After a little over an hour, the wind stopped.
Huang Si checked the surveillance footage. The robots were all gone, and so were the signalers. The losses were severe.
"Wind (possibly energy): When my consciousness was swept along by the wind, I could roughly sense it forming a continuously rotating vortex and moving in the direction of the Ring. The last time the wind blew should have been March 23, 2023, because that day it carried off nine little robots. The time between that gust and today's was six days and ten hours. I should observe around this time next time to see whether there's another gust. It lasted about an hour and forty minutes. My head hurt too much to keep careful track."
Huang Si made a note.
But the gust hadn't been entirely without its benefits.
When the wind scattered Huang Si's mental field, he sensed that although it had spread out, the wind's penetration seemed to have changed its nature slightly in some way. So even though his mind had been blown apart, he hadn't completely lost awareness. Instead, his mental field had continued extending far into the distance.
Huang Si was eager to see what new changes had occurred in his mental field, but even the slightest use of his mental power made his head hurt so badly he felt he might die.
With no other choice, Huang Si rested obediently.
For the next three days, even switching to microscopic vision gave him a headache. Using Creation Power wasn't restricted, but this caused a great deal of inconvenience to his research. So Huang Si simply spent all three days with the AIs.
The AIs had gradually evolved intelligence and were starting to seem a little like people.
Three male AIs and one female AI seemed to have become the leaders among the AIs. Their minds were also slightly more mature than the others', so the rest tended to obey them.
Of course, there was also one AI who seemed a little antisocial and kept to himself, always wandering outside the group.
Huang Si watched the AIs' social dynamics for a while and found them quite amusing.
He pulled a preset administrator role from the console and entered the virtual world called the Mountain and Sea Realm.
A crowd of AIs hurried over to greet him. Even the previously antisocial AI came running over. He didn't quite dare approach, but stayed off to the side, watching.
In this virtual world, Huang Si was everyone's father—not their actual father, but their nominal father, the sort who was to be respected. He hadn't set it up so that he'd given birth to all these AI sons.
"Have you had any recent insights?" Huang Si asked.
The AIs looked at one another, not daring to speak up rashly.
Since Huang Si was the system administrator, had repeatedly used his system privileges to move mountains and fill valleys in front of the AIs, and was also their father by design, they were all quite afraid of him.
At last, one of them, a man named Bei Xuan, hesitantly spoke up.
"Father God has asked. Your foolish son dares not withhold an answer. Lately, I often wonder why the Mountain and Sea Realm extends only ten thousand li in every direction, and whether there are other worlds beyond it. I have pondered this long and hard, but have found no answer."
Huang Si cried out inwardly, My God! This AI is so humanlike. He can even have such philosophical thoughts. But he couldn't tell him the real answer. That would only burden him with unnecessary worries.
Still, something seemed a little off.
Rather than answer him directly, Huang Si brought up the console and accessed the database's underlying logs.
He searched the database for the machine-learning records of AI No. 002—in other words, Bei Xuan.
Sure enough, after searching, he found the record he'd expected.
Damn, is this the poem I uploaded when I was drunk? How did I put my own poem in the machine-learning material?
It was a complaint Huang Si had written about the Dark Space and his life in captivity. He hadn't expected the AI to pick up the idea after it was added to the machine-learning material.
Huang Si first deleted the record from the machine-learning database, then turned back to Bei Xuan with a grim expression and replied:
"The world is finite. That's normal. It is finite, but has no boundary, because there is nothing outside the world. There is only emptiness."
At first, Bei Xuan and the others had been apprehensive when Father God didn't answer them right away. They didn't dare speak and could only stand quietly to one side.
Now Father God had given them this answer. Bei Xuan and the others looked bewildered. The words sounded profoundly mysterious. Though they didn't quite understand them, they were certainly divine revelation from Father God and deserved careful contemplation.
"Any other questions?" Huang Si asked.
At that, a female AI named Xi Yuan stepped forward and bowed deeply before speaking.
"Father God, I have something I do not understand. The sky is vast and beyond our reach. Does it have limits, just like the earth?"
Although Huang Si had given them a fantasy setting inspired by Eastern mythology, he hadn't given them the ability to fly. Even the ground, with a diameter of ten thousand li, took up a great deal of database space.
If he let them fly, they'd easily pass through the world's boundaries.
So the AIs could only look up at the sky from the ground.
In reality, though, the sky was just an animated wallpaper.
Huang Si wasn't going to tell them that, either. He thought for a moment and replied, "The sky has an end because perception is limited. If perception were limitless, then the sky would have no end."
Xi Yuan and the others hurriedly wrote down his words. They didn't understand them, but they could ponder them later.
Suddenly, Huang Si called out to the AI in the distance. "Mo Xia, I can see you have a question too. Why not ask it?"
The AI named Mo Xia, who had been hiding to one side, jolted in alarm. He hurried out from behind the cover and kowtowed on the ground. "Father God, forgive me."
Father God had summoned him, yet he'd hidden away over a matter of pride. That was surely a grave offense.
Huang Si said coolly, "After I leave, you will confine yourself on Mount Buzhou for three months."
Mo Xia kowtowed. "I will obey Father God's teaching."
Huang Si didn't dwell on the matter. He let Mo Xia get up, then asked if he had any questions.
Mo Xia hesitated before bowing and saying, "Your unworthy son has only one question. Why must other people always gather together, while I, Mo Xia, find it deeply uncomfortable to be around others?"
Huang Si thought, Because they're social animals. You probably have social anxiety.
But he wasn't going to burden Mo Xia with such complicated terminology.
"This is simply your nature. I grant you permission to be this way. No one may interfere with your choice to live apart from the group."
Huang Si made his decree.
Mo Xia was overjoyed. He knelt on the ground again. "Thank you, Father God."
But among the AIs, one named Dong Yao frowned. He stepped forward, bowed to Huang Si, and said, "Father God is treating Mo Xia far too kindly. If you keep indulging him, I fear it will harm him."
Huang Si knew this guy. Wasn't he the most overbearing of the four AIs who wanted to be leaders?
But Huang Si had no intention of curbing his ambition for power. The AIs were more fun when each had their own personality.
However, Dong Yao's words also drew objections from some of the others. A female AI named Shu Shui stepped forward and bowed before speaking.
"Lord Dong, you are mistaken. Father God has made it clear that this is Mo Xia's nature, and nature cannot be changed. Why impose restrictions on him?"
The AIs started bickering noisily. Huang Si couldn't be bothered watching them argue, so he simply waved his hand and used the system to mute them.
The AIs all fell silent. They were immediately alarmed, realizing that Father God was angry.
Huang Si was helpless. These AIs had only come into being three or four years ago. Though machines learned far faster than humans and their minds matured several times as quickly, they were still only equivalent to children of five or six.
Put simply, they were basically elementary school students—the internet's greatest weapon, responsible for countless team wipes and AFK disasters. These AIs, who were about as mature as elementary school kids, might pick a leader among themselves and exclude one another, but in the end, they were still children.
Huang Si had no need to get involved in his AIs' squabbles.
"Quiet. Reflect on what you've done. Goodbye!"
Huang Si logged off.
The AIs were a way for Huang Si to pass the time now, but they would still be very useful in the future. An intelligent assistant who could be installed on any computer was incredibly convenient.
The robots Huang Si had developed before had about as much intelligence as a household vacuum cleaner. They could only make simple conditional decisions based on preset programs. But that wasn't enough. Huang Si needed truly intelligent assistants who could help him.
After resting for three days and adding a few more logic circuits to the AIs, Huang Si felt that his soul had nearly recovered.
Huang Si stood in the living room and closed his eyes. His mental field spread out in an instant.
Ordinary people used their consciousness by concentrating it. Everyone instinctively focused their attention to observe things.
But what Huang Si had learned from the "wind" energy was another way to use mental power: dispersal.
His mental field spread evenly in all directions, as if blown by the wind. This made it thinner and less sensitive to the things within it, but it didn't dissipate. Instead, it kept expanding.
A radius of ten meters... a radius of fifteen meters... twenty meters...
A few minutes later, Huang Si's mental field had expanded to a radius of twenty-six meters. It covered the entire house and even stretched slightly into the darkness beyond.
But by then, Huang Si was already drenched in sweat. Expanding his mental field to a radius of twenty-six meters was his limit.
Now his consciousness covered the entire house, but everything happening inside was blurry and indistinct. He couldn't sense anything clearly.
After holding it for quite a while, Huang Si drew his mental field back in. When it had shrunk to a radius of ten meters, he found it a comfortable distance.
"Has my mental strength increased a little?" Huang Si wondered.
He looked at the table in the living room and applied his mental power to it, lifting it upward with his mind.
The large wooden table defied the laws of physics, rose straight up, and hovered in midair.
"Hmm. I can lift something this heavy with my mental power without feeling tired. Looks like I really have gotten stronger."
After that, Huang Si ran a few more tests.
Huang Si looked at a silicon wafer in front of him. His invisible consciousness enveloped it, and then, in an instant, a thousand silicon particles split off from the wafer and flew to one side.
"A thousand. I did it, but I took a shortcut..." Huang Si murmured.
He was alone, so it didn't matter whether he cheated. Still, he had indeed taken a shortcut just then. Pulling small crystals off the silicon wafer was all one action, and Huang Si used one thread of consciousness to lock onto a hundred silicon structures. That meant he only had to split his attention ten ways to pull off the silicon particles.
But it was still an impressive result. It meant that in the future, as long as he encountered repetitive tasks that weren't too complicated, he could divide his attention and complete hundreds or thousands of things at once.
After testing a few more times, Huang Si felt a little tired. At the same time, he had confirmed one thing: expanding and spreading his mental field was very beneficial to increasing his mental strength.
And mental strength reflected the strength of the soul.
What was the point of having a stronger soul? Never mind. As long as it was useful, that was enough. Huang Si couldn't be bothered to worry about it, especially since he already had enough Creation Power.
Huang Si crouched in the house and spent four days making little robots, finally replacing the ones he had lost over the past few days.
In the early hours of the morning, the alarm rang.
"The wind's due around now. I wonder if it'll blow today?" Huang Si got dressed, got up, and then carried a stool to the front door.
Just as he'd expected, the wind gradually picked up.
Before you continue