Chapter 382: Difference Engine

"How is this possible?"

The Phantom, sensing the sudden emergence of steam rules around him, wore a face full of disbelief.

The Plane's Chosen of the Steam Phantom Plane actually had three.

Trapped in suffocating fog, the Phantom felt the World's Will suppressing him—its immense pressure rendered all his transcendent powers, including his Root Power, unusable.

Even his physical attributes were somewhat weakened.

Olivia's voice came from behind the Phantom: "The words 'impossible' should never come from a transcendent's mouth."

The Phantom turned toward the voice and slashed his blade through the fog; the blade sank into it, neither scattering the mist nor meeting any solid resistance.

As he retracted the blade, faint rust appeared along its surface.

Not only was he himself being rejected, but even his equipment, incompatible with the plane's rules, began to be repelled by the plane.

Olivia's mastery of steam rules, lacking only the condensation of divinity, surpassed Xavier's by a margin.

This made the Phantom even more confused.

Normally, a plane produces only one Chosen who matures.

Because the hallmark of a matured Chosen is the ability to influence the entire plane's rules using their Root Power, thereby drawing upon the plane's full strength.

To draw upon the entire plane's rules, the plane's rules and the Root Power must be perfectly identical, resonating in unison.

That is, only when a single rule completely dominates the plane's rules does a Chosen corresponding to that rule emerge.

Once a matured Chosen appears, all other immature Chosen are immediately eliminated and cannot mature.

Because the path has been sealed off.

But Olivia's situation was different—her Root Power corresponded to the same plane rule as Xavier's, causing two matured Chosen to coexist in the Steam Phantom Plane.

And with Xavier's demise, the Chosen's fortune concentrated entirely upon Olivia, further enhancing her influence over the rules.

The Phantom panicked—he had to find a way to escape.

Following his memory of the path toward Saint George Cathedral, he moved forward and asked:

"Your Majesty Olivia, when did you become the Chosen?"

Olivia's voice came from all around, making it impossible for the Phantom to determine her true location.

"Since five years ago, when I confirmed the feasibility of the transcendent steam engine."

The Phantom estimated the distance in his mind and quickened his pace.

"Then why did you allow the Steam Council to exist?"

Olivia replied calmly:

"Because the timing wasn't right—some things couldn't be done by me; if discovered, Zhu Li would be displeased."

The Phantom asked in confusion: "Lidazhu Sect?"

He didn't understand what Zhu Li had to do with this—he saw her as merely Olivia's subordinate.

But it didn't matter—he had reached the hidden passage leading upward from below; once he left this underground space and returned to Saint George Cathedral, he would no longer be suppressed by the plane's rules.

Then, with his Fast-Slow Root Power, even if he couldn't win, escaping wouldn't be difficult.

He entered the passage and hurried forward—but after only two steps, he sensed something wrong.

The fog around him had not dissipated, and the texture of the stone steps beneath his feet differed from his memory.

Olivia's voice sounded again:

"Yes, Zhu Li. Even bringing you to the deepest underground before acting was because I feared getting too close to the surface might disturb her."

As Olivia spoke, the surrounding mist thinned; only then did the Phantom realize he had not entered a hidden passage, but a special space crafted entirely of metal.

The steam rules not only suppressed his physical attributes but also misled his intuition.

A great sense of dread filled the Phantom's heart—he pulled out his instance-exit item, intending to leave the instance, but discovered the device could not activate within this metal-made special space.

The next moment, he felt the temperature rise, and faint hissing steam sounds emerged around him.

Then the Phantom heard his final words: "Pity—I had high hopes for you."

On Bai She Street, Wu Chang's physical body and True Self returned to the secret Anquan Force with Xavier's corpse.

When he returned to Bai She Street, the Steam Phantom Plane had stabilized—the steam rules no longer restricted transcendent abilities, and the perpetual smog over Grimlan had dissipated along with the steam rules.

Looking up at the starry sky, Wu Chang felt an inexplicable clarity—he had never felt this light since entering the instance plane.

Members of the Secret Art Knights' Order, under Raven's command, were cleaning up the devastation on Bai She Street.

If only the Executioner had acted, they might still have repaired the damage in time to hide it from the public.

But after Xavier's rampage, nearly half the buildings on Bai She Street were severely damaged—hiding it was now impossible.

Raven was now consulting Randy and the Police Department's senior officials, pondering how to explain the disaster to the public tomorrow.

A dozen minutes later, Leng Shan and Jian Xing returned from the Grey Church slums; Wu Chang's True Self, along with the other players, joined them at the Steam Council's outpost in the Collingwood Processing Plant.

In the underground outpost, they found the Steam Council's most core research.

The Frankenstein-class transcendent machine tool.

This machine tool could fuse dead objects possessing transcendent power with living beings, granting the living organism partial transcendent abilities of the fused material.

Steam Council members had become transcendent half-human, half-machine beings precisely through modifications by this machine tool.

The acquisition of the transcendent machine tool brought no anomaly.

Before their eyes appeared the prompt: "Obtained the Jewel of the Industrial Crown," and the cleared sky outside did not darken again with smog.

It seemed that with Xavier's death and the Steam Council's destruction, all danger had been eliminated.

Now, the players only needed to wait thirty days, witness the World Industrial Exposition, complete Main Quest One, and then exit the instance.

As True Self led the players to the Steam Council outpost, Wu Chang's physical body moved alone to Xavier's secret mechanical workshop.

This place held all of Xavier's research manuscripts; as a Chosen born with mechanical talent, Xavier's study of transcendent steam engines far surpassed that of the Stilan authorities.

What was recorded here was the essence of the Steam Phantom Plane.

Wu Chang divided the knowledge inside into two parts: the esoteric knowledge, he would study carefully later to refine the Source Power; the purely mechanical knowledge he handed over to He Yun for reference.

While sorting through the manuscripts, he saw dozens of design sketches pinned to the wall in Xavier's office.

The sketches depicted a massive, intricate supernatural steam engine; according to the scale markings on the drawings, its size approached that of a palace—it was not only enormous but also extraordinarily complex.

Each isolated region was densely covered with annotations; the difficulty of constructing any single region was no less than building a complete supernatural steam engine.

Xavier's resentment had mentioned these sketches more than once; the sketches recorded the pinnacle of the supernatural steam engine he and Prime Minister Ron had envisioned.

A universal machine that connected to the world's rules—given sufficient energy, it could perform vast calculations to derive perfect solutions to any problem—the Difference Engine.

In Xavier and Prime Minister Ron's original vision, once the Difference Engine was built, it could find the perfect solution to every problem, and all difficulties would vanish effortlessly.

But the Difference Engine was too complex; they had barely sketched the most basic design before Prime Minister Ron was suddenly assassinated, and the plan came to an abrupt halt.

Helpless, Xavier then sought to connect with the world's rules, condense divinity, and attempt to transform himself into the ultimate supernatural steam engine to replace the Difference Engine.

After all, in the Holy Lord Church's scriptures, gods were omniscient and omnipotent beings; if he gained omniscience and combined it with steam rules, he might well replace the Difference Engine.

Even if he couldn't replace the Difference Engine, building it as a mechanical deity would be far faster than as a mortal. Wu Chang stared at the sketches on the wall—each one recorded vast amounts of information; merely glancing at them made his head spin.

If nothing unexpected, the pinnacle of supernatural steam engines Xavier wished to witness in his blood-soaked final words was the Difference Engine in these sketches.

Even looking at the Difference Engine's sketches confused him; asking him to build it was asking too much.

Not even in the Steam Phantom Plane could He Yun understand it in less than ten days to half a month.

He took out the Omniscient Crystal and asked whether the Difference Engine was merely Xavier and Ron's delusion—or if it had any chance of realization.

The good news was, the Omniscient Crystal affirmed the sketches' feasibility, stating that the Difference Engine depicted could be built in the Steam Phantom Plane, given enough time and cost.

The bad news was, it was useless—and might even have side effects.

As the Omniscient Crystal bearing the title of Omniscience, though it couldn't achieve true omniscience, given even a sliver of information, it could deduce the clues Wu Chang sought.

Facing the Difference Engine, hailed as capable of finding perfect solutions to all problems and possessing omniscient power, the Omniscient Crystal looked down on it with contempt.

According to the Omniscient Crystal, once built, the Difference Engine would possess nearly infinite computational power—this was true—but the problem was, the Difference Engine sought answers by connecting to plane rules, and its own intelligence was extremely low, almost nonexistent.

After all, the Steam Phantom Plane was still in the steam engine era; combining steam engines with the supernatural was already the plane's upper limit. Asking it to forge silicon chips and create advanced artificial intelligence was simply too much to demand.

The solutions provided by plane rules were rigid and inflexible; though they wouldn't cut off your hand for a headache or your head for a toothache, their brutality was similar.

Moreover, the rules of the Steam Phantom Plane were not the plane's natural rules—they had been "polluted" and assimilated by the Plane's Chosen One.

Under such circumstances, the solutions obtained would be severely influenced by the Plane's Chosen One's subjectivity.

For example, if the Plane's Chosen One were an idealistic humanitarian devoted to building a utopia, the solutions he received would be highly humane.

But if the Plane's Chosen One were a capitalist, or like Xavier, whose thoughts had been severely corrupted by flesh-and-blood supernatural steam engines, the solutions would be hellish.

Thank goodness Xavier's plan failed—if he had truly built the Difference Engine and followed its solutions to address his problems, the native inhabitants of the Steam Phantom instance would have suffered terribly.

The turning point that deeply moved Xavier and revealed the Plane's Chosen One's mission was a textile worker who died of overwork right before his eyes.

The textile worker's sudden death before him led him to ask the soul-question: why, with productivity increased by dozens of times, did workers still need to labor longer hours to maintain the same standard of living as before?

If he had taken this question to the Difference Engine for resolution, Wu Chang could already imagine that before the solution, Stilan was merely in deep water and burning fire; after the solution, it would be total annihilation.

He bundled all the information from the mechanical workshop and tossed it into his personal space, then returned to Bai She Street to discuss how to handle last night's events.

The next morning, when Grimlan's residents awoke, they saw Bai She Street reduced to ruins and fell into panic.

What happened? Did the Stilan Council's high-ranking officials fight each other, or did someone launch a military coup?

Some who woke earlier saw the Conservative Party's sunny doll still hanging in Garden Square, and their conspiracy theories multiplied.

Fortunately, Wu Chang and the others had prepared—they had revised The Hills Gazette overnight, describing last night's attack on the front page.

The Steam Council, as an entity, could not be exposed to the public.

First, it involved too many people; second, the Steam Council had no public recognition, and people wouldn't believe it.

After discussion, they chose to blame last night's attack entirely on the Quiet Church.

They claimed it was an attack by the Quiet Church, seeking revenge for Stilan's long-standing suppression of the Quiet Church; its followers had assassinated Acting Prime Minister Glade and Chief Justice Gasco last night.

Although the Quiet Church succeeded, the Secret Anquan Force, in conjunction with the Police Bureau, fought bravely and captured all Quiet Church followers involved in the assassination—the details are currently under interrogation.

This report sounded absurd, but most Grimlan citizens believed it.

Since its founding, Stilan had always clashed with the Quiet Church—it was a well-known Dafan Sect with extremely high public recognition in Stilan.

Many unsolved murder cases could be blamed on Quiet Church followers performing blood rituals.

Many

In the public's general understanding, the Quiet Sect was rotten to the core, capable of and willing to commit any evil.

A small fraction of the populace remained skeptical, but without evidence, they could only voice feeble conspiracy theories.

Finding a scapegoat was easy, but calming the aftermath would take a long time.

The first issue to address was the questioning from the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party.

In this attack, both the leaders of the Conservative and Liberal Parties died unexpectedly; Acting Prime Minister Glade was manageable—he was assassinated in front of many people inside the police station.

There were sufficient eyewitnesses to prove Glade's death was an accident.

The Conservative Party's side was harder to explain: Chief Justice and his party had been neatly hung on streetlamps; this method of killing carried too strong a sense of revenge, making it hard to reconcile with the attack on Bai She Street.

But no one cared about the Conservative Party's complaints.

The Liberal Party's rise had already marginalized the Conservatives; the Grain Law had been abolished, industrial oversight had failed, and now the Chief Justice was dead—the Conservatives had become a toothless tiger.

In no time, the Conservatives would be completely hollowed out, becoming nothing but a political mascot of Stilan.

No one cared what a mascot had to say.

Power is conserved; when one loses, another gains.

After the Bai She Street attack, two people gradually stepped into the spotlight; one of them was Randy.

The successive withdrawals of top Prime Minister candidates made Randy the overwhelming favorite for the next Prime Minister; combined with his recent activity, people quickly turned their attention to this low-profile Minister of Internal Affairs.

Especially after confirming Randy bore no obvious party label and was seen as impartial, more like a balancer, all sides expressed support for his ascension.

Everyone is currently weakened and needs time to recover.

If Randy received recognition from politicians, the other, Queen Olivia, received recognition from the people.

It was less recognition than a last resort.

After Glad's assassination, Olivia no longer held back from the Liberal Party, allowing Connor to expose the truth behind the earlier Pine Coal Mine explosion.

Coupled with previous cases, the Liberal Party, the Conservative Party, and the Industrial Industrialists Association all collapsed under scandal.

Workers and the lower classes, after surveying everything, found neither politicians nor factory owners worthy of trust.

They looked around, and finally fixed their gaze on Queen Olivia, who had long championed science and gradually emerged into the spotlight in recent years.

Perhaps only Your Majesty could truly support them and truly lead Stilan toward greatness.

As the last resort, Olivia gained massive popular support.

Both houses of parliament sensed something was wrong, fearing Olivia would restore royal power, but with no clear leader, they could not organize effective action, and could only hope a politician of sufficient prestige would act.

Yet every senior minister in the cabinet had, to some degree, been involved in the "Silent Church Attack."

Of the three remaining cabinet ministers, Interior Minister Randy supported Olivia; Foreign Minister Evans had been discovered to have ties to the Steam Council and was now under soft confinement by the Arcane Knights, unable to speak.

The Chief Justice died in the attack; the Naval Minister, who held military power, was suspected of close ties to the Silent Church and was now busy distancing himself—how could he dare speak?

Thus, Olivia smoothly secured the people's support.

Riding this wave, Olivia announced to the people that she would showcase Stilan's national strength at the upcoming World Industrial Exposition, showing all nations which direction the future of the world lay.

She would also publicly reveal the existence of the Supernatural Steam Engine at the World Industrial Exposition, deploying them across all industries to drastically reduce working hours and free people from the suffering of labor.

For a time, Queen equaled progress; the phrase "Olivia will restore the royal glory" could be heard everywhere.

The people's support coalesced into an invisible force, swirling above Grimlan.

(End of Chapter)