The second time Shuixing entered Numberspace to try and re-summon Pechorin, she found him already re-summoned. This surprise sent her disembodied consciousness through a thought-looping tailspin until she found herself in the asset storage envelope for trees. After that she was able to imbue her consciousness with enough volition to avoid being swept away by the tides of changing numbers.
If Pechorin was alive again, she reasoned, the only entities with the power to make it so were—according to her hypothesis—Pechorin himself, or the Yishang. And since Pechorin had not re-summoned himself at any point during his long, dark stay in oblivion, she decided it must have been the Yishang. The question then became: For what purpose? Pechorin had no fan following among the Celestials and no plot relevance to the current apocalyptic special event that the Celestials were aware of. She ruled out the possibility that the Yishang had revived him for the sake of some grand narrative on the Po-Lin side, as the private lives of the Heroes mattered only insofar as the Celestials knew about them. With a finite amount of time to entertain the remaining Celestials and entice them to buy into a new game world, the Yishang's incentive was to show off the “good” Heroes like Boulanger and Ailing, with the “bad” Heroes as one-dimensional villains. Even giving the final boss (who was undoubtedly Natsuko) some last-minute character development was essentially a waste of time.
No matter how Shuixing looked at it, reviving Pechorin was simply bad writing.
It occurred to her that if she wanted to understand the Yishang’s thought process, she must once again return to their communication channels. Entering through an administrator’s access, she had at her fingertips the entire history of the Yishang’s communications stretching back over a decade. Though having trawled a good portion of their most recent (and comparatively sparser) communications, any attempt to investigate further back was confronted by a scientist’s worse nightmare: An unfavorable signal-to-noise ratio. There was simply no practical way to pare down the enormous cache of data aside from using key terms like ‘Pechorin,' a prospect which itself presented her with a scientist’s second worst nightmare: The unknown unknown, or the lack of knowledge about which knowledge might be useful to her. She could key-word her way to an email between programmers detailing algorithm parameters, but this might lead down a rabbit trail of mundane, useless knowledge. Conversely, an off-hand lunch request might hint at the physical layout of the Yishang’s realm, in turn aiding the discovery of an escape route to whatever wider network of algorithms bolstered the Yishang’s private one.
And Shuixing herself.
All of this was nothing but a cognitive detour from what she had come here to do, and was also a sign to Shuixing that she was losing her mental dexterity within Numberspace. Refocusing, she queried the Yishang's email database with ‘Pechorin’ as a key term. The results surprised her. Or, more accurately, the lack of any results since 2045—over two years ago prior. The last and final email mentioning Pechorin by name (whose ‘real’ name in the Celestial language was actually 毕巧林, or Biqiaolin) was dated to October 25th, 2045:
Though this email provided some modicum of insight into the permanent death crisis of two years ago, it told Shuixing nothing about what the Yishang intended with ‘Biqiaolin’ in the present. Nor did Shuixing find it helpful to follow Huang Jianyu’s organization tree since he had been reassigned to the company’s newest game, Novo Nocturn Nine, the previous year. Flux Aeternum, the game whose world they were all stuck inside, had had its team reduced to a skeleton crew whose main objective was to manage the finale and prepare the server to be turned off. With no notion of what else to do, Shuixing flicked to one of the earliest emails mentioning Pechorin, praying for any insight she could find. She found one from 2040, the year the game was released:
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None of this was new information. Upsetting in its flippancy and disregard for Shuixing and the other entities of Po-Lin, yes, but not new, with the exception of learning Pechorin had been deliberately made underpowered to test the ‘competition method.’ Shuixing realized there was little chance of penetrating the Yishang’s motives, and that it was equally likely, in light of that, that Pechorin had simply chosen an arbitrary moment to re-summon himself and the Yishang had nothing to do with it. Had she possessed a respiratory system to sigh with, Shuixing would have.
This line of inquiry no longer worth pursuing, and with an indeterminate amount of time remaining until the end of her journey, Shuixing decided to update herself on the emails coming through the Yishang's mail server. The most recent email was one entitled simply, ‘Relating WeChat Conversation.’
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