Doing no evil was Li Chen's bottom line. He refused to use people as materials or risk other dangerous undertakings. Yet using blood essence factors and Gene Editing to modify flesh puppets, creating perfect simulated humans with bloodlines and even divine souls, seemed feasible.
This was a world of puppet masters. It had none of the timid, overcautious thinking of Past-Life Earth, nor any notion that flesh puppets possessed the same rights as living beings.
The rights of life began with conscious thought, or even the possession of a divine soul.
For that, a puppet had to reach seven-star rank or higher, possessing the essential nature of a true spirit, akin to an artifact spirit or a soul, along with the corresponding sentient intelligence.
Still, Li Chen had to admit that he had indeed set foot in the forbidden territory of natural creation.
To follow in the footsteps of those great predecessors, he had to anticipate the various risks involved.
Most of these were not problems of technology, but of mindset and morality.
In fact, the puppet masters of this world belonged to various factions: the Spiritual-Talent Human-Rights Faction, the Machine-Fate Faction that regarded humans as machines, and the ancient, evil Unrestrained Faction.
Yet none of these factions was conservative enough to regard artificial humans without souls as living beings. In other words, anything at six-star rank or below conformed to common morality and ancestral teachings, and also partly conformed to the moral views of Past-Life Earth.
But in one respect, Gene Editing and artificial breeding truly were ahead of their time.
They had already gone beyond the scope of healthy reproduction and child-rearing, beyond Earth's human conceptions of life and moral choices.
Had Li Chen been a scientist on Past-Life Earth, rashly undertaking genetic modification, artificial wombs, and the