Chiyo Saori's finger hovered over the disturbing pattern.
The blue light of the screen reflected on the lenses of her gold-rimmed glasses, reflecting a cold chill.
"This is not random noise." She enlarged the dense group of lines, and the seventeen red lines suddenly straightened in the complex eye movement trajectory, as if a horizontal plane was forcibly cut out of the chaotic thread. "In the seventeen samples, at the moment when the target was confirmed to be killed, the line of sight stayed on the horizontal axis for more than 0.3 seconds. Among them, these three..."
The screen jumps, and the profiles of three different teenagers are frozen.
Although it is only an extremely small muscle movement, under the high-precision bone imaging, the slightly raised mandibular angle looks extremely dazzling.
"They were 'looking down' at the corpse." Chiyo's voice was very soft, but like a needle piercing the air. "Killing should have been the end of the mission, but they had the illusion that 'I am above the dead.' Sir, this is the bud of subjectivity. Once they get used to looking straight or even looking down at everything, in this closed cage, sooner or later someone will look up at the ceiling and then think about what is on the ceiling."
Uchiha Xuan did not look at the screen, but lowered his head and played with a dark chakra crystal in his hand.
"Then tear down the ceiling and replace it with a guillotine."
He casually crushed the crystals, and the powder fell. His tone was as calm as if he was talking about dinner, "Activate the 'visual path lock'. I will weld their eyeball movement range to the range of 15 degrees to 30 degrees downward. That is the angle from which slaves see the road, and the angle from which believers kneel and worship."
Instructions are given instantly.
In the training ground on the ground floor of the fortress, countless dark red light strips suddenly lit up on the originally dark metal floor.
The light belt winds like a blood vessel, which is the only "legal path".
"Dip--Visual permissions are being reconstructed."
The mechanical sound has not yet faded, but drastic changes have already occurred.
The boy code-named C-04 was moving at high speed, and the mechanical puppet directly in front of him swept towards him with a giant blade.
Out of survival instinct, C-04 subconsciously raised his eyelids, trying to capture the trajectory of the blade above.
The moment his sight crossed the horizon, there was no alarm or current.
There was a slight but dull explosion.
C-04's eyes suddenly popped out, and the capillaries on the surface of the eyeballs burst as if they had withstood the high pressure of the deep sea.
Two lines of thick black blood flowed down the corners of the eyes, which was a sign of instantaneous congestion and necrosis of the retina.
The severe pain caused him to stop moving, and the giant blade of the mechanical puppet directly cut off half of his shoulder.
He didn't even scream, but rolled on the ground covering his blind eyes.
"Continue." The instructor's cold voice echoed on the radio. There was no call to stop, and no medical team entered. "The task is not completed, and the countdown is ten seconds."
The rest of the newborns were obviously stiff.
This is not just punishment, this is a violent rewriting of the rules.
The next twenty minutes were a tragic "lowering show".
In order to avoid the invisible "Fire Seal" pressure from above their heads, everyone desperately lowered their eyes and stared at the dark red guide line on the ground.
Can't see the attack from above? Then use your body to resist.
Can't judge the enemy's height? Then attack the lower plate.
One after another, figures were shot away, and the sound of broken bones could be heard endlessly.
Some people's ribs were broken and inserted into their lungs, and some people had a large piece of their scalp cut off, but no one dared to raise their eyelids.
The fear of "eyeballs will explode as soon as you raise your head" is more direct and biologically deterrent than death.
Chiyo looked at the mess on the surveillance screen and frowned slightly. "This loss rate is too high. Perhaps a micro-corrector can be implanted in the neck? Once it is detected that the cervical spine elevation angle is too large, high-frequency vibrations will be directly released to destroy the balance of the semicircular canals. This is lower cost and more controllable."
"Stupid."
Xuan walked to the huge floor-to-ceiling window, overlooking the tiny clouds at his feet, "With foreign objects? That's dog training, not god-making. If they lower their heads because there is something around their necks, then once that thing breaks, the first thing they will do is bite out the owner's throat."
He turned around, his eyes as deep as an abyss. "What I want is a Pavlov-style conditioned reflex, a fear engraved in the neurons. Fear must come from within."
He snapped his fingers, and the system interface unfolded in the air.
"Modify the audio subliminal implantation logic. Mix an infrasound wave into the tinnitus triggered by Fire Seal. Adjust the frequency to a frequency band that is inaudible to the human ear but can be received by the cerebral cortex."
"At the same time, start progressive visual deprivation. Anyone who dares to raise their eyes even an inch will have their vision blurred. The higher they raise their eyes, the faster they will become blind. Let them understand that in this world, only by looking down at the road can the world be clear."
Three days later.
The entire training ground was as quiet as a tomb.
No one spoke, no one looked around.
All newborns maintain a strange posture when walking: their backs are slightly arched, their chins are firmly pressed against their collarbones, and their eyelids are drooped, leaving only a gap to stare at the ground three inches in front of their toes.
When a flying bird accidentally broke into the ventilation duct and fluttered its wings above the head.
There are no instructions.
More than a hundred teenagers present held their heads, huddled up, and knelt on their knees almost at the same moment.
That kind of uniform fear is no longer due to thinking, but like a knee-jerk reflex, it directly crosses the brain and gives orders from the spinal cord.
"Looking at the taboo, the construction is completed." Chiyo looked at the data flow, and the fingers pushing up the glasses were trembling slightly.
This precise castration of human instincts made her, the puppet master, feel a bit of physical discomfort.
In the cultivation tank at the deepest part of the fortress.
The huge, flesh-red genetic embryo slowly turned half a circle.
As it rotates, countless tiny precipitates in the turbid green culture solution slowly gather and condense as if pulled by some invisible magnetic field.
Through the thick glass, you can see the sediments suspended in the liquid, gradually forming vague human-shaped outlines that are only the size of a fingernail.
Hundreds of tiny human figures were densely suspended around the embryo, all maintaining the same posture - facing the huge one eye, kneeling on the ground, with their heads lowered.
In the shadow of the surveillance blind spot, Chiyo Saori glanced at another set of data reports that she had deliberately suppressed at the bottom, but her brows furrowed even tighter.
Although these newborns behaved like the most devout believers during the day, in the dead of night, even though she had completely blocked their REM (rapid eye movement) sleep cycle with drugs, there were still some unexplainable, extremely weak abnormal peaks on the brainwave monitoring charts...