Chapter 50: The Eternal City (3)
Xiang Nanli slept deeply and peacefully, even dreaming of his childhood.
Did a human’s life truly begin on the day of their birth, or did it only count once memories took shape?
Xiang Nanli had been born on a spring morning, but his earliest memory was set on a midwinter night.
“What is he saying?” his aunt asked.
“Have you taken him to see a doctor? Is there something wrong with his nervous system? Or is it facial paralysis?” his grandfather chimed in.
“Should we go to Chinatown and ask that person for a protective talisman?” his grandmother suggested.
“Alright, enough. Stop talking. It’s annoying,” his mother snapped.
“At worst, we keep him inside his whole life. It’s not like we can’t afford to feed him,” his father said.
Xiang Nanli had noticed the voices in the living room. He put down the half-dismantled tape recorder in his hands, crawled to the door, and quietly pried it open a crack.
He observed the argument in the living room until his aunt suddenly locked eyes with him, a look of distinct panic washing over her face.
Xiang Nanli shifted his gaze, landing on the young woman he saw most often.
She was turning to look at him as well.
Xiang Nanli opened his mouth: “Ma… Mom.”
He opened his eyes, but his mother wasn’t there. Instead, Dongfang Qingdi was right in front of his face.
“Xiao Qing.”
The moment Xiang Nanli spoke, Dongfang Qingdi handed him a glass of water, warmed precisely to $45^\circ\text{C}$—just right.
Xiang Nanli took it, taking a moment to scan his surroundings: “Gulp, gulp… Xiao Qing, how long was I out?”
Well, did I suddenly move into a presidential suite?
Dongfang Qingdi replied expressionlessly: “4 hours, 21 minutes, and 17 seconds.”
Because explaining everything in detail was overly tedious, Dongfang Qingdi packaged the data from while Xiang Nanli was unconscious and sent him a copy—a refined edit, of course, with certain parts omitted that shouldn’t be shown to him.
This was the Human Alliance’s “Consensus” technology. The reincarnation inheritance of the Apocalypse Knights utilized similar tech.
For people who weren’t particularly bright, this technology had some side effects—such as being unable to tell who they were, a condition known academically as “personal dissociation.”
For Xiang Nanli, however, it had practically no effect.
Sitting on the bed, Xiang Nanli froze for a full three minutes. It felt as if he had just watched a film from a god-mode perspective with a freely adjustable camera angle.
For instance, when Xiao Qing was slaughtering the giant serpents, Xiang Nanli’s attention had been drawn to the bulging belly of the Holy Spirit. Zooming in to look closer, it had felt as though a person was trapped inside.
The serpent was slain. Dongfang Qingdi used a blade to slice open its blood-red skin, revealing Sirius curled up underneath.
More than half of Sirius had been dissolved by stomach acid, looking like a mound of decaying, melting flesh.
By all logic, it seemed impossible for him to be alive, yet his heart and brain were still beating. The blood vessels across his body were plugged into the inner walls of the Holy Spirit like IV needles.
Dongfang Qingdi stood nearby, watching for a brief moment. Then he hauled Sirius off the ground and tossed him back into the pit of serpents—
Xiang Nanli couldn’t help screaming in his memory: “AAAHHH Xiao Qing! Why did you throw him back?!”
That looks way too much like destroying evidence!
Dongfang Qingdi’s voice paused slightly: “He should have been digested long ago, but the Holy Spirit was born weak. Coupled with his fierce will to survive, he still had a thread of life left when he was cut out.
“Throwing him back allows him to replace the Holy Spirit and absorb the nutrients of these companion spirits. He was originally chosen by the Inquisition to be its pilot anyway.”
Sirius’s situation was completely impossible to replicate. First, the Divine Court would never waste a Holy Spirit like this.
Second, there wouldn’t be a second compatible body, and even if there were, none possessed a will so unyielding that it could astonish an artificial intelligence.
Timing, geography, and human will—not a single factor could be missing.
Sure enough, the companion spirits in the serpent pit did not attack Sirius. Instead, blood-red threads, resembling umbilical cords, extended from Sirius’s body and plugged into the companion spirits.
The giant serpents converged toward the center, intertwining to form a massive ball of flesh. The ball of flesh breathed, squeezing out a wave of red liquid with every contraction, which was then reabsorbed as the ball shrank back.
The scene was unsettlingly bizarre.
The footage ended there.
“The embryo in the incubation pool is continuously shrinking and appears to be re-incubating. I estimate it will successfully hatch in 30 days.”
Xiang Nanli couldn’t help asking: “Then the creature that hatches… will it still be Sirius?”
Dongfang Qingdi: “I don’t know, I’ve never seen anything like this before.”
Setting down his glass of water, Xiang Nanli asked: “What about those people? How do you plan to handle them?”
The robots had herded the residents of the Main City into circles on the plaza.
Out of the Eternal City’s population of over seventy thousand, the inner city contained fewer than 1,000 citizens. After killing those who fought to the death and releasing some families of bio-soldiers, three hundred remained.
All of these people were the high-born nobility of the Eternal City, leeching off the great vessel of the city like parasites. To put it politely, they were generational aristocrats—either holding high office themselves or being closely related to those who did.
Given that the Eternal City was merely a medium-sized surface stronghold, these aristocrats lived lives that were perhaps inferior even to the middle class of the Underground Cities.
Out in the freezing snow, some had been dragged out by robots while still asleep in their beds, huddled together in thin indoor clothes like pigs awaiting slaughter.
The corners of Dongfang Qingdi’s lips curved up slightly: “You shouldn’t be asking me that, Xiang Nanli. You should be asking yourself.”
Xiang Nanli raised an eyebrow: “Oh?”
“The stronghold is something you want to build.”
Dongfang Qingdi turned his head away, clearly having no intention of offering help.
It wasn’t that Dongfang Qingdi was cold-hearted; rather, making decisions was something Xiang Nanli had to face as an organizer.
What the Survivor Base would ultimately become depended entirely on Xiang Nanli’s strategy at this stage, and it would inevitably develop around his core values.
If the Survivor Base could truly live up to its name and survive among the vast ocean of surface human settlements, someone would naturally inherit his legacy after his time passed… Of course, with current technology, Xiang Nanli could work for the base for at least another three hundred years (assuming he didn’t die suddenly).
Xiang Nanli had to step up.
Though, if he backed down in the face of hardship, that would be even better.
To be honest, this was entirely uncharted territory for Xiang Nanli.
There was a substantial difference between starting a company and building a stronghold.
When starting a company, a boss only needed to pay salaries, while employment contracts and labor laws handled the rest.
Building a stronghold, however, carried much deeper implications.
Xiang Nanli had never studied political science or history, having at most skimmed international news headlines.
“An organization needs to define its source of power and whose interests it represents… Our base—”
Dongfang Qingdi corrected him: “Your base.”
“Right. My base. I want it to be a society where intelligent beings can coexist—humans, Omnics, and even weird creatures like Ezekiel…“
Dongfang Qingdi crossed his arms and let out a light scoff.
“Of course, for now, the primary focus is still on humans, because humans need protection the most among the three, and they will likely make up the majority. But humans need to be categorized too; the nobles and serfs of the Eternal City are clearly not the same group. A healthy, strong organization should unite as many forces as possible. Right now, whether the base can get off the ground hinges on me… how many resources I have, and how much determination I bring to make it happen…“
Xiang Nanli’s thoughts jumped around as he rambled to himself for a long time. Feeling a headache coming on, he even felt the urge to flop back onto the bed and go back to sleep.
He resisted it, though: “‘A noble soul fears virtue, not force; a base mind fears force, not virtue.’ Let them stay in the circles for now and freeze a bit first. How do we take the Gospel with us?”
Dongfang Qingdi answered: “The background data transfer is running; it should be done soon. Want to go to the control room and check?”
Ten minutes later.
Xiang Nanli glanced at the robotic soldiers standing guard at the entrance and pushed open the main control room door.
He muttered: “The base can allow Omnics into the system of power, but it can’t rely entirely on machines as a military deterrent. While Omnics might be more reliable than humans in certain matters, doing so would undermine the foundation of our power source. Alpha, help me record this insight in a dedicated folder. I’m afraid I’ll forget it later.”
[Understood.]
Inside the control room, Xiang Nanli spotted a familiar face.
“Andrew? You’re still alive?”
Andrew’s four mechanical arms clicked away across the keyboard in front of him, not even bothering to look up: “You don’t sound particularly thrilled.”
It was a strange scene.
A robot sat before a massive computer screen, writing code for another robot.
Andrew explained: “I’m trying to import the Gospel into this mechanical dog. It’s basically giving the Gospel a new body. This body might not be as powerful as the original, but at least it can move around freely.”
Besides, Andrew had a small selfish motive.
A weaker body was easier to control.
Someone like Dongfang Qingdi… who could beat him? If he had any dark thoughts, he could slaughter everyone in the city in the blink of an eye.
The mechanical dog receiving the data transfer had several cables plugged into it.
“You actually know how to do this?” Xiang Nanli was shocked.
He walked over and glanced at the screen.
Heh. After hundreds of years, the core code was still the exact set he had written back in the day.
Granted, there were changes now—like switching to writing data code in a higher-level consciousness space. But conditions here were crude, lacking any connection to a cloud network.
Besides, the reason the Gospel was still using such primitive code was that it, too, was an ancient AI from hundreds of years ago.
Andrew snapped in frustration: “Six hundred years ago, I graduated from Donglan University with a degree in Artificial Intelligence!”
Donglan University was currently located in Luoyang City. Since the era Xiang Nanli had lived in, it had been the best university in the world, bar none.
“Weren’t you a biochemistry major?”
“I took a double degree!!!”
Who would have thought that Andrew—who had failed his intermediate physician qualification exam three times—was actually a real genius?
Just as Xiang Nanli was thinking this, a red error prompt suddenly popped up on the screen.
“Uh, th-this…” Andrew felt as though his mechanical body were breaking into a sweat. “The Gospel’s anti-intrusion system was triggered.”
Dongfang Qingdi raised an eyebrow slightly, preparing to step in, but Xiang Nanli casually patted Andrew’s shoulder: “Thanks for the hard work, I’ll take it from here.”
He nudged Andrew aside, sat down at the computer, and skimmed the code page at a speed so fast it made eyes dazzle before beginning to fix and expand it.
Xiang Nanli had two fewer arms than Andrew, yet his efficiency wasn’t lower in the slightest.
A few minutes later, the malfunction was resolved from an angle Andrew had never even conceived!
Andrew felt a wave of complex emotions: “Weren’t you supposed to have just unfrozen from a cryo-chamber?”
Xiang Nanli’s answer made Andrew want to punch him: “Yeah, weird, right? I took one look and just knew how to do it. How’s that happen?”
Blue lights lit up in the eyes of the mechanical dog standing on the floor.
Having just woken up, the Gospel was still somewhat disoriented.
It looked around the room, not yet grasping the situation, but its body instinctively dashed toward Xiang Nanli.
“Xiang Nanli! Xiang Nanli!!!” The mechanical dog let out whining sounds. “Xiao Fu is here!”
Before it could pounce, Dongfang Qingdi stepped on its back, pinning its movements.
He knew these low-I.Q. AIs only performed brainless logic checks. That was probably how someone tricked it out of control of the Gospel hundreds of years ago, too.
