People are in Type-Moon, but they practice science

"No, you came just in time."

Qin Xuan called Illya over, "Illya, go to the spiritual realm. Pandora and Ellie seem to be in some trouble."

What Qin Xuan meant by "going for a trip" was a literal trip. Originally, the interior of the Earth's box was operated through Chaos's long-range interference. However, since Ellie built the World Tree Spiritual Channel, it can support long-range synchronization of consciousness - after all, there is only one observer with the highest authority, and just logging in to the consciousness is not a problem.

"Ellie reported that the box on her side seemed to be affected by external forces. Darius's spiritual consciousness was taken in, which means that the residual spiritual state was retained outside. In other words, Ainsworth will start a great replacement that will last for thousands of years."

Illya's eyes became serious. In the past three years, she has known that they existed as the real boxes. They were completing history rather than changing it.

So, how to avoid the tragedy brought by the destruction of the original world, including saving Miyu's brother? That is, when Ainsworth plundered the spiritual resources on a global scale, the people affected were completely preserved in the world of the box.

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Decades have passed in the Earth calendar.

This was just a brief moment for Pandora, but a lifetime for the human Darius. He should have lived longer... but he spent all his life analyzing Pandora's Box.

He was already very old at this time, with pale and sparse hair hanging down, and his face was full of traces of old age and sorrow.

"God, please teach me... how... how can I open this box!?"

Darius was trembling as he leaned on his cane, at the end of which was tied the black box that had haunted him his entire life. He had heard the voice of the great god Chronos in the past, but it was sporadic... it took several years for him to hear any sound, which was a great torment for humans.

"Mirror technology... has never worked..." The elderly Darius compiled a method from all the oracles. He thought that the mirror space technology was used to open Pandora's box, but it turned out to be completely wrong. In the end, what was used was a degraded replacement technique.

"...I combined my academic knowledge and calculations, invested my entire life, and exhausted my wisdom, but I still failed... The inside of the box is still beyond the calculation of humans alone. Although it is extremely small in scale, it is actually very large. No matter how much time I spend analyzing it, it is completely insufficient..."

Really...human life is too short.

Darius thought, and suddenly, a dangerous idea was born in his mind.

"Pandora, are you still looking at the stars?"

"-Yes, I don't know why, but the distant starry sky always gives me a familiar feeling," Pandora looked far away in the direction beyond the universe, but she could not see anything.

"Stars are but burning flames... and one day they will go out." Darius lowered his head, and the shadow obscured his expression at the moment.

Chapter 310 I Will Never Leave You Alone

"Darius, even if the flames fade away one day, I will never forget the warmth it once brought me."

Pandora's eyes were no longer as dim as before, even though Darius seemed to have spent his entire life trying to open the box without success.

"——Don't forget, it was your burned hand that gave me inspiration."

She continued, referring to the day when young Darius took the box from the flames despite the burns and vowed to open it in his lifetime. She knew that opening the box was a luxury, but she also felt real comfort in her heart - at least a human had made a sincere effort for it.

No.

Facing Pandora's affirmation, Darius rejected it. No, no, no, no, that won't work, Pandora. If that's the case, how many more years will she have to spend and how many lives will she have to witness? All living things follow the natural law of birth, aging, sickness and death, but Pandora gets the despair of eternal life...

"I can't die yet," Darius made up his mind. He planned to cross that bottom line. At this moment, he was like Machiri Zorgen who felt hopeless about his ideals, and like the God-Age Kurdris who lamented the endless causes of the destruction of the world.

Their pursuits are different from each other, but what remains unchanged is the obsession with continuity, so much so that this obsession will be constantly imposed on future generations.

"The box... will definitely be opened! I swore! Everything will eventually die, but you are the only one that has been abandoned. If this world makes you sad... then I will rewrite this world!"

"what……?"

Pandora turned around suddenly and found Darius smiling at her, a terrifying smile, "You——"

"I will never... leave you alone."

As the old Darius finished speaking, with a loud splash, his entire body turned into a shapeless mass of black mud, and then collapsed completely, forming a puddle of muddy water on the ground.

"Darius—?!"

Pandora was panicking, not understanding what was happening.

She ran around, looking for him in the Ainsworth's yard. There was black mud...mud...mud everywhere.

After several generations, the elderly Darius is now the patriarch of the Ainsworth family. There should be a large number of people, including children and servants, in the mansion. But at this moment, he and his descendants are nowhere to be seen in the entire mansion. All that remains are puddles of black mud.

“…The key lies in the problem of storage (data).”

Just as Pandora was searching aimlessly, a voice sounded behind her. It was the voice of a young man full of vitality.

"…The cycle of life and death cannot be stopped, so isn't it enough to keep and replace them according to the ideal state?…Yes, even if it is just a short life that flashes by," the young man's voice seemed to be talking to himself, "but if my concept is continuous, then it is not death."

At the end of the road covered with endless black mud, the figure of the young man Darius appeared. His appearance and his clothes were just like when we first met. "——This is my replacement magic."

Pandora's eyes slowly widened, "Darius...?"

"Surprised, right? Actually, I am too. This is my body in my prime. I have been preparing for so many years. For decades, I have been trying to exchange information from the box and obtain the laws outside this world. The problem is... the continuity of the storage field is not a simple input and output. There must be a large number of the same nature to activate the relay end of the 'box'... So, I need to gather the efforts of the entire family..."

Darius calmly explained his philosophy, how he would input his descendants into the box so that he could continue the life, but he turned a blind eye to the people who sacrificed their lives and the mud and water under their feet that made them unrecognizable. Facts have proved that once a certain bottom line is crossed, it is difficult for people to turn back.

"——Darius! What have you done!" Pandora's tone was full of emotion...disappointment? Sadness? Angry? Or something else.

"I'm sorry, this is already the limit for me, but this is also considered progress in research. Believe me! The function of the box was activated this time, which means we are heading in the right direction. We will definitely open the box one day in the future!"

"No! Darius, something is wrong with you!... The poison of immortality is only for me to bear. If a human were to gain immortality... If it were a human, what twisted and cruel consequences would it cause... Darius, you made a vow with your burned hand. You have spent your whole life striving for it, and now it ends here. This is enough. There is no need..."

Pandora spoke incoherently with excitement.

"——Don't worry, Pandora. Even if the research is not successful, I will live forever..." Darius thought that this was not a bad thing. At least Pandora would not be left alone. "By the way, Pandora, you mentioned burns. What kind of burns?"

I don't remember at all. When did he encounter such a thing?

Darius asked, holding up his good hands.

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Inside Pandora's Box.

Concept replacement will definitely miss something, because after the replacement, what remains on the outside is just the surface data. Darius, who performed the replacement, became another person who seemed to be someone else. The memory of the deep things, together with the original consciousness, will only be saved through the internal device of Pandora's Box as the target sample of the mirror world that needs to be collected.

Deep inside Darius' heart is the oath he made to Pandora when he was young, along with the unforgettable burn.

This is just like the feelings that the other two dolls, Angelica, value, and Beatrice's first love.

"Where is this? The box is gone?"

Darius, in an old state, opened his eyes. He climbed up from the soft soil and found that there was a dense jungle all around him, towering ancient trees, and many people lying nearby, middle-aged, young, women, and children... They were his own family, the descendants of the Ainsworth family.

'Great, they're still breathing.'

Darius heaved a sigh of relief. He slumped to the ground, the mere movement of his old body exhausting.

Although he still had doubts about 'where is this place', he believed that the ritual he had initiated at great expense of his life had failed, and it seemed to have turned into an effect similar to cross-space teleportation... That was the only time he made a decision that crossed that bottom line.

The current situation... since no tragedy has occurred, the last resort has not worked, and he has nothing left, then all his attempts to activate the box's function should have failed, without exception.

"I see. Sorry, Pandora... Perhaps this is my end. As for the rest, I'll leave it to my descendants..."

The original Darius, who had truly complete memories, let go of his obsession and chose a completely different path from the Darius in human history.

Chapter 311 The Antinomy of Fate

"I never expected that the first visitor to the Mirror Sphere would be Ainsworth..."

Illya's consciousness descended into the spiritual realm, and she complained to Miyu who was accompanying her.

"...This is the normal situation. We knew that information before (traveling through time and space)," Miyu walked with Illya to a lush green meadow with ease. In addition to the most conspicuous World Tree, there were also a huge amount of light and shadows, dots condensed from starlight, colorful bubbles, prosperous, cute, miniature winged creatures, fairies that had not yet taken shape, and so on.

Like Gaia's tentacles, these are also native elves that were newly born in the thousand years of operation of the spiritual realm.

"——After all, Ainsworth is the owner and user of the box for thousands of years."

Miyu followed Illya, and she now had mixed feelings about Ainsworth.

When I was young, I thought this magic family was a cold family that coveted the power of my child, and it was full of magicians and puppets that were twisted by some kind of magic. But now with a different perspective, I can see that what this family did was also the result of a variety of factors.

Chaos wants to cross the star gate to reshape the planet, Darius meets Pandora and wants to open the box, and in order to cooperate with the plan to return to their hometown, they have to complete the history and build the three realms...

Everyone was pushing things forward for their own plans, and thus, a history that lasted thousands of years and seemed to be confusing was born...

"But, does Illya know this? The plan has been in place for several years, so it's impossible for her not to realize it..."

"Miyu-chan?"

Illya suddenly stopped and looked at Miyu. To be honest, more than three years have passed, and it seems that she can no longer be called "Little Miyu". They are both middle school students, and their bodies have naturally grown. But the name is probably difficult to change. They are familiar enough with each other and will not care about it.

Miyu stood tall and graceful beside him. Not only was she the tallest of the trio, she also had the longest black hair, which fell from her back to her waist.

But speaking of growth, the older brother doesn't seem to have grown much in comparison... Ah, he said before that this was some kind of research result, and it is expected that he will complete a new stage of growth after the results of this plan. What is the principle behind this...

"Illya, you..."

"Really, Miyu-chan, you're thinking about Ainsworth and the others again, right? Hehe, I sensed it right away!"

Illya pointed to her forehead. Although her academic level has been at the bottom among the three people in recent years, her mental strength and magic power growth levels are the highest. In other words, in terms of strength, if you simply compare the numbers, Illya can crush the two of them.

Now, with the mark given by Qin Xuan and her own efforts (?), it may not be so convenient in other occasions, but in the spiritual realm, as long as she wants, she can easily sense the thoughts of others.

Just like the "telepathy" among the six supernatural powers of Buddhism.

"——Miyu-chan, although I am not very qualified to comment on the Ainsworth affairs... Unlike Miyu who has been involved since childhood, I gradually came into contact with these things after meeting my older brother. If you ask me to talk about this history alone... it is of course a very sad story."

Yes, the initial idea was obviously a good one, but as time went by, Darius lost many important memories... No, even if there were no flaws in replacement magic, people's ideas would still change over time.

Before meeting Pandora wandering the mortal world, Darius was a traditional good man devoted to alchemy; before becoming Zouken Matou, Machiri was a magician with the ideal of saving the world; before witnessing the sub-Servant experimenter Mash Kyrielight, Leif was a simple researcher and a guardian of humanity who would never compromise with the demon Florence in order to maintain the present.

Everyone will change, and the Tao changes with time. Even if there are unchanging things in one's heart, the tide of the times will carry people forward.

"Miyu-chan thinks that we are the existence in the box, and everything is caused by us, right? But I think differently - on the contrary, it is precisely because of this, because we know these tragedies, that we need to do this - all we need to do is make this process as perfect as possible, this is inevitable."

"inevitable……?"

"Oh, right, Miyu, do you still remember Chaos? That old-fashioned alien robot. We still don't understand its technology, but from our point of view, its plan is very strange, isn't it? Although Chaos agreed to cooperate with Big Brother, it disappeared from then on... Well, Chaos has now lost its functions other than executing the plan, and then, or it chose not to cooperate at the beginning, and still moved alone in the universe until it shut down... I think Chaos chose this because he knew the inevitability of self-destruction. If you know the end point, self-destruction, then choosing a suitable process, the best ending - retaining a copy of the results of transforming the planet, compared to another ending of lonely exile in space, it is more reasonable, right?"

"——By the way, it's like that... the law of who has the least time?"

Illya suddenly felt a little stuck.

"Fermat's Law of Minimum Time."

Miyu added, "When light enters water, it will be refracted. Water and air are different substances, and the density of water is greater than that of air. As a result, light is refracted in water because this path takes the least time."

This is inevitable. When light enters water, its propagation speed slows down. If the light still follows the original straight line, it will take longer to reach its destination, so the light changes its path.

So, the question is, how does light know to choose the shortest path? The phenomenon of light is like... light has a destination. If it doesn't have a destination, there is no need to change the path.

Moreover, the light only chooses the shortest path, as if it knows where to go before setting out, and can predict all the obstacles and materials that will be encountered on the road, calculate and choose the path that takes the shortest time.

Maybe this is the fate of light, maybe we have to face our own destiny.

"…So," Miyu pondered, "we are also taking the most appropriate path to the ending."

p.s. When I watched Ted Chiang's "Story of Your Life" that year, I was shocked, a shock that made me re-recognize free will/fate determinism

Chapter 312: Corpses of the Gods, Sins of Humanity

"puff."

Miyu suddenly smiled.

"......?" Illya was confused by Miyu's reaction. Shouldn't she be shocked by this insight?

"Well... I just find it a little... incredible that Illya, who learns the slowest among the three of us, can have such clear insight." Miyu said rather tactfully.

"Ah, Miyu is so mean. How come you think I'm stupid and the last one, just like Kuro?"

Illya puffed her cheeks. She felt that her shining points were just not so obvious in front of Chloe and Miyu. "--Sometimes I am also very smart, okay?"

"Hey!" A lively and cheerful voice suddenly popped up, "Illya's cleverness means repeating what others have discussed with you?"

The small figure is a miniature girl holding a small magic wand, the fairy Ellie.

"Hmm!" Illya blushed when she was exposed in front of him.

"Hehehe... Lady Illya is still so lovable." Appearing together with the fairy Elly was Pandora, the real Pandora who had been living inside the box.

The real Pandora is the one who has the strongest "reverence for God" among the people here. She regards those who appear in the "God's Domain" as the real "messengers of God", so she always calls everyone "Mr. xx". However, after staying with Ai Li for a long time, her personality and speech have become much more cheerful and lively.

This made Illya and the others feel relieved. If they developed into serious and rigid believers, Illya and the others would not be able to stand it - they couldn't be serious all the time.