Wu Minzhe had disclosed all he knew, but the urgency for his routine interrogations had diminished.
He was temporarily detained in a cell.
Sitting on the cold metal chair inside the prison, he gazed at the blank ceiling and let out a deep sigh, much like a woman lamenting the fleeting beauty of spring.
Suddenly, a black and white pendulum appeared on the wall in front of him. The pendulum began to swing slowly. Wu Minzhe's focus was gradually drawn into it, his gaze becoming fixed, unable to extricate himself.
A voice akin to that of a deity whispered in his ear, "You are already dead."
Wu Minzhe had a sudden realization. Oh, so I'm already dead.
When a special operative from the Bureau of Mystic Security came to interrogate Wu Minzhe, he found Wu Minzhe motionless, seated on the chair. The operative called out to him but received no response. A light push sent Wu Minzhe tumbling down.
The "autopsy report" for Wu Minzhe was quickly presented to Qiao Ge'er, whose face became exceedingly grim. He was livid. "The abilities of the 'Regenerated Warrior' are still intact, Wu Minzhe's body had no issues! Yet he believed himself dead, so his consciousness just perished like that?"
His office was at the top of the branch building, and he looked down upon his jurisdiction. Since Wu Minzhe's case broke out, he knew there was a problem inside his bureau. But he was not worried. He was confident that, given time, he would catch those little pests and, like a woodpecker, mercilessly tear them to shreds and devour them whole!
Now, however, the 'Dungeon Troll' suddenly lost its memory, and Wu Minzhe had committed suicide via consciousness... and all of this happened right under his watch, without raising any alarm within the entire branch.
He thought of a certain 'matter' and couldn't help but look up, staring into the distance.
He knew that this was not something he, as a mere branch director, could handle alone, so he immediately sent all the data to Headquarters.
「Several light-years away.」
In a section of the Star Ring Zone, a handful of uninhabitable planets lay. Despite the absence of planetary storms, these planets experienced extreme temperature fluctuations between day and night and were frequently struck by meteoroids.
Deep beneath one such planet's surface, tens of kilometers underground, was a hidden base.
The base was small but equipped with cutting-edge facilities. An AI robot maintained its operations. His routine tasks involved updating the information on the special chips in the left-side warehouse and checking that the culture dishes in the right-side biological workshop were functioning normally. Aside from that, he spent most of his time with no work to do, quietly sitting at his station, browsing through various data on the interstellar network.
In such a base, there was no concept of "day and night," but the AI robot defined his "day and night" by his daily tasks. He started his "day" with the update of the chip data. Twelve hours later, inspecting the culture dishes marked the beginning of his "night."
Thus, day after day passed. Initially, he recorded how many days he had spent, but one day, after reading an article that provoked some small thoughts about "life," he stopped counting the days, though he retained his routine of alternating "days" and "nights."
Today, he had completed his nightly task and was now comfortably lying in bed—not to sleep but rather because he enjoyed lying down while surfing the net at night.
Suddenly, there was a BEEP from the base's equipment; he had received an instruction.
He immediately and mechanically rose to carry it out. Following the serial number in the instruction, he retrieved a chip from the left-side warehouse and inserted it into a slot on the control panel.
A ray of light expanded and converged, creating a blurry human-shaped hologram.
The figure's gender was indiscernible. It was composed of tiny data points in constantly shifting colors, which rapidly exchanged and transformed into one another.
Then, the AI robot mechanically pressed another button, and the console projected a hologram of an old man with silver hair and a distinguished gentlemanly demeanor.
He looked at the data figure, chin lifted slightly with a touch of arrogance as he queried, "Number 241, you've failed again. How many chances have we given you?"
Trembling, the data figure knelt down. "My lord, I am close to success! Please, continue to believe in me. I will bring you and the other lords the rewards you desire.
"If you abandon me now, all previous investments will be lost."
The old man let out a cold laugh but still said, "This is your last chance. Take a good look at how you failed this time." Thɪs chapter is updated by novel-fire.ɴet
The AI robot cooperated and began to replay the relevant recording: the hospital exploding, Chen Gu leading his team to the scene, and Chen Jixian fighting her.
The data figure's memory node had last been updated—he had uploaded his final memory data—just before Zuo Qianyun and her team headed for the hospital.
Now the data figure also knew what had transpired after this node.
The old man issued an order to the AI robot: "Give him his final biological body, and then kick him out."
He then addressed the data figure, "Remember, this is your last chance. If you fail again, we don't care about the loss. We will immediately extract all the data we need from your memories and select someone else to complete this mission.
"And you will be utterly and completely dead!"
"Yes!" The data figure knelt and kowtowed. "Thank you for your generosity. You will not regret this decision."
Taking advantage of the brief moment before the old man disconnected the call, he pleaded urgently, "My lord, could I perhaps return to my own gender this time?"
The old man showed a trace of displeasure. "A failure has no right to make such requests. Cultivating biological bodies is expensive. Appropriateness is all that matters. Don't have too many extravagant hopes. Your entire focus should be on the mission, not the gender of your body."
"Yes." The data figure dared not say more. The old man's hologram faded and disappeared.
The data figure glanced at the AI robot, sorely tempted to plead with him to arrange the gender. But he knew that all AIs in the Star Sea were now programmed with extremely strict settings; the robot could not possibly bypass these restrictions and defy the old man's command to choose a biological body for him.
He sighed inwardly, resigning himself to his fate for the time being.
This inward sigh manifested on his digital body as a momentary dimming of all his data lights.
Observing the dimmed data lights, the AI robot felt something welling up inside him. Comparing it with things he had seen on the interstellar network, he recognized this sensation as "sympathy."