“You stinking scrap iron! You rotten scrap iron! Is it that fun pretending to be mute in front of me for so many days aaaaaah?!”
After hearing Weeping of the Shadow “speak,” Xia Li’s first reaction was not fear, not panic, but extreme… rage.
After all, the large amount of negative emotions accumulated from these days of miserable life had finally found an outlet, and if she did not properly seize it now, it would be far too wasteful.
“You bastard garbage son-of-a-bitch scrap iron… I’ll stomp you to death! Stomp you to death! Stomp you to death aaaaaaaaaah!”
“Hey hey hey! Don’t! If you stomp me broken, even if you want to sell me as scrap iron you won’t get a good price!” After suffering dozens of stomps from Xia Li’s little feet, Weeping of the Shadow hurriedly shouted.
“You actually still have the self-awareness of being scrap iron?”
“Of course… my ass! I am the world-famous Weeping of the Shadow, condensed from the painstaking efforts of the most outstanding designer! You actually thought of selling me as scrap iron, what a terrible blasphemy! Not to mention doing such undignified things as stomping on me to vent anger! Apologize! Quickly apologize!”
“The one who should apologize is you!” Xia Li’s rage rushed straight to her forehead, making her entire face burn bright red! “I finally managed to climb into the winners’ circle of life! It’s all your fucking fault that I turned into this current appearance! Even if I don’t get to be that damn Crown Princess, what’s the meaning of turning into a dog girl? At the very least let this lady become a cat girl!”
“Hey hey hey, so what you care about is this?!” Weeping of the Shadow was also stunned, “And when it comes down to it, this isn’t even your body, right? You’re just an inventory consciousness that the system pulled out from the ‘Light’s Abyss.’ To be precise, you’re a reconstructed product of the consciousness of some dead ghost who died who-knows-how-many thousands of years ago.”
“Who are you calling a dead ghost? Eh wait… you know about my matters?” Xia Li was about to give this foul-mouthed bastard sword a few more stomps, but suddenly stopped her movements.
“That’s right! During these days when I was gradually recovering my normal functions, I more or less figured out what happened,” Weeping of the Shadow said, “In short, Xia Li… ah no, Your Highness Xia Li, I’m afraid both you and I have been calculated against by someone.”
“Calculated against?”
“Yes. However, please allow me to start explaining from the history of this world: I myself am merely a craftwork manufactured in the year 8755 AD. My master, out of personal preference, designed for me the function of ‘being able to automatically return to the master’s side,’ and permitted me to extract energy from the Nano-Element System and create certain magic-like effects… for example, those moves you used when assassinating His Majesty the Emperor.”
“Nano-Element System? That is…”
“A special swarm of nanomachines that can use metabolic waste inside the human body to cyclically self-replicate. Every ‘person of the heavens’ like you who lives in the tower city-states has this inside them. However, although nanorobots are very common, this kind of robot was specifically designed for the planet Elysia. Its purpose is to allow the owner to stably utilize ‘Extra-Rational Power.’”
“Mm…” Xia Li nodded.
Although a good amount of the original body’s memories had already returned, there were still holes everywhere, just like a cow brain that had been turned spongy by mad cow virus.
Therefore, there were also many things she did not know.
“Fifty centuries ago, humanity that was carrying out great expansion within the Orion Arm discovered this planet seventy-five parsecs away from the solar system.” The pitch-black longsword explained, “The probe robots that first arrived here noticed that this seemingly ordinary planet was continuously radiating outward a very special form of energy.”
“That is ‘Extra-Rational Power’?”
“Correct. At the very beginning, this power was still very sparse, and its influence on the real world was limited to the level of bending spoons or floating paper, but strangely, as humans massively colonized this planet, ‘Extra-Rational Power’ also became stronger and stronger, and the reason remains unknown to this day.”
“And then?”
“At first, people were overjoyed, thinking they had discovered an inexhaustible new energy source. Unfortunately, their excitement quickly passed. Because research showed that ‘Extra-Rational Power’ would rapidly attenuate when far from the planet; at twelve kilometers from the planetary surface its intensity halved, and at one hundred kilometers from the planet it could almost no longer affect the real world.”
“In other words, it couldn’t be taken outside to use?”
“Yes. In addition, ‘Extra-Rational Power’ can only be guided through the will of intelligent beings, and is itself very unstable. Accidents often occur because of tiny discrepancies, and these accidents often manifest in ways that conflict with basic physical common sense. This is the reason the concept of ‘Extra-Rational Power’ got its name.”
“So those rich people who treated this place as a tourist resort wanted to experience real magic but were afraid of accidents, so they created that ‘Nano-Element System’?”
“Exactly. You ‘people of the heavens’ are the descendants of those guys,” Weeping of the Shadow said, “Ten centuries ago, the civil war within the Confederation spread to this region, causing the planetary system where Elysia is located to lose contact with the outside. And not long after that, the ‘Extra-Rational Power’ on the planet suddenly lost control and intensified, directly causing complex equipment without protective measures—especially electronic equipment—to be unable to function on the surface. Technological civilization therefore retreated into the city-states far from the surface.”
“This I do know…” Xia Li nodded.
She still remembered that because the influence of “Extra-Rational Power” was too strong, the cost of providing protective measures for electronic equipment and complex mechanical devices so they could work on the surface was extremely expensive, often several times higher than manufacturing the equipment itself.
Precisely because of this, although relying on the ancient technological legacy the empire composed of “people of the heavens” held a huge advantage over the “people of the earth,” they still could not efficiently rule the surface and needed to rely on vassals and protectorates for indirect control.
“More importantly, during the great war, ‘Extra-Rational Power’ also underwent changes, and some aggregates composed of this energy that possessed autonomous consciousness appeared. These energy aggregates are called ‘Resentful Spirits,’ and often possess extremely strong malice.”
“Mm…” Thinking of her appearance when she had been controlled, Xia Li could not help but shudder, “Is that the guy who kept shouting ‘hungry’ inside my head before?”
“Yes. Many ‘Resentful Spirits’ have a hunger that is nearly an obsession and cannot be soothed. This is also their general characteristic.”
“Tch… so it was a bunch of cyber hungry ghosts.”
“Although my memory database has been damaged. But according to my inference, it is very likely that someone deliberately brought a ‘Resentful Spirit’ with pre-set behavioral logic into the tower city-states… One part of it was injected into a city’s communication system, triggering collective chaos and madness; another part was injected into my system, and then…”
“And then, after I followed instructions and obtained you, my consciousness would be eroded by this thing.” Xia Li said.
“To be precise, the one whose consciousness was eroded was the ‘original’ Xia Li. Because the damage was too severe, most of her consciousness is still asleep. The current you is merely an ancient dead ghost fused with a small portion of her consciousness and memories—gah!”
“Don’t you dare say that word again!” Xia Li roared while painfully stomping on that pitch-black longsword.
At the entrance of a distant alley, several passersby saw this scene and hurriedly quickened their pace to slip away.
“Then how exactly did I come into this body?!”
“This… I’m not too clear either. However, as far as I know, the planet Elysia once built a special facility called the ‘Light’s Abyss’ in the past, which preserved tens of billions of human consciousness replicas. No one knows for what purpose the ancients of the Golden Age built it, but if it detects that a high-level individual with administrator privileges has fallen into a situation that may endanger the city, the cost-based automatic security system seems to extract a suitable consciousness from it and implant it into the target for takeover.”
“No wonder…” Xia Li muttered.
Undoubtedly, the imperial family and high nobles of the Federal Empire who held ruling authority over many tower city-states certainly possessed their “administrator privileges.”
Precisely because of this, after the original body’s consciousness had almost been completely swallowed, that system extracted a replica of the consciousness of “Xia Li” that had been preserved who-knows-how from that so-called “Abyss,” forcibly stuffed it into Xia Li’s body, and competed for control against the body-snatching “Resentful Spirit.”
…It just didn’t succeed, that’s all.
“In summary, although I don’t know who the guy who did this is, there is no doubt that that person must hold a high position in the Federal Empire. Otherwise it would be impossible to obtain something as extremely rare as a ‘Resentful Spirit,’ let alone, after making preparations, precisely have the Imperial Army General Staff instruct you to fall into the trap.” Finally, Weeping of the Shadow summarized.
“Tch…” Xia Li angrily clenched both fists—judging from the memories left by the original body, the enemies she had made in daily life were not too many… because the word “too many” was already insufficient to describe the number of these people.
Because she was praised as a genius unseen in the imperial family for several hundred years, and because she usually handled matters without compromise and with iron-faced impartiality, blocking many people’s paths of advancement, Xia Li had almost successfully provoked every single person who had a reason to hate her.
And this also meant that among the upper echelons of the Federal Empire, aside from her already-exploded biological mother and a few trustworthy friends, everyone else could possibly be the person who had secretly harmed her.
In other words, unless she could return to the tower city-states to investigate, she would never know who had done these things.
But as an exiled criminal, returning was fundamentally impossible…
“Oh, it’s not impossible either.” Weeping of the Shadow seemed to have guessed what she was thinking, “Over these several centuries, the Federal Empire has long since become corrupt, and its rules and regulations are riddled with holes. In other words, as long as there is money, this sword can completely think of ten or even nine paths back to the heavens for you.”
“Oh, ‘as long as there is money’? Really, thank you so much!” Xia Li coldly laughed with some annoyance, “Right now our biggest problem is that I only have five yuan and eighty cents in my pocket, and this broken sword of yours simply can’t sell for a good price! Those scrap collectors at most are only willing to pay one or two or three yuan and fifty cents! Never mind returning to the Federal Empire, in another two days I’m going to starve!”
“So stop only thinking about selling me aaaaaah!” The black sword roared with some collapse, “Haven’t I already said it? The only plan for now is to sell your own body; that’s the fastest way to make money!”
“You you you… mm…” Xia Li’s face instantly turned the color of a ripe strawberry, “That… even if I absolutely have to do this, I’m still not prepared yet… after all, on the level of consciousness, I was previously… was… was…”
“Fuck! Is this something that needs preparation?!” The black sword declared, “Forget it, just follow my instructions! Although in theory I also count as a victim of this conspiracy, since you believe I bear responsibility toward you, then I will definitely send you back to the heavens! Listen carefully, walk two hundred meters forward along this road, turn left, and find the building with a red light hanging on the next street! I guarantee you that as long as you lie down on a bed there, the problem of eating can be solved within two hours!”
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