Honkai Impact 3rd experience, starting with a thousand Herrschers

The atmosphere in the entire laboratory became unusually quiet.

When the door to the experimental chamber opened, when the barrier between life and death was broken, the woman's legs trembled, but her eyes began to harden.

"Xiaotian, husband, Dad, Mom..."

Cheng Xing could no longer hear what was said after that; rather, he simply couldn't bear to listen anymore.

The woman muttered to herself, giving herself some kind of motivation. Her body, which had been trembling, gradually calmed down. She went to the door of the cabin, then turned around and looked at Cheng Xing, whose body was trembling even more than hers and whose face was unusually gloomy. He smiled and said...

"Child, you really look like my son... I wish he were still alive."

She went inside.

The experiment begins.

Cheng Xing made no mistake, they made no mistake, and they remained silent.

Mebius remained silent, calmly watching a person die.

The experiment is over.

She is dead.

Cheng Xing saw it—her face contorted in pain; he heard it—her desperate roars of agony; and…

"I regret it! I don't want to participate in this experiment anymore! I don't want to continue! It really hurts! Please, please let me go, please let me go!"

Mebius remained silent.

Cheng Xing's shoulder was pressed down; it was Jerak.

"You've made your choice, so don't look back. Don't cry and regret like a cowardly child. If you don't want to see more people die in despair and pain because of this, open your eyes wide and complete this experiment properly! Now try to understand why people have sacrificed themselves, why this happened, why!"

"You can't change it."

"Because this is the reality of this world."

Chapter 77: Reality Can Be Changed

I killed someone.

Undoubtedly, Cheng Xing watched a person die tragically before his eyes. He had the ability to save that person, yet he could only watch helplessly as someone died right in front of him.

He saw a person's awareness before life and death, a person's despair and regret when facing death, and an ordinary person's struggle and bewilderment.

He also realized what it meant to be powerless.

Have you ever faced a similar situation?

Cheng Xing sat in the chair, looking at Jerack who was leaning against the wall smoking.

“Back then, we had no choice at all. We were just passively accepting one experiment after another. We tried to resist, but in the end, we continued because of the helplessness of reality. But you are better than us. At least your test subjects are volunteers who sacrificed themselves to fight against the Honkai resources, while we... were a group of ignorant children.”

"...They're all the same, aren't they?"

"...Ah, they're all the same."

After a long silence, Cheng Xing suddenly reached out his hand to the guy and said, "Give me one."

What kind of cigarettes do minors smoke?

Although Gerald said that, he knew that this guy needed a way to relieve stress, so he took out a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, took one out and handed it to Cheng Xing.

Cheng Xing took the cigarette and held it horizontally to his nose, carefully inhaling the familiar scent and feel. This scent, which inexplicably made him feel relaxed, made him slowly exhale and say, "It's clearly a virtual creation simulated by a personality, yet it still possesses such a realistic scent and feel. What kind of principle is this? What kind of delusion is this?"

Cheng Xing's cigarette inexplicably lit up. He put the cigarette butt in his mouth, took a skilled drag, and then slowly exhaled the smoke.

Experiencing the fantastical sensations and mild addictive effects that influenced his brain and consciousness, Cheng Xing seemed to see some past events in that cloud of smoke. He saw himself squatting on the ground, crying helplessly, and collapsing onto the bed in a state of bewilderment.

How similar it is! How similar it is to myself now!

At this moment, Cheng Xing suddenly had a strange thought, as if all the illusory personalities and false selves he had thought about before were wrong. No matter how distant the past or the future, he was still himself.

A thousand thoughts, a thousand ideas, all ultimately belong to one's own mind.

Cheng Xing threw the cigarette, which had burned out, on the ground and stomped it out. Then, without even taking off his clothes, he collapsed onto the bed and fell asleep.

He slept very soundly, without dreaming or seeing anything strange, and peacefully slept until the next day.

Cheng Xing opened her eyes, got out of bed, glanced at the cigarette butt on the floor, picked it up and threw it in the trash can, then went to the bathroom to wash up.

Even after Cheng Xing left, the cigarette butt remained in the trash can.

Back in the lab, the body that had been in the experimental chamber yesterday had been disposed of. Cheng Xing saw Möbius leaning back in his chair, his head tilted to the side as if he were asleep.

Klein was slumped over a nearby table, surrounded by scattered paper documents.

Last night, everyone noticed that Cheng Xing was not in a good condition. After making sure that the experiment was completed, they let him leave immediately to go back and rest. The remaining work was to be carried out by Mebius and Klein.

Cheng Xing took out two blankets from the locker and draped them over the two of them. Then he gathered all the documents on the table and sorted through them as he went.

They are right. All of this is the result of the sacrifices of those who died. If we cannot face this data squarely and cannot use it to pave the way forward, then wouldn't those so-called sacrifices be meaningless?

Cheng Xing was more serious than ever before. He no longer cared about reality or illusion. What mattered more was what he had to do now: to avenge those who died in the collapse.

In order for humanity to defeat the Honkai, so that one day in the future everyone will have the ability to trample the Honkai underfoot.

Mebius opened her slightly blurry eyes, yawned, stretched, and looked around. She found that the little guy had been working at his seat for who knows how long.

The processed documents were neatly arranged, and he himself was constantly calculating something.

Mebius shook her head helplessly; she knew Cheng Xing needed time to accept reality.

So she didn't bother them any further and chose to have breakfast first.

But the result was that the guy was still busy at his seat until evening, without even eating, which made Mebius unable to help but go up to him and say something.

“Cheng Xing, you don’t need to be in such a hurry. This is just the first human experiment. We will need to do many more to compare the data. I know this is very difficult for you to accept, but in order to prevent the sacrifice of so many people in the future, and for the future strength of human civilization, we must make those sacrifices. Don’t worry, all the people we found are volunteers. I have consulted their wishes and explained how serious the consequences would be. If you feel guilty, you can put all the blame on me and let me bear the necessary evil.”

Mebius wanted to persuade her exceptionally talented friend, but at that moment she saw him raise his head, and the excitement in his eyes startled her.

"Doctor... I've calculated it! I've calculated the balance formula between the human body and Honkai energy!"

"How is that possible?!"

Mebius roared in disbelief.

This caused Klein, who was handling things nearby, to stop what she was doing and look over in confusion.

"Doctor, we don't need to sacrifice others."

Mebius stared blankly at Cheng Xing.

Can you be sure your data is accurate?

"I can."

“…Okay, I will participate in the experiment myself.”

"What! Doctor! Are you sure you don't do this?!"

Klein tried to dissuade her.

“Klein, look into his eyes.”

Mebius stared directly at Cheng Xing.

"I saw a glimmer in his eyes for the first time."

Although reality is very cruel, although reality forces us to make choices, and although reality directly changes our choices.

But sometimes, we can make reality bow down to us.

This sounds like a dream, it sounds unbelievable, but people have already done it many years ago.

One person's strength can rarely change anything, so is the strength of a thousand people enough?

And coincidentally, Cheng Xing possesses the power of many people and a hope that can change reality.

Chapter 78: Experiment Successful

Mebius entered the experimental chamber herself, lay down on the operating table, and then looked at Cheng Xing, who was standing next to her without any protective gear, and said with a smile in her eyes.

"Are you finally going to tell me something?"

"...Doctor, I could very well be a Herrscher as well."

"Ah."

"…………Thanks."

"How could you possibly fool me, you little brat whose life experience isn't even as long as mine? Your undisguised peculiarity has already been exposed... Do you really think humanity can defeat the Honkai?"

"I don't know, but I want to try to do that, try to fight for it, and do my best to achieve that kind of ending, so that I won't regret it when the end comes."

"You're a rather inexplicably pessimistic person."

The two of them showed no seriousness or awareness of what was about to begin in the laboratory; instead, they both wore strange smiles. Then, the Honkai energy level in the entire room began to rise.

Why was Cheng Xing so confident that the experiment would succeed? Why did he believe the data calculated by those personalities?

Because he witnessed it all firsthand.

Having witnessed the entire human experimentation process yesterday and grasped some facts last night, he was able to make mental calculations.

All day long, he was constantly replaying scenes of human experiments in front of him. The personalities also personally participated in those experiments. Using the blank model as a template, they continuously created various skills from their minds and recreated various scenes they had experienced.

They truly achieved what it means for one person to be equivalent to an entire laboratory.

"Oh, so this is the pain of being completely corrupted by Honkai energy? I died too quickly back then, so I didn't feel anything."

"Hey, hey, you've already experimented on yourself three times already. Shouldn't you make room for me now? If you keep going like this, your personality will collapse. We're not at that point yet."

"Really, if we had acquired this ability earlier, we wouldn't have needed to sacrifice others. It's a pity we all arrived too late."

"What nonsense are you talking about? If no one sacrifices themselves, how can our impoverished fantasies ever come close to reality?"

"Alright, let's stop with this pointless talk and focus on continuing."

Cheng Xing personally participated in this experiment, personally sent his friend to the operating table, and personally completed this fusion between humanity and Honkai energy.

Klein watched with some unease as everything unfolded in the laboratory, but she did not do anything to stop it; she simply faithfully recorded the data she was supposed to record.

The experiment lasted a total of four hours.