Taros said, "You have two choices now. First: stay and keep me company. Second: accept my trial. If you pass, I can grant any one of your wishes, though I will decide how it is fulfilled."
"And if we fail?" Romantina asked.
"Stay and keep me company."
Taros and Tais spoke in unison.
"Just how lonely are you?" Zhou Qing quipped.
"This is the trouble with intelligence," the Brain Bug said through Tais. "Once the Swarm's collective mind gains a vessel and becomes a truly independent consciousness, it instinctively longs for another existence capable of understanding it. If only one member of a species possesses intelligence, it will not feel superior. If it does not choose to sleep, it can only sink into the long passage of time.
"According to the Swarm's past research, if the goal is merely survival and the continuation of its own information, then individual intelligence and independent thought are not actually necessary."
Dugu Bo clearly could not understand. "Utter nonsense!"
Romantina, Riko, and Rabbit Girl could not agree with such an idea either.
Aitaljia could not understand any of it and yawned.
"An interesting idea." Zhou Qing could understand the Swarm's way of survival, but he did not agree with it. After all, he was human, and their current group had an example of a woman who possessed independent thought—
Timidit.
For her, the version of herself in her past memories, bound to that island, might have had it easier without consciousness.
After all, possessing independent thought and will had instead made her suffer countless agonies, yet she still had to live on. Even after arriving at the Abyss Ruins, she had endured even more pain.
Yet it was precisely because she had independent thoughts that she stood up again. She no longer chose to