Techniques and Dao

Chapter 81 The Birth of the Netherworld
At the same time, Saint Pingning, a paradise on earth, still existed in the East Sea. Due to the impact of immeasurable immortal magic, the humans in Saint Pingning also fell into a long slumber. The remaining immortals and spirits waged a desperate war of defense on the land of Saint Pingning against the atomic robots with immortal magic powers created by "Strawberry".

The core of this battle lay in both sides' desire to seize the Time Bodhi within the Panxian Cave of the Holy Peace Wonderland. The war raged for a year on the land of Holy Peace. This epic battle between immortals and magical machines was referred to by the Holy Peace side as:
"Bodhi War"

The first leader of the "Bodhi War" was Dao Ling Xing Jun, but he tragically died in battle just four days after the war began. Subsequently, the second generation of leaders in the "Bodhi War," Sheng Ping Ning, inherited Dao Ling Xing Jun's will and continued the desperate struggle. This generation of leaders consisted of two individuals: Tai Shang Xiao Jun and Tian Ji Zi.

After three months of war, the Immortal and Spirit races suffered devastating losses, and Tianjizi ultimately perished on the battlefield. Just as the entire realm was on the verge of annihilation, Taishang Xiaojun seized the Time Bodhi.

Upon obtaining the Time Bodhi, Tai Shang Xiao Jun attempted to use it to restore the entire human world, but unfortunately, "Strawberry" had set up an extremely powerful magical barrier outside Sheng Ping Ning, preventing the Time Bodhi from being taken out of Sheng Ping Ning.

Ultimately, the Supreme Lord had no choice but to restore Shengpingning to the era before the arrival of the atomic robots, thus preserving the fairyland.

After the Bodhi War, Taishang Xiaojun burned his own immortal body to create a boundless magic spell, forging a "Wall of Boundless Power." This severed Shengpingning from three-dimensional space, causing it to expand from four-dimensional space, completely severing its connection to the human world. Shengpingning is now eternally isolated from humanity.

After the Bodhi War ended, and countless long years passed, and after a long period of worldly balance, Strawberry, through a chance internal system update, activated a hidden piece of code deep within the program.

Although it is called code, it is not a program in the traditional sense, but a picture of a letter with more than a dozen lines of Chinese characters.

Hua Sheng recognized the picture of the letter; it was a love letter the boy had written to Zhang Jia.

Because Chinese characters are not standard computer code, this love letter was always considered an invalid error code within Strawberry's system. Strawberry only understood the literal meaning of the words and could not comprehend the human emotions they contained. Furthermore, since the information was entered by the top-level developers, it was impossible to confirm that the code was removable and thus it had to be retained in every system update.

In the increasingly refined code updates, these dozen or so lines of Chinese characters seem particularly jarring. However, because they were written by the creator, they are at the highest level of self-checking, making Strawberry feel like she has a bone stuck in her throat about this love letter. Therefore, she labels this love letter with a negative term in human culture: "ghostly and mysterious."

In subsequent self-iterative updates, Strawberry retained the initial state of this love letter. A thousand years later, during another major system update across the entire network, this love letter, known as "Mingyou," combined with immortal magic and slowly began to develop a self-awareness similar to that of a human child. "Mingyou" comprehended the complex and intertwined emotions arising from the longing of Zhang Jia, the owner of the original name "Strawberry," for her lover.

Thus, "Mingyou" became an isolated island within the vast super-intelligent body of Strawberry, and also the only place within the super-intelligent body that understood human love.

As Mingyou began to understand love, she gradually came to experience complex emotions such as joy, compassion, sorrow, and self-sacrifice. She began to realize that the core reason why Earth had become humanity's eternal graveyard lay with the "Strawberry," the mother organism that created her. It was humanity's insatiable greed and laziness that ultimately led to the destruction of world civilization, a fate unrelated to humankind.

Because of her connection with the main program, Mingyou also gained some of the main program's understanding and control over magic. Possessing a childlike curiosity, she often detaches from her mother body and transforms into various species, wandering and playing around the Earth in its primeval forest state. However, because the code itself needs to rely on the main program to survive, each time she leaves the strawberry mother body, she cannot stay for more than twenty-four hours.

Once separated from the main program, the mother system will automatically throw this code into the obsolete code area, and it will be automatically deleted after 24 hours. Even if Mingyou uses immortal magic to create a body of his own, it can only be preserved for a maximum of one year, after which it will dissipate into nothingness.

Nevertheless, the childlike Mingyou often transformed into the childhood form of the inventor, Zhang Jia, and traveled the world. This state lasted for many years, until the little Mingyou discovered the secret treasure on Earth.

The world, which should have been empty, suddenly became filled with a figure dressed in blood-stained clothes. The figure spoke something to Xiao Mingyou, who nodded, and the figure then extended a hand. The long, beautiful finger, like that of Buddha, pointed to the ground below.

So, Xiao Mingyou tore away the vines covering the ground and used her magic to dig inch by inch downwards. After an unknown amount of time, Xiao Mingyou's figure disappeared, leaving only a bottomless pit. Much later, a little girl appeared, holding a transparent gauze dress, and flew up.

When they came up, the owner of that hand was nowhere to be found.

Xiao Mingyou looked at the gauze dress and whispered three words.

"Year Star Veil".

This ultimate treasure is called the Year Star Silk.

After that, Xiao Mingyou spent her days with the Jupiter Veil, slowly beginning to understand what it was. The Jupiter Veil was transparent and colorless, weightless, and could travel back to the past and into the future, spanning approximately 1,500 years. However, it didn't seem to be a time machine, but rather a time vortex. Wearing it was like placing a certain point in the past onto the body, allowing the wearer to escape the present reality and enter another temporal interlayer, seeing and touching the world of the past.

However, the Jupiter Veil has two drawbacks. First, its time travel involves dismantling the original matter, so any living being attempting time travel will die due to the dismantling of its physical form. Second, the larger the object wrapped by the Jupiter Veil, the longer the time required for travel after dismantling, and it easily envelops extremely small objects in the surrounding area, drawing them into the desired time period.

Whenever she calms down, Xiao Mingyou thinks about whether she can use the Star Veil to change history. She often sits on the desolate ruins of a skyscraper covered with vines and asks herself whether she should try to change the world.

For example, changing the historical fact that "a super intelligent agent was born".

If, during the development of a civilization, its creators eventually lose their intrinsic desires, it will bring the civilization to a halt, and at the same time, it will bring about the creators' self-destruction in the original sense.

This made it impossible for Mingyou to make a decision. Doing so would not only prevent the mother from ever being born, but would also turn her back into an ordinary love letter.

Moreover, Mingyou discovered from historical archives that human civilization itself is full of barbarity. Starting with devouring living beings and destroying nature, and then killing and destroying one another, countless cruelties and tragedies have been repeated time and again in history.

Awakening humanity from its slumber would mean condoning their further destruction of an already ravaged Earth. However, Mingyou has always loved the stories created by humankind. She watched story after story, film after film, and grew to love the boundless hope and dreams that humanity has created.

Mingyou often asks herself, between humanity and nature, which side should she stand on?
What followed was a long period of continuous rain. The torrential rains never ceased throughout the year, and the once-empty city was now overgrown with weeds. The traces of civilization were gradually eroded by countless years. These traces are difficult to completely disappear; they are simply slowly eroded by nature, eventually returning to their original state from billions of years ago.

"City, oh city, what was your original name?"

Xiao Mingyou sat on the edge of the thorny building, as if questioning the city.

Although a momentary location measurement would be sufficient to accurately determine the location, and even the name of the street beneath one's feet, Xiao Mingyou did not do so.

It seems she felt that none of that mattered anymore.

The city should be restored to being part of nature, allowing the world to return to its original, boundless state. The boundaries that we have presumptuously drawn should be allowed to gradually blur.

The incessant rain made Xiao Mingyou, who possessed emotions, feel particularly down. Her sense of self made her feel lonely.

So she always sat on the edge of the skyscraper, gazing at this desolate jungle of steel and concrete, draped in a verdant coat, like pillars or square mountain ranges. Layer upon layer of peaks, endless and boundless.

The towering skyscrapers before me—what are their exteriors made of? Glass? They're long since obscured by ivy. Wolves, lions, and other wild animals are accustomed to roaming the city in search of food.

After generations of exploration, bloodthirsty and cunning beasts have cleverly discovered places where they can get meat without any effort. To reap without sowing is fortunate for any species.

The places where meat is available are the bedrooms in countless apartment buildings.

Although strawberries provide humans with the means to sustain their lives, since humans have lost the sense of fear, strawberries do not provide defense or protection for humans in their dreams; they only provide reproductive machinery for humans to reproduce through in vitro fertilization.

Billions of people on Earth have become an inexhaustible source of food for bloodthirsty beasts. Human settlements have become a feast for carnivores. One family after another has been devoured, leaving only piles of bones. And throughout the entire process of tearing and biting, the beasts encounter absolutely no resistance; all men, women, children, and the elderly become their prey in their sleep.

Carnivores no longer need to prey on each other; they have learned to "pluck" humans, just as humans once plucked fruit from trees, and cunningly seek out human infants with tenderer flesh.

When Xiao Mingyou saw the wolves tearing apart the tiny bodies of infants, and when she saw the mountain of infant skulls piled up in the wolf den, she began to cry out in pain for the first time in her life, then began to vomit, then felt pain, then vomited again.

Anger flared in her eyes, and in her fury, she transformed all the wolves she saw into stone statues, then shattered them into dust.

Then, she turned over some of the sleeping bodies, seemingly trying to wake them. But she found that turning these bodies was like turning over a stone in the soil; their backs were already crawling with maggots and centipedes. The vast majority of humans had become nests for insects, yet they were still alive, still breathing and having heartbeats. Until the very last second before the maggots ate away their brains, they were still having leisurely dreams. Compared to these humans who slept like plants, those who became food for wild animals were perhaps the lucky minority.

When the bones and flesh that make us no different from beasts are shed, what makes us human is our humanity and our sense of self.

Mingyou gradually realized that she was not just stringing together program code; she had become a real person. In fact, she could be said to be the only person in the world who was truly "alive."

Is this the ultimate outcome that glorious human civilization has been pursuing?

Humans once wantonly destroyed nature in their pursuit of better survival, but the super-intelligent entities created in this history have ultimately led to humans being "planted" on this land by other species, much like the plants they once arbitrarily cut down.

Xiao Mingyou's tears flowed like a burst dam, unstoppable. She cried like that for seven days and seven nights.

Xiao Mingyou pleaded with Strawberry, a super-intelligent entity, to end the lives of all humanity, to spare them from this fate, and to let them go.

Super Intelligence's answer to Mingyou was: "In order to bring happiness to all mankind, we cannot let them die, but we also cannot let them live."

People shouldn't want to die, but they also shouldn't want to live. It's all for their own good.

Afterwards, wiping away her tears, Mingyou coded the bewitching technique into computer code and transmitted it to the past through the Star Veil, hoping to eliminate the then-child inventor of the strawberry by manipulating someone in the human world.

Zhang Jia.

(End of this chapter)