Chapter 472: Ruins 16

I will serve Qionglin with all my heart and soul, because Qionglin is my home, just as it is your home as well.

Luo Qi gripped the pine needles until the plant's thorns pricked his fingers, drawing beads of blood. He had never before thought that one day he would be able to utter such hypocritical lies. He would continue to say them in the future, until these words came easily to his lips, his face wearing an expression of loyalty and righteousness. Yet in his heart, he was clear—clearer than at any time before. Even though he still had to fight against hallucinations, there was no longer a shred of confusion or hesitation in his heart.

Liu Ziyu paced back and forth in the underground vault, examining all the air vents, checking for cracks in the walls, and even finding a way to measure the thickness of the walls.

Luo Qi, hands in his pockets, slowly strolled over to a giant machine in the middle of the room and watched it for a while. The machine was over four meters tall, almost connecting to the ceiling. Near the machine, every few meters, there sat a very crude rectangular container with a capacity of about two cubic meters. "Liu Ziyu, don't you think this place doesn't look like a bank's underground vault? It's too crude."

"Like a factory workshop," Liu Ziyu said. She was floating above, checking the pipes exposed on the ceiling. "Factory workshops should look like this, right? I haven't seen many."

Luo Qi didn't speak. He looked up along the machine's robotic arm, and at that moment, his heart gave a violent jolt. Right in the middle of the pitch-black machine, an Alien covered in a black carapace was clinging tightly to it. He reflexively took a step back, tense to the extreme, unable to even make a sound. He hadn't noticed this thing in the room, and he had locked himself inside? They put this kind of thing in the Sandbox?

Just then, he suddenly felt himself enter another Mind system. A desire for slaughter spread from his back, seeping into his limbs. He became more agile, his fingertips stretching long and thin like blades. He lowered his head, looking at his arms covered in black iron armor, and the thought of slaughter became ecstatic. His body was so light and suited for leaping; he shouldn't stay in the open, shouldn't stay on the ground. He should return to the trees, return to the heights, wait for prey to approach, and then deliver a fatal blow...

"Luo Qi?" A cat's meow.

"Luo Qi!" a girl called out impatiently, mixed with an even sharper cat's meow.

He was stunned. Who was calling, and who were they calling?

"Luo Qi." A man's voice, calling him from the depths of his memories.

He froze. Who was calling him?

Many phantoms suddenly appeared, overlapping.

In a Jiangnan Ancient Town, a young man said, "Luo Qi, take your cat away!"

In a simple, crude room, a man walked in and said to him, "Luo Qi, get up off the floor."

In a comfortable hotel, with rain pouring like a deluge outside the window, the man sat behind a table, leisurely flipping through a menu, "Luo Qi, what shall we eat?"

In the dim night, the man's face was as white as paper, extremely weak, yet he pulled hard on his arm, forcing him to look into his eyes. "Luo Qi! Luo Qi, listen to me."

He looked into those eyes, and a familiar feeling pierced into the depths of his Yajian, as if he had fallen into a Teleportation, and he was swept into another layer of space.

He remembered who that person was. He believed what he said; he said he was Luo Qi, so he was Luo Qi. Like a Coordinate being set, the memories and Yajian belonging to Luo Qi fully revived. His life rapidly unfolded from the Root Node, restored, and returned to its place. Luo Qi stood there blankly, as if having broken free from a terrifying nightmare.

His vision suddenly cleared; there was no Alien on the rusty machine at all. The ceiling was floating with countless cold light sources created by Magic. He shivered and suddenly grabbed his own arm—no insect carapace, only the soft skin and flesh of a mammal. He was not an Alien insect; why had he thought he was an Alien creature? He had downloaded a large amount of the Queen's memories. Although he had not retained the Queen's Yajian, and static memories did not cause backlash, he himself had been getting lost. He had not yet truly read the "Zhuangzi Butterfly Effect" in the Mind Mage textbooks, but he suspected he already knew what that theory was, and also knew that theoretical knowledge was not of much use to reality.

Luo Qi still felt a lingering fear. He turned his head blankly and saw Liu Ziyu floating toward him from overhead, not flying very gracefully, much like a human in a weightless state, using a reverse force to fly over.

"Are you calling my soul?" Luo Qi asked her with a hoarse voice.

"Why say it so unpleasantly?" Liu Ziyu asked.

"No," Luo Qi said in a low voice, "that's not an unpleasant thing to say."

Liu Ziyu flew over, perhaps just hovering there due to air resistance. She looked at Luo Qi in mid-air with curiosity and a bit of confusion, "What's wrong with you?"

"Me? Nothing's wrong with me." Luo Qi paused nervously, covering up with some panic.

Liu Ziyu pointed a finger at him.

"What's wrong with me?" Luo Qi asked guardedly.

"It's your cat! You found a silly dog! Your cat has been meowing, and I just called you to ask what was wrong with the cat, but you didn't react at all."

Luo Qi was stunned for a moment, only then belatedly realizing that the cat had climbed onto his shoulder, its claws hooked into his hair, as if it were about to kick his nose and climb onto his face in the next second. He hurriedly reached out to soothe the black cat. As a Telepathy-capable creature connected to him on a shallow level, it must have sensed the chaos in his Yajian just now.

"What's wrong with you?" Liu Ziyu asked again.

Luo Qi hugged the cat into his arms, "I... I was thinking about something just now."

Liu Ziyu looked at him twice and then let it go. "Hmph, fine if you don't want to say, I'm not that curious anyway."

Luo Qi breathed a sigh of relief, soothingly stroking the cat; it was fortunate that Liu Ziyu had this kind of personality. He walked forward a few steps, approached a rectangular cargo crate, and suddenly reached in to grab two handfuls from the bottom of the crate.

Liu Ziyu's curiosity was piqued again, and she hurriedly landed on the ground to follow and look. "What did you find?"

Luo Qi straightened his back, looking at the shredded paper strips in his hand. "I know what this place is."

"A place for printing money?"

"A place for shredding money," Luo Qi said, dividing half of the thin paper strips in his hand to Liu Ziyu.

"Shredding money?"

"After circulating for a period of time, humans will recycle and process old money."

"Ugh, so disgusting, how many people have touched this pile of waste paper." Liu Ziyu said, throwing the shredded paper in her hand back into the cargo crate. "They used green money? Not red? US dollars?"

"No." Luo Qi looked carefully at every thin, shredded paper strip in his hand. Suddenly, he pulled out one of the strips and placed it in front of Liu Ziyu, "Look, what is this? Look at this, the symbol on it."

Liu Ziyu began to be confused, then suddenly froze, "This is... this is Ancient Mage Language. No, not entirely, but very close, like a variant of an ancient language. Ancient Mage Language has an evolutionary process; the more it transforms, the simpler it gets. This looks like an intermediate stage I've never seen before."

"What does it mean?" Luo Qi asked earnestly and urgently.

"It has appeared in many Spells, representing the number one," Liu Ziyu said. "One dollar? Maybe it's one dollar."

"When have Mages ever printed money?" Luo Qi sighed, not understanding why Liu Ziyu was so clueless about these things; she seemed only interested in Magic experiments.

"Oh, right." Liu Ziyu finally understood, "We have used credit points since ancient times, and the Supreme Committee has always been responsible for the Calculation of credit points."

Luo Qi bit his lower lip, "So..." "So why use paper money? Just for fun?"

"Do you think this is a playground? When have you ever seen Mages have such a sense of humor?" Luo Qi said in a low voice.

"So..." Liu Ziyu was unwilling to state this speculation, "So we have also used paper money?"

"There is another possibility, which is that a group of humans used this number," Luo Qi said. "Have you heard of it?"

"Impossible," Liu Ziyu said immediately. "Ancient Mage Language means Spells; we completely isolate Magic knowledge from humans."

"But using paper money, using machines to shred money, this is something that only happened in modern times." Luo Qi breathed slightly, "In modern times we used paper money, but we all didn't know?"

"We... wouldn't need to use machines to shred money, right?" Liu Ziyu said confusedly. "Shredding money is a matter of minutes with Magic. Not to mention shredding money, even if Du Zhengyi were to come and pulverize this workshop, it would be a matter of minutes. How could they go to the trouble of building a machine?"

This sentence reminded Luo Qi. He turned his head to look at Liu Ziyu, "Mages could not possibly use paper money."

"Hmm?" Liu Ziyu asked.

"Because the threshold for copying paper money, that is, making counterfeit money, is too low. The vast majority of Mages can do it," Luo Qi said. "I think this is why we use credit points to exchange for rare materials, and why the Supreme Committee is responsible for the Calculation."

"Oh, right." Liu Ziyu was, after all, not as familiar with human life as Luo Qi; she had never thought about the issue of paper currency. "Then what is this for? Did some perverted Mage build these as a joke?"

Luo Qi stuffed the fragments of paper money into his pocket, "Ziyi, I heard that the Black Market in the Sandbox resets every day and starts over the next day. What does that mean?"

"Oh, that means the world of the Sandbox has an Underlying Magic, which is a replication Magic. After every fixed clock cycle is completed, the objects in the Sandbox world will be reborn, returning to the state at the beginning of the previous cycle."

"What? Sold goods can replenish themselves? Is it a Treasure Basin?"

"How is that possible!" Liu Ziyu almost shrieked, "The things sold in the Black Market are all precious, and the Magic Energy required to replicate such things would likely be more than making another one. The Sandbox only replicates very simple things that have no Magic power."

"For example, the plush toy in the car and the scraps of paper in the cargo basket? Even if someone has touched them, they will replicate year after year?"

"If it's that kind of ordinary car made of steel, it can actually be replicated too. This replication can also be rewritten, for instance, if you want to create new things, or slow down the rate of replication..."

"I understand," Luo Qi said, and he pondered for a moment. "So, the kind of terrain and the kind of scene this place presents must be an intentional choice, right?"

Liu Ziyu nodded, "But as I said, most Sandboxes are inherited, and for a Sandbox of this massive scale, people generally don't make major modifications."

"You mean to say that the Progenitor Mage built this Sandbox, this Sandbox in the likeness of a modern human city ruin, and even carefully designed the machines and workshops for shredding banknotes?"

"Uh..." Liu Ziyu got stuck, trapped between the paradox and the paradox, "Then it must be that the Archive modified this Sandbox for some purpose, changing it into this appearance... and psychotically designed the banknotes..."

"That is truly sick," Luo Qi said in a low voice.

"Yeah," Liu Ziyu said blankly, unable to even agree with her own words.