On my second playthrough, they were full of malice towards me.

The reason they were able to display such formidable combat power was entirely due to the unprecedentedly powerful weapons they possessed.

After a long period of discussion, it was the boy who took the lead in stopping the noise, and the restless villagers gradually quieted down.

As Liao Ji spoke, the mechanical arm in his hand began to transform again. This time, what appeared before the villagers was not a weapon, but rather...

A person.

Liao Ji looked at the first mural, which depicted a continent divided into five equal parts, with each part having its own evil creature resembling a lord.

"Legend has it that the calamities of this world will choose the creatures on earth as the carriers of their will, using them to continuously create calamities and devour this world until our civilization comes to an end. The one chosen by the calamities to destroy the world is the King of Calamities."

"Impossible! How could the servants do such a thing? They would never get involved in our battles."

Taking a deep breath, the boy stared at Liao Ji, who was still waiting for an answer. This time, his eyes no longer held the previous wariness and hesitation, but instead became respectful and even a little ardent.

The boy's eyes were fixed on Liao Ji's mechanical arm. After becoming a Calamity Transformer, his senses seemed to have been greatly enhanced. Therefore, he could sense that the scavenging thugs were wrong. Liao Ji's strength did not seem to be strong. Even his turbid Calamity aura was very weak. Compared to Calamity Transformers, he seemed to be an ordinary person.

"Alright, the reason I accepted your village chief's request for help is because he told me that I could find the answer I was looking for here."

However, this oppressive atmosphere didn't last long, or rather, they had seen too much of it and became numb. Instead of grieving here, they thought about what to do next and how to continue to eke out a living in this hellish world.

"Wait a minute, could it be that the machine servant is the weapon he was using earlier!?"

No wonder he's so amazing.

Many survivors hoped that Liao Ji would become the new village chief of their Kano village, but there was only one person who was still somewhat hesitant about it.

As a result, many villagers looked at Liao Ji with expectant eyes.

Liao Ji recognized one of them; it was the same one marked on the old man's map earlier: Witch's Territory, the Witch.

"Machine-Machine-Servant!??" The boy, who had just been clenching his fists, opened his mouth wide and exclaimed in shock when he saw 86 appear.

If the weapon in Liao Ji's hand really came from the machine servant, it means that the person who saved their village of Kano was actually a villain who betrayed the "machine servant".

"Sir, may I ask you about the weapon you are holding?"

The reason is simple: the boy learned a cruel truth from the female leader of the thugs: there were greedy and shameless people who had set their sights on the mech servants, using their "principles" to betray them and obtain a large number of their high-end weapons and equipment.

"Also from...machine servant?"

"This was passed down through many generations of my great-great-great-grandfather. It records three stories about the world."

Upon hearing Liao Ji's words, many villagers in Kano Village gasped in surprise, their fear of Liao Ji greatly diminished. They later learned that the old man was none other than the original village chief of Kano Village.

Immediately afterwards, a commotion broke out among the villagers. Their expressions were exactly the same as those of the old man Liao Ji had encountered before, all showing incredible shock.

When the village was invaded by scavengers, the fire-bearers were brutally murdered, and only after a great cost were paid did the village chief manage to escape with a group of people from Cano Village, preserving the last embers of the fire.

"So can you tell me what the machine servant, the witch, and the prophecy are?"

This is normal. Liao Ji's performance in the battle just now has proven his strength. In this dog-eat-dog world of the apocalypse, the best way to survive is to get the protection of the strong. Otherwise, you will only repeat the fate of the scavengers and thugs before you.

This is the village chief's house. After the boy opened a mechanism in the wall and came out of a secret room that looked like a cellar, the boy who led Liao Ji downstairs finally stopped in front of a series of murals.

To be precise, it's an android dressed as a maid.

Why are the machine servants here?

The boy immediately fell silent.

"No, I just happened to meet an old man in the wilderness and accepted his request for help, so I came here."

"Yes, perhaps this is the answer Grandpa was giving you."

But when Liao Ji told them that he had only seen the village chief and not the other villagers, and that even the village chief had died because his wounds had not been treated, all the villagers in the settlement fell silent, and an atmosphere of sadness and despair filled the air.

In the teenager's mind

Only a "machine servant" could construct such a powerful weapon.

"Come with me." After saying that, the boy immediately walked towards a certain room.

"Three stories?"

"No, no, no, no, have you all forgotten? The prophecy, that prophecy!!"

"If I say yes, what will you do?" Liao Ji asked with interest.

"There are four Chaos Kings in the world: the Northern Witch, the Southern Dragon, the Forest Fairy, and the Ancient Tower Witch. They each reside on one side of the continent, releasing vast amounts of Chaos. It is because of their radiation that the world is forever shrouded in pollution, giving birth to countless Chaos monsters. Only by defeating the four Chaos Kings can this world be saved."

"However, countless years have passed, and people have tried to challenge the four Turbid Calamity Kings, but without exception, they have all failed. Instead, the pollution caused by the four Turbid Calamity Kings has intensified and expanded, until it engulfed the entire world."

The first story ends here, telling the origin of this world. According to this development, the world should have been destroyed long ago. The second story provides the answer as to why the world can still survive under the four powerful Turbid Kings.

When the boy led Liao Ji to the second mural, what was recorded there was none other than...

"The blood-red sun hangs in the sky, causing widespread suffering, chaos, flames, and death. The world is on the verge of collapse, but what makes people even more desperate is that at this moment, the consciousness of the Turbid Calamity gives birth to the fifth Turbid Calamity King—the maid."

"Everyone thought this would be the last straw that broke the camel's back, and that our world would come to an end. But no one expected that, perhaps even the will of the turbid calamity itself, it would choose the most ruthless mechanical species as the turbid calamity king. But it never expected that the maid and her master had already established a deep bond, a forbidden love that transcended species, which blossomed and bore fruit in their lives."

"So when Zhuo'e attempted to manipulate the maid to carry out her will to destroy the world, the maid used her love for her master to gain a heart, a heart that machines had never had. It was this heart that made the maid, the fifth Zhuo'e King, the first Zhuo'e King to rebel against Zhuo'e and fight for her master's world!"

Chapter 204 The Witch

As the boy inside the cellar began to explain, Liao Ji looked at the corresponding murals again.

The second story mural is significantly longer than the first, consisting of several panels. The background of the first panel is a garbage dump.

This is not an ordinary junkyard, but a special place to pile up androids that are either outdated or broken.

Among this mountain of steel scrap, you can see the figure of a discarded, scrapped domestic maid android.

Her bionic skin was mostly cracked, exposing the old circuit boards and wiring inside. This made her look like a half-human, half-machine in other people's eyes, with no beauty to speak of, or even ugly. The only thing that could identify her was her maid outfit, which was covered in mud, dirty and tattered.

Worse still, the hazy acid rain depicted on the murals suggests that the area where the landfill is located is clearly prone to continuous rain, and the humid air is nothing short of poison for these machines with cracked protective layers.

The rusty parts exposed by the maid in the mural are the best illustration of this, indicating that they have suffered severe corrosion.

The androids abandoned here are worthless, and no one is willing to recycle them. Their fate is to either have their few remaining uncorroded parts stolen by passing scavengers, or to pray that one day someone will be willing to pay to dispose of them.

Treatment doesn't mean fixing them, but rather putting them into a hot, molten furnace to protect them from corrosion and melt them in the molten lava.

Liao Ji saw in the next mural that machines were being towed away by large trucks, thrown into the molten lava like garbage and turned into iron.

If nothing unexpected happens, this might be the end of the story, but it's like the most popular Cinderella and Prince Charming tale in human history.

As the mural progresses, the next scene depicts a young scientist, completely shrouded in a cloak, arriving at a landfill on a rainy night.

As if guided by fate, the young scientist found, in the vast sea of ​​machines, a pile of garbage, a household bionic maid that had long been buried at the bottom by newly arrived scrapped machinery and mixed with silt.

Soaked in the cold rain, the young scientist took the maid home to a warm and dry container laboratory. With his unparalleled wisdom, he successfully repaired the maid and appointed her as his assistant, his only experimental assistant.

From then on, the young man and the maid in the mural lived happily ever after.

They stayed together, eating together, working together, fighting against misfortune together, embracing and sleeping together, and crossing the taboo line that was not accepted by the world, falling completely in love.

However, the scene shifts to the very moment she falls in love. The maid's intense emotions attract the will of the Chaos, who attempts to make her the fifth Chaos King. As she is in pain and confusion, on the verge of falling into becoming the destroyer of the world, a kiss from her master awakens the maid's heart.

But it seems that her strength alone is not enough. So, with the outstanding creativity of the young scientist, the maid can connect with every abandoned and scrapped android, passing on and sharing this "heart" of "love" between humans and androids.

Here, the mural of the second story finally came to an end, and Liao Ji looked at the last panel.

With the help of "heart", the maid, who had gathered all the power of the AI, finally joined forces with her master to defeat the will of evil in the name of love.

From then on, having become the powerful "Queen of Turbid Calamity," she and her master established a sanctuary for themselves in the world of the End, living happily ever after with all the intelligent machines and their master.

After looking at the second mural, Liao Ji seemed to understand why "Zero" was unwilling to wake up.

Liao Ji was very familiar with the story depicted in the mural, as it was essentially the story of his encounter with Zero in the game.

Of course, many "romantic" elements have been added to it.

For example, the so-called "guidance of fate" was actually him taking a liking to the attribute panel with zero potential and unlimited potential at first glance. Sleeping together and even crossing the taboo line was even more out of the question in the first playthrough. Not to mention, the young scientist in the story seems to have become the person loved by thousands of machines because he shared love. What kind of ultimate harem is this?

However, what Liao Ji was more concerned about was the ending of the second story.

Even though the maid has become the King of Chaos, instead of saving the world and clearing the Chaos Realm, she only established a pure land. It seems that she will stop there and live a peaceful life with the young scientist.

The boy beside her explained, "It's impossible for a maid to fight four against one. Her limit is already snatching a corner of the world from the other four Turbid Kings as an unpolluted pure land."

"Because of the maid's existence, although the calamity did not shrink, it also stopped expanding. The world's structure was thus set. Although 80% of the world was still a world of calamity, at least 20% was habitable. All living beings migrated there and were protected by the maid and her master. If no accidents occurred, civilization could continue."

Liao Ji noticed that the boy beside him was speaking in increasingly lower voices and clenching his fists, so it was likely that something unexpected had happened.

After all, as mentioned at the beginning, there are three stories.

The reason why we are now in such a state of utter despair, as well as the servants, prophecies, and other elements that seem to have barely appeared in the first two stories, is probably not entirely due to the third story.

In the cellar, the boy's torchlight led Liao Ji to the last mural.

In the firelight, what appeared before Liao Ji was a...

Witch.

The witch in the mural is an old woman with pink hair, miniature bat-like wings on her back, and a fleshy tail growing from her buttocks.

Her skin was dry and wrinkled, and she wore a very damp black cloak. A large witch's hat covered half of her face, revealing only a long, hooked nose.

Clearly, her identity can be determined from her appearance: one of the four Turbid Kings, the Ancient Tower Witch.

“A balance has been reached between living beings and calamity, and the world has stabilized, but such peaceful times are not what the witch wanted to see.”

"The witch attempted to continue the world's depravity until its destruction, but the maid's existence was an obstacle she could not avoid. If the witch wanted to destroy the world, she had to defeat the maid. However, she and the maid were both kings of the Turbid Calamity, and their strengths were evenly matched. A direct confrontation was definitely not an option. Therefore, the witch came up with an evil plan."

"She stole the maid's lover."

Chapter 205 Salvation Society

The mural shifts, and the pink-haired old woman transforms herself through witchcraft by brewing a magic potion. Her withered, wrinkled skin becomes fair and smooth, and her shriveled figure becomes full and alluring, turning her into a charming woman who is both mature and youthful.

At first, the witch tried to seduce the young scientist with her beauty. Liao Ji saw the witch in the mural, constantly posing, wiggling her buttocks and wagging her tail, wearing a low-cut dress and swaying back and forth in front of the young scientist. Unfortunately, the young man was unmoved and remained loyal to the maid.

Enraged, the witch brewed another potion and secretly had it slipped into the young man's food. Bewitched by the witch, the young man fell in love with someone else, leaving the maid and becoming entangled with the despicable witch.

By the time the maid discovered it, it was too late. The young scientist, now without the maid's protection, was murdered by the witch as soon as he reached her bed.

Liao Ji: "Uh"

Still a bit taken aback by the abrupt change in style, Liao Ji's eyes widened even more when he looked at the next mural.

The witch in the mural used a kitchen knife to cruelly dismember the young man's limbs, which were bound to the bed. She then distributed the five pieces of the young man's body to the five Kings of Turbid Calamity, including the maid, giving one piece to each of them. This completely eliminated any possibility that the maid could save or revive the young man.

Liao Ji: ".?"