Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

“My lord!”

An old man in a white gown who was short, slender, and looked like a weasel hurried to walk forward.

A metal ring had been embedded into the old man’s brow and around his head. More than ten ports were distributed on the metal ring evenly. Most of the ports had some weird magical equipment that was either blinking or humming. The information streams that they triggered around his head were chaotic.

He was Luo Tiansheng, the supervisor of the laboratory of high-end magical equipment and techniques in Manjusaka, and a renowned scholar who was adept at everything from flying swords and crystal suits to biochemical modifications.

Staring at ‘Great Iron City’ that was on a rampage on the light beams, Wuying Lan asked, “Dr. Luo, you said that the Fist King went out of control, but didn’t we know that something was wrong with his Great Iron City? All the procedures of his modification on Great Iron City were closely monitored and recorded by us. What tricks could he possibly pull?”

“There is nothing wrong with ‘Great Iron City’. The problematic part is the way to control ‘Great Iron City’, or rather, the Fist King himself,” Luo Tiansheng said. “Please look at the battle parameters that the Fist King has demonstrated right now.”

Shua!

A light beam where the Fist King was butchering his enemies was enlarged. Detailed analyses were run on his every attack. Every subtle change, from speed to angle to strength, was displayed after quantification. The thousands of data points were calculated through complicated formulas, and the value of the comprehensive combat ability was presented.

“How interesting.” Wuying Lan narrowed his eyes. The skin around his eyes was still frozen in frost, but his lips curled into a smile of interest. “His movement should be somewhat clumsy when he is steering a ‘Great Iron City’ almost a hundred meters tall, but his speed and agility are more than twice what we anticipated. He is almost as fast as a Colossus. What kind of secret arts has his remaining soul been practicing to enable him to make use of such an enormous iron fortress as if it were part of his body?”

“You’re quite right, my lord,” Luo Tiansheng said drily. “The Fist King’s comprehensive combat ability is 275% higher than our expectation, and the value is still rising. Based on all the techniques that he has ever trained, it is absolutely impossible.

“Therefore, we went back and studied all the files of the Fist King in the past. Overturning a lot of our preconceived hypotheses, we have reached the most astonishing conclusion!”

“Oh?” Wuying Lan looked at the light beam, where ‘Fist King’ Lei Zonglie had grabbed a player of Immortal Cultivators in his giant hand.

The player struggled hard and screamed desperately. He seemed to be shouting something like, “I’m done. I’m done playing. Come on and save me. Get me out of this place!”

But it was useless. In the very next second, the player was crushed by the Fist King into a cluster of sparks and blood.

Wuying Lan’s cold smile was even more intense. “What is your conclusion?”

“No spectral Cultivators can achieve what the Fist King has achieved—hacking Xiahou Wuxin’s automatic flying sword system, changing four spiritual puppets in an instant, and eventually controlling a gargantuan spiritual puppet almost a hundred meters tall in such a deft and accurate way. Absolute none!” Luo Tiansheng said affirmatively. “Therefore, ‘Fist King’ Lei Zonglie can’t be a ghost. The whole group of specialists can vouch for that!”

“Not a ghost?” Weird brilliance beamed out of Wuying Lan’s eyes. “What is he then?”

“An artificial intelligence,” Luo Tiansheng said. “Or, you may understand him as a very unique spiritual puppet, my lord.”

“interesting.” On the light beam, ‘Fist King’ Lei Zonglie was shouldering the intense barrage from Liberty City. The colorful fireballs seemed to have covered him in an armor of flames. He, or it, uttered metal and mechanical roars at Liberty City, the tower leading into the sky beyond Liberty City, the Heavenly Rails above the tower, and Manjusaka at the center of the Heavenly Rails.

As if he were observing the most fabulous toy, Wuying Lan said, “Explain yourself.”

“This whole time, we have been fooled by ‘Fist King’ Lei Zonglie. It has been acting outwardly and straightforwardly and did not bother to disguise his ambition to unite the entire Land of Sins, misleading us into thinking that he was just a simple-headed warrior.

“Now, we can tell that he only declared such appalling ambitions in order to cover a greater secret. He disguised himself as a living human being, a remaining soul who had lost the fleshly body, and a spectral Cultivator who had crawled into an artificial body.

“It was not until today when he exerted all his strength that we managed to catch a glimpse at the truth. He is not a human being but a spiritual puppet that boasts automatic learning and upgrading abilities, and a super artificial intelligence that can vividly simulate the feelings and demeanors of human beings.”

“I know that there was an increased trend of super artificial intelligence in the Imperium about three hundred years ago,” Wuying Lan said unhurriedly. “A lot of specialists believed that spiritual puppets with the ability to automatically learn and upgrade themselves could replace soldiers to a very large extent. At least, they could replace the bottom-level soldiers—the cannon fodder.

“If the goal proved to be a success, we wouldn’t need to feed so many filthy hominoids.

“At that time, the specialists ran a lot of experiments on this planet, right?”

“Yes,” Luo Tiansheng said. “Two hundred years ago, we sent forty-seven models of spiritual puppets that could automatically learn and upgrade to the Land of Sins. Each of them had a unique logic circuit and means of upgrade. At that time, our main approach was still competition. We hoped that the forty-seven spiritual puppets would fight, swallow, and merge with each other like forty-seven different insects. Then, the last survivor would be the king of them, and its logic circuit, mind database, and upgrade forms would have the greatest value to be studied and manufactured.

“Therefore, when the spiritual puppets were sent to the Land of Sins, they were not set with any specific targets. Only a fuzzy instruction was set deep into their mind database.”

“What was the instruction?” Wuying Lan asked.

“Upgrade to the strongest whatever the cost and method!” Luo Tiansheng said.

Wuying Lan asked, unmoved, “What happened later?”

“Later, the project ended in a natural course.” Luo Tiansheng sighed. “It was supposed to be the project with the hugest investment in the laboratory of the Land of Sins two hundred years ago, but everybody underestimated the difficulty in creating real artificial intelligence. The so-called ‘automatic learning and upgrading’ was just an impractical illusion. In the end, the spiritual puppets can still only carry out mechanical and definitive tasks but cannot understand fuzzy, chaotic, and unpredictable targets.

“A spiritual puppet can destroy everything in a pair of fixed coordinates, but it cannot understand what ‘upgrade to the strongest’ means.

“What does ‘strongest’ mean? Is it the strongest in the Land of Sins, the Devilish Scorpion Galaxy, the Imperium of True Human Beings, or the entire universe? Does it mean to be strong enough to blow up the three-dimensional universe, the four-dimensional universe, or even everything beyond?

“At that time, the specialists did not take the question into consideration but simply inputted such a ridiculous instruction for the artificial intelligences.

“Also, because of the vulnerability and instability of the new crystal processors, the fault rate of the batch of automatic-learning spiritual puppets was very high. Even if no faults happened, ninety-nine percent of them would be mired in absurd logic traps.

“If the regular spiritual puppets could be compared to lifeless slaughter machines, the automatic-learning spiritual puppets were like three-year-old children. They were unpredictable and uncontrollable.

“The automatic-learning spiritual puppets project became a bottomless hole that absorbed tremendous resources. The sects, families, and corporations that were involved in the project all suffered heavy losses. It even led to the decline of the laboratory in the Land of Sins and even its doom, if you had not come here to bring it back to life again, my lord.”

Wuying Lan nodded. “Then, what was the ending of the spiritual puppets that boasted the automatic learning and upgrading abilities?”

“Most of them were destroyed in wars,” Luo Tiansheng said. “They were dismantled into the most fundamental components in the ceaseless battles in the Land of Sins or buried in the deepest part of the city ruins.

“Only some of them fell to the hands of the sinners. But their performance was very unstable in battles and got a lot of people killed. Later, they were mostly used for civil purposes and worked as ‘machine servants’, ‘waiters’, or ‘porters’.

“You know that the resources for our surveillance are very limited, and the analysis abilities of humans and crystal processors are seriously inadequate. Therefore, after the success of dozens of projects since you came here, most of the resources have been distributed elsewhere, and we gradually lost track of the remaining automatic-learning spiritual puppets.”

Wuying Lan smiled. “It appears that the ‘king of competition’ that the specialists and professions looked forward to two hundred years ago has been born without anybody knowing it.”

“Yes,” Luo Tiansheng said. “When they studied the super artificial intelligence, the specialists and professors resorted to anything possible, even including the most extreme approaches. A lot of the super tiny crystal chips excavated from the primeval relics of the Pangu Clan and the Nuwa Clan were directly duplicated and embedded in our crystal processors. It must be noted that countless complicated rune arrays and circuits are within the super tiny chips. We do not even know their functioning mechanisms, only the input and the output. They are essentially ‘black boxes’ for us.

“After the crystal processors that were embedded with countless super tiny black-box chips were sent to the ever-changing, chaotic battlefield, what kind of amazing changes could happen in two hundred years? I can only say that anything is possible!”

“So, this can be counted as a pleasant surprise?” Wuying Lan mumbled. “Look at it. How strong, how magnificent, and how intimidating! Tell me about it. Does it have a real self-consciousness? Is it a life of a brand-new life form?”