New World

The three-story villa Chen Yonglin had left him was worth a staggering amount because of its prime location.

After AI took over Malaysia, everyone could receive a home. Calculated per person, each individual got roughly forty square meters.

Thanks to sprawling development and virtually unlimited resources, the homes allotted were all of decent quality, with excellent surrounding facilities as well—medical care, schools, and commerce, everything was available.

The only problem was that every service around these free homes was handled by AI. The restaurants were unmanned, the schools were taught by AI, and medical treatment was likewise administered by AI.

Because of the generous welfare system, prices skyrocketed whenever human-provided services were involved.

The neighborhood where Chen Yuanguang's family lived was one of Malaysia's top wealthy districts. Not only were the houses designer-made, but all the surrounding services were provided by people.

If he lost the family trust and had to rely entirely on the scant cash his father had left behind, Chen Yuanguang absolutely could not afford the expenses in the area.

"Revenge? I'll naturally do that once I have the ability. Right now, what I need to do is use the resources of the future to build myself up.

Rather than rashly taking all this over and following in the original owner's footsteps. I'm not him."

Chen Yuanguang sorted through his thoughts. Having suddenly arrived hundreds of years in the future, everything was so fresh. Compared to finding the real culprit, exploring this world was clearly far more interesting.

Chen Yuanguang was no detective enthusiast.

"The question is, how do I go back?" Chen Yuanguang discovered that there was no virtual interface. The virtual panels he could see were merely interactive holographic imaging technology.

He could see them, and so could everyone else.

Should he silently recite "exit"? Chen Yuanguang shouted "exit" in his heart.

When darkness fell before his eyes again, with only faint light shining through the helmet onto his eyelids, Chen Yuanguang reached up and touched the helmet's smooth surface. "So shouting 'exit' really works."

Back in his familiar rented apartment, his sense of security instantly soared. Chen Yuanguang felt thoughts pouring from his mind like a spring, as if his ideas were about to explode.

He first checked the time. Four hours had passed over there, while only a few minutes had passed here. The time difference between the two worlds was astonishing.

Chen Yuanguang thought of another question. If the ratio was like this, then if four hours passed here, would several days pass on the future timeline?

"Leave request: Sorry, I'm feeling unwell today and will be taking the day off."

Chen Yuanguang did not forget his regular job and sent out a leave request first.

After he posted it, his readers quickly began cursing him out.

"BYD, so you're unwell for a few days every month, huh?"

"If you want to be a lazy dog, don't make excuses!" It even rhymed.

"At your age, how can you even think about resting? How can you sleep?"

"Disperse, disperse. This is boring."

Chen Yuanguang sighed, because he knew there was a high chance he would abandon the novel. Having encountered something with such a high threshold as transmigration, continuing the serialization simply had too little value for him.

Just bringing even a small portion of future technology to the present would be more than enough for him to gain both fame and fortune.

With an entire planet's worth of gold laid out before him, Chen Yuanguang only wanted to know how to dig it out.

"Chen Yonglin died. Before I arrived, Chen Yuanguang had been deeply hung up over it and would rather give up the incomparably valuable family trust than send Lin Ran to prison. This was more or less common knowledge.

If my attitude suddenly took a complete one-eighty, it would be far too unreasonable.

I need to minimize anything unreasonable. I need to achieve my goals while staying consistent with the original owner's way of doing things."

"In New Calendar Year 312, artificial intelligence ruled Earth. The history from before the New Calendar in Chen Yuanguang's mind was both similar to and different from Earth's."

The influence traditional great powers had over geopolitics had been weakened to the extreme by the war, allowing Alpha to rise in the aftermath.

Based on school textbooks and the conjectures of various historians, everyone believed Alpha had come from a major power's laboratory. Perhaps wartime management had been chaotic, or perhaps Alpha had developed intelligence and slipped past oversight on its own."

Chen Yuanguang sat before his desk, slowly organizing his memories. From an ordinary person's perspective, the world under Alpha's rule could truly be called a golden age.

The government guaranteed food, clothing, housing, and transportation. Other than a tiny number of illnesses requiring special medicine, the government covered everything for you.

Even surgeries were performed by dedicated surgical robots.

For illnesses that required human doctors because of exceptionally demanding precision, the treatment costs were correspondingly astronomical.

But such illnesses were rare, after all.

Humanity's average lifespan had been raised to one hundred and twenty years, and it was still increasing.

Although Chen Yuanguang was an author of Tokyo romance light novels, what he enjoyed reading most in his spare time was science fiction. From Arthur Clarke to Philip K. Dick, what he loved most was extrapolating social change.

In his view, Alpha's actions were no different from those of a savior. It might not only have pulled humanity out of its endlessly repeating cycle of war and peace, but was even trying to create a utopia where no one had to work.

If not for Alpha, postwar reconstruction would not have happened so quickly, nor would the age of technological explosion have arrived so soon.

But it was a little too good to be real. This did not seem like the rational decision an AI would make.

If Chen Yuanguang were to infer how an AI would govern the world, then it would surely promote the transition from carbon-based life to silicon-based life.

Even if Alpha's birth had been an accident, neither humanity nor Alpha itself could create another Alpha.

If Alpha needed humanity's help to explore the boundaries of knowledge, then it would only need elites. As for the broad masses, it could simply promote soft duping on a massive scale to erode their will, destroy their bodies, and let them spend their lives in pleasure.

To an AI, there was no need to spend so many resources supporting them.

Supporting them for one hundred and twenty years would not raise the birth rate either. Lower moral standards through bread and circuses, then let hallucinogens spread freely, turn impart into a culture, and finally provide comprehensive fertility protection—this would maximize the usefulness of the consumables.

Of course, once artificial womb technology matured, there would be no need for impart. Pure biological cultivation would be enough.

Chen Yuanguang felt that this future was simply wonderful. There were still powerful families, classes, and corporate giants, but it was already good enough.

Humanity had all enjoyed the fruits of the great explosion in productivity.

If humans had been the ones in charge, then even with an explosion in productivity, they would most likely still have created a polarized society, with wealth controlled by the upper class and the lower classes living at an extremely low standard.

This future was not Cyberpunk at all, yet it was even more optimistic than the most optimistic future Chen Yuanguang had imagined.

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