to speak. He understood that what he saw was different from what everyone else saw. To achieve that by five was a miracle. Teaching a normal child about "mom," "dad," "milk," or "white" is a matter of patience and repetition. Humanity is just that smart. But for his unique case, it was a monumental task. Mom? Dad? One cloud of chaotic information pointing to another cloud of chaotic information and calling it "Mom." It was a miracle he ever made sense of it.
When your perception of the world is fundamentally different, learning becomes incredibly difficult. It's like teaching a blind person the meaning of purple.
Fortunately, as his body and brain developed, his control over his ability grew. At four, he began to learn how to "collapse" the information streams, to default to blocking out the things he couldn't understand. At first, he could only block a tiny fraction, but it was enough to finally get a glimpse of "the world as others see it." As he matured, his filtering ability improved. When he was tested at four and a half, he scored an IQ of fifty. If his grandfather hadn't listened to the fortune-teller and had taken him to a doctor at age one, he wouldn't have been classified as "mildly disabled." They would have called him a complete imbecile. And his vision wouldn't have been 20/100; he would have been functionally blind.
Conversely, the fact that he could score a fifty at all while under such immense informational pressure suggested he might actually be a genius.
The hardest part was the beginning. The more concepts he learned and the more his body matured, the stronger his control became. The information streams began to recede, and his mind grew clearer. By middle school, his IQ had likely recovered to sixty and was accelerating. His poor grades were a result of the intense headaches that came from forcing his brain to think while under assault from the data streams.
He actually loved to learn, because knowledge was his only remedy. The more he understood, the more information he could consciously filter out, freeing up mental space previously occupied by useless data. After dropping out of school, freed from a rigid curriculum, his learning became more self-directed. He observed the world, contemplated it, sat in the fields and listened to the chatter of villagers, and absorbed concepts from television. This gave him time to process and solidify the simplest, most basic knowledge—common sense that other children grasp at a young age.
That half-year at home was the most critical period of his recovery.
And now, since waking from his last blackout, he could finally filter out the vast majority of the information that normal people couldn't see. His physical development governed his ability to block unknown information, while his cognitive development governed his ability to block known information.
With the crushing weight of the data lifted, his intellect had returned to normal—or perhaps, something more. Now, he could open or close the information streams of the world at will. When he wanted to know something, he could simply query it with his mind. When he didn't, the world appeared to him as it did to everyone else.
"Except for the stars," Elias sighed.
His unique perception, his "information sense," wasn't limited to sight; it extended to hearing, touch, and smell. And while he could now filter the information of human society, the moment he looked up at the night sky, his mind was slammed by a new, colossal wave of information. This was why he used to get crippling headaches and faint when looking at the stars.
Every star contained an immense amount of data. He could block out the simple information from a regular star; he'd learned to filter the sun by age six. But even now, at sixteen, he couldn't block the information coming from stars that harbored civilizations.
Yes. Civilizations.
Among the stars were countless civilizations. Stars that were alive, stars that were home to intelligent life, beamed light across the cosmos to Earth. When that light reached him, it carried information infinitely more complex than sunlight. Even after filtering out all the familiar data points he shared with his own sun, there remained an overwhelming amount of information from the stars that he could not yet comprehend.
At sixteen, he still couldn't block it all. The heavens were still an open book of things he couldn't understand, constantly unfolding in his mind. Perhaps with further physical and mental development, he would grow strong enough.
This meant that even now, his mind was in a state of suppression, his thoughts laboring under the weight of cosmic information. Even during the day, he could feel it, though it was much fainter than at night.
Elias Huang's intelligence was being suppressed by the entire starry sky. He was still not at his full potential.