Chapter 314: The Truth

The entire engine room fell into dead silence, with only the hum of the gyroscope still spinning.

"When we were in the cold storage room, I already found it strange—why was it that everything dug out were frozen corpses of powerful and wealthy figures with no signs of labor?"

Li Cheng said, "Let's assume that when the disaster struck, they were with you, and you coaxed them all into hibernation pods. Then where are the soldiers, doctors, scientists, and other support personnel who were by those powerful figures' side?

It's impossible that when the calamity came, the powerful figures all fled on their own and brought no one with them, right?

Besides, Gao Ta is so conspicuous in the wasteland that plenty of scavengers know about it. Over the past few years, people must have come to explore it—so where are those scavengers now?

There's only one answer: you eliminated those powerful and wealthy figures who, in your eyes, had no value beyond genetic diversity,

and hid the remaining civilians—whether ordinary people from before the disaster or scavengers from after—in some corner of Gao Ta, all in hibernation pods.

The crops and artificial meat cultivated in the hydroponics room were originally prepared for these people."

Zhao Zijing hesitated for a moment. "The corpse that Fu Ding and Hua Long found in the cold storage room—"

"It's merely a replica formed by accelerated growth of an artificial embryo,"

Li Cheng waved his hand and said, "For a scientist who keeps the continuation of human civilization on his lips, he wouldn't put an infected corpse in the same room as a healthy embryo symbolizing humanity's future. Even if that corpse were himself.

If you don't believe it, you can have Fu Ding and Hua Long go back to the cold storage room and carefully check whether the frozen corpse's body surface shows any signs of life—knock and bump scars, vaccine scars, dental calculus, and so on.

You can even detach a hand or foot, burn it to ash, and test the heavy metal components accumulated from life and work in the ashes—cloning technology can't simulate those.

I knew two buddies surnamed Ken and An, whose living habits weren't great before they died, and both ended up dying from excessive heavy metal intake."

Zhao Zijing opened her mouth, turned to look at the silent spider-shaped robot, and said in a deep voice, "Why?"

What the players want is to complete the quest and grab some rewards along the way; what Noah wants is to keep Gao Ta and activate the space-jump engine. The two sides have no fundamental conflict of interest.

As for the captured Whalesong Guild member 【Wanwei Phantom】 who triggered this whole chain of events—that can also be resolved through negotiation—

Noah wants a player's qualification, and Gao Ta happens to have a mutated snail that just killed a player and newly acquired a qualification.

There's no reason, and no need, to trick players into doing things.

Especially something as absurd as killing Noah himself."

"..." The spider robot was silent for a long time, then suddenly said, "Have you... ever seen the starry sky?"

"What?"

Zhao Zijing frowned, saw Li Cheng raise an eyebrow slightly, and explained, "Back at the abandoned building, we used fiber-optic drones to try to penetrate the cloud layer for reconnaissance, and found that even up to the stratosphere, there were still massive dust clouds. So we gave up."

The stratosphere is between 10 and 50 kilometers up, which indeed exceeds the typical player's reconnaissance range—unless one has a low-cost skill like Cloud-Stepping that lets you ascend by stepping your left foot on your right.

Li Cheng caught a certain emotion in the spider robot's electronic voice and immediately asked, "What's outside the starry sky?"

"... Gods. Or, in your terms, supernatural entities."

Noah said softly, "When I was very young, I realized I was different from everyone else. I could see differential functions in the veins of leaves, formulas for calculating pi on coins, and knowledge I'd only read once in books would automatically compile itself in my mind. Whenever I wanted to invent or create, inspiration would surge forth endlessly.

Brain-computer interfaces, human cryogenic hibernation, animal and plant gene editing, photonic quantum computers...

For me, theoretical and technological breakthroughs were something natural, like water flowing downhill." This speech was rather too Versailles-like, and Li Cheng couldn't help but quip, "Good lord, are you Ramanujan or a Whispered?"

Ramanujan was one of the most famous mathematicians in Indian history, who claimed to be inspired by the Hindu goddess Namagiri and could dream up entirely new mathematical formulas at night.

The Whispered, on the other hand, are a setting from the light novel *Full Metal Panic! *, referring to humans who are born with hyper-modern knowledge latent in their minds and can develop black-technology devices.

"In a sense, you're right."

Noah said calmly, "The talent, wisdom, imagination, and innovative thinking I thought belonged to me actually all came as 'gifts' from supernatural entities.

With the help of these 'gifts,' I gradually gained control of social resources, invented and built the space-jump engine, and opened Pandora's box for all of human civilization."

Li Cheng immediately thought of the newspapers he'd seen when first entering the scripted quest. "The space engine failed?"

"It succeeded—to be precise, it successfully achieved the effect the supernatural entities wanted."

Noah spoke, using a mechanical arm to project footage captured by a near-Earth orbit satellite.

A resplendent, magnificent nebula, covering the entire starry sky, hung above the Earth.

The bright luminous spot at the nebula's center was, like a dragon sucking up water, continuously and slowly drawing water and earth from the planet.

Not a single error, not a single duplicate, not a single omission—everything is here for you to read!

Set against the pitch-black cosmos as a backdrop, it gave a soul-touching terror.

Noah continued, "The space engine itself is a trap. Once activated, it pulls the supernatural entity close to Earth's orbit, letting it devour an entire planet.

The essence of the Collapse is that it is feeding. And the mutated monsters are humans, animals, and plants that underwent mutation under its influence."

"I see. Phew—"

Li Cheng exhaled in relief. "Good thing I didn't get tempted along the way to grill some monster meat for a taste. The doctor told me if I kept eating, the prions would start kicking in."

Again? Hannibal, is that you?

Zhao Zijing had already built up resistance and didn't stop to quip, pressing Noah: "So you want to atone, and take the remaining people to escape to Kepler-22b? Since the space engine is a scam, how can you ensure this attempt will succeed?

Secondly, since that supernatural entity chose you, why have you been able to keep your sanity for so long? And why do you want us to kill you?"

"I'm not special,"

Noah said softly, "Even if it weren't me, someone else who received the 'gift' would have followed the same steps to invent and create, until they built a space-jump engine.

To the nebula, I'm just a preset program—once activated, it runs automatically until the result is delivered.

So it doesn't care whether I live or die, or whether I lose my sanity.

As for the engine itself, by design it can't reach six hundred light-years away, so I changed Gao Ta's purpose—letting it head to your world."

(End of Chapter)