Chapter 2208: The Origin of Artifacts, the Psionic Paradox

A person's consciousness is a complex dynamic system, but it also contains features that run through it from beginning to end, which is what Xia Duo calls "personality."

Within this personality, filling it with a large amount of sensory and cognitive information, whether active or passive, constitutes a roughly complete consciousness.

Of course, personality, as a significant feature of consciousness, does not appear at the very beginning, nor is it immutable once formed; personality is shaped by a vast amount of conscious information and can, in turn, exert an influence on that conscious information.

Mohawi's consciousness is chaotic, which can perhaps be viewed as multiple personalities representing different systems mixed together; if given enough time, perhaps a brand-new personality could form within this chaotic dynamic.

But that timeframe is uncertain, and at the same time, Xia Duo is not sure if the other party will become harder to deal with after forming a new personality; naturally, it is better to handle it as soon as possible.

However, because of the other party's chaotic consciousness, the information within it—including sensory information and the cognitive information processed based on it—is also very disjointed.

The main reason is that all conscious information is not directly readable, but requires the step of subconscious analysis; if the information extracted is cognitive, then there are traces to follow, provided, of course, that this thought belongs to Mohawi and not to a character from a Projection World that Xia Duo discarded.

If only sensory information is extracted, then it becomes troublesome; it might not be understandable even after being parsed, much like how an instrument for analyzing gravitational waves cannot analyze infrared rays.

In short, parsing conscious information is not an easy job; perhaps Psionics could do it better, but Xia Duo, after all, has not mastered Psionics.

Fortunately, however, in the analysis of the memory fragments from Mohawi's sixth Consciousness Copy, Xia Duo found key information—

A memory of Mohawi pondering the discord between the two schools of Zhamu Dasi.

Xia Duo seized this clue and traced it upward through the vast amount of Mohawi's shattered memory fragments, quickly sorting out a massive, multi-branched network.

Moreover, under his conscious search, the main direction of this network's upward tracing shifted from Mohawi's cognitive information to sensory information (more accurate objective memories) that used thoughts as key nodes.

From this, Xia Duo gradually sorted out the origins and history of Zhamu Dasi and its two schools that have been fighting for countless years, and even the origin of Psionics!

All of this likely traces back three thousand years to the predecessor of Zhamu Dasi—the Dasi tribe, or kingdom; whether it is even older is difficult to verify in Mohawi's cognition, and he even believes that the past history of Zhamu Dasi has been modified.

In short, Mohawi believes that during the Dasi period, people in that region began to awaken Psionics one after another; the number was extremely small, but it never ceased, and the most famous and powerful among them was the tribal leader at the time, Zhamu.

The Dasi Kingdom was established by Zhamu in imitation of the Elf, and the latter Zhamu Dasi actually continued the Dasi Kingdom established by Zhamu.

Of course, because of the rise of Psionics, the current Zhamu Dasi and the original Dasi Kingdom are no longer the same concept; Zhamu's descendants have not been able to occupy a ruling position in the current Zhamu Dasi.

And the sources of the two schools, Zeqi and Anti, can also be traced back to when Zhamu was alive, though at that time the specific names Zeqi and Anti had not yet appeared; they were merely the origins of the ideas.

As the most powerful Psionic Warrior at the time, Zhamu naturally had a large group of followers, one of whom later became known to the people of Zhamu Dasi as the "First Generation Psionic Mentor."

This can basically be seen as the original founder of the current era's Psionic Magic System in Zhamu Dasi, so what exactly did he do?

To this day, only one thing can be verified—that First Generation Psionic Mentor used Zhamu's head to create a Mind Artifact that allowed ordinary people to also awaken Psionics!

That artifact is still preserved in the capital of Zhamu Dasi, Nayakolisi City, and is admired by countless people; after the First Generation Psionic Mentor, every person who created a Mind Artifact has been called a "Mind Mentor."

Among the twelve artifacts, a very small number were made using body parts preserved from Zhamu, but more are manifestations of the progress of the Psionic Magic System.

Of course, an Artifact is an Artifact after all; in Mohawi's memory, every Mind Artifact comes with a Mental Image World that can exist independently, which is equivalent to creating something from nothing in reality based solely on thought.

This is not without a price; every Mind Mentor sacrificed themselves for this, and those twelve Mental Image Worlds can also be seen as the continuation of the thoughts of the twelve Mind Mentors.

Thus, we arrive at the classic environment of conflict: among the twelve Mind Mentors, the influence of the First Mentor is undoubtedly the greatest, and the interpretation of the First Mentor's thoughts has formed multiple different branches.

If it were just a disagreement among ordinary Psionic Scholars, it would not actually cause much of an impact, but as it happens, the thoughts of the subsequent eleven Mind Mentors were also not unified, and their interpretations of the First Mentor's thoughts clearly leaned in two directions.

And Mind Mentors cannot be wrong; this is the root of the ideological divergence between the two schools of Zhamu Dasi, and also the root of why the dissent is difficult to resolve.

The two current schools of Zhamu Dasi take turns in the Executive position, changing every ten years; in other words, their domestic ideology and foreign attitude also change every ten years. This seemingly balanced approach determines the tragic future of this country.

This is not just Xia Duo's own view; from the perspective of the two schools, it is also the case—they both believe that it is the existence of the other that prevents Zhamu Dasi from developing stably or conquering everything.

For thousands of years, they have switched back and forth between war and truce, never able to transcend it; but war, once started, is not necessarily something one can decide to stop on one's own.

Therefore, for thousands of years, wars large and small in Zhamu Dasi have almost never stopped; it is merely a matter of contracting for a while every ten years.

As for the origin of Psionics, scholars in the upper echelons of Zhamu Dasi generally believe that as long as thought exists, there is a foundation for the birth of Psionics; in other words, any intelligent species has the possibility of Awakening Psionics.

Of course, in the eyes of the lower and middle classes of Zhamu Dasi, Psionics originates from the continuation of the thoughts of the First Generation Psionic Mentor (and King Zhamu), and it is only possible to awaken Psionics under the radiance of an Artifact.

This is also the main reason why, whether in the Northland or the South of the Main Plane's Xilu, one must go to Zhamu Dasi to awaken Psionics.

The uncertainty of natural awakening is too high; one might work hard for a lifetime and still not necessarily awaken, but the Mind Artifacts of Zhamu Dasi have a very high probability of allowing people to awaken Psionics, though there are differences in strength.

In Mohawi's cognition, the First Mentor once said a sentence—the world is as big as the mind is; the "world" here refers to the Mental Image World, but it can also be considered the strength of Psionics.

That is to say, once modern people with open minds awaken Psionics, they will be more powerful than the closed-off people of Zhamu Dasi.

But Psionics essentially originates from the mind, and things on the idealistic level are all very strange; do modern people believe that everything in the world can be changed by thought alone?

Xia Duo does not know about others, but he himself cannot agree with a world where everything can be changed by thought alone; in such a situation, if he obtained powerful Psionics, would he deny the existence of Psionics itself?

This creates a contradiction; if his Psionics were to deny the existence of Psionics, then perhaps he would be unable to awaken Psionics in the first place.