Reality Instrument

AI Rick was, as expected, a magical AI butler from Cthulhu Rick's household.

Anything Rick could do, he could do too.

Anything Rick couldn't do, or hadn't had time to study, this guy trapped in the cabin had had plenty of time to learn.

After Morty finished eating at the priest's house,

he saw that AI Rick had already built a small factory.

The entire manufacturing process—from wood to steel, and finally to alloys stable enough to retain their physical form in space—was laid out before Morty.

After eating so much barbecue, Morty needed to walk it off, and this gave him the perfect opportunity.

"You made all this stuff by hand?"

"Not all of it. The main idea is tool automation."

"What do you mean by tool automation?"

Even though he knew Morty was trying to learn from him, AI Rick was still like every other Rick: he loved showing off his knowledge in front of Morty.

It was as if a smart Morty were like a pureblood straight guy seeing a trans woman: he'd be intrigued at first glance, then get grossed out when he looked closer.

So, to regain some ground in the battle of wits,

AI Rick kept working with his hands and talking without pause.

"Tool automation is the idea of constantly increasing output throughout the production process."

"Suppose you want to chop down a tree. You realize your fists are useless, so you try using a rock. But rocks are too slow, so you discover a stronger metal: iron."

"But iron isn't shaped right to be an axe, so you smelt it and turn it into an iron axe."

"But now there's a whole forest in front of you. The problem becomes that you need N iron axes, but you're only one person."

"That's when your thinking shifts from making tools to automating them."

"Starting with simple machines, then moving on to complex ones, you eventually get to large-scale logging trucks and robotic loggers."

"So..."

Morty said, "Making something isn't just about building it and calling it a day. You also have to figure out how to spend less time using it."

AI Rick said, "Right..."

Morty's summary left AI Rick somewhat speechless.

Now he understood even better why Rick treated this Morty the way he did.

Compared with other Mortys, this one really was frighteningly smart, with an incredible knack for learning.

Even his sharp tongue could match Rick's...

"For such a simple thing, you're babbling on and on. Why not start with Pangu creating the world?"

"And your 'main idea' is tool automation!"

"Even a caveman knows how to use tools to make life easier, okay?"

"I think you've been in this world too long. You need a good dose of outside technology to knock some sense into you. Your head's full of either secondhand Magic Potion or Deep One shit!"

"Come on! Just tell me how you're going to use the resources here to build a spaceship capable of traveling through outer space in a short time!"

After Morty gave him a thorough dressing-down,

AI Rick pointed toward the lawn, where the grass had been dug up, and gestured for Morty to go take a look.

He walked over.

A spaceship buried deep underground, dismantled and exposed, came into view.

"W-where did this thing come from?"

"It's just a wreck from the previous historical era. I didn't have anything on me. What, did you expect me to build a spaceship and a factory in the time it took to eat dinner?"

Morty stood at the edge of the pit, hesitated for a few seconds, then leaped down into the buried ship, whose roof had a huge hole in it.

Using his phone's flashlight, he illuminated the decaying steel passageways, thick with the smell of dirt.

Morty walked a few steps and found a yellowed old diary in a cabin around the corner.

Judging by what AI Rick had just said about the "previous historical era,"

Morty figured the diary must be at least a thousand years old.

After all, if all the knowledge a civilization had accumulated was wiped out at once, as long as its people survived, it would take only about a thousand years to start over.

Well, that was only counting the journey from ancient times to the modern era.

It didn't include the period of explosive progress after computers came along.

Using the translation system to render the text before him into something he could understand, Morty was soon engrossed in the diary.

Setting aside the diary's author's rambling,

one fascinating idea in the book made Morty exclaim that his own imagination really did fall far short.

In this world where Cthulhu existed,

every time an intelligent species emerged from ignorance into an age of reason, it inevitably encountered the Cthulhu creatures at some point.

The first intelligent species might have had little experience.

But as long as the planet wasn't destroyed,

the relics and fragments of knowledge left behind by the previous civilization would be passed down like a flame.

So the civilization before the one Morty lived in

had come up with an incredibly audacious idea.

Domestication!

Since monsters like the Cthulhu creatures spent so much time asleep, could they build a tool to find them and then make use of them?

Trying to take on gods who existed beyond the physical realm

was undeniably a wildly suicidal idea.

But they really went through with it!

The diary said that people of that era had already ventured into the stars, only to discover that the universe seemed to be full of forbidden zones.

And the masters of those forbidden zones were the Great Old Ones, the Old Gods, and the Outer Gods.

And so the God-Hunting Project was born.

They weren't as clever as Rick, who had directly built a Silent Sword, but they weren't trying to destroy the Cthulhu creatures either.

Instead, just like raising dogs,

they wanted to hunt these gods and use them for their own purposes.

That was why the spaceship had a Reality Instrument.

The explanation was this: if the world had both a mental plane and a physical plane,

then the Reality Instrument used atomic collisions to trigger an atomic storm throughout a given region, disrupting the stable order of the mental and physical planes.

This kind of chaos, arising from the most fundamental elements,

couldn't be stopped even by the Cthulhu creatures.

If they could stop something like this, then Old K wouldn't have been beaten by the Old Ones and forced to sign a peace treaty.

So there was only one problem with this thing being on the spaceship...

After it was built, it had only ever been tested. It had never once been used in actual combat.

That was because of what had destroyed this civilization.

That Great Toad had been fighting the Old Gods at the time.

The two sides fought for a full hundred years, wiping out everything this civilization had...