Chapter 58: Bombing the Island Nation (06)

The helium cannon of the Sino-Japanese nuclear energy reactor was in its final debugging phase.

Luo Yuqing was in the laboratory conducting the final verification work.

To estimate the reaction chain formula of the nuclear energy reactor, it was necessary to observe closely and extract various numerical indicators from the A37 nuclear energy reactor at the Nora Harbor. Previously, using the data brought back by thousands of ability users sent out by Human Base 01, Luo Yuqing and her team had already calculated about ninety-five percent of the reaction chain formula.

However, the remaining five percent consisted of uncertain values that had evolved over decades due to the collapse of the nuclear energy reactor. Someone needed to go deep inside the A37 nuclear energy reactor to obtain the corresponding data.

Yet, after a full sixty years of nuclear fission reactions, the core layer of the A37 nuclear energy reactor was already filled with a massive amount of nuclear elements. These nuclear elements had not only replaced the presence of oxygen but had also created a miniature, never-extinguishing sun in the underground layer. Even if countless ability users were to throw their lives away at it, they could not bring back the remaining five percent of the data.

Seven days ago, after obtaining the coordinates of the Nora Harbor A37 nuclear energy reactor, Su Bai had brought back the complete nuclear explosion data of the core layer.

"You... you brought it back just like that?"

Luo Yuqing looked in shock at the data uploaded to Su Bai's optical brain.

"Yes."

Su Bai reached out, her right hand touching the cochlea-shaped object hanging beside her ear. With a gentle tug—before Luo Yuqing even had time to issue a cry of restraint—Su Bai removed the miniature machine that symbolized the optical brain.

"Wait..."

Luo Yuqing pulled out a small, pinky-sized tube wrapped in transparent material from her pocket. "This contains a neuro-analgesic... The optical brain is bound to the nervous system, forcibly removing it like this..."

It would hurt terribly.

But Luo Yuqing did not have time to finish the second half of her sentence.

"It's fine."

Su Bai handed the optical brain to Luo Yuqing and blinked. "All the data is right here. As for binding the optical brain to my sea of consciousness again, I'm afraid the optical brain might accidentally be destroyed by the things inside my sea of consciousness."

Luo Yuqing stared at her blankly: "The optical... brain will be destroyed?"

The cochlea-shaped object in her palm emitted a translucent golden glow, covered in fine branch-like lines resembling thorns, and it trembled slightly as if responding to what Su Bai had said.

For a split second, Luo Yuqing seemed to hear the optical brain transmitting a message to her via brainwaves—

Save me, tvt.

In a highly technologically advanced society, to better store and retrieve data, scientists invented a brain-computer interface system called the optical brain. Made of high-density materials, the optical brain could keenly capture human brainwaves and integrate vast seas of data with human memories through a series of independent internal architectures.

Amidst such massive data transmission, there had once been discussions about whether optical brains possessed self-awareness. At the time, the academic community was vaguely split into two factions: the conservative human faction, which championed human will and carbon-based life, and the liberal faction, which respected free will and attempted to manipulate AI thinking.

However, all these disputes vanished into thin air after the island nation suddenly decided to discharge nuclear wastewater.

Luo Yuqing gently gripped the optical brain in her hand and took a deep breath. She bent down and solemnly executed a deep bow. "Thank you."

Discussions and information regarding Su Bai in the Plane Live Broadcast Room stopped entirely at the first fictional world she had entered. Although Su Bai's performance in the Dragon-Abusing-Heaven world was extremely outstanding, as a prospective deity who had only entered a single fictional world, most viewers in the Plane Live Broadcast Room were still taking a wait-and-see attitude toward her.

Prospective deities who possessed a sufficient amount of faith power inherently held certain permissions. If the price offered by the viewers of the Plane Live Broadcast Room was generous enough and the reason justified—such as Luo Yuqing's request to eliminate the public enemy of humanity—a prospective deity could also travel to different worlds to perform special missions within the scope permitted by the Heavenly Dao.

The tipping currency of the Plane Live Broadcast Room could be converted into the power of faith. In addition, these special missions could also accumulate extra faith for prospective deities.

Because of extracting the data of the nuclear energy reactor and building the human underground base, the price offered by Luo Yuqing was not particularly high within the Plane Live Broadcast Room. However, what was particularly eye-catching was the extra faith power attached to this special mission. Precisely because the conviction hoping for the disappearance of nuclear pollution was tenacious and strong enough, many prospective deities renowned in the Plane Live Broadcast Room had attempted to take over this commission from Luo Yuqing.

Yet, the greater the fame, the better the person?

Were those deities who professed compassion for all living beings truly acting solely for the Great Way of all living beings?

Or perhaps, they might not even understand what the Great Way of all living beings was, nor did they truly acknowledge that all sentient beings were salvageable; they came here simply to become the gods of sentient beings.

Luo Yuqing rejected the requests of these people and found Su Bai.

Now it seemed she truly had not chosen the wrong person.

It would take at least five days to decipher these data. After handing all the data over to Luo Yuqing, Su Bai hurriedly asked for the coordinates of the Yuzhou Eden.

The optical brain showed that it was already four o'clock in the morning. Most of the laboratory staff had already returned to the silos' rest pods to sleep.

Luo Yuqing's eyes stared intently at the screen in front of her, her brain rapidly calculating various reaction values.

A pair of hands suddenly tapped Luo Yuqing's shoulder.

In the completely silent laboratory, these hands appeared so soundlessly that Luo Yuqing, immersed in her own world, involuntarily let out an extremely suppressed scream.

"Shh."

Su Bai made a silencing gesture. "It's just me."

"You scared me to death."

Luo Yuqing let out a sigh of relief. The prolonged work and the scare left her limp in her chair. She pushed back her hair and muttered, "Xiaobai, why didn't you give me a heads-up when you came back?"

Su Bai stated concisely, "I've brought back people like Masao Osakabe and Morimoto Kishida."

Luo Yuqing: "?"

She sprang up from her seat, turned around rapidly in an exaggerated posture, her face plastered with disbelief. "What did you say?"

The guards at Yuzhou Eden were heavily armed, and those ability users had chips forcibly implanted in their brains, the highest directive of which was to annihilate all living creatures approaching Eden. Therefore, these ability users could completely be described as a suicide squad.

Su Bai repeated, "I brought back Masao Osakabe and Morimoto Kishida, and the people inside Eden, I've brought them all back."

"The nuclear elements on their bodies are too dense, so I opened a domain composed of Heaven-Swallowing Ice Flames in Room 1708 of the silo. Would you like to see how to handle them?"

Luo Yuqing: "...?"

She fell silent for a moment, then could not help asking, "But there are thousands of people inside Eden..."

As far as she knew, Room 1708 was just a tiny storage room and simply could not accommodate so many people.

Su Bai nodded. "Yes, so many people are indeed rather inconvenient."

Under Luo Yuqing's astonished gaze, she said with extreme calmness, word by word, "But I've already considered all these issues in advance. To avoid crowding the limited space, I compressed their bodies as much as possible."

Luo Yuqing: "?"

What did it mean to compress their bodies as much as possible?

Su Bai continued, "And I chose the smallest storage room."

After she uttered this sentence with great composure, Luo Yuqing's expression had transitioned from shock to horror. Yet, matching her horrified look incongruously, the corners of Luo Yuqing's mouth involuntarily hooked up, revealing a trace of exhilarating joy.

"I have some preliminary thoughts on how to deal with these people."

Su Bai added, "But before that, I thought you and your teammates might be interested in taking a look at them."

*

Room 1708 was a small storage room of only thirty square meters.

However, the moment Su Bai opened the door, Luo Yuqing found that the Room 1708 before her eyes was completely different from the Room 1708 in her memory.

"Don't worry."

Su Bai stepped inside. "Everyone from Eden has been isolated by the domain I constructed with Heaven-Swallowing Ice Flames, and no nuclear pollution will spread."

Luo Yuqing stared dumbfounded at everything before her, forgetting even to lift her foot and step inside.

At some point, the room had been filled with layer upon layer of racks, and the racks were crowded with cans made of transparent glass-like material, inside of which were blood-red objects mixed with dark purple.

A rectangular label was pasted on each can.

"Osakabe... Masao... Kishida... Morimoto?"

She drew a sharp breath and slowly read the words on the label. "They are... all inside the cans now?"

Su Bai casually picked up the can labeled Masao Osakabe next to her and shook it.

A lump of soft meat puree detached from the left side of the can with a plop and slammed hard against the right side. Because their skin had been entirely dissolved, bodies consisting now solely of newborn flesh were extremely sensitive.

A harsh scream and plea for mercy echoed from inside the can.

"Please... let me... go, please! Whatever you want me to do... I'll do anything!"

Su Bai tossed the can bearing Masao Osakabe's name into Luo Yuqing's hands. "Don't be afraid."

"On the surface, these look like ordinary glass cans, but internally they are all isolated by the flames separated from the Heaven-Swallowing Ice Flames. I can guarantee there is no nuclear radiation."

Luo Yuqing swallowed hard and lowered her head to look at the glass jar in her hand.

In a trance, she seemed to see white eyeballs mixed with a yellow, pus-like liquid slowly rolling around.

The moment he saw Luo Yuqing, Masao Osakabe's eyes widened abruptly. As if grasping at the final straw of life, he could no longer care about the pain of his flesh sticking to the glass jar, and cried out loudly for help: "Save me! Save me! I am innocent! I am innocent!"

Luo Yuqing clenched her fingers, her eyes stained with hatred.

Around the time the island nation began discharging its nuclear wastewater, the Dawn Technology company under Luo Yuqing's name had just captured a significant share of the technology market, such as an emerging AI named "Xiao Er." At the time, AI systems on the market were springing up like bamboo shoots after a rain.

At that time, the conservative human faction and the liberal faction were debating whether optical brains—having accepted massive amounts of information—possessed self-awareness, and what kind of AI should be implanted within optical brains to properly manage them. Dawn Technology's AI named "Xiao Er" entered the public eye due to its high security and high neutrality.

Unlike other AIs, Xiao Er's underlying code was implanted with canine genes. Luo Yuqing unexpectedly and perfectly combined bioengineering and information technology, endowing Xiao Er with extremely high loyalty and obedience toward humans. Consequently, this AI stood out in the global vote on planet B-12 and became the mainstream AI implanted within optical brains.

And at that time, Luo Yuqing's name also entered the sight of the upper echelons.

While Dawn Technology was flourishing, more and more people noticed that the company's technical staff consisted almost entirely of women. Reports even claimed that such a whimsical idea as combining canine genes with algorithms was a brilliant concept that only women could conceive.

Unlike a society dominated by men, which overly pursued power, desire, and superior social status, an article published in a top-tier journal at the time claimed that the current lack and degradation of social morality were partly due to the absence of female leaders' voices in the highest decision-making tiers. Consequently, it was difficult to make decisions imbued with truly more humane sparks of brilliance and warmth, or decisions that discarded so-called "power" and "desire."

Led by Dawn Technology, more and more women entered the tech field. They began learning to listen to the voices of their inner hearts, pondering what they truly desired, and wondering whether the ideology of strong men and weak women was something subliminally implanted into their brains by society from birth.

Why was it that since birth, what was emphasized was not their identity as human beings, but rather their identity as women?

During that period, Luo Yuqing always heard such voices—

Why was there an antagonistic relationship between men and women?

Why?

Luo Yuqing occasionally thought about such questions as well.

Yet these questions were resolved the very moment the island nation decided to discharge its nuclear wastewater.

When humanity had a common enemy, and at the critical juncture where everyone faced life and death, those gender distinctions that had been continuously reinforced by society and finally rooted in human brains began to crumble.

Or rather, when nuclear radiation silently spread to planet B-12 and humans were forced to retreat underground, vying for power and wealth was no longer humanity's primary task. This social system continuously collapsed amidst chaos, and the steel bars supporting the building named "society"—the so-called distinction between men and women—also began to disintegrate as the building fell.

Luo Yuqing had seen women and men with contamination levels above Grade A unhesitatingly head to Nora Harbor to extract data regarding the A37 nuclear energy reactor. She had seen uncontaminated female scientists go deep to the frontlines to research special medicine suitable for ability users, only to die later unable to withstand the agony of nuclear radiation. She had even seen a father push his wife and daughter into the base while choosing to fight mutant creatures alone.

Nuclear radiation did not distinguish between men and women; therefore, under the rules dominated by nuclear radiation, a human was simply a human.

Not men and women.

Thus, in these people, Luo Yuqing always saw the radiance of human nature, rather than merely the radiance of men or the radiance of women.

That was right.

When a human was first born, the concepts of so-called men and women did not exist in their brains at all, nor did concepts like "men should study science and engineering" or "women should tend to domestic affairs," nor the concept that "working and making money is vastly superior to bearing and raising children."

In an animal society where clear rules had yet to evolve, females possessing reproductive rights often held more speaking power, while males fought bloody battles to obtain the opportunity to "pass on their genes," desperately and frantically displaying their superior, powerful genes to females.

Yet looking back at human society, from the moment a person was born, society continuously weakened the concept of human beings while repeatedly emphasizing the concepts of male and female. Very coincidentally, humans indiscriminately took these pieces of information, seemingly revered as truth by everyone, directly as their own rules of action.

Abiding by such rules, some not-so-bad people committed evil unconsciously, and bad people committed evil openly utilizing the rules. In the end, the most equitable rule turned out to be the nuclear elements driving humanity into a desperate corner.

From then on, nuclear radiation superseded all rules, once again condensing human beings back into human beings.

Yet should she thank the island nation?

Luo Yuqing looked into Masao Osakabe's terrified eyes inside the glass jar, a towering fury igniting within her own eyes.

How could that be?

Weren't it precisely these so-called upper-class individuals and politicians who toyed with human hearts that formulated the so-called rules of this society?