Chapter 16: Racial Consciousness

Faced with these tiny points of light, Jin had no intention of taking them head-on. With nimble movements, he leaped agilely into the air, swiftly evading the descending sparks.

As Seven X leaped into the air, his arm swept across the top of his head, and the razor-sharp Eye Slugger flashed outward with lightning speed, cleaving Peguila's body cleanly in two.

Amidst a piercing screech, Peguila's body rapidly dissolved into countless green radiance, scattering and fading away into the wind.

A single strike, and it was finished.

The Eye Slugger looped back through the air, caught firmly in Seven X's grasp, and was slotted back onto the crest of his head.

Only then did Seven X's colossal form thump heavily back onto the ground. Meanwhile, the stream of light particles emitted by Peguila plummeted like hailstones, striking the earth and triggering widespread, devastating explosions.

However, precisely at the moment that first Peguila was slain by that single slash, in regions unknown to Jin, across the entire expanse of the world, countless individuals simultaneously felt a sudden, scorching heat erupting from within their bodies.

Regardless of nationality, geographical borders, or racial background, these people shared one defining characteristic: they were all customers of Nano-Cybertech. To put it more accurately, they were all humans who had consumed Shiner-5.

Nano-Cybertech was a multinational corporation, and its flagship product, Shiner-5, had swept across the globe.

Thus, when viewed on a global scale, this count of "countless" individuals, roughly estimated, numbered in the hundreds of millions.

What did hundreds of millions signify? The total population of the Earth was roughly estimated at around six billion, meaning hundreds of millions accounted for about 8.33% of the global population.

Of course, such a statistical figure alone might fail to convey the true magnitude.

To put it into perspective, this number was equivalent to more than half the population of China, eighty percent of the population of India, or the combined populations of the United States (315 million), Indonesia (237 million), and Brazil (200 million).

With such a vast number of people, the majority were concentrated within developed nations, including the United States, European countries, China, and various other countries across the world.

At this very moment, these hundreds of millions of people experienced the exact same physiological reaction: a searing burning sensation originating deep within their hearts and lungs, while their outward appearances aged drastically and rapidly in the span of a single heartbeat. Human life energy was draining away at an alarming rate. From within each of their bodies, a cluster of green energy materialized, flowing outward and surging toward the exact same destination.

Densely packed green energy clusters blotted out the skies, hurtling at breathtaking speeds across oceans and continents. The pitch-black night was thoroughly illuminated, presenting a scene that felt nothing short of an apocalypse.

These were the purest forms of energy that Peguila had extracted from its host organisms.

As an extraterrestrial species, Peguila had laid its groundwork on Earth for nearly a decade. From initially merging with human consciousness to propagate its race, to ultimately establishing Nano-Cybertech and developing the product Shiner-5, it had managed to spread Peguila cells across the globe through commercial products. By transcending spatial distances, it had established breeding grounds for its species in every corner of the world.

An alien life form totaling hundreds of millions in population had thus firmly and completely established its foothold on Earth.

Moreover, because they possessed individual intelligence, the Peguila race had even given rise to an Alaya consciousness.

What is the Alaya consciousness?

Humanity's initial understanding of this consciousness originated from Buddhism. The original Sanskrit root of Alaya means "storehouse" or "repository" — that which stores and collects.

Therefore, the Alaya-vijnana (Alaya consciousness) refers to the eighth consciousness, the Tathagatagarbha, which is capable of storing the seeds of both flawed and flawless phenomena, such as life and death across different stages.

At the same time, the Alaya consciousness is also known as the storehouse consciousness.

Sentient beings in the mortal world possess eight consciousnesses: eye, ear, nose, tongue, body, mental consciousness, and the root of mind (collectively known as the first seven consciousnesses or the seven transmigrating consciousnesses), with the eighth being the Alaya consciousness.

Buddhism posits that the various activities of sentient beings in the world, driven by body, speech, and mind, create wholesome, unwholesome, pure, or indeterminate karma. Once created, these karmic seeds are seized by the seventh Manas consciousness and deposited into the eighth consciousness — the Alaya consciousness — for safekeeping.

The Alaya consciousness possesses the function of "preservation," retaining the first seven consciousnesses of every individual.

If humanity were viewed as individual neural cells, the information exchange between people would represent the spiritual activity of this gigantic brain. And that brain is the Alaya consciousness.

Humanity is also a form of life. Although humans themselves cannot consciously perceive her, she truly exists, possessing all human knowledge and emotions. Because of this, she harbors a fear of her own destruction, of "death." While she is humanity itself, she remains indifferent to the death of individual humans — much like a human being who feels no particular concern over the natural death of cells within their body, though they certainly would not remain indifferent if their body were injured, mutilated, or facing total death.

If the complete annihilation of humanity would result in her death, she would manifest on the surface level the moment such a possibility arose, which specifically manifests as humanity uniting externally.

Mainstream science suggests the existence of what is termed racial consciousness, and the Alaya consciousness can be considered the aggregate consciousness of all human beings across the world.

Furthermore, there exists the consciousness of the Earth itself.

There also exists the consciousness of the universe, which is the aggregate consciousness of the entities of countless living planets just like Earth.

Putting aside the latter two forms of consciousness for a moment, let us focus specifically on the Alaya consciousness.

The Alaya consciousness is essentially the generic term for the consciousness of any given race. Every species equipped with sufficient individual intelligence will naturally give rise to a racial consciousness.

Therefore, for Peguila — an extraterrestrial species possessed of extremely high intelligence — even though they existed on Earth in the form of mere cells, over decades of development, they had naturally birthed an Alaya consciousness belonging exclusively to the Peguila race.

Seven X was fighting an individual Peguila, but the moment he cut down a Peguila collective entity, he had already triggered the Alaya consciousness of the entire Peguila race.

As mentioned earlier, if the total annihilation of humanity would lead to the death of the human Alaya consciousness, she would manifest on the surface level the moment such a crisis threatened to occur, specifically resulting in humanity uniting against an external threat.

This rule applied equally to the Alaya consciousness of the Peguila race.

At this point, dear readers might wonder: when other Ultraman characters battle alien invaders who have targeted Earth, such a phenomenon does not occur. Why, then, must Seven X face the formidable hurdle of combating an Alaya consciousness?

This actually involves a direct confrontation between racial consciousnesses.

If we treat the Earth as a platform, under normal circumstances, the human Alaya consciousness, having operated and cultivated the Earth for tens of millions of years, had turned the planet into its ultimate stronghold. Consequently, under generalized conditions, the Alaya consciousness of any invading alien race would find itself operating here much like an away team in a football match.

As a result, humanity's Alaya consciousness would inherently suppress the Alaya consciousness of the alien invaders.

However, this world was different.

This world had been eroded and riddled with holes by the Grachies race, and catalyzed by Issei's secondary personality, the Grachies race had likewise birthed its own racial Alaya consciousness. (The middle-aged man and middle-aged woman in that bizarre garden were the materialized manifestations of the Grachies race's Alaya consciousness.)

Humanity had been subjugated, trapped like birds within a cage, which consequently led to the weakening and severe suppression of the human Alaya consciousness.

It was akin to an away game in football, only to discover that the opposing team's fans hadn't even shown up at the stadium, rendering the home-field advantage completely negligible.

Thus, freed from the restraint of humanity's Alaya consciousness, the Alaya consciousness of the Peguila race was able to emerge to the surface layer.

The instant Seven X slaughtered a Peguila collective individual, the Peguila racial Alaya consciousness was flooded with an overwhelming sense of crisis.

If Seven X could not be stopped, the entire Peguila race would face extinction.

Therefore, by requisitioning all dormant Peguila individuals across the globe and draining energy directly from their human hosts, it urgently sought to reinforce the Peguila collective entities and desperately crush Seven X.

There was once a saying that carried profound truth:

You can fight a single individual, but you cannot fight all of humanity; you can fight a specific group, but you cannot fight an entire race.

Jin did not know that what he had to face was not merely the dozens of Peguilas standing before him — he was facing an entire Peguila race.

Author's Postscript: I introduced a fairly significant secondary setting here. I had been pondering for a long time how to write Seven X, given that tokusatsu dramas inevitably carry various flaws and loopholes. The most glaring of these was how easily Seven X unleashed his overwhelming power when battling the final boss, the Grachies race.

Moreover, there are massive oversights in places we often fail to consider, such as this exact scene during the battle against Peguila. No one had ever paused to think: with the product Shiner-5 having swept across the globe, could Seven X's mission really be resolved simply by hacking down a few Peguilas?

That would be utterly impossible.

Therefore, I incorporated this major secondary setting here in an attempt to patch up the narrative loopholes of the *Ultraman Max / Seven X* series, and I hope everyone can understand and appreciate this choice.

I can proudly say that the Ultraman fanfiction I write is far more rigorous and logically sound than other works in the same genre.

Perhaps not everyone will like it, but this is my steadfast conviction, and it is precisely why I believe *Drifting Through the Ultraman Era* deserves to be called the premier Ultraman fanfiction.