Ten thousand I am across the heavens

After observing for a period of time, Mo Chengzi discovered that the state of the other continents simulated in the virtual world was mostly in the process of industrialization. However, only the level of technology was advanced enough to achieve industrialization, while the social system was far behind.

This reminded him of a literary work that had been popular in the Republic of Mountains and Rivers not long ago. It was a series of literary works called Warhammer, which had spawned many novels, games, board games, and virtual short films, and enjoyed considerable popularity for a considerable period of time.

This work often tells the story of humanity, which has developed into the interstellar age, but is unable to control its inner emotions. As a result, its various desires are used by evil gods in the subspace, which in turn affect reality, forming various technologically advanced but cruel and twisted worlds.

He originally thought that such works would only appear in specific distorted worldviews, such as those with a subspace, where human emotions would have a repercussion effect on reality, and where many ancient races influenced by these emotions were left behind in the human era, becoming various natural disasters that filled the universe, which would lead to the birth of such a catastrophic social system.

But now it seems that order is the accident. If no one is willing to put in the wisdom and perseverance, no one has the courage to persist, then chaos is probably the norm.

Apart from the Republic of Mountains and Rivers, the other four continents are in a similar state. Even the Central Continent, which has the strictest order and is maintained by the ten ancient sects, is not much better off.

In the introductions about local customs and traditions, he saw hundreds of millions of people living in a city, as if they were living in a nest, and each person was a part of a huge and complex industrial system, or even a raw material in this huge and complex industrial system.

After all, where there are cities built by the righteous path, there are also demon king cities built by the demonic path. In the past, the demonic path at most killed people to refine their souls, which was just a formality. At most, the souls were tortured and eventually vanished into nothingness.

But as technology has advanced, the demonic path has also kept pace with the times, making killing and soul refining more meticulous. The related techniques are derived from many papers on human emotions research in the Republic of Mountains and Rivers. Many of these papers mentioned that strong emotions contain energy, especially in a world where willpower can distort reality to a certain extent. Therefore, history often records a large number of people unleashing potential far beyond their own abilities under strong emotional impulses or in desperate situations.

The research direction within the Republic of Mountains and Rivers is to find ways to use conditioned reflexes, music, images, pictures, text, and other methods to stimulate people's emotions, thereby regulating their mental state to ensure better performance in work, life, and even combat.

The relevant research has been widely applied in literary fields such as music, films, and novels, and while it may not have achieved remarkable results, it has at least improved the lives of many people.

However, different people see the same thing and understand it in completely different ways. Some people watch "Entering Science" to break down feudal superstitions, but another group of people choose to reverse the process and use the techniques learned in "Entering Science" to perform shamanistic rituals.

The same applies to the demonic cultivators on various continents. Technological innovations have led them to discover that the masses are more valuable than they imagined. In the past, they could at most extract flesh and blood, and the more powerful ones could refine souls, but that was about it.

But now these guys, after capturing people, squeeze every last drop of their potential while they're still alive, throwing them into sweatshops to work day and night. The negative emotions they generate while working are collected and used as weapons, special energy sources, or materials.

When these people's bodies could no longer withstand the strain, their brains were removed and placed into machines to create machine servants. Even though their bodies were dead, they still had to undertake heavy tasks within the mechanical shell.

Over time, these mechanical servants may give birth to vengeful spirits. If the accumulated resentment is too great, there is a high probability that they will mutate. After mutation, they will be collected and the vengeful spirits will become new resources. They will be refined into magical artifacts like the Ten Thousand Soul Banner and become ghost generals within them.

Just watching the expansion pack was enough to make Mo Chengzi's forehead veins throb. He was considered one of the more successful people in the Shanhe Republic. If he accepted this mission, combined with the merits he had already accumulated, he could easily exchange them for a very cost-effective immortality package, basically the top-tier civilian version of the immortality package.

Having seen this part of the expansion, he couldn't wait to go to the real world and become an immortal, to create a perfect body with the Ten Absolute Physiques, and to equip himself with two spare immortal apertures, and then to kill his way into the lair of these evil cultivators.

What we see in the expansion pack are actually just nest cities built by fifth-level co-cultivators. The things created by the immortal-level demonic path will have a population of hundreds of millions, forming a special ecosystem on its own, and they will not even treat people as human beings anymore. Because of the diffusion of technology, in addition to mechanical technology, biological technology has also spread.

Medical technology is supposed to be used to treat illnesses and save lives, but it also includes cloning, artificial wombs, and in-vitro fertilization.

These technologies were originally intended to liberate women. Although the tradition of a ten-month pregnancy has lasted for hundreds of thousands of years—and in this world, for millions of years—even today, children born to their mothers can still exhibit differences that current science cannot fully explain. This doesn't necessarily mean they will have better talents, but rather that variations unlikely to occur in an artificial womb might appear. These variations may not be benign, but they have survived over millions of years of evolution and may still have their merits, even if current science cannot fully comprehend them.

Therefore, the Republic of Mountains and Rivers currently only regards artificial wombs as an optional alternative and has not promoted them on a large scale. Given the current physical condition of humans, childbirth is not that difficult, and many people are willing to experience the process. Therefore, even if this technology is developed, its usage rate will not exceed 50%.

However, once the technology is leaked, it will cause a huge disaster. The technical barrier itself isn't particularly high. It's not the kind of thing that creates a technological barrier that others can't learn. Developing the relevant technology might require a lot of financial investment and countless clinical trials, but it's much easier to copy the research results. Just copy the data and formulas, and it's ready to use immediately.

Even if some of the data requires professional adjustment, and errors could lead to minor defects in newborns, it wouldn't matter to the evil cultivators of the demonic path.

Why would they need to clone any geniuses? If they can cultivate them, that's great, but if they can't, it doesn't matter. They can just increase the quantity. If they cultivate 100 people and not a single genius, they can cultivate a million! What kind of scarce resource is biomass?
Therefore, if this technology were to spread, it would be a disaster. The demonic realm at the immortal level would establish large-scale human incubation centers as standard equipment in their demon king castles, producing cloned humans in batches, much like mass-producing industrial goods.

Moreover, it used a high-speed cultivation technology that was strictly prohibited in the Republic of Mountains and Rivers. The resulting bodies were nearly adult-sized.

The forbidden technology of knowledge transfer was used recklessly by them, even though the technology itself had been invented long ago. However, because the transferred knowledge is memorized rather rigidly, its effectiveness is not very good, not as good as genuine understanding. It can even lead to side effects such as cognitive dependence and mental rigidity—things far more difficult to treat than physical illnesses. As a result, this technology was listed as forbidden by the Republic of Shanhe shortly after its creation, becoming one of the few technologies explicitly prohibited by law.

However, the technology itself isn't particularly difficult to master; it relies on low-level code that humans are born with, similar to conditioned reflexes. By establishing conditioned reflexes, knowledge is directly imprinted into the human brain, thus bypassing the process of understanding.

The low technical barrier means that even if the technology itself is considered taboo, it cannot prevent its spread. After all, even if the technology is dangerous, it doesn't mean it shouldn't be researched. Precisely because the technology itself is dangerous, it is even more important to have a thorough understanding of it and know how to solve problems if they arise. What is taboo is only its use, not its development.

"This is utterly inhuman. Is this really a form of society that humans can imagine?" Mo Chengzi now truly realized how heavy the burden on his shoulders was. Facing these beings who were no longer human, even if he could customize a top-of-the-line immortal suit for himself, he honestly didn't have much confidence fighting on their home turf.

Because he had briefly simulated it within his own virtual realm. If he were to use his existing technology without any limits, disregarding human life and morality to enhance his strength, then his current strength would have a very large room for improvement, essentially strengthening to the point where he could easily crush his current self with the strength of one hand.

Although the technology used by the other side was significantly inferior, their level of audacity and moral depravity was probably beyond his reach. After all, the bottom line of these evil cultivators had exceeded his imagination in many ways. Some of their unethical actions made him exclaim, "Holy crap, is that even possible?"

"Now we need to revise our strategy. Originally, we thought we needed to win over and unite only the lower-level cultivators and ordinary people, developing these real laborers into our comrades. But now it seems we have to broaden our target range. We also need to find a way to unite those who were not considered human from birth. Although we don't have the strength to wipe out so many demon king lairs at once, I must find a way to destroy as many of these lairs as possible once I get there."

The more Mo Chengzi learned about the customs and cultures of the various continents, the more he realized how well he had been protected. He never imagined that people's bottom line could be crossed to this extent.

After briefly reviewing the information about his next destination, he decisively chose to use most of his accumulated merits and a large portion of his savings to redeem an immortality package. Currently, the immortality rate in the Mountain and River Republic is not very high. This is partly due to the suppression by the Heavenly Dao, making the difficulty of achieving immortality rapidly increasing. It's also because the new generation of this era is mostly quite arrogant and proud.

To become an immortal, one must strive to be the most powerful, though not everyone can achieve this. However, most people harbor the ambition that if others can do it, why can't they? This leads to the fact that most "immortal-ascension packages" with less-than-top-tier configurations don't sell very well, even for those who have already accumulated enough savings and merit points to redeem them. Many choose to hold onto their current peak fifth-stage cultivation, honing their skills in the virtual world, strengthening their Dao traces, and refining their own Dao trace combination to create the most suitable and perfect one. They are not in a hurry to become immortal; many even wait for new technologies to be released, comparing the pace of technological progress to see if it slows down. If new technologies are constantly being introduced, they will continue to wait.

To some extent, achieving immortality early in the Republic of Mountains and Rivers has now become a way of actively contributing to society.

Ultimately, after becoming an immortal, one's abilities become stronger, and one can shoulder more social responsibilities. However, this often leads to one falling behind in technological advancements, causing one's own strength to gradually decline with the development of the times.

Mo Chengzi was originally a staunch advocate of waiting, always thinking he should wait a few more years until new technologies emerged before attempting to become an immortal. Perhaps by then, with advanced technology, he could obtain the Supreme Immortal Aperture in one go, and incidentally, acquire the second to tenth Void Aperture Gu, allowing him to ascend to immortality with all ten apertures. Wouldn't that give him a chance to become the strongest immortal in all of history?

However, such things are ultimately just dreams. While technology has advanced rapidly in reality, the current strength of a single Immortal Aperture is at most equivalent to the combined advantages of the Ten Absolute Bodies. It's still far inferior to a Supreme Immortal Aperture, which contains the Nine-Turn Immortal Gu, the Supreme Immortal Embryo Gu, and the Nine-Turn Killing Move in perfect order. To suggest that anything mass-produced could match, or even just approach, its quality would be far too absurd.

As for multiple hollow orifices, the technology of the Mountain and River Republic is relatively advanced. The fourth hollow orifice gu has been successfully refined and may be launched on the market after a period of clinical verification. The fifth hollow orifice gu is also under intensive research and development. However, the difficulty increases exponentially as the number of the gu increases. So even with Lanno's personal participation in the research team, no one dares to guarantee that the research and development will be successful.

[To be continued]

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