Chapter 1 Thoughts

Hao Ren's thoughts returned to the moment before Zorm reached its critical point and completely collapsed.

Nolan, the only NPC in the Dream Ark, her special "soul" encoding meant that she could not be uploaded to the Core Research Station via the drone link. At that time, there was also not enough time to establish a new relay protocol in the drone link. When everything seemed desperate, the only thing Hao Ren could think of was to preserve Nolan's soul as much as possible—since it couldn't be transmitted, he would find a place nearby to save it.

Since the compatibility problem only occurred within the drone link, the Great Tortoise Rock Terrace itself had enough data processing power to handle this level of incompatibility, so Hao Ren's last attempt became possible: he downloaded Nolan into the Great Tortoise Rock Terrace's shipboard mainframe.

Of course, this hasty download was still not entirely satisfactory. Nolan's soul inevitably suffered some damage after being downloaded to the mainframe. This was mainly due to the compatibility issue. Therefore, until just now, the ship had been busy processing Nolan's data, and the data terminal was left here for this purpose. But in any case, the good news was that there were no major problems with memory and emotion. Nolan herself was an NPC, and her data had a high degree of self-reorganization ability. After some recovery and debugging, she finally recovered.

Looking at the gray-haired girl pacing anxiously on the holographic image, Hao Ren scratched his face, not knowing where to start explaining. He could only first introduce the place: "This is my ship—the Great Tortoise Rock Terrace."

"Your...ship?" Nolan's memory was still stuck before the destruction of Zorm, and the last stage of her memory was spent in a daze, so she could hardly figure out the situation. "Why do I suddenly have a spaceship... Ah! I remember, the whole world... How's Zorm?"

"Ahem," Hao Ren coughed twice, "Before that, let me confirm your status. How do you feel now? Are you feeling mentally confused or have you lost any memories? Also, what is your surrounding environment like?"

"Me?" Nolan looked down at herself. "I seem to be fine, but I don't know where this is. There's nothing here. I only see a lot of streamers floating around. Apart from that, the humans, houses, sky, and earth, all these things have disappeared..."

As Nolan spoke, a trace of panic suddenly appeared in her eyes: "Could it be...the world has finally been destroyed?"

"The real world's Zorm has been swallowed by the sunlight. It happened seven hours ago," Hao Ren switched windows and transmitted a piece of video data to Nolan's eyes. As a program body, the latter originally didn't need to use "eyes" to browse images, but in order to maintain the personality of "Nolan," the shipboard mainframe faithfully simulated her human functions. Therefore, Nolan still maintained human common sense and senses. Hao Ren saw a smaller holographic image appearing in the holographic image. Nolan looked at those scenes, her eyes gradually widening. "This is the image of its final moments."

Nolan watched a huge, indescribable biological-mechanical hybrid burning fiercely in the sunlight, the entire planet disintegrating and falling into the sun. In her shock, she exclaimed, "Then I am now..."

"Don't worry, I managed to rescue everyone's souls at the last moment," Hao Ren coughed lightly. "Ahem, I have complete soul transfer technology here, which is more advanced than the technology used by the Zorm Ark. It can extract souls from matter like drawing liquid. Therefore, there are actually no 'people' on the planet that fell into the sunlight. The location where you are now is the planet Tanagus, hundreds of billions of light-years away from Zorm, near a space station called the Core Research Station. This is my research facility."

Hao Ren lightly glossed over the massive soul data chain project in one sentence, but Nolan was not stupid after all, and still heard that an astonishing event, beyond the understanding of ordinary people, must have occurred at that time. She had no way of knowing the principle behind this event, and could only accept it stiffly: "In other words... before the previous storage device was burned down, you transferred the data of the entire virtual world to another storage device?"

Hao Ren nodded: "That's right."

"Is this new storage device safe?"

"Definitely safer than Zorm—the Core Research Station can operate normally even if it falls into a black hole."

At this time, Nolan finally realized that something was wrong. She blankly looked around: "But... where are the others? Why am I the only one here?"

Hao Ren put his hands together on the console, his body leaning forward slightly: "Nolan, do you... know what's different between you and the others?"

"Different?" Nolan frowned, "Are you talking about the ability to retain memories of reincarnation? Can't you do that too?"

"Retaining memories of reincarnation is just a superficial phenomenon. What I'm about to say next may be difficult to accept, but you must listen—"

As Hao Ren spoke, he paused slightly before his expression became serious: "If I told you that you are not human..."

He used as calm a tone as possible to explain everything, even including the structure of the entire Zorm Ark and the cause and effect of humans hiding in the virtual world ten thousand years ago, all of which were explained clearly, because only in this way could Nolan better understand this huge, long-standing, and magnificent plan, and what role she originally played in this plan. When she heard that the virtual world was built in the dream of an ancient and primitive creature, Nolan couldn't help but exclaim, and when she heard that she was actually a monitoring program for a series of mechanical devices used to maintain the dream, she remained in a dumbfounded state, unable to speak for a long time.

The number of times she lost her composure in just half an hour was even more than the number of times she lost her composure in hundreds of years of reincarnation in the past.

After Hao Ren finished speaking, Nolan still hadn't recovered, so he could only call out to wake her up: "Nolan, Nolan, I'm done."

Nolan's expression恍惚 for a moment. She took a breath, bit her lip, and looked at Hao Ren at the other end of the screen. She finally realized what the window in front of her meant: this was the dividing line between the real world and the virtual world. The man on the other side of the screen was sitting in front of a device in the real world, and she... was still a string of data trapped in the virtual world, and this time this string of data was not even human anymore.

"What you said is true?" Nolan's voice sounded unusually calm.

Hao Ren spread his hands: "I have no need to lie to you."

"I'm actually just a... program?" Nolan bit her lip. "A program that was created to monitor equipment?"

Hao Ren was speechless for a moment.

"So I actually have no parents, no family, no past, and even in the real world, these things never existed," Nolan suddenly thought of a lot. "So my memories were all virtual from the beginning..."

Nolan's reaction was reasonable. Anyone who suddenly knew that they were not human at all, but just a piece of code running in a machine, and that all the emotional experiences, preferences, and memories since birth were actually strings of characters typed out by some programmer or group of programmers, would probably not be in a good mood. Nolan was already showing a strong will by just sighing like this.

"Actually, as far as I'm concerned, there's no difference between AI and humans," Hao Ren knew that he should say something in this situation anyway. He talked about his worldview—a broad vision that came from seeing countless strange civilizations and life forms after becoming an inspector. "Being able to be aware of oneself, having one's own emotions, under this premise, sentient life is actually the same, whether they live in a carbon-based body or a machine, there is no difference on the level of the soul."

"Thank you for your comfort," Nolan showed a stiff smile, "But... this is still hard to accept, isn't it?"

Hao Ren sighed: "Yeah, it's pretty hard to accept."

Seeing Hao Ren's embarrassed look, Nolan took the initiative to change the subject: "Then let's not talk about these things. You just mentioned that you are working on reshaping an ecosystem? If I understood correctly... you are like a creator, possessing this kind of power?"

"Ahem," Hao Ren almost coughed up his bronchus on the spot. "You're exaggerating too much. My model is far from a creator, and I'm not doing the reshaping of the ecosystem myself. At most, I'm just an investor this time: the kind that's only responsible for providing raw materials and venues."

"Sorry, this matter is a bit beyond my imagination and not easy to understand," Nolan smiled slightly, then her face darkened again, "Emotions are really strange things. I should be happier, but after knowing that I'm just a program used to monitor the system, reshaping the ecosystem seems to have nothing to do with me."

Faced with Nolan's wry smile, Hao Ren could only sigh helplessly with Lily.