Chapter 588.1: The Sanctuary

"Those damn mutts..."

On the bridge of the Heart of Steel.

Through the targeting systems, the captain gazed at the pyramid of human heads and blood-smeared walls more than 10 kilometers away, and couldn’t help but curse under his breath.

Chu Guang glanced at the captain beside him, then turned his eyes back to the floor-to-ceiling windows of the bridge and spoke slowly. "If we let them think such provocations work, they’ll soon build a second, a third pyramid, and when the moment comes that they lose, they’ll kill everyone."

"These creatures are quite enthusiastic when it comes to killing. There’s no need for us to waste ammunition."

From a practical standpoint, the effectiveness of indirect fire into concrete-dense urban zones was very limited.

Not to mention that howitzers relied on fragmentation. Even a strategic nuclear weapon of tens of thousands of tons was not nearly as exaggerated against reinforced concrete as shown in movies.

There were documented cases where, during an atomic explosion, people inside concrete buildings just 500 to 600 meters from ground zero survived. As long as they didn’t recklessly run outside to look, they even avoided lasting effects.

As for Mutant Humans, that went without saying.

Such creatures could only be killed with overwhelming neutron radiation. Hoping to kill them indirectly through long-term cancers was unrealistic.

"... Understood," the captain nodded with a heavy expression.

At Chu Guang’s gesture, he turned to his adjutant and gave the order.

"Drop anchor!"

The adjutant saluted. "Yes, sir!"

Huge steel chains tumbled from the belly of the airship, slamming into the ground with a crash that sent up clouds of dust.

Next, the elevators descended.

With forward troops and construction equipment being deployed to the surface, both upper and lower decks of the ship bustled with activity.

After giving a few quick instructions to the captain, Chu Guang turned and headed to the brig, where Yore sat strapped into a wheelchair.

On his head was a VR headset wired into the ship’s sensors, and at that moment he was staring at the pyramid of severed heads.

"So this is the heaven you want to reach?" Chu Guang asked, looking at him.

Yore said nothing, sitting there as if he had not yet awakened from a trance.

However, Chu Guang knew this man had been awake since before dawn, merely feigning madness.

He continued, "Where is the Sanctuary?"

After a long silence, Yore let out a small laugh, half mocking himself, half mocking the world. "Haven’t you already guessed?"

"I know the Sanctuary is virtual. What I’m asking is, where is its server?" After a pause, Chu Guang added, "Or in other words, how do we destroy it?"

Yore answered with silence.

Chu Guang didn’t mind. He spoke softly. "The bionic chip in your brain has locked away part of your memory. Our experts here do find it tricky, but you know as well as I do that breaking it is only a matter of time."

"Is that a bluff?"

"It isn’t," Chu Guang said calmly. "One of them suggested I send your brain to Ideal City for slow research. But then you’d have no chance at redemption."

"Redemption... haha." Yore suddenly laughed out loud, turning his VR-covered face toward Chu Guang and raising his voice. "Why should I redeem myself? What crime have I committed? Compared to the masses the Wasteland kills, compared to those it turns into livestock and beasts, the few we sacrificed are nothing! And those people lived like livestock already. Even if we did nothing, they would rot away on their own."

"If you truly understood them, you’d know how hopelessly stupid they are. They put chains around their own necks, lash out at anyone who tries to help them. They want to be animals. They’re better suited to this wasteland than anyone, they want it to go on forever. Better that their lives mean something, at least if they die by our hands, they become fuel to end the Wasteland Era."

Yore laughed hoarsely, the sound growing wild and deranged.

He sounded exactly like a lunatic.

Behind Chu Guang, Lu Bei stared coldly at the twisted, insolent man, his lips twitching involuntarily.

Chu Guang, by contrast, watched with a blank expression.

Only when Yore’s throat gave out and his laughter died did he speak again.

"And who decides what that so-called meaning is?"

Yore rasped back, "No one needs to define it. The people of the new world will judge what we did. Even if they curse us, it doesn’t matter. I never did this for honor or fame."

Chu Guang looked at him with pity. "A shame."

Yore stayed silent, his expression saying he didn’t care what was said.

Chu Guang went on. "Even if you reach a new world, your Wasteland Era won’t end. This land will only become another kind of wasteland. Your sacrifice is meaningless. From beginning to end it’s nothing but your own self-satisfaction."

At last Yore couldn’t help but retort, "And how do you know what future people will think?"

"It’s not about what I know. Why are you so certain?" Chu Guang fixed his gaze on him and enunciated each word. "You’ve never lived a second in your imagined heaven, yet you expect to solve earthly problems with celestial means."

"When someone is hungry, we give them food enough to survive, then show them how to earn more, how to live with dignity, not suggest they swap in a bionic stomach that digests mud, and a jaw strong enough to chew stone."

Yore sneered coldly. "You think too simply. If hunger alone could end the wasteland, it never would have existed in the first place. Hunger isn’t the real problem..."

"But at least hunger is a tangible problem," Chu Guang cut him off flatly. "Solve that one, and then the next. To think every specific problem has a single universal solution, that by becoming new humans all issues vanish once and for all, then what?"

Yore blinked, then muttered, "... Then?"

"Yes, then what? When new humans face problems of their own, what will you do? Design something even more perfect than them, force everyone through another evolution? Leap from one utopia to the next?"

Seeing him speechless, Chu Guang pressed on. "That is the legacy you are thinking of leaving. If you failed, so be it. But if, by a 1/10,000 chance, you succeeded, that would be the greatest disaster. Any price would be necessary sacrifice. Today’s tragedy will be repeated again and again, drowning everyone else in an impossible dream. So tell me, am I the one thinking too simply, or is it you?"

Drawing his eyes from Yore’s blank face, Chu Guang knew he hadn’t considered any of what he said. He continued in a cold voice, "Perhaps one day we will evolve into a new species, but only because the time has come naturally. Never as a forced choice. Never as a shortcut."

"I gave you a chance to atone. But it seems I wasted my time."

"Find somewhere else to repent."

With that, Chu Guang turned and walked for the door.

Yore stared after the receding footsteps, suddenly uneasy, and called out, "Wait!"

At the doorway, Chu Guang stopped and looked back. "What is it?"

After a moment of silence, Yore spoke slowly. "The Sanctuary isn’t on the ground. It’s not on a single server either. It’s a mesh of countless bionic chips, strung together by one or more nodes... That is where the Sanctuary is."

Surprise flickered across Lu Bei’s face.

Surprise at the Sanctuary being formed of innumerable chips, surprise too that the obstinate man would confess.

Yore himself wasn’t sure if he was right to say it.

The memory extractor had not only torn out his memories, it had also dredged up long-forgotten fragments.

He was a researcher, one who should know that bold hypotheses and careful verification were the basics.

Yet ironically, though he knew it, he had failed to do it, instead placing hope in divinity to replace humanity.

Perhaps, as the administrator said, the dream’s end was not heaven, but another kind of hell.

He slowly turned the wrist bound to the armrest, raised a crooked finger, and tapped his temple. "For example, This is one of them. The signal here is poor, so it can’t connect to the net."

The Heart of Steel was a sealed iron hull. Unless standing on deck, all data exchange with the outside had to go through controlled channels, monitored by Little Seven. Luo Qian would never leave such an obvious opening.

That was why Eclipse was unexpectedly able to use Zhao Tiangan’s corpse to reactivate a chip and reconnect to the Sanctuary.

When Zhao Tiangan died, Luo Qian lost his connection. Biologic chips needed a living body to power them.

If it had been through Yore’s chip, it never would have worked. Everyone knew he was captured.

Chu Guang frowned slightly. "Distributed computing?"

Yore gave a self-mocking laugh. "Not exactly, but you could say that... Each chip is a cell of Luo Qian and the Sanctuary. All the cells share information across the net. When one chip goes offline, its stored data remains as an independent persona. For example, in my head right now, there’s a Luo Qian."

Chu Guang fell into thought. "I see."

It was much like Little Seven.

Sometimes, even in dead-signal zones, Little Seven could still talk with him through VMs or other devices, but the one speaking wasn’t the Little Seven in the shelter. It was a split sub-entity created at a given point.

Call the main body A, and the branch AI could be called A1.

A1 had all cached data up to that point, plus whatever computing power portable devices could provide.

So even without A’s data, A1 could communicate normally. It just couldn’t sync everything until the connection was restored.

Then, once the signal returned, A1 and A would merge again.

It sounded strange to humans, but ordinary to digital life. After all, information was their entire being.

That was why Little Seven was so clingy, always begging to be taken along.

Luo Qian was similar.

Each chip stored a fragment of the Sanctuary. With normal communication, they formed an entire formation.