Artificial Blessed Grotto-Heaven

The data space inside the chip was a pure white wilderness, as pristine as heaven.

The sky was blood-red—the color of the chip's outer shell.

Across the wilderness, countless dead souls slept. Here, they did not need to turn themselves into components and build one ability module after another.

They only needed to rest in peace, until they wished to awaken.

And as they slept, specks of white fragments spilled from their bodies, drifting through the air and forming cloud-like structures.

These were "Psionic Clouds," a natural phenomenon produced when large numbers of spirit bodies gathered together.

If this phenomenon settled for another century or two, or if the souls wandering here were of sufficiently high quality, it would form the golden clouds on the Xenobiology Research Institute's Dragon Bone Plaza: "Psionic Essence." A pure psionic material found only within Subspace Labyrinths.

And these clouds were the raw material Ian and Adalbert would use to create "artificial intelligence."

"No wonder you wanted to release these dead souls... You needed the psionic matter produced by their natural activity to create brand-new souls!"

At this moment, Adalbert saw through Ian's purpose. Ian, however, did not make much of it. "That is indeed one of my purposes, but I truly do want them to be free."

"It is simply that this freedom will also bring me additional gains. There is no contradiction in that, is there?"

Souls underwent metabolism as well.

Soul fragments naturally shed within a living human body would soon be reused by the body, while the lost portions quickly regrew. This process of constant accumulation was how a soul naturally grew. It was slow, but steady.

After losing the body, a soul could only continue shedding fragments, and the psionic matter fragments it shed could not be reused. If it