Chapter 265: Return

Walking out from the brightly lit Base, breathing in the long-missed air, Sun Cheng leaned against the wall outside the Base entrance, looked up at the sparse, visible starlight in the sky, and suddenly felt an illusion as if he were in another world.

"I'm back... This time, it really was a long time..."

A very uncomfortable, awkward feeling was currently filling Sun Cheng's heart.

It was a long-lost experience called 'strangeness'!

Although Sun Cheng had vaguely sensed it the previous few times he returned from another world—that he would feel a slight awkwardness toward his body in the real world—it had never been as intense as what he felt this time.

"It seems I really stayed in the other world too long this time..."

With brows slightly furrowed, Sun Cheng quickly withdrew his gaze from the starry sky and turned to look down at his own hands.

He clenched his fists, felt the unprecedented sense of strangeness he now had toward his body, and only after a good while did he smooth out his brows.

Although his body felt strange to him, being able to temporarily avoid the crisis of the Transformers world and enjoy a brief tranquility in the real world was, for him, a form of adjustment before a great battle.

In the real world, there were indeed too many people and things he cared about.

"I'm back!"

Toward the empty, desolate valley, he softly spat out these four words.

Sun Cheng felt that his nerves, which had been tightly strung for months in the Transformers world without daring to relax in the slightest, had finally loosened at this moment.

Although there were some unpleasant things in the real world, at least there were no Decepticons or Autobots here, nor a United States that stared at him and searched for him all over the world.

That was enough!

With a thought, an iPhone 5 suddenly appeared in Sun Cheng's hand.

Holding it in his palm, enduring the sense of strangeness toward his body, he said to the phone: "Xiao Wu, try to see if you can connect to the network!"

The one he called Xiao Wu was precisely this iPhone 5 in his hand.

This iPhone 5, which had once traveled to the other world with him, although it looked the same as before, had fundamentally changed.

Although it was like that Mechanical Life converted from a Nokia, Sun Cheng had wiped away its Frenzy consciousness and rewritten a semi-artificial intelligence voice-control program, making it look more like a robot.

As soon as Sun Cheng's words left his mouth, the screen of the phone in his hand immediately lit up.

He looked down at the screen, where a rotating circle appeared, indicating it was searching for a signal.

After lasting about two seconds, the icon representing the signal in the top right corner of Xiao Wu's screen lit up, and as expected, it was at full bars.

"Master, connection successful. Captured ChinaNet signal, usage permissions automatically acquired!" A crisp female voice sounded from the phone; it was Xiao Wu.

It was actually ChinaNet!

Sun Cheng was speechless. He knew about ChinaNet—the public internet based on Internet network technology managed and operated by the state. It also provided wireless network access, but not only were the login procedures cumbersome, the signal was also so poor it made one speechless. He hadn't expected Xiao Wu to connect to it.

However, after thinking about it for a moment, he quickly felt relieved.

This was Nandu, the political center of this country.

No matter how bad ChinaNet was, the base stations within the capital region would certainly be spread out. With Xiao Wu there, naturally, there were no such cumbersome login and connection procedures, and the signal certainly wouldn't be bad.

Unable to resist picking it up to test the internet speed, Sun Cheng casually clicked on the browser inside the phone.

Just as he entered, a striking news headline on the browser's homepage immediately attracted his gaze.

【Turmoil in Central Asian politics rises again; military coup in Astana; Army Chief of Staff announces the removal of the pro-China President!】

"Astana... I remember that's the capital of Kazakhstan..."

In the Transformers world, for the sake of entertainment and also to constantly consolidate his foundation—plus the fact that Mechanical Life did not need to recover through sleep like humans when energy was sufficient—Sun Cheng, who was in a waking state every day, had a considerable amount of private time even on the busiest days.

Whenever he had free time, he would extract information from the second memory zone that 'Huan' had searched for on the internet to digest. This included not only a large amount of industrial and scientific knowledge from the other world but also the history, humanities, myths, and so on of various countries.

As a result, before he knew it, he had surprisingly become a polymath.

Kazakhstan was China's northern neighbor. Although it couldn't be called powerful, it was also a premier military power in the Central Asian region.

This country's relationship with China had always been good in recent years. After all, in this world, although the Soviet Union did not disintegrate in 1991 like the Soviet Union in the Transformers world, when the timeline reached the 1991 node, it also experienced a massive upheaval.

Under the instigation of foreign forces, the three Baltic states, the three Transcaucasian states, the five Central Asian states, and even the three East Slavic union republics were all clamoring to break away from the Soviet Union.

Although the historical trajectory was different from the Transformers world, here, Soviet Vice President Yanayev launched a successful coup on August 19, 1991, arrested and executed a group of major politicians including Gorbachev and Yeltsin, and controlled the military to barely preserve the three East Slavic union republics as well as Moldavia and Abkhazia, preventing this massive red empire from disintegrating as well.

However, the Soviet Union at that time was indeed weak to the extreme.

Under the instigation of international anti-Soviet forces such as the United States, NATO, and China, the three Baltic states, the three Transcaucasian states, and the five Central Asian states eventually withdrew from the Soviet Union before the end of 1991.

The Central Asian country—Kazakhstan—was a former Soviet union republic that China had worked hard to win over at the time. Since its independence, the country's top leadership had always been relatively pro-China. In recent years, not only had they reached a series of border demarcation agreements favorable to China with the Chinese side, but other economic, trade, and technical cooperation also relied heavily on China.

Unexpectedly, a coup had suddenly occurred in Kazakhstan!

Xiao Wu, possessing a certain level of intelligence, must have noticed that he had lingered on this news story. Therefore, after Sun Cheng exited, the screen did not return directly to the original page but appeared within a search page, where a dozen news items appeared from top to bottom, all related to the military coup in Kazakhstan.

"Well done..."

Sun Cheng praised it with satisfaction, feeling an indescribable sense of pride in his heart.

Even the Mechanical Life of the Cybertron planet needed to spend a huge amount of manpower and material resources to create an artificial intelligence with high intelligence like 'Huan'.

Because in a sense, an artificial intelligence that reached that level could no longer be described as a machine or a program; it was almost a living, alien life form. At least when he was with 'Huan', it was difficult for him to treat it as a pile of code.

Xiao Wu was a 'weak' artificial intelligence program that Sun Cheng had written with Earth code during his spare time in the other world. Although its shortcomings in the face of human intelligence were obvious, measured from the perspective of Earth's technology, I fear that once it was unveiled, the sensation it caused would be no less than the birth of the internet back then.

Of course, Sun Cheng had no interest in exposing Xiao Wu for the time being.

Watching the news with great interest for a while, breathing in the evening breeze with a hint of moisture in the valley, he only withdrew his phone after the sense of rejection coming from his body gradually dissipated. He walked along the familiar yet strange valley path to the foot of the small hill where Base No. 1 was located, onto a piece of open ground.

Then, looking up at the moon hanging high in the sky, Sun Cheng's expression tightened. He waved a hand toward the open ground in front of him, and accompanied by two dull thuds of heavy objects hitting the ground, two huge shipping containers, like buildings, suddenly appeared on the open ground before him.

"While my spirits are still good, let's start working!"

Muttering softly, Sun Cheng's gaze swept in turn over these two huge objects he had brought back from the other world, and the corners of his mouth curled up without him knowing when.

PS:

I haven't updated for a few days, so I'd like to apologize to everyone here.

I adjusted my mindset and took the opportunity to read through all the hundreds of thousands of words updated previously.

I discovered some plot holes, and I have already contacted the editor to unlock them in preparation for revisions.

Updates will stabilize, and I will continue to write according to the outline. The Transformers world remains the largest part of this book, but it is only a part of it.

That is all! 8)