Chapter 609 - 606: Touch

Chapter 609: Chapter 606: Touch

"What... are we?"

When Mo Ling asked this question using the language of touch, the companion playing with him stiffened. It seemed unable to comprehend the question. It circled Mo Ling a few times before nuzzling up against his side.

"I don’t know," the companion replied blankly.

"Follow me." It lightly tapped the side of Mo Ling’s head, urging him to follow it to another place.

Soon, it led Mo Ling into a hard-walled cave.

Here, Mo Ling once again came into contact with the companion who felt like jelly.

"Ask it," the companion who had led him there conveyed to Mo Ling.

’Ask it? Does it know?’

So, Mo Ling coiled himself around the soft, jelly-like companion and conveyed his question.

"What... are we?"

After understanding Mo Ling’s meaning, the jelly companion began to caress him in turn, answering his question.

"We... are Finger Insects."

The answer shattered Mo Ling’s daze, granting him a moment of clarity.

"Finger Insect? A bug like a finger?"

But in the next instant, the red haze washed over him again, drowning his will.

’What’s a finger?’ Mo Ling fell back into a stupor. He knew the word, yet he couldn’t recall its meaning. After a fruitless attempt to think, he had no choice but to give up.

"You are very smart," the jelly companion suddenly praised Mo Ling.

"Why?" Mo Ling nudged it inquisitively.

"Because none of the others have ever asked me this. They only want to play. You are the first Finger Insect to ever ask me this question."

This message was far more complex than anything Mo Ling had ever perceived before. The companion had to touch him for a long time to convey it all, and it took Mo Ling just as long to understand its meaning.

But the jelly companion waited patiently.

"Why?" Mo Ling asked again, once he understood.

"Limitations." The jelly companion replied with an incredibly complex word, then began to slowly trace patterns on Mo Ling again.

Mo Ling didn’t understand at first, but gradually, by piecing together the jelly companion’s various movements—part guesswork, part inference—he finally grasped what it was trying to convey.

"The development of the Finger Insects... is limited..."

The language of touch is a highly inefficient means of communication.

Not only does it convey very little information, but it is also highly prone to ambiguity. A single motion can mean entirely different things in different contexts, making communication for the Finger Insects increasingly difficult.

In the early stages of their development, Finger Insects would often leave their caves to explore. For a Finger Insect, the more things they touched, the richer their understanding of the world became.

Flowers, grass, trees, the earth... Only after touching these things could they understand what they truly were. The more they touched, the more they knew. This understanding of tangible objects made their consciousness clearer. As their understanding of the world grew, so too did their intelligence.

However, exploration meant danger. The more they touched, the more likely they were to encounter something hazardous: poisonous weeds, sharp stones, thorns... All of these could cause tremendous harm to a Finger Insect. Since they could only learn about the world through touch, it was inevitable that they would be injured by such things.

Some Finger Insects, after touching these dangerous things, would use their last moments to warn their companions. They would leave behind a single "word" conveying danger, but their companions, having no idea what the object actually was, could only feel an unknown dread.

Beyond that, there were things that killed Finger Insects before they could even be touched. They would feel a sudden tremor, and a companion beside them would simply vanish, leaving them with no idea what had happened. They collectively referred to these unrecorded phenomena as "Calamities."

As the world they explored expanded, these unknown fears multiplied, and they encountered more Calamities. Gradually, more and more dangerous "words" began to circulate among them.

The Finger Insects grew afraid. They retreated into their caves, no longer willing to explore the outside world.

Some Finger Insects strongly opposed this decision, believing their race shouldn’t be confined to the caves. If they didn’t touch the world, they could never know it.

"But to touch the world is to touch danger."

These proponents of exploration were met with even fiercer opposition.

For Finger Insects, touch was the only way to know the world. Knowledge passed on from others was, in the end, just a "word," an ethereal "motion." They could never truly understand "what that thing really is."

Knowing the word for "grass" was not the same as knowing grass itself. One had to actually touch grass to fully understand what it represented, to link that abstract motion to a real-world object.

But what about poisonous weeds? What about thorns?

To truly understand them, one had to touch them. But touching them meant death...

To know the world is to be doomed to die?

The Finger Insects came to this realization, and a wave of despair washed over the entire race.

This was the limitation of the Finger Insects, a reality they had no choice but to face.

Playing in the cave was safe, of course, but since they had refused to explore the outside world, the collective intellect of the Finger Insects had begun to regress as the older generations who had been outside passed away.

The newborns knew fewer and fewer words, and even when they learned a word, they couldn’t connect it to a physical object. Some didn’t even know what a "tree" was. The elders could tell them, but they would quickly forget it in the course of their play.

The intelligence of the Finger Insects wasn’t actually low. They could easily memorize anything they touched, quickly forming a mental outline of the object’s shape. Their powers of abstract thought were exceptionally strong; if they explored an area, they could even construct a three-dimensional map of it in their minds.

Their understanding of the world was derived from touch. By hiding in the cave, they could never touch the world, and so their minds ceased to turn.

The newborns became increasingly simple and dull. They no longer contemplated the true nature of the world, instead spending their days at play, trapped in the cave until they died.

The elder Finger Insects were powerless. They could teach the newborns all manner of words and describe the world’s beauty, but they could not teach them what the world was *truly* like.

The newborns couldn’t imagine things they had never touched. The world inside their minds was this cave—their most familiar place, and their most unyielding cage.

Coiled around Mo Ling, the jelly companion slowly finished recounting the history of the Finger Insect race.

Only then did Mo Ling notice that the jelly companion’s skeleton had grown somewhat soft, and strange wrinkles had appeared at the base of its body.

"Are you... old?" Mo Ling dazedly tapped out his question onto the jelly companion.

"Me? I’m about to die," the jelly companion replied nonchalantly. It gently caressed Mo Ling, offering its heartfelt counsel: "You must go and touch the world for yourself. Our world isn’t just this cave..."

"There are flowers, soil, trees, mountains, seas, storms, sunlight..."

"The hard, the soft, the rough, the smooth, the tangible, the intangible..."

"So beautiful... so beautiful."