Preparations Before Traveling Through Time (4k)

Wendy hurriedly shook her head. "Don't look at me. If something like this happened, Teacher Theresa never taught me what to do."

Schicksal and Anti-Entropy were enemies.

But in Theresa's teachings, Valkyries showed no mercy only toward Honkai Beasts. When it came to enemies who were also human, she had never taught them how to handle them.

This was something Theresa had never considered. She believed Valkyries only needed to fight the Honkai and had no need to involve themselves in struggles over ambition and power.

But that left Wendy at a loss when faced with a situation like this.

If it meant torturing Bronya into revealing information about the Honkai Energy reactor, she could not do that either.

But killing her? Imprisoning her? Wendy could not bring herself to make that decision.

Bronya, standing nearby, seemed to sense their dilemma. Her face remained calm, but inwardly, she let out a sigh of relief.

She had actually been very nervous too.

After all, not everyone she had faced before had been as kind as Wendy and Mei. It was just that she had always won in the end.

Just then, Chen Ran spoke. "Ah, we can't kill her, but we can't let her go either. What a headache."

"But I just remembered that I know a little biology. How about we hypnotize this Bronya directly?"

"Hypnotize?"

A trace of fear appeared in Wendy and Raiden Mei's eyes.

Chen Ran gave an evil smile. "That's right. Hormones in the human body are very fascinating things. I happen to have researched the ratios at which a person's sense of self can be suppressed while they remain able to accept external commands. Commonly known as hypnosis."

He was not lying.

It was knowledge given to him by the system.

"This is very common knowledge in biology."

Raiden Mei complained, "That is not common at all, okay?"

Wendy, however, understood the teasing in Chen Ran's eyes.

Her eyes shifted, and she pointed at Bronya. "Perfect. I've always wanted to see what it looks like when someone gets hypnotized. There's a ready-made subject right here."

Tilting her head, she said, "Make her do the bunny dance afterward."

Raiden Mei looked puzzled. "What kind of dance is the bunny dance?"

"It was the debut dance of the once-popular magical girl Teriri. Actually, that was Teacher Theresa. I secretly found the records," Wendy said.

Raiden Mei: "..."

"You people at Schicksal really know how to have fun."

As for Bronya, the person in question, she only felt like her whole world was falling apart.

Sure enough, she should never have expected kindness from her enemies.

When Bronya woke up, she only felt as though she had had a long dream.

She vaguely remembered Chen Ran saying he was going to hypnotize her...

Wait, hypnotize?!

The girl's eyes flew open, and she instantly became fully awake.

Then she discovered that something had been inserted into her head.

"You're awake."

Bronya looked over and found Wendy smiling brightly at her. "You've been asleep for eight hours. Do you feel uncomfortable anywhere?"

"What did you do to Bronya?"

All sorts of terrifying things flashed through her mind.

Back when she had been the Ural Silver Wolf, she had heard that some warlords had rather unusual tastes. They especially liked obedient girls and disobedient girls—particularly the process of training disobedient girls into slaves.

Wendy burst out laughing. "You didn't actually believe that, did you? Don't worry, Chen Ran didn't really do anything."

"Ah, who said I didn't do anything?"

Chen Ran's leisurely voice rang out. Smiling at the girl, he said, "Bronya, you should still remember the chip implanted in your brain, right?"

"The chip?"

Wendy asked in surprise, "What is that?"

Bronya said nothing and merely watched Chen Ran quietly.

Chen Ran did not hide it. "There were no conditions here for surgery, so I didn't remove it. But I used a few methods to connect your internal chip to a computer and read its data."

"You understand this field too, so see for yourself whether it's real."

Chen Ran knew that mere torture would not make Bronya reveal information about the Honkai Energy reactor.

To destroy someone, one had to break their heart. Only by making her feel that she had been betrayed would Bronya have a chance of revealing what she knew.

And the proof that Cocolia had betrayed Bronya was the chip for the emotional processing module in her brain.

With his knowledge of biology and computers, it was not difficult for Chen Ran to connect her chip to a computer. Of course, the real reason was that this world had many special materials capable of accomplishing things he would never have dared imagine.

Bronya herself could hack into Schicksal's classified archives. Now, he might not be any worse than her.

Everything went smoothly.

The emotional module chip core Cocolia had implanted in Bronya was essentially a miniature computer processing system. But that computer was directly controlled by Cocolia, with Cocolia's commands taking priority.

Moreover, the system could emit powerful electrical signals that could instantly override Bronya's original consciousness.

In other words, the hypnosis Chen Ran had mentioned earlier.

He spoke teasingly. "I haven't even started hypnotizing you yet, but Bronya, you're only one step away from falling."

Bronya looked at the chip data Chen Ran had pulled up, her face still expressionless.

After a long while, she spoke. "I need tools."

"Here."

Chen Ran handed her his small computer.

He knew Bronya was trying to verify it, and he was not worried about the results of her verification.

Actually, from Bronya's perspective, Cocolia had done nothing wrong.

She had been the victor. If Cocolia had truly been ruthless, Bronya would already have died in Siberia.

But Cocolia's mistake toward Bronya was that she had given Bronya love, then given her betrayal.

Back then, Bronya had asked Cocolia, "Do you want to become my master too?"

And Cocolia had answered, "Compared to being your master, I would rather be your mother."

A warlord's love was undoubtedly cheap, yet it had given the girl an unrealistic dream.

The girl's fingers flew across the computer with effortless fluidity, but the tension and unease in her eyes grew increasingly intense.

Chen Ran had not lied.

That was the conclusion Bronya reached through reason.

So she truly had never been deeply loved. Cocolia, like all her previous masters, had only regarded her as a useful tool.

Bronya's eyes gradually became lifeless, like a crashed computer.

Wendy still did not understand what was happening. Curiously, she asked Chen Ran, "What's wrong with her? She looks like she isn't feeling well."

Feeling somewhat emotional, Chen Ran suddenly said, "What would you do if one day Principal Theresa betrayed you?"

"Ah, I'd probably be very sad."

Wendy blinked and spoke her thoughts directly. "The kind of sad where I could never eat ice cream or watch movies again. But Teacher Theresa isn't that kind of person, so I definitely won't ever face something like that."

Chen Ran casually said, "But Bronya has."

"She was betrayed by her 'Teacher Theresa.'"

Wendy understood what Chen Ran meant.

After a long while, she quietly said, "Chen Ran, I want to buy ice cream. Two of them."

"She probably wants something cold and delicious right now too."

Preparations Before Traveling Through Time

Within World Serpent's Elysian Realm.

Wendy finally understood why the other Flame-Chasers never wanted to say much when Mobius was mentioned. And why, when she followed Mobius into the laboratory, they had only given her looks of "respect" and "blessings."

She felt the wound on her body gradually healing. Just moments ago, Wendy's blood had been drawn from that spot.

"I'm curious."

She directly asked Mobius, "This is clearly a space made of data. Why are you able to draw my blood?"

"Mm-hm, what do you think data and consciousness should be like?" Mobius said with a smile. "Something you can see but not touch?"

Wendy hesitated for a moment, then nodded. "That's how it should be."

"Ha, after all this time, humanity's understanding of the fundamental forces hasn't changed at all." Mobius stretched lazily. "What a painstaking waste of the experimental results he and I achieved together."

"He?"

Surprise filled Wendy's eyes. By instinct alone, she knew who the "he" Mobius mentioned was.

Seeing the surprise in her eyes, Mobius became even more smug. "That's right."

"Like the stigmata on your body, they are essentially the result of research conducted by him and me. Oh, I forgot that MEI participated too, though she only made a tiny, insignificant contribution."

"The power within stigmata is power condensed from consciousness. And the dimension where consciousness exists shares the same origin as Honkai. So why would you think consciousness and data cannot affect reality?"

"Little white mouse, tell me, what has Kevin in this world become? Has he continued carrying out the Stigma Project?"

The sudden flood of information disrupted Wendy's train of thought. She instinctively replied, "Before coming here, I had never heard of Kevin in reality."

After a pause, she said, "But if what you said is true, then his arrival fifty thousand years later must also be related to stigmata."

Mobius did not hide anything. "He was the first human in that era to possess stigmata. More precisely, every stigmata that appeared afterward was created by modeling it after his body. As for the origin of his own stigmata, he never said, and I never asked."

"And theoretically, the power of stigmata can indeed travel through time."

Mobius gave an affirmative answer.

The foundation of her cooperation with Wendy lay in stigmata. Even the Previous Era, brilliant as it had been, had not fully excavated all the power within stigmata.

The reason was simple. A person's genes were essentially set from birth. Unless they were altered through Honkai by means such as Fusion Warriors, random genetic mutation would basically not occur in mature lifeforms.

Yet the prerequisite for stigmata was implanting information capable of resisting Honkai into an unborn lifeform. At the time, neither Mobius nor MEI had the opportunity to study mature individuals with stigmata.

Except Chen Ran.

But the reality was that Chen Ran had concealed many things.

"Little white mouse, you can collect the Signets of every Flame-Chaser here. Once the power of the stigmata has been fully developed, you'll have the prerequisite to accomplish that."

Although she did not know how Chen Ran had traveled through time using stigmata.

There was no doubt that stigmata were the foundation of this cooperation.

However, Wendy shook her head. "Collecting Signets is too slow."

After a pause, she said, "He left me a genetic serum that can activate stigmata."

When she realized Chen Ran had disappeared, Wendy went to the Far East Branch and had a huge argument with Theresa.

That argument had led nowhere, because Theresa no longer knew who Chen Ran was. She had even helped Wendy investigate Chen Ran's identity, only to discover that Schicksal had no records related to him at all.

His traces had been erased from this world.

But the things he had left behind had not disappeared.

The serum Chen Ran had given Theresa before ending the simulation had later been placed in Theresa's principal's office.

The principal did not know where the serum had come from, so she naturally did not use it recklessly.