Where Was the Promised Third Honkai?!!

Fu Li froze for a moment, then revealed a mischievous smile. "You mean you want to have a threesome with me?"

"Peh, peh, peh! Dream on!"

Seeing that he still had the mood to joke around, Kiana curled her lips and let go of his hand.

Mei was still beside them. It would set a bad example.

"That is quite the dream."

Fu Li said solemnly, "A mere paramecium actually dares covet the genetic material of a higher life-form like humans."

"You looking for a beating? You looking for a beating?!"

The girl aggressively rolled up her sleeves, and her fingers, clenched one by one, made a series of cracking sounds.

"Resorting to violence out of embarrassment, so that means—cough!"

Under her increasingly dangerous glare, Fu Li decisively stopped digging his own grave.

There was an old saying in Shenzhou: Those who recognize the times are heroes. He had no desire to be pinned to the ground by the Kaslana family's inherited freakish strength and made to calculate what one thousand minus seven was.

"Hehe!"

Having secured a temporary victory, the white-haired little ball raised her chin.

After looking around, she pointed her gun toward the villa district beneath the night sky. "That place looks pretty good, doesn't it? They're all huge houses too—ah! I've suddenly come down with a disease where I'll die if I don't live in a huge house!"

"Then let's go take a look. If it works, we'll rest there."

"Climb up from somewhere hidden. Sneak into the village, no shooting."

"That's what I just told you, okay!"

"That's what I just told you, okay!"

"You're a damn echo machine!"

Still bickering, the boy carried Bronya on his back while the girl supported Mei, who was half-asleep, and they noisily headed toward their temporary shelter.

A sage of Shenzhou, Mencius, once said: When Heaven is about to confer a great responsibility upon a person, it must first torment their mind and will, exhaust their muscles and bones, starve their body, subject them to poverty, and frustrate their efforts, thereby stirring their heart, strengthening their resolve, and increasing what they are incapable of doing.

Cocolia felt there was no need to make things so complicated. If you really wanted to make someone stronger, all you needed was to give them a pig teammate.

"I am deeply sorry, Executive Cocolia!"

The temporary captain of the pursuit team stood before Cocolia and shouted in his naturally rough voice:

"We lost Miss Bronya and those three treacherous scoundrels! Please punish us severely!"

The legendary pig teammate had appeared!

As both adjutant and driver, Yae stood nearby, dusty from travel and awkwardly smiling as she cursed those clueless idiots from head to toe.

So what if you lost them? Are you proud of it? Why are you shouting so loudly?! Do you even know who's standing in front of you? Believe it or not, with one snap of her fingers, a hundred thousand Fathers could descend from helicopters and chop you into meat paste in minutes, Kora!

Cocolia stood with one hand on her hip, her expression cold, yet she had not lost her composure over the disappearance of her precious daughter.

Instead, she took out her phone and dialed an encrypted number.

No one answered.

She frowned and dialed again.

Still no answer.

She looked at her adjutant. "Yae!"

"Here!"

Miss Adjutant straightened her body.

"Use your phone. Call this number."

"Yes!"

Yae hurriedly drew her naginata, realized something was wrong, then hastily put it away and took out her phone instead.

She dialed the number as Cocolia instructed. Soon, an impatient elderly male voice sounded from the other end.

"Who is it? I'm busy!"

Cocolia snatched the phone away. "It's me, Cocolia."

Click!

The call was hung up directly.

The bleak autumn wind swept past, lifting the dull blond hair beneath her shadow. She looked so small, pitiful, and helpless.

"E-Executive?"

"Call again!"

Cocolia took a deep breath. "This time, you talk to them!"

She made no effort to hide the gritted-teeth fury in her voice, which was mixed with a trace of helpless resignation.

The reaction from the other side had not surprised her. The people in the technical R&D department had originally been forcibly requisitioned by her under the pretext of the Large-scale Social Darwinist Experiment. Their leader, Dr. Eck, was a super veteran who had joined Anti-Entropy during its earliest days. Obeying orders but not authority was perfectly normal for them.

Normally, Cocolia would not have needed to care about that.

As long as those people completed the work she assigned them, she would not care even if they wore women's clothes on national television and danced Subject Three.

But things were different now. Bronya and the critically important Raiden Mei had disappeared one after another. When she wanted to search for them, Einstein, who was temporarily acting as leader of Anti-Entropy, had unilaterally cut off her access to modern facilities such as satellites and networks.

With no information at all, Cocolia had no choice but to notify those talents who possessed cutting-edge technology.

"H-hello, I am—"

Yae shakily dialed the number and began communicating with the other side according to Cocolia's instructions.

Two or three minutes later, she hung up amid the roar from the other end.

Her doe-like eyes glanced timidly over, conveying a very bad signal.

Having already guessed the answer, Cocolia sighed and put a hand on her shoulder in encouragement. "What did they say?"

Yae pulled a miserable face. "They said... they said you should hurry up and get lost so you don't interfere with their progress. They've already started researching room-temperature superconductivity..."

Heavenly Time Calamity Bestowal was still working its fucking magic!

"Room-temperature superconductivity?"

Cocolia frowned. "Didn't they figure that out back in the nineties?"

The doctor said it was pure technological room-temperature superconductivity without any Honkai Energy mixed in..."

At those words, Cocolia's eyes widened instantly.

Then she turned into a wisp of helplessness. "Then we really can't disturb them."

The technological tree of the Honkai world was quite peculiar. Its development path could broadly be divided into two branches:

The first was conventional technology, advancing step by step, as understood by the general public.

The second was Honkai technology, mixed with the miraculous energy known as Honkai Energy.

There was no need to say much about the former. Most civilian technologies widely used throughout the world belonged to this category.

What truly mattered was the latter.

Any physics formula became simpler once Honkai Energy was added as a variable. It was precisely on that basis that Honkai technology could exist.

Whether it was room-temperature superconductivity, Sky Battleships, or controllable nuclear fusion, these industrial-revolution-level barriers that conventional technology had yet to break through had already been achieved one by one by Honkai technology during the Cold War in the latter half of the previous century.

Even so, conventional technology still dominated society, while the existence of Honkai remained hidden behind the scenes.

Why was that?

Were the people who developed those things unwilling to make them public?

Of course not.

The real reason Honkai technology could not be widely promoted lay in its very name—Honkai.

Was room-temperature superconductivity impressive?

Very impressive. Energy loss would be nearly zero; charge a phone once, and it would never need charging again until it broke down.

But it was Honkai.

Was stable nuclear fusion impressive?

An endless supply of clean energy, something humanity needed to reach the stars and the sea.

But it was Honkai.

It contained Honkai Energy, which meant that ordinary people would become infected and turn into Dead Walkers as soon as they came into contact with it.

It did not matter much in military applications. A certain major country on the South Asian subcontinent had tremblingly built two Sky Battle Carriers, though on average they crashed into the Indian Ocean once every three flights, and the salvage teams were getting sick of pulling them out.

But once it spread on a large scale like electricity...

All eight billion humans would become Dead Walkers—that was a bit of an exaggeration.

After all, many people had insufficient resistance and would simply be reduced to ashes the instant they came into contact with it.

Taking dosage into account, cut that number down a little. Two billion, then.

Two billion Dead Walker zombies unleashed upon the world would inevitably give rise to millions of pseudo-Herrschers due to such an enormous population base.

Just imagining that scene made Cocolia's scalp tingle.

That was the main reason military technology and civilian technology were so divided in modern society. Sky Battleships flew everywhere and mech forces were organized into armies, yet the quality of life for ordinary people was not much different from that of the early twenty-first century in a world without magic.

Still, Cocolia knew a little about room-temperature superconductivity.

There was a rather interesting saying that had always been popular online:

Technological inventions that existed before you were born were natural necessities of life.

Technological inventions that appeared between the ages of twenty and forty were extraordinary creations that changed human society; technological inventions that appeared after forty were evil heresies that had no need to exist.

There was some truth to that, but it only applied to those content with the status quo.

As an Anti-Entropy executive, Cocolia might not know every aspect of scientific research, but she could at least understand the basics.

According to what she knew, without the use of Honkai Energy, room-temperature superconductivity—such an absurdly futuristic material—was theoretically impossible to develop with the technological level of the current civilization.

Conventional technology emphasized gradual progress. If certain prerequisites had not been fulfilled, then no matter how hard you worked, you could not jump to the next step.

Even so, Cocolia still chose to tolerate the research team fooling around rather than forcibly ordering them to cooperate.

The reason was simple. In scientific research, materials science alone really did contain a touch of mysticism.

Countless existing examples had shown people that something you could not develop after researching it for half your life might truly emerge because your hand shook while adding materials one day.

Of course, the prerequisite was that your foundation had to be solid.

If two bowls of noodles filled you up, then it was because you ate two bowls of noodles. Eating only the last bite of the second bowl was useless.

So the question was, did the research team led by senior engineer Dr. Eck have a solid foundation?

What a joke.

Cocolia quickly composed herself. "Continue ordering the mechanical troops to search."

Noticing Yae's surprised gaze, she smiled. "Just do your best."

The research group was immersed in experiments.

Einstein had cut off her access.

The troops she could deploy harbored ulterior motives.

Raiden Mei had vanished under mysterious circumstances.

If they thought this little bit was enough to leave Cocolia helpless, then they were underestimating her far too much.

However...

Looking at the photograph of the silly-smiling white-haired girl, then recalling the white-haired Valkyrie who had descended from the sky during the Second Honkai, Cocolia fell silent for a moment.

"Cancel the warrant for Kiana Kaslana. Only issue warrants for Fu Li and Raiden Mei. Also, notify that Green Serpent for me. Tell her I accept the conditions. Have her send me the Mental Platform Generator and the pseudo-Herrscher core."

"Ah? Yes!"