Chapter 416: Esper?

Central Siberian Plateau, no-man's-land.

In the blizzard of minus twenty degrees, a team of giant crawler transport vehicles moved slowly in the dark like a long snake.

Not long after, they merged with transport vehicles driving from other places, lined up in two rows on their own, and came to a mountain peak.

The giant steel gate, which was four or five meters thick, had already opened automatically, and the two teams of transport vehicles drove into the mountain belly.

There was no light in the mountain belly, but a huge blast furnace in the distance was continuously pouring hot molten iron downward.

In that scorching radiant micro-light, one could see a huge space in the mountain belly, which was filled with all kinds of machinery, all of which were operating non-stop.

This place looked like a factory.

However, unlike ordinary factories, this factory in the mountain belly could not see any human figures, and even all the machinery was operating automatically, with no space or buttons for humans to operate at all.

In the east side of this huge unmanned factory in the mountain, an area planned as a raw material warehouse, the transport vehicles finally reached their destination.

They stopped at fixed positions one after another, and then several mechanical arms stretched out from the walls on both sides, skillfully dismantling the modular container vehicles on the transport vehicles, and then performing work such as refueling and repairing them.

At the same time, two heavy mechanical arms stretched out from above, lifted the containers, placed them on a super-large crawler that was twenty meters wide, and the containers were immediately dismantled by the mechanical arms around the crawler, and then the various mineral ingots that had been processed were classified and sent to various processing workshops.

Such crawler transport facilities were all over the entire factory. Raw materials entered various standard parts workshops through them, turned into various parts, and then in the assembly workshop, they were turned into a whole by mechanical arms.

And at the end of the crawler was a super-giant automated warehouse. Here, countless Undetectable Extension Charms were released. Entering it, there were rows of racks that could not see the end, piled with various drones, mechanical dogs, small crawler combat vehicles, and even various models of heavy artillery and missiles.

The pitch-black steel stood silently in the Siberian cold wind. Except for Murphy, no one in the world knew of their existence.

In the underground ultra-clean space below the mountain belly, a magic material experiment was in progress.

This layer was divided into a total of three hundred ultra-clean laboratories. Each laboratory had ten rows of test benches, ten in each row. There were dozens of mechanical arms on each test bench, which were taking turns applying magic of different frequencies, different intensities, and different properties to various materials that had been preliminarily processed on the test bench.

One experiment every two minutes, and each experiment could perform magic performance analysis on tens of thousands of materials. Such experiments had been going on for months without sleep, and would continue to go on.

Massive experimental data were summarized and preliminarily analyzed by the brain-like supercomputer "Binary Tree" under the laboratory, and then uploaded to the cloud database "Alaya" via the mind network for the study of all Ravenclaw members connected to Murphy's mind network.

And even with such a fast experimental data generation speed, sometimes it would still not keep up with the needs of various laboratories. After having the successful experience of the Future Research Institute, more and more laboratories began to use time acceleration to speed up the output speed of results.

"Time," Murphy said in an underground laboratory, "might be the greatest power in the world."

"Any small change will become an exponential change under the blessing of time."

"The intelligence bestowed upon us by millions of years of human evolution, the wisdom bestowed upon us by tens of thousands of years of civilization development, and the knowledge brought by hundreds of years of research, all at this moment, with the help of magic, have reached a critical point."

"Now this world is undergoing an unparalleled explosion."

"Its brilliance and glory are completely no less than the Cambrian explosion five hundred million years ago."

"This explosion can happen because we have been actively accumulating and actively seeking change. The more we know, the stronger the power we possess."

"But you can't do it." Murphy looked at a crab that was bound in a huge glass box but was still slowly regenerating.

The main body of this thing was blown away by the space-based cannon, but it still had many clones. The one here was just one of them, caught by Lucas for research.

"Your power comes from faith. The process of you drawing power is to a certain extent passive," Murphy said, "Of course, you will also gradually recover your power with magic recovery, but as long as the speed of technological explosion is faster than the speed of magic recovery, we don't need to worry about your existence."

"Time is on our side."

"Human," the crab's mouthparts squirmed, making a clanging sound like rocks and metal colliding, "You know nothing about the power of gods."

"Oh?" Murphy smiled.

"You are trapped here, yet you are so arrogant," Murphy shook his head, "We have captured several individuals who call themselves gods. Of course, you have not yet recovered your full power, but we have also obtained enough data and are no longer ignorant of you."

"Gods are the tip of magic."

"Your power comes from faith, and faith is a concept in the mental realm. You borrowed certain concepts, imaginations, and emotions in human thinking to build a set of rhetoric about why they should believe in you, thereby defining your authority."

"This set of rhetoric is actually an agreement with believers, a covenant bound with believers. You provide some convenience for believers, and thus you can borrow the spiritual power of believers."

"These spiritual powers converge with you as nodes, and you possess magic power far exceeding hundreds or thousands of wizards. And the concept that is the core of your faith becomes your divine position."

"For example, you, the divine position of water and sea, so the magic used related to water and the ocean will be huge in power."

"This set of logic belongs to what we call the 'Mind Path'."

"The reason why your magic is so powerful is only because you purified huge spiritual power through 'divine position', thereby raising your magic level. Its principle is already clear to us."

"No, you don't understand," the crab's mouthparts knocked, "You may understand knowledge and technology, you may be good at using the power of rationality, but you don't understand human nature."

"Human nature?" Murphy smiled, "You actually talk about human nature with a human?"

The crab didn't find it funny. Its voice was as flat and cold as ever, "Perhaps it is your intelligence higher than your peers that makes you proud, so you don't bother to understand, but the stupidity of humans is far beyond your imagination."

"Knowledge and rationality are virtues that only a few people deserve to enjoy."

"Ignorance and darkness are the truth of this world."

"Humans, weak and selfish, short-sighted and fond of self-deception. Compared to racking their brains to understand a truth, they are more willing to believe in an authority. Compared to struggling in reality with all their might, they are more willing to immerse themselves in false fantasies."

"This is the essence of your group, this is human nature."

"People are trapped by their own nature, and gods can use this as a rein to drive them. Although you are human, only gods are masters of using human nature."

"You ignited the explosion of technology."

"But we are also waiting for an explosion. An explosion ultimately brought about by human stupidity."

At the same time, thousands of kilometers away, Rome, Parliament Building.

A few young wizards released the Illusion Body Spell on themselves, and then walked in swaggeringly.

(End of chapter)