Chapter 44 Yun Tianming's Love_1
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Yun Tianming's attitude towards humanity was complex; he was neither an extremist nor did he believe he had to save anything.
"Who am I, where am I, and what should I do?" Yun Tianming's answers were entirely different from ours.
The most critical layer of the Staircase Program was not whether Yun Tianming was loyal to the human world, but to allow the Trisolaran world to feel human emotions, understand the human world, and comprehend human trickery. Humans knew nothing about Trisolarans, but they had enough understanding of themselves.
Wade didn't care whether Yun Tianming was loyal; what he cared about was his familiarity with his own opponent. When the Trisolarans prepared to flee and accepted Yun Tianming's request to see Cheng Xin once more, it was clearly something the original Trisolarans would never do. Their consent indicated that they had begun to possess a tinge of human emotions.
By then, the Trisolarans had greatly improved in terms of cunning, at least fooling the general populace was easy for them. The Trisolarans must have also known that Yun Tianming might reveal some intelligence to the Earthlings, but they didn't care; they even seemed willing to give humans a chance.
Yun Tianming didn't provide humans with the answer to avoid the Dark Forest Strike, but he gave human children a choice, which determined their future possibility of standing in the universe.
Yun Tianming offered humans three options, and their choice determined humanity's future. He even implied that the human world might be downgraded, but the choice of humanity still disappointed him as expected.
After so many years, Cheng Xin had not grown, and neither had humanity. Not growing came with a price; an inability to grow was unsuitable for survival, and the destiny of humanity had already been sealed.
Cheng Xin was both fortunate and tragic; she faced too many choices in her life, each one capable of deciding the fate of all humanity.
Such decisions, if said to be without Yun Tianming's influence, would be unbelievable to the reader. The Trisolarans secretly pushed for Cheng Xin to become the Swordholder for various reasons, but choosing Cheng Xin definitely had Yun Tianming's involvement. The wealth accumulated from the star Yun Tianming gave to Cheng Xin later was related to the cultural industry, and most of humankind's cultural output originated from Trisolaris, undoubtedly including Yun Tianming's influence. Wade, using Cheng Xin's wealth to manufacture the Lightspeed Spacecraft, naturally had to comply with Cheng Xin's restrictions. Wade could have been the second Zhang Beihai, but he met that permanently childlike individual.
Cheng Xin was the decision-maker at every critical juncture of human destiny, facing choices with the strongest mission in human history, without equal.
And behind all this was always Yun Tianming's shadow. Was this love or hate for Cheng Xin?
Handing over human destiny to Cheng Xin, did he really not understand what Cheng Xin would choose? Perhaps he knew; perhaps this was his love for Cheng Xin.
The first layer of Yun Tianming's love for Cheng Xin was the hazy moonlight love from their college days.
The second layer of Yun Tianming's love for Cheng Xin was his willingness to follow her into hell, even though it yielded despair and desolation for him.
The third layer of Yun Tianming's love for Cheng Xin was entrusting her with human destiny, which was, indeed, love by Lin Sen's view, as the nature of love is the hope for the other's growth. Just as a father wants his child to grow, letting a child grow through adversity is true love. As lovers hope their partner strives to match them, love is a process of both striving closer together (in plain terms, love is the process of understanding and accommodating each other, while love at first sight translates to "you lust for their body; you're despicable!").
The fourth layer of Yun Tianming's love for Cheng Xin was that growth comes at a cost, as does failing to grow up; Cheng Xin needed to pay the price for her choices, and love ultimately requires self-restriction. As children, we treat our parents as extensions of our hands, thinking of them as part of our "self"—when hungry, parents feed us; when cold, they clothe us. As we grow, we become independent, and it is in this independence that we develop love for our parents. This independence is a form of self-restriction, removing the parts that aren't the self.
The fifth layer of Yun Tianming's love for Cheng Xin would continue to the end of the universe...
And there may even be a sixth layer, a seventh layer...
Up to the point where Yun Tianming's love for Cheng Xin equates to his love for the universe, for gods and beasts.
No matter how much we curse Cheng Xin, perhaps in Yun Tianming's heart, Cheng Xin is forever that moonlight beam. Is surviving with extreme rationality really the right approach? We are born human, yet we strive to become beasts.
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No matter how Yun Tianming treated Cheng Xin, Wade didn't care, all Wade wanted was to wait for one opportunity.
The Trisolarans wouldn't give it, but Yun Tianming might, just one chance, one was enough!
For humans, one chance... was it too few?
The core of Wade's work was deception and betrayal, he understood Yun Tianming, and he also empathized with him. Yun Tianming was undoubtedly gifted, every civilization had its charm, and he knew Yun Tianming would choose Trisolaris. He just hoped Yun Tianming would give himself, give humans a chance.
Wade hid everything about himself, he could even deceive Sophon. At the Tea Ceremony Meeting, Sophon said Wade was a devil, his deterrence level was always one hundred percent, without any fluctuation.
The Trisolarans' understanding of strategy was still slightly inferior; they could only obtain results through calculation models. Those who truly understood the essence of deterrence should know that maintaining a hundred percent deterrence level was only possible through disguise, but disguising a hundred percent deterrence level was much more difficult than actually having it.
Just for this reason, Wade was enough to be deified.
The Trisolaran world, Yun Tianming, Cheng Xin, they were all Wade's chess pieces; this was Wade's strategy, with deception and betrayal as the eternal melody.
With painstaking efforts, heaven would not fail one - Yun Tianming indeed brought humans an opportunity to choose.
Wade succeeded; he hid his innermost feelings, he walked alone through nearly four centuries, once again arriving at the juncture that would decide human destiny.
After obtaining intelligence, he successfully developed a lightspeed spacecraft, but the trail left by the lightspeed spacecraft would expose the trace of Earth. Clearly, the human government would not allow the existence of a lightspeed spacecraft; using it to escape would leave a trail that revealed the Solar System.
What would happen to the humans left in the Solar System? They might immediately suffer a Dark Forest Strike from other advanced civilizations, thus, the human government immediately commenced the eradication of Wade's forces.
It must be said, Wade had waited for that opportunity, but his loyalty was no longer to the humans he once knew.
Essentially, the Solar System had already been exposed, the Trisolaran Star System had been destroyed, and humans still naively thought they could evade detection, worrying that the trail left by the lightspeed spacecraft would reveal Earth's location, a strangely illogical concern.
The question at this point should have been who would go and who would stay. This issue had persisted for 300 years, and humans were still unable to resolve it. No one like Zhang Beihai had emerged again; in fact, there were hardly any "non-softies" left. Was such humanity still worth saving?
Wade kept his promise to Cheng Xin, leaving the last critical decision of human fate to her.
Lin Sen speculated that Wade was not a cold and ruthless person; his feelings were exceptionally delicate - he had spent his life in disguise. His emotions were not for Cheng Xin, but for Yun Tianming; he understood Yun Tianming's love for Cheng Xin.
Perhaps out of guilt towards Yun Tianming, perhaps hoping that the girl Yun Tianming loved could grow, or possibly to see whether humanity was still worth saving, he still handed over humanity's final fight to Cheng Xin.
He still hoped that Cheng Xin would order resistance against the government forces to preserve the ember of civilization, but when it came to disappointment, Cheng Xin would never let anyone down.
Wade despaired; an iron-willed strongman, in his last moment of helplessness and plea, said, "To lose humanity is to lose a lot; to lose the animal inside is to lose everything."
"I choose humanity." That was Cheng Xin's finishing blow to Wade!