The Omniscient

Chapter 3: The Pressure from the Stars

“Grandpa, you should rest early,” Huang Ji said softly.

“How could something like this happen to someone as good as Dr. Liang? It’s thanks to her care that you don’t faint when you see the moon anymore.”

“Good people are rewarded. She’ll be alright.”

“Sigh… Xu’er, you should get some rest too.”

“Yes, I’ll wash the dishes and go to bed.”

Huang Ji had returned home, and his grandfather had been deeply distressed upon hearing from him about Dr. Liang’s kidnapping. He was both worried and confused but ultimately helpless. This was something for the police to handle. The old man could only hope and pray for Dr. Liang’s safe return.

Huang Ji helped his grandfather fetch water to wash his feet, then assisted him to bed. Afterward, he cleaned up the dishes in the kitchen.

When everything was done, he walked into the yard and looked up at the sky. His grandfather’s snores echoed faintly from the house—he had fallen asleep in the time it took to wash the dishes.

This conflicted look was something entirely new for someone like him, labeled as mildly intellectually disabled.

He had awakened.

Since fainting three days ago, his intelligence had returned to that of an average person.n/ô/vel/b//jn dot c//om

Perhaps he had never truly been intellectually disabled in the first place.

The world he saw had always been different from that of others.

To him, the world appeared like a massive database, filled with intricate information. Everything—every flower, every tree, every bird and insect, every gust of wind, every sip of water—revealed its data to him, exposing all its inner workings.

But the problem was, he couldn’t understand it.

The information didn’t automatically become meaningful unless he already understood the concepts behind it. For instance, a tree’s age. If Huang Ji didn’t know what "age" meant, the information about it would appear chaotic and incomprehensible.

Only when Huang Ji grasped the idea of age, learned about years, months, and days, understood that trees have ages, and recognized that time had passed from when the tree was a seed to the present, would the information begin to make sense.

Then, when he looked at the tree, part of its data would become clear:

"Age: seven years, three months, twenty days, nine hours, forty-four minutes, and one second…"

And this information would continue to change every moment.

The same applied to other details: the tree’s species, volume, mass, the number of molecules it contained, how much water it had absorbed, how many fruits it had borne, the exact times it sprouted, and every instance it bore fruit—all this could be perceived, as though reviewing its entire history. ȐÃƝǑ𐌱Ëṥ

The sheer amount of information was staggering.

He could even know things like who planted the tree, how many people had touched it, how many bugs had nibbled on it, and other bizarre details.

This innate, extraordinary ability had been with him since birth.

And it was because of this overwhelming gift that he had spent sixteen years as an intellectually disabled person.

Yes, a seemingly omniscient ability had rendered him a fool for most of his life.

It was all because the amount of specific information Huang Ji could perceive depended entirely on his scope of understanding.

When he was born, he understood nothing. The entire world was a vast, unknown chaos to him, brimming with countless incomprehensible pieces of information.

This overwhelming sensory input was far too much for an infant to handle—unbearably cruel, even. His senses and thoughts were flooded with strange, unintelligible data he couldn’t make sense of.

As a result, he became sluggish, his thinking dulled, his memory poor, and his eyesight seemingly impaired.

Or perhaps what appeared to be poor vision was simply the result of too much information obscuring his view—chaotic and complex, filled with an endless barrage of indescribable data.

When subjected to IQ tests and reflex assessments, he fared terribly. He couldn’t even comprehend what the doctors were asking him to do, leading them to conclude he had intellectual disabilities.

But in truth, Huang Ji was extraordinarily intelligent. So intelligent that by the age of four or five, he had grasped the concept of "parents," realized that he was supposed to learn to speak, and understood that the way he saw the world was different from others.

The fact that he could comprehend these things at all was nothing short of a miracle.

For most children, learning concepts like "dad," "mom," "milk," or "white" involves repetition and patience. With just a few tries, most kids understand because human cognition is naturally brilliant.

But for Huang Ji, the process was vastly more difficult. What was “dad”? A mass of chaotic data. What was “mom”? Another incomprehensible mass. Pointing to one chaotic cluster and calling it "mom," then pointing to another and calling it "grandpa"—the very act of understanding was miraculous.

Seeing a world different from others made recognizing it unimaginably challenging, akin to teaching a blind person about the color purple or red.

Initially, Huang Ji was practically no different from a blind child.

Fortunately, as his body and brain developed, he gained increasing control over his abilities.

By the time he was four, he began to understand how to limit and filter the flood of information. He could start "ignoring" things he didn’t understand.

This filtering process was rudimentary—he could only block a small portion of the data—but at least he could begin to glimpse the “world others saw.”

As his body matured, his ability to filter information improved, and the burden on his mind lessened. He also learned to suppress even comprehended information when it became too overwhelming.

By the time he underwent testing at age four and a half, this progress allowed him to score an IQ of 50.

If his grandfather hadn’t trusted the fortune teller and had taken him to a doctor at age one instead, the results would have been much worse. At that time, his IQ would have been assessed as far below 50, and he would have been labeled severely intellectually disabled—a complete "idiot."

Similarly, his eyesight would not have been measured as 0.2 but rather as functionally blind—or barely able to detect light.

Paradoxically, his ability to achieve an IQ of 50 despite the crushing overload of information was perhaps evidence of his extraordinary brilliance.

In truth, there was never anything wrong with his eyesight.

The beginning had simply been unimaginably difficult.

As Huang Ji’s understanding of concepts grew and his recognition of the world expanded, his body matured, and his ability to control his powers strengthened.

The overwhelming influx of information gradually narrowed, his mind grew lighter, and his intelligence began to recover.

By the time he reached middle school, his IQ had already improved to 60, and his recovery began to accelerate.

Huang Ji’s poor academic performance stemmed from the overwhelming influx of information that assaulted his mind whenever he tried to think deeply about a problem. The mental strain often led to splitting headaches, which made it impossible to continue studying and sometimes even caused him to faint.

Ironically, he loved learning, because knowledge helped alleviate his condition.

The more he understood about the world, the more irrelevant information he could actively filter out. This freed up mental space previously occupied by useless data.

After dropping out of school and returning home, the lack of academic pressure allowed him to pursue learning in a freer, more self-directed way.

He spent time observing the world, understanding it through his unique lens—sitting in the fields lost in thought, listening to the idle chatter of passersby by the roadside, or absorbing the concepts broadcast on TV.

These quiet, contemplative moments gave him ample time to internalize and sort through basic concepts—common sense, things most people grasp in early childhood.

Only by mastering fundamental logic and understanding could he begin to explore deeper knowledge.

As such, the six months he spent idle at home turned out to be the most crucial period for his recovery.

Since waking from his last fainting spell, Huang Ji had gained the ability to block out the vast majority of the extraneous, non-human information he had been plagued with.

His physical development corresponded with his ability to filter incomprehensible data into a "hidden" state, while his cognitive growth determined how much of the comprehensible data could also be managed.

With the oppressive flood of data largely subdued, his intellect recovered to the level of a normal person—or perhaps even surpassed it.

Now, he could toggle between filtering and accessing the world’s information at will. Whatever he wanted to understand, as long as it was within his grasp of comprehension, he could retrieve directly and instantly.

When he chose not to query this hidden layer of reality, his view of the earth, the village, its people, and the surrounding mountains and rivers aligned with what a normal person might see.

“All except for the starry sky…” Huang Ji sighed.

Beyond sight, he could also use his hearing, touch, and even smell to experience information. Together, these senses formed a unique ability he called his "information sense."

While he could now filter out most human-world information, looking up at the night sky still brought an overwhelming assault of data, shaking his very mind.

This was why, in the past, gazing at the stars had caused him unbearable headaches and even fainting.

Each star carried an immense amount of information. While he had learned to block ordinary celestial data—such as the sun, whose information he managed to filter by the age of six—he remained unable to suppress the data from certain planets.

To be specific, planets harbor civilizations.

Yes… civilizations.

Among the countless stars, many were home to thriving civilizations. Of those, he could perceive at least the ones advanced enough to inhabit their stars directly.

Stars that host life and civilizations emit light that reaches Earth. This light, rich with incomprehensibly complex information, bombarded Huang Ji’s unique senses. Compared to sunlight, it carried an intricacy beyond measure.

The real challenge lay in the fact that even after filtering out information similar to the Sun’s—those ordinary stellar concepts—there remained a wealth of data from the stars that he couldn’t yet understand.

Fortunately, the light he received from these civilization-bearing stars had been weakened and diluted during its journey to Earth. He wasn’t directly perceiving these civilizations at close range, which would have been far more overwhelming.

After he grasped the concepts of stars, civilizations, and aliens, Huang Ji managed to suppress much of the information coming from the cosmos.

But at sixteen years old, he still couldn’t block everything. There was still an abundance of unfiltered, incomprehensible information from the stars pressing down on him.

Perhaps his body needed to mature further, his brain to develop more fully, to completely overcome this burden.

At present, his thinking remained in a "dulled state," hindered by the sheer weight of information.

Even during the day, under his peculiar double-pupiled vision, he could still sense traces of the information from the stars. It was simply less oppressive than at night.

In essence, the entirety of the starry sky was suppressing Huang Ji’s intelligence.

His mind, though much improved, was still far from its lightest and freest state.