Chapter 761 — The Truth of Project Zero

Upon an endlessly vast expanse of water, enormous metal platforms stood in ordered rows; in the sky, colossal geometric bodies and numeral symbols revolved in silence. At the center of sky and water, Daniel, clad in black robes, already stood beside a white round table.

"My Lord," the old mage bowed in salute the moment he saw Gao Yang, "I have become a Mystic Pole Luminary of the Church of Eternal Slumber."

"You have passed the trial and been promoted smoothly?" Gao Yang looked Daniel up and down twice, then nodded slightly with a smile. "That is truly good news. Congratulations."

"This station no longer matters much to me," Daniel at once lowered his head and said with sincerity. "The knowledge and health you bestowed are what cannot be measured in value."

Gao Yang could feel that the old mage's words came from the bottom of his heart.

At the first, this old mage from Typhon, from the Church of the Long Night, had perhaps been "loyal" to the "Outlander" only out of fear—and loyalty born of fear often cannot withstand trial. But as time passed and more and more things came to pass, that loyalty had plainly changed without his noticing.

Knowledge and health—and, having obtained these two, the tangible change in his condition of life in the real world. All of this could not be ignored.

The old mage bowed his head before the "Outlander," and the reverence in his heart had long since surpassed his fear.

He knew that he could hardly be counted a good man—even if he once had been, he was not one now.

But at least he still remembered gratitude.

He had once been driven to despair by the matter of his talent, once driven to madness by imperfect biochemical modification, once nearly stripped entirely of reason, his mind ruled by those endless whispers and hallucinations. He had once lost almost everything, including most of his humanity.

It was the "Outlander's" bestowal that gave him the chance to recover those things, one by one.

Perhaps in the eyes of the Outlander, He had merely given him some inconspicuous knowledge and some simple means of healing—but this "trifling" aid from a "higher being" was enough to change the entire fate of a mortal.

The gifts of fate must be repaid with loyalty.

"My Lord," Daniel said respectfully, "after becoming a Luminary, I obtained higher authority. I have investigated the truth of 'Project Zero,' and have made my first contact with the root of the present crisis of the mind!"

Gao Song's gaze turned stern. "Project Zero... what exactly is it?"

"They are trying to unseal the 'Mind Imprint'!" Daniel answered at once. "And not just for one or two people. They intend to connect the dreams of every mortal man and woman, and strip away every Mind Imprint the gods have ever laid upon humanity!"

Daniel's answer nearly made Gao Song miss a breath, and the grave, majestic air he had struggled to maintain came close to slipping from his control.

It was two seconds before he had steadied himself. He fixed his eyes on Daniel's. "They know about the 'Mind Imprint'?"

"Yes, though they call it the 'Shackle' or the 'Chain of the Gods,'" Daniel said with a nod. "I do not know where exactly they first learned of the phenomenon, but clearly the Sleepers, who devote themselves to studying the mortal mind and the realm of consciousness, understand far more about the 'Mind Imprint' than the Congregation of All Things Final does..."

"The Congregation of All Things Final's research still stops at 'flesh and body'; the Sleepers have plainly entered the realm of the mind, even of the soul..." Gao Yi nodded slightly. "Then what do they actually intend to do? How does Project Zero operate?"

Daniel nodded and began his detailed report. "First, they build a vast, self-contained mental world, which they call the 'Sandbox.' This Sandbox is a more complex and higher-order space than the Illusory Pivot City; apart from the necessary monitoring measures, it is utterly sealed off from the outside real world.

"A person's mind is channeled into this Sandbox world, and before entering it they undergo thorough hypnosis and memory excision—every memory and concept relating to the gods is deleted—and the Sandbox world itself contains no information whatsoever connected to the gods.

"Once the Sandbox begins its sealed operation, it forms a closed system capable of self-consistency and self-maintenance. Because it exchanges no information at all with the outside world, and its interior has likewise been thoroughly 'disinfected,' it ought to be a wholly godless world. Those who 'live' within the Sandbox will not remember what the outside world is like; they will believe only that everything inside the Sandbox is real.

"Finally, through 'time iteration,' the flow of time inside the Sandbox world is accelerated until it is completely decoupled from the outside real world. The Sandbox is left to run for a thousand years or more within, and the minds within are made to undergo dozens, even hundreds, of 'cycles of reshaping'..."

"Time iteration?" Gao Shao seized at once upon a key phrase in Daniel's report. "Accelerating the flow of time within the Sandbox world? Would that not require an utterly immense amount of computational power?"

Daniel nodded gravely. "Yes—immense computational power. And not only immense computational power: it also requires human brains capable of remaining connected forever as the 'running substrate.' The Sandbox must be sealed off utterly—not merely isolated in the mental plane, but isolated in the real world as well. Ordinary Sleepers, however, network on a floating basis: every node is constantly changing, and so fails to satisfy the condition..."

The riddle was at last unraveled, and the question that had long plagued Gao Song found its answer.

"So that is why they need brain slaves!"

The mind itself has no need of a fixed "server." Its entire operation, in Gao Yang's understanding, is in essence built upon "cloud" technology: so long as a certain number of users remain connected, so long as a small portion of the computational tasks is distributed among those users, the whole can keep running. If one insisted on naming any hardware foundation at all, it would be nothing more than some terminals for connection, along with the devices needed for debugging and monitoring.

Therefore the Sleepers had no need at all to convert anyone into a "brain slave" in order to sustain their own.

But their "Sandbox" did.

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