The Invasion / The Man of Miracles, Part One

"Come with me."

Kevin didn't say anything. He stepped off the transport plane first, and Elysia waited for the wriggling transparent object to follow Kevin down before following closely behind, forming a pincer formation.

At this moment, Elysia had a strange Déjà vu, as if she had seen this kind of thing somewhere before.

As they entered the Shenzhou Branch, a pair of eyes were already quietly watching them from a distant corner.

The girl silently watched Elysia and Kevin walk into the branch, but her gaze seemed to be focused on the unseen Starlight.

When Kevin instinctively looked in her direction, she had already vanished without a trace.

At this moment, Elysia realized why this scene felt somewhat Déjà vu.

Back then, Lin led the girl around the headquarters and gave her a tour, which seemed very similar to this scene.

Meanwhile, at the headquarters of the Firemoth.

"Why conduct a consciousness detection experiment on this Herrscher Core? Wasn't it confirmed the existence of Herrscher consciousness within it when it was first discovered?"

Vill-V, who was captured to conduct this experiment with only two people, had no complaints, but she was also quite curious as to why May would suddenly conduct such an experiment that seemed meaningless to her.

One of the reasons for carrying out the Divine Key Project was to completely transform the Herrscher Core still had hidden dangers, into weapons for humanity. Whatever the Herrscher consciousness within them was, it would be irrelevant in the future.

"...Ten seconds left." Mei didn't answer, but just stared intently at the information displayed on the detector.

This experiment could be described as impromptu or premeditated. She was the only person capable of probing the consciousness of Herrscher through technological means, and the only one who knew this secret was her assistant, Vill-V.

This technology must not be disclosed for any purpose.

Ten seconds passed in the blink of an eye.

"Let me see... Wait a minute! What's going on?!" Vill-V, who had initially thought this was just another boring experiment, now stared wide-eyed.

Mei's eyes behind her glasses were completely obscured by the reflection of light.

Chapter Sixty Invasion

"Is this a good idea, Kevin? Should we let it stay?"

Unlike others Elysia neither smiled nor made any jokes, but stared seriously at the silent room at the far end of the corridor.

"This is just surveillance." Kevin said calmly, arms crossed. "If this is the 'sincerity' they need, then we have no choice but to accept it."

However, given the precedent of Xingcai hacking into Immer's computer, the network in that room has been completely cut off, making it impossible for her to steal the branch's data through intrusion.

In addition, at least twenty people were assigned to monitor Xingcai in all aspects. Even if it were transparent, it would be impossible for it to move under the noses of so many people.

However, even Kevin himself was not entirely confident about this arrangement.

"Alien creatures, Honkai, Planetary Honkai Beast..."

There were so many things that followed, and any one of them was enough to overturn the worldview of all humankind.

Can we really trust Xingcai? Do they simply want a place to go?

"Teacher, do you believe that miracles really exist in the world?"

The man standing in front of the operating table, who was both an assistant and a student, suddenly asked him a question.

At this moment, the man was the only student left.

The man understood why he asked the question, because just yesterday, one of his only two remaining students had also died in the experiment.

The last remaining student picked up a pistol and shot the student who had become Honkai zombie in the head.

Being instantly corroded by Honkai Energy at close range, even if one wanted to remove the damaged parts and replace them with machinery, it would be too late.

"..." The man numbly put on the mask, even though the protection was useless. But the others kept urging him to take precautions and even told him not to conduct such dangerous experiments himself anymore.

Protection? What could possibly stop the Honkai Energy from eroding at such close range?

Masks? Filters? Protective shields? Or perhaps a noble and great spirit of dedication?

Ridiculous.

"When I was little, my parents always taught me that even in dire straits, we must have hope and look forward to a miracle." The student smiled calmly, as if recalling his childhood. "They said that the birth of humankind is an incredible thing, a great miracle in this vast universe."

"... So, do you believe in miracles?" The man's cold, inhuman eyes looked at the student whose eyes were sparkling.

"Yes, I believe miracles will happen."

Even though he has lost many people along the way, he still looks forward to the future.

Isn't it a miracle that humanity has teachers?

The man lay blankly on the hospital bed, half of his limbs completely devoid of feeling. His next task was to replace those limbs with machines.

But he remained expressionless as he listened to the doctor's advice.

The man's last student died in the experiment.

The gleam of expectation on his face vanished from the world before the experiment was even over.

Like every other dead person, there was no difference; not a single superfluous word was uttered.

It's like being crossed out on a piece of paper.

The man didn't hear a word the doctor said; he didn't even notice when the doctor left or when the pink-haired girl came in.

The emptiness in his eyes was like a black hole, with nothing inside, nothing that could fill it, and nothing that would flow out.

"Lin, are you alright?"

The pink-haired girl knew that what she said was pointless, but other than that, she didn't know how to communicate with this boy she had known for so long.

She watched helplessly as he transformed from someone who often told strange jokes and expressed bizarre opinions into someone who gradually became numb to life, taciturn, and distant from everyone, including her.

It was as if the person inside his body was no longer him, but a puppet called "Doctor Lin".

This time, however, the man did not remain silent as usual. "The birth of humankind is not a coincidence, but a series of chain reactions from the conditions for the emergence of life to the evolution of life. In other words, it is not a miracle, but an inevitability."

"..."

The pink-haired girl didn't understand why the man was saying these things, but at that moment, all she needed to do was be a perfect listener.

There was neither disdain nor seriousness in the man's tone. He spoke in the same tone he used for everything, "Behind every thing that is seen as accidental, there are necessary conditions. Just like when introducing a murderer, you always introduce his history of trauma so that the audience understands that his birth was not a story written on a whim."

There are no miracles in this world.

Isn't it a miracle that humanity has teachers?

The man clutched his head, breathing laboredly and painfully.

Are you kidding me?

What kind of miracle is it for a loser like him?

Why do so many people look forward to him and believe in him, even if it means entrusting their lives to him?

Let's face reality: humanity's current achievements are not miracles, but mountains of corpses and seas of blood piled up with lives and sacrifices.

Stop praying for miracles to happen.

There are no miracles in this world. No gods will descend to save humanity, and no humanity will suddenly unleash a burst of inner power to defeat Honkai.

Every person who believes in humanity and chooses to sacrifice themselves without hesitation is simply conveying despair.

"Despair."

The people sitting in the monitoring room watched the monitor screen intently, and even though it looked like an empty room, they dared not let their guard down for a moment.

Since Xingcai couldn't use any detection methods to observe, they could only use their naked eyes to see if there were any abnormalities in the scene, and whether Xingcai, which "seemed" to be lying on the bed, was not moving.

At least for now, after Xingcai entered the room and lay down on the bed, there was no further movement.

Do aliens need to sleep too?

Nobody knows for sure; the only aliens they ever encountered might have been the ones in movies and TV shows who had brains without shells and used toy guns to turn people into skeletons.

Hopefully, nothing goes wrong.

At that moment, someone quietly opened his door and entered the Shenzhou Branch's archives.

The girl wearing a helmet stood expressionless in front of the database door, and she reached out and pressed her hand on the lock.

"Click".

After a soft click, the door lock unlocked automatically.

Her deep blue eyes, visible through her helmet, radiated a bewitching light.

Chapter Sixty-One: The Miracle Man (Part One)

After unlocking the database door, the girl stepped inside, and the door behind her closed automatically.

Her helmet's night vision function was activated as she searched for something in the unlit archive room.

She quickly discovered her target – a storage device that could connect to the main database.

With a casual grasp in the air, a standard longsword from the Fire Moth appeared in her hand. She strode to the equipment, raised the longsword high, and coldly stared at the equipment in front of her through the azure viewing window.

Then, without hesitation, he slashed down with his sword.

"Bass!"

The night was peaceful.

"Is there anything unusual?" Kevin asked the last shift monitor as he entered the monitoring room.

"No, although we can't tell where it is, we can see if it's active. It has started moving again and is observing the room's facilities."

Kevin leaned closer to the monitor screen, squinting as he stared at the tiny, transparent fluctuations inside, confirming that its outline was indeed the starlight outline he had memorized.

He let out a long sigh and then asked, "Has anything happened within the Shenzhou Branch?"

"Um... there seemed to be some anomalies in the database last night..."

Why didn't you report this to me?

The monitor was somewhat at a loss when faced with Kevin's questioning. He was just a newly hired staff member who simply followed the instructions for this task and had not noticed the anomalies in the database.

The anomaly in the database was that he glimpsed the database door seemingly unlocking abnormally for a moment while monitoring it, but when he looked more closely, it was normal again.

Furthermore, the system did not have any abnormal access records.

"... Never mind, I'll go take a look."

Kevin knew he wouldn't get any answers from him by asking, so he went to the Shenzhou Branch's database himself.

The branch and headquarters archives differ in some ways because each branch is responsible for different projects and functions, so the archived information is also different.

However, the headquarters' database can be accessed through a specific terminal. The headquarters' database contains all the data on the entire Firemoth, and even most of the data on humanity. It can be said that the headquarters' database is a microcosm of the human race.

However, access to the Headquarters Database requires the authentication of the person in charge of each branch, so not everyone can access it.

However, Kevin was thinking about what Immer had reported: that Starlight had hacked into his computer and absorbed most of the data from the Firemoth.

The invasion of a mechanical life form like Xingcai would probably be impossible for humanity to withstand with its existing security measures.

Upon arriving at the database, Kevin used his badge to open the door, and the scene that came into view made his pupils shrink to a tiny dot.

The terminal, neatly cleaved in two, emitted sparks.

"Squeak."

"What makes humans so special is that they are always calling for peace and equality, but they have never really achieved it."

The man wrote this sentence in his diary, but quickly crossed it out. His handwriting in his diary was sometimes neat and sometimes messy, just like his fluctuating mood and emotions.

He tapped the pen, then wrote another sentence with his metallic hand, "But who can decide who lives... If life is equal, is death right? If death is equal, what is the meaning of unequal lives..."

Can a person's life really be decided by a complete stranger?