Can Ci Pin - - - Chapter 191

Chapter 191 – Would Rather Mistakenly Kill the Innocent Than Let the Evil Run Free

The New Sidereal Era went through its darkest seven days.

“Ancients have said that it also took God seven days to create the world; even today, Woltorian standard time still calculates seven days as one week.” Lu Bixing suddenly said to his mech pilot.

The pilot from the Silver Ten was taken by surprise, and quickly turned to compliment him, “So it’s a good sign that we chose to commence the operation right now?”

“It’s just a coincidence.” Lu Bixing laughed and said, “The Garden of Eden was also a name of blessing too–here, give me piloting access.”

The pilot was puzzled and wondered since when their Prime Minister had also caught the Marshal’s “mental networks must always be in my own hands” disease. As he hesitated and gave the Prime Minister access, he worried his superior wasn’t pleased with his piloting skills. He couldn’t help but mumble beneath his breath, “Sir, my mech piloting skills are actually still passable in the navy.”

“Of course an elite like you from the Silver Ten will be better than me, but the first batch of AI mechs that arrive will certainly attempt to trap us by launching a direct attack to our mental networks. I have a cheat so I can withstand a little longer,” Lu Bixing explained. “I’ll hand it over to you when I can’t hold on anymore.”

At the same time, the Silver Fourth Squadron heading to the furthest military zone had already discreetly arrived in place. Anakin carefully placed the highly-sensitive energy detectors around and waited quietly for the promised time.

The AI mechs patrolled the galaxy following the routes of the terminals, keeping an eye out for enemies that had sailed into the First Galaxy.

The Heart of the Rose was almost concerningly silent; the wormhole terminal separated a few days of delay between the First and Eighth Galaxies. Nobody knew what was happening on the other side of the terminal.

Lu Bixing connected to the mental network and recalled the first time he had successfully activated a mech, the joy and excitement he felt when he rose above the atmosphere of planet Cayley.

The world was kind to him back then; he had a lot of unreliable and strange friends, a boundless dream, and an old man behind him. That old Persian cat was clearly keeping an anxious eye on him, but would always pretend to look away–as if he wasn’t already caught worrying over his son.

He had thought he was about to unveil a corner of the starry sky.

He had wanted to prop up a whole night sky of stars above the broken Eighth Galaxy, planting some seeds of hope in the hearts of the same restless young souls who yearned for a better future like he did. He wanted to close up the school during every long vacation between academic semesters to follow the celestial bodies and travel through the eight galaxies. If he ran out of money, he would go design mechs on the side to earn some extra income to fund his endless adventures around the cosmos, freely enjoying his 300 years worth of life. Love would come and go in his life without strings attached; he wouldn’t have to devote such heavy love as he held for Lin Jingheng and create a myriad of emotional suffering. When he grew old, he would just go home to write an autobiography of his life, collecting all the useless little inventions he made throughout the years into a book to publish.

How beautiful would such a life be.

He originally planned on accomplishing his dream by 40 and would live the life of his dreams; yet he didn’t expect that even up til now, he hadn’t managed to realize that dream lifestyle.

I built so many schools back then, but nobody would let me be the principal. All of Lu Bixing’s senses expanded with the mental network as he thought, I have the power to pilot a mech to sail around wherever I want, but I’ve only ever left the Eighth Galaxy a handful of times. And every time I left, I was either faced with some kidnapping or had to go out in battle.

“Prime Minister, we’re starting the countdown. The mech is preheating; engine system check complete, coordinates confirmed. All passengers: remain in position and prepare for emergency warping—”

“Ten, nine, eight….”

“I sure am pretty mediocre,” Lu Bixing muttered self-mockingly, “as a Prime Minister of a galaxy.”

The Union mech hiding near a First Galaxy Communication Station opened fire first and cleanly cut off the network.

“Three, two, one—”

The end of the countdown was buried in the sounds of the mech engine; the commanding ship and its escort mechs exposed themselves at the transfer portal in the First Galaxy. A massive wave of abnormal energy woke the phantoms within the First Galaxy as malicious eyes locked in on the intruders. The arrest order traveled like a raging tide across the transfer portals all around the galaxy to the patrolling mechs.

Before Lu Bixing’s crew could settle in, another wave of abnormal energy arrived–the closest fleet of AI mechs were making their way over at this moment.

An emergency warp experience was extremely uncomfortable; it was equivalent to traveling in space outside of a mech for a whole day in one’s naked body. The entire crew inside the mech was bubbled in by the jelly-like protection airbags and needed a few moments to catch their breaths after the warp.

Of course, AIs didn’t need that buffer time in between emergency warping. They sailed out of the transfer portals at their fastest speed without taking a second of rest; they sent out a wave of mental network attacks to knock down the crew while the pilots were still pulling themselves back into shape.

Lu Bixing took this neural attack wave with his biochip-powered mental strength while all mechs immediately switched over to a backup pilot.

At the same time, all sixteen teams that had dispersed to their separate military zones began recording all changes in energies from the fortresses there. This was the one good thing about AIs; if the forces stationed in those military zones had been human soldiers, it would be impossible to avoid inaccuracies and small inconsistencies in action–even if they were all professionals trained to be precise. The different speed of activation would also need to be accounted for on top of other variables, making it impossible to accurately calculate the time difference.

Only when facing AIs, where Woolf’s main processor acted as the ‘brain,’ could they achieve such a feat; the military fortresses around the galaxy were like its organs that made it possible for humans to reverse-engineer the location of the main body.

Lu Bixing’s commanding ship fired six rounds of missiles simultaneously, barely managing to stop the forces chasing after him. The closest two missiles clashed with nearby the commanding ship, massive amounts of broken metal burst away from the mech bodies and crashed violently onto the shields. The commanding ship quickly took this opportunity to escape.

Yet an army of AI mechs locked in on their ship through their warping network as fleets sailed out in batches through the transfer portals, shaking up the entire First Galaxy.

“Minister Lu, the enemy released warping disruption signals!”

“All nearby transfer portals have blocked our communication, we’ve been surrounded…”

“Watch out!”

Missiles and mental network attacks fired out at the same time. Even for biochip humans, human-mech sync rates could not reach 100%. During the brief shake up of the mental network, the missile shot past the commanding ship from a dangerously close distance, almost hitting the weaponry as the sirens inside the mech screamed in horror.

It had barely been a hot second since Lu Bixing’s bluff about not making a heroic sacrifice was spoken; the young man now felt a layer of cold sweat down his back.

The sixteen teams of human fleets would be communicating with each other through heavy layers of protected communication channels as they rushed to lock down the military zone where the main body was located. Their enemies would certainly use this opportunity to attempt to break through their communication locks; once the enemy managed to hack into the channel through the main processor and discovered the goal of the human fleets, it would immediately move itself from its position. So while keeping the channels locked was important, the key component of this operation was to allow the closest fleet to the main processor to immediately clean out all transfer portals in the area and trap the AI in its place.

To ensure a swift operation, every team had to be well-equipped with both mechs and soldiers. Therefore, when arranging the teams, Lu Bixing had left only a few small escorting mechs on his end, who were not enough to serve as a fully-occupied party when the doors opened.

Lu Bixing’s quick wits saved him in this desperate situation: “Send out a communication request!”

They only needed to hold the enemy down for a little more than ten minutes to lock onto the location of the main AI body. Now that he couldn’t run nor fight back, his only choice was to buy some time. “I want to speak with Chief Woolf.”

Within two sentences, an overlaid wave of high-energy particle cannons powerful enough to melt a mech shield fired.

The shields were swallowed up like microscopic organisms in the mouth of a whale. Heavy mechs were enormous and were like exposed targets walking right into space radiation zones without shields. Even a small piece of mech remnant in space could cause significant damage, let alone a missile.

Yet the temperature outside the mech body continued to rise rapidly; the shield screeched in one last desperate attempt to stay intact while continuously sending in damage reports, only to be annihilated into dust while the escorts watched in dismay–the commanding ship soon became a shellless turtle.

“Minister Lu!”

The next moment, the violent wave of fire from the AIs finally stopped as the opposing end accepted the communication request.

The escorts around Lu Bixing cooperated seamlessly as they took this brief opportunity to quickly sail towards the heavy mech’s landing dock.

Lu Bixing found a different place to sit down. The cold sweat on his back was a strange sensation for him, but he had no choice but to put on an angry and frustrated expression as he threw out a question to Woolf, “I thought your job was to defend against the Freedom Corps and protect the peace of the galaxies, and didn’t you say you were going into sleep mode? Then what are you doing right now–sleepwalking across space?”

Woolf’s voice rang out: “Annihilating biochip humans is my duty.”

“Who the fuck are you accusing of being a biochip human!?” Lu Bixing glanced quickly at the time, feeling as if that second hand was ticking as slowly as a turtle. A whole minute right now felt like a whole eternity as he said, “Now that you know about the Nuwa Project, can’t you tell that the chip I have inside me is different from that opium madness from the Freedom Crops?”

“I know,” Woolf responded without any hint of emotion. “The chip inside you has been modified to something closer to that of an accelerator for biological evolution. According to Doctor Laura Gordon’s research data, a body successfully modified by the Rainbow Virus would meet the technical requirements for evolution. Therefore, injecting a chip into such a body would trigger the autoevolution of the biological host–the key component of success was the portion of using the Nuwa Project to produce a suitable host body, not the biochip itself. The Freedom Corps gave up on the path of biological evolution in their research. Lin Jingshu took Doctor Gordon’s biochip and modified it to become harmful to humans, making it create hallucinations among people. The resulting product was then spread widely throughout the masses, to which the public responded by building a strict and rigid social hierarchy based on these chips.”

Lu Bixing: “Aren’t you so knowledgeable on this subject.”

Woolf continued to make irrational comments: “But you’re all still biochip humans that must be annihilated.”

Lu Bixing choked on anger at this illogical conclusion: “Hey old Chief, are you sure you didn’t catch a virus?”

“Your nature is all the same,” Woolf ignored him and continued to explain himself. “The Freedom Corps’ biochip empire wanted to annihilate all of humanity and foundationally reconstruct human society at its roots. Your evolutionary path instead allowed a portion of existing humans to become superhumans, and the birth of these new superhumans will create new class struggles and conflict. This will all inevitably lead to the fracturing of society and war; according to our estimation, it would be highly likely for natural humans to face complete extinction at that point. Both biochips will eventually lead to the same result; there is no difference, therefore both must be destroyed.”

Lu Bixing was taken aback for a moment; he didn’t expect this AI to be so thorough in its analysis and not simply lump all biochip humans into the same category. He almost instinctively tried to explain, “I’ve considered this problem already, many years ago and I’ve even destroyed all research data regarding it…if I didn’t, the Eighth Galaxy would have already built its own superhuman military fleet by now, wouldn’t it?”

It seemed as if the AI found some truth in this statement and fell into silence.

Lu Bixing quickly followed up with the same energy: “Biochips can be cloned and reproduced as much as we want, but the artificial body modification of the Nuwa Project is the real key. With our technologies now, bodily modifications have an extremely high rate of failure that could cost lives; luck plays an important role in this as well. The AUS had attempted to relaunch their Rainbow Project numerous times to no avail, and the success cases were significantly low. I had virtually no way of leading a proper lifestyle before I was 15, and to be honest, I don’t even know how I managed to survive and live to this day. Tell me, which galaxy would possibly legalize and allow this astronomically dangerous mass human body experiment to go into action? It doesn’t even maintain a suitable level of promotion within any community. Remember how that tyrant King Cayley died back then? The Eighth Galaxy still remembers, so how could I even dare to make the same mistake? At the end of the day, I’m really just another test subject myself.”

Woolf said: “Indeed.”

The crew let out a small sigh of relief.

Lu Bixing took a look at the clock again and they were still only halfway to their scheduled time. He had always been someone who could strike up a conversation with anyone at any time without trouble. It was the first time he had to hold such a heavy topic in conversation: “I’ve never hurt anyone. Even if I had once been enchanted by the demons inside me to illegally obtain a sample of the Rainbow Virus, I’ve already destroyed it all. But you, Chief Woolf, you refused to follow up on all these other biochip humans still roaming outside of the First Galaxy. You aren’t sending out help anywhere else and instead directed all of your energy to fight against the Alliance troops stationed in the Heart of the Rose. On top of that, you even tried to get your hands on the freshly-settled Eighth Galaxy! Now tell me who’s the one causing trouble here between the two of us?”

The AI once again fell into silence.

“If you want to completely destroy all biochips,” Lu Bixing took in a breath of air and continued, “very well. I’ll go lay in an ecopod right now and sail out of the mech. You can choose to do whatever you want with me, only if you promise to call back all dispatched troops and go immediately to sleep.”

The soldier beside Lu Bixing’s expression darkened, “Minister, you…”

Lu Bixing lifted a hand to interrupt him and turned back to Woolf: “Even if your mechs have no pilots and are controlled by AIs, they are all still space-grade weapons built by the military. Crisis still plagues the universe outside of the First Galaxy, so why are you wasting your resources on me? I only have a few soldiers around me, I’ve virtually come on my own to the First Galaxy. We’re not here to cause trouble; I’m willing to make a sacrifice for the peace we worked so hard to attain. Chief Woolf, if we both share the same goal, how about we stop this senseless fighting between us?”

“You have a point,” Super AI Woolf responded slowly.

Lu Bixing lowered his voice and ordered his soldier: “Prepare an ecopod for me.”

He would go inside the ecopod, fly out into space, and wait until the AIs captured him—assuming they would capture him and not simply blow him up into stardust–that should be enough to last until they located the AI’s main body.

Once the main processor was destroyed, these looming mechs around them would simply be decorations; Lu Bixing’s heart regained a bit of confidence.

Yet at that moment, the AI Woolf suddenly said: “But I can’t determine whether or not you really destroyed all Nuwa Project data. Until we fully overtake the Eighth Galaxy, I also cannot determine if you have kept a secret research lab or not. The wormhole terminals are easy to disrupt but difficult to keep stable, so it would be hard for me to enter the Eighth Galaxy if this opportunity is missed—”

Lu Bixing understood the unspoken words, his face growing pale within a matter of seconds.

“So before entering the wormhole zone, I already notified Longyuan and the fellow supermechs that they shall not return until they take down the Eighth Galaxy,” the AI that fully replicated Woolf’s personality said coldly. “As for you, I would rather mistakenly kill the innocent than let the evil run free.”

As the last syllable dropped, countless warmed-up cannons fired missiles towards Lu Bixing’s commanding ship while everyone aboard was focused on the conversation!

The artificial digital void in the Eighth Galaxy had been completely destroyed. The AI fleets that had been fighting as the underdogs rose madly in a feral uprising, firing attack after attack at the Human Alliance’s last defense line without rest.

Until now, it had been days of restless and intense fighting. Relaxants were starting to lose their initial effectiveness as everyone’s bloodshot eyes stared at the battlefield.

For days, the Galactic Forces had been pushing backwards; they were getting dangerously close to the active human areas of the Eighth Galaxy.

“Marshal.” Inside the Milky Way City Command Post, Huang Jingshu sent out her message to the top commander, “The entire Eighth Galaxy’s anti-missile systems are being temporarily set up right now.”

Lin Jingheng’s voice was virtually gone; he could no longer afford to lose more of his already-hoarse voice and simply gave her a glance through the communication screen.

Huang Jingshu immediately understood what he meant– how long do they need?

“Twelve hours,” Huang Jingshu said. “Installation is completed on all major planets so far, and currently all major public terminals within the galaxy have been closed off. The equipment on the terminals is in its final adjustment phase, we only need twelve more hours to finish!”

Lin Jingheng waved his hand to hang up the call and called out with his sore throat: “All fleets, do not back up anymore for the next twelve hours. If you die, you better die as a roadblock at your post!”

In the First Galaxy–

The mech dock on Lu Bixing’s command ship opened up and a dozen or so small mechs sailed out into space. Just as they left the heavy mech, the commanding ship was engulfed in the explosions from the missiles.

Lu Bixing felt like his heart forgot how to beat. “Just how much longer!?”

“Minister,” a soldier from the Silver Ten beside him said, “the Eighth Galaxy has Marshal Lin in command, what could possibly happen even if the Great Swords all unite?”

Lu Bixing truly wanted to pretend to believe in him and give him a reassuring smile, but he could no longer put a grin on his face.

Many years ago, he also thought Lin Jingheng was invincible. Even the mention of that name could give him a sense of security as if there was no battlefield in the universe that this man couldn’t hold onto, no enemies that he couldn’t defeat.

Yet this blind trust had already vanished along with those sixteen years of unparalleled anguish for the loss of his love.

“Prime Minister, watch out!”

While Lu Bixing’s mind was off the battlefield, a missile almost crashed into them. The small mech managed to dodge it at the last minute, but soon after, the AI’s mental network attack swirled in like a tornado. This brief hiccup was then met with a complete barricade of the road ahead by countless AI mechs.

Lu Bixing could hear his own heart thump as if it was about to explode from his chest.

“Minister Lu, we locked in successfully!”

Lu Bixing’s head shot up—perhaps it was fate that the Alliance fleets managed to lock down on the area where the main body was located at right at this tidal-changing moment, but even more fateful was that the location was right in the military zone closest to him right now!

Yet before he could respond, his mech was also locked onto by an enemy missile.

There was nowhere he could escape anymore as he was now targeted within this massive and dense barricade.