Chapter 767 — The Predicament

Those seats were distributed around the pillars, forming individual sections. At this moment roughly half of the sections were "full," the chairs occupied by Long Slumber cultists in black robes with star pendants hanging from their collars. Some of the cultists leaned back against their chairs as if sunk in deep sleep; others remained awake, but the neural cords and runes behind their seats likewise glimmered faintly.

In the other half of the sections, the neural cords behind the seats had been detached and extended to connect to a corner of the hall, where rows of couches were arranged, and upon them lay dozens of Long Slumber cultists in a state of coma.

Some personnel in grey robes or short brown robes moved among those comatose cultists, tending to these brethren who could not wake because of contamination.

At this sight, Yuri's brow could not help but furrow.

He walked toward the area where the beds had been arranged.

A tall, gaunt priest with unkempt blond hair came forward to meet him, bowing respectfully. "Selena of the Daylight Doctrine, Bishop You Yaoheng."

Then he turned deliberately toward Selena Gael: "The Doctrine of the Supreme Polarity has increased the sessions of mental soothing as you instructed; the condition of those few has stabilized."

This was a mid-ranking priest, of no great standing within the order. Among believers of this level, many did not even know that Selena of the Daylight Doctrine was in fact already dead—they would see her appear at the order's strongholds, and occasionally even converse with her. Under the all-encompassing sensory projection, the Selena of the Daylight Doctrine in their eyes had always been a living person.

Selena nodded to the mid-ranking priest and, walking slowly forward, said to Heng: "Pay the utmost attention to the state of those neural cords. These operators' consciousnesses are now shattered, their mental fragments sunk deep within Sandbox One. If anything goes wrong with the neural cord connections... they will never come back."

The unkempt blond priest bowed his head and replied, "Rest assured, we are exceedingly careful on that point."

Yuri's gaze swept over the people lying on the beds.

Their faces were calm, their breathing steady, as though they merely slept soundly in a long dream, yet were sunk so deep they could not wake. Artificial neural cords extended from the backs of their heads, connecting to the pillars in the hall; upon the surface of the cords, runes glimmered faintly.

Most Eternal Sleepers could in fact be connected directly through dream divine arts, but such a connection was not the most efficient. Hence, in this "control hall," the connected operators needed to rely on materialized neural cords to link and merge with one another.

These neural cords were technology from the Society of All Things' End; more than a decade ago it had been immature, but in recent years it had been greatly improved, its negative effects substantially reduced.

When Sandbox One lost control and the contamination erupted from within, the operators directly connected to Sandbox One were struck while in this state of "material connection." Against such an impact, the frail defenses of the human brain were all but useless; in nearly an instant, the contamination seized these comrades' minds and, using them as a springboard, entered the psyche.

Now the contaminated ports of these operators had in fact already been shielded, and Sandbox One's overflow no longer used them as a springboard—but the contamination had long since spread to the brain-slave array and several virtual connection ports. Even without these operators as a springboard, the connection between Sandbox One and the psyche could no longer be shut down.

And the operators themselves remained tightly bound by Sandbox One, their consciousnesses sunk deep within the sandbox, unable to awaken.

After a long silence, Yuri suddenly said, "If we went deep into their dreams, we might be able to observe the situation inside Sandbox One directly."

"But more likely we would face the deepest contamination and end up like these people," Selena Gael said, shaking her head. "The human mind can scarcely withstand an information shock of that magnitude. After all, even those of transcendent rank are, in essence, still 'mortals.'"

Selena placed particular emphasis on the word "mortals," which made Yuri involuntarily knit his brows.

"Selena of the Daylight Doctrine, you think what has appeared in Sandbox One is... truly..."

"It is too early to speak of that now; at the very least we must wait until the situation has been reported to His Holiness the Pope." Selena said, and raised her head to "look" toward the far end of the other side of the hall.

She did not possess a pair of eyes of her own that could open in the real world, but here, through the senses of the many believers present, she could "see" everything in this place.

In that direction, along the wall at the end of the hall, were rows of neatly arranged windows; through the crystal glass covering those windows, one could clearly see another hall on the opposite side.

In that hall stood an even denser array of square pillars, each surrounded by rows of rectangular platforms.

A great number of unconscious "brain slaves" lay upon those platforms, their cranial nerves linked to the neural cords in the hall, their bodies sustained by various biomass conduits for nutrient delivery and metabolic circulation.

"We originally meant to create a beautiful dream..." Selena Gael sighed softly. "Yet in the end, it is bound to become a nightmare."