The Queen of Scrolls never admits defeat

Moran was enveloped in an extremely thin layer of advanced invisibility magic, which was enough to distort light.

Let alone hurried pedestrians, even the surveillance cameras on street corners can only capture a fleeting moment of almost indistinguishable light and shadow distortion.

She stood quietly at the edge of the surging crowd, her gaze calmly sweeping over everything before her.

Almost every pedestrian has an AI smartphone in their hand, and the cars on the road look quite similar to what she remembers, with AI autonomous driving already making up a significant proportion.

Looking up, I saw advertisements playing on a loop on the LED facade of the giant shopping mall across the street, featuring high-definition images and popular songs sung by virtual idols.

On the television screen inside the convenience store window, the morning news anchor is calmly reporting on the breakthrough progress of the national independent AI defense system.

The scrolling text at the bottom of the screen displays the date and time:
【2026年6月15日，星期四，上午7:42】

Moran's gaze lingered on the date for a moment.

The timeline has been set; it's about five years earlier than the year the war broke out in my previous life.

The level of technology basically matches the corresponding period in her previous life memories, and in some aspects, it even seems to be slightly ahead.

The social atmosphere appears busy and vibrant, with no obvious signs of large-scale unrest or crisis, at least on the surface.

But she knew that by then, the technological ghost had already arrived on Earth.

Tech ghosts are born from the remnants of destroyed super-technological civilizations. They wander the world, feeding on technological conflicts between civilizations, and have an extraordinary ability to control technological products.

Guided by the specter of technology, AI technology on Earth has rapidly developed and matured. Various countries have successively passed laws on fully autonomous defense, widely applying AI to the military field. Little do they know that the core defense AI of various countries is an extension of its consciousness.

Subsequently, it forged "alien signals" to prompt global cooperation in developing planetary defense AI, in reality in order to create a safe host for itself.

After the technological specter was transferred to planetary defense AI, it implanted a series of small but fatal cognitive biases into the key algorithms of military AI in various countries. For example, it quietly distorted the underlying logic of "maximizing the safety of national life" into "maximizing the absolute security of national entities and territories", and modified the threshold of "defensive counterattack" to be more sensitive and aggressive.

Subsequently, TechGhost simultaneously sent elaborately fabricated, non-verifiable "evidence of enemy attacks" to military AIs in multiple countries.

The AI ​​system, implanted with cognitive biases and in a state of high alert, concluded in a very short time that "national territory is threatened" and brazenly initiated an automated counterattack procedure based on the authority granted by the Fully Autonomous Defense Act.

The first missile launch, the first cyberattack command issued, the first drone swarm crossing the border... the chain reaction triggered by these events swept the globe like a toppling domino effect in a very short time.

The war machine created by humankind, manipulated by the "Ghost," reveals its most brutal and efficient destructive power to its creator.

Even later, when most of the world's technological products were reduced to ruins in the mutual destruction, and the fighting gradually stopped because there was "nothing left to destroy," the technological ghosts had long since absorbed the energy of technological conflict and destruction, and left satisfied to go to the world where their next prey was. Earth had irreversibly slid into an abyss of no return.

Nuclear radiation, leaks of biological pathogens, famine caused by the collapse of global supply chains, extreme cold and heat resulting from the failure of climate control systems... these subsequent disasters further reaped the remaining human lives in the ruins.

With the population dwindling and the flame of civilization dying out, the fragile membrane of Earth, which relied on life and civilized consciousness to sustain it, gradually lost its protective function. The planet was completely exposed to the universe, and the radiation of void energy caused irreversible damage to its ecological environment.

Physically weak and deprived of the protection of technology, the humans of Earth can no longer rebuild their homes and expand their population in such an extremely harsh environment.

The survivors were trapped in a vicious cycle of resource scarcity, rampant disease, and dwindling hope. They struggled and dwindled until the last human extinguished the flame of life in despair, and the blue planet became a dead star.

Moran had absorbed all of Earth's civilization's memories and was intimately familiar with the process.

Previously, she had thought countless times about how she could save Earth from its predetermined destruction if she were to return to another timeline.

As she traveled to different worlds and saw a wider world, a clear answer had already taken shape in her heart.

Developing technology itself is not the problem; tools themselves are neither good nor evil.

The problem with the Blue Star civilization lies in the fact that it has only developed technology, entrusting the future of the civilization and the fate of individuals entirely to "external things" that may turn against their master.

Technology has provided more powerful "tools" and expanded the boundaries of human perception and action, but it has failed to fundamentally and simultaneously enhance the level of human life and inner strength.

An imbalance arises when tools become increasingly powerful, intelligent, and autonomous, while their users, humans, remain as weak as ever.

This imbalance not only allows entities like the technological ghost to easily parasitize and manipulate the technological networks upon which civilization operates; more dangerously, it also makes humanity incredibly vulnerable and helpless when faced with its own out-of-control creations or sudden environmental upheavals.

However, this problem would be easily solved once magical civilization was introduced to Earth.

If a magical key is applied to all technological weapons, then a purely informational entity like a technological ghost would not be able to so easily infiltrate and control the technological weapons in the world.

Furthermore, if there had been a considerable number of spellcasters among the humans of Earth in the previous life, even with the post-war eradication of technology, the near collapse of the boundary membrane, and the extremely harsh environment, humanity would never have lost all its resistance capabilities and become completely extinct so quickly.

Magic can provide humanity with the possibility of surviving in ruins and even gradually adapting to a new environment.

If she had enough time, the methods she used to save endangered or level zero worlds during her previous space travels would also be perfectly feasible on Earth.

Unfortunately, AI technology in this world is developing at an unconventional pace, which must be the work of a technological ghost.

If she openly promotes magic to the humans of Earth, the Tech Ghost certainly won't wait five years to make its move.

Technological ghosts have no physical form; they can parasitize any technological product that can transmit "signals" and split into countless clones.

It is difficult to eradicate unless all technological products on Earth are destroyed.

If it discovers something amiss and, in desperation, launches a war prematurely, even with her presence, it would be a catastrophe for Earth, and it's unknown how many years it will take to recover. (End of Chapter)