Cloud-Mist Information Matrix

"I needed an intelligence organization." Not just to investigate the Bei Family; his unfamiliarity with Seacloud City also made him feel like a country bumpkin entering a big city for the first time.

At least a modern country bumpkin could use a phone to learn about the world. But this world had no such thing as mobile phones. The Identity Jade Token only had a few apps, with no news, Weibo, Bilibili, or anything of the sort.

"Seems like there aren't even any newspapers in the city." Yang Ning wandered the streets and found that aside from shops selling materials, pills, Magic Artifacts, food, cultivation techniques, and spirit pets, there were only service industries such as lodging, flower houses, gambling dens, escort services, and task-distribution halls.

Moreover, there were an enormous number of flower houses. Yang Ning would spot one every few steps. They ranged from high-end to low-end, and all seemed to be doing brisk business.

Besides that, Yang Ning kept seeing arenas on street corners. Two people would be fighting atop them, crowds cheering beside them, while others took bets and opened the odds.

There were not only martial artists fighting, but women as well, bare-chested and wearing nothing at all. Yang Ning stopped to criticize them for quite a while before reluctantly leaving.

"Seacloud City has two major forces permanently stationed here. One is the students of Ascension Academy, and the other is the Haiyun Army. Each grade of Ascension Academy has thirty to forty thousand students; across six grades, that makes two hundred thousand. The Haiyun Army's numbers are unknown, but they should also be around two hundred thousand."

"Every student and soldier requires extensive logistical support during study, daily life, and work, such as dining, healthcare, supply management, transportation, communications, and technical support. Based on experience, every soldier needs at least one to two service workers to provide such support.

"Therefore, the service industry needed for four hundred thousand people may employ between eighty thousand and one hundred sixty thousand workers," Deep Blue said.

Yang Ning nodded, then added, "Seacloud City truly was once a service-industry city, but with graduates and soldiers' families settling here over the years, it has long since produced a large native population. When we arrived, we saw vast farmlands around Seacloud City, so it should be a city that places equal emphasis on the primary, secondary, and tertiary industries!"

There was no need to mention the primary industry. There were few Qi Refining cultivators in Seacloud City, so most of what was grown was rice and medicinal herbs for ordinary people.

The secondary industry mainly focused on the research, development, and manufacture of weapons and pills.

The tertiary industry was the service sector, centered around flower houses. After all, the school's four-person groups consisted of three men and one woman, while female soldiers were even rarer in the Haiyun Army. Among those four hundred thousand permanent residents alone, there were three hundred fifty thousand bachelors. Naturally, this industry had flourished.

"Then the place with the best intelligence gathering is naturally the flower houses. But unless I monopolize every flower house in the city, the information gathered definitely won't be comprehensive!" This was not the sort of Village Town with only one flower house, where he could monopolize all the city's news.

And even if Yang Ning had the capital to open flower houses, he would not spend money on something like that.

He considered himself a pure person. His first goal was immortality, and his single-minded pursuit of research was also because it helped him attain immortality.

Once commercial competition was involved, it would inevitably waste a tremendous amount of his energy.

"All problems in this world ultimately come down to capability. Since I'm a scientist, I'll solve this in a scientific way!"

He only needed to gather intelligence. The modern Skynet was a good example.

But cameras were too conspicuous and needed to be deployed in too great a number. Put them on the streets, and anyone who was not blind would notice something was wrong.

Radar? It was useful for tracking enemy aircraft and the like, but far less effective for monitoring people.

"Sophon?" Yang Ning shook his head. He wanted one, all right, but he could not make it!

Still, he could make something with similar functions.

It only needed to record images and sound, and among Yang Ning's abilities, there happened to be something that fulfilled both requirements.

Water!

Water could refract and reflect light. The telescope function of Yang Ning's Deep Blue Eye made use of precisely this principle.

If Water Mirrors were spread throughout the city, they could monitor the entire city. And that was not difficult, because Seacloud City was shrouded in clouds and mist year-round, its air filled with liquid droplets.

Water was also an excellent conductor of sound, and sound caused droplets to vibrate. As long as those vibrations were recorded, the sound could naturally be reconstructed.

It was merely a decoder. The principle was not complicated.

What Yang Ning needed to do was create droplets that could lurk within the mist without being noticed by anyone.

If those droplets were filled with spiritual power, they would definitely be detected. But what if they contained only spiritual power?

Specifically, spiritual power naturally leaked by himself and collected by the Nightmare Dragon Pearl.

Everyone in this world naturally leaked spiritual power. Such spiritual power should be everywhere in the streets. Yang Ning's spiritual power should flow into it like a stream joining the sea, impossible for anyone to detect.

Of course, planning for defeat before planning for victory was Yang Ning's habit. So what if it was discovered?

It probably would not have anything to do with Yang Ning.

Because what he used was spiritual power processed by the Nightmare Dragon Pearl, vastly different from his original spiritual power.

After all, one point of his spiritual power could not conjure 1,408 bullets out of thin air.

Then could Nightmare Energy be detected?

Yang Ning did not think so either. The Nightmare Tribulation had happened three hundred thousand years ago. Could anyone have lived from three hundred thousand years ago until now?

"I've considered everything I can think of. Whether Nightmare Energy can be recognized, whether spiritual power modified by Nightmare Energy can be recognized... that can only be left to fate!" Yang Ning shook his head. He disliked this feeling of being out of control, but with his current abilities, this was all he could do.

After all, he was only pretending to slack off, not truly intending to lie flat. Development still had to continue.

As Yang Ning walked down the street, he seemed to be merely looking around, but he silently summoned a droplet of water three micrometers in diameter and tried infusing it with spiritual power.

He had already tested this last night. The larger an object's volume, the more spiritual power it required.

And it was not only his own creations that could be infused with spiritual power. Any inanimate object could be.

Ordinary inanimate objects, such as soil and metal, could be turned into controllable objects after being infused with spiritual power, but the consumption was enormous.

On the other hand, things he could already control, such as wind, clouds, thunder, and lightning, became not only easier to use after spiritual power was infused into them, but also extremely energy-efficient to control due to the ability granted by the Dragon Pearl, with almost no consumption.

One point of spiritual power could modify a mass of water thirty centimeters in diameter. After atomization, it could produce fifty million mist droplets three micrometers in diameter.

Each mist droplet could monitor an area of four square meters, allowing a total of two hundred million square meters of land to be monitored.

Seacloud City covered a total area of 4,257 square kilometers. Twenty masses of water would be enough to handle it.

"These droplets need to be able to hover. My control range over water is only forty-six meters, but water infused with spiritual power is not restricted by that. It seems like it can go however far it wants!" Yang Ning began setting the functions of the water in his hand.

Firearms modified by Nightmare Energy could fire bullets infinitely. Modifying a water droplet was naturally as easy as turning one's hand over, especially since the functions Yang Ning added were not complicated.

As for transmitting light, vibrations, and changing shape, those were abilities water already possessed.

"This is already a microrobot, isn't it?" After a long while, Yang Ning looked at the droplet before him, visible only through the Eye of Microns. It had changed from a bead of water into a water droplet made up of countless hexagonal diamond-shaped planes. Two long tentacles grew from either side, countless smaller tentacles grew from those tentacles, and countless even smaller tentacles grew from the smaller ones.

The scientific name for those tentacles should have been flagella.

Those planes were used to transmit light, while the flagella relayed vibrations. Yang Ning called this form the complete form of the reconnaissance droplet.

To prevent people with exceptionally sharp vision from spotting the reconnaissance droplets, Yang Ning gave them eighty thousand possible forms. Sometimes only one plane would appear, sometimes only one flagellum. Their positions were also highly random, shifting 4,426 times per second. Yet their transformations were not random; the spiritual power within would set their forms according to changes in airflow and wind direction.

Still, at every instant, there was always one plane and one flagellum.

"Is this really something a Body Refinement Realm cultivator could make?" Looking at the finished product, Yang Ning held back a laugh. He was not happy over the droplet's functions, but because no one could possibly suspect him.

In this world, cultivators' abilities were tightly bound to their realms. It was unlike Earth, where the person pressing a Nuclear Bomb launch button might be an old man too weak to truss a chicken.

That was the nature of scientific creations. Even a child holding a technological creation could kill an adult or blast down a building.

"Indeed, it isn't!" Deep Blue's tone was cheerful as well. "Without the computational power of the Spirit Realm, the supernatural abilities brought by the Dragon Pearl, and Nightmare Energy's power of corrosion, even Qi Refining cultivators could not accomplish something like this!"

"Exactly!" Yang Ning nodded. Even if it were a Qi Refining cultivator, they still could not operate it properly even if he handed them the complete set of technology.

The images and sounds transmitted by one hundred quadrillion water droplets—forget Qi Refining cultivators, even Spiritual Law Realm cultivators might not be able to process all of it!

"Since it's already made, then... should we give it a name?" Deep Blue asked.

Although he would be the only one using it and no one else would know about it, one should still pursue a sense of ceremony in life.

Besides, microrobots were still robots. Giving them a name would make it easier for a Machine Soul to be born!

"How about Water Droplet Information Matrix?" Yang Ning smiled. This time, he had a genuine Water Droplet detector, except he had one hundred quadrillion of them!

"Then if you make a real Water Droplet in the future, what are you going to call it?" Deep Blue asked.

"Huh?" That truly was a problem.

No one who loved science could dislike Da Liu, and Yang Ning was also a loyal fan of The Three-Body Problem. Since he had come to a world where he could scale the peaks of technology, he definitely had to build a Water Droplet someday.

Then he could not use the name Water Droplet detector now.

"Then I'll call it the Cloud-Mist Information Matrix!" Yang Ning thought for a moment. "Yes, the Cloud-Mist Information Matrix. After all, when these droplets gather together, they resemble clouds and mist. From now on, I'll leave the information transmitted by this matrix to you to manage!"

"Alright!" Deep Blue readily accepted the task of consolidating the Cloud-Mist Information Matrix's one hundred quadrillion droplets. After all, she had the Spirit Realm at her back. Computational pressure? It did not exist!