Ah, that felt good! With 715 giving him a massage and Tony scratching his head in frustration, his brain practically smoking, Rimuru felt as though he had arrived in heaven.
"This isn't scientific. How is this possible? How does this thing work?" Tony stared at the T-1000 before him and asked the question from the depths of his soul. He could understand the T-700 and the T-800, and he even had a rough idea of how the TOK-715 worked. But the T-1000 was another matter. There wasn't a circuit board anywhere in its body; the whole thing was liquid metal. How did it work?
Watching Tony from the side, Rimuru, just like that senator, couldn't keep the corners of his mouth from rising. This was great. He had finally found something even Tony couldn't figure out.
Tony's brown hair was a mess, his shirt sleeves were casually rolled up to his elbows, and his eyes were bloodshot from staying up all night. Clutching a high-precision molecular scanner, he stared blankly at the puddle of gleaming silver liquid metal in the middle of the lab table.
This was the T-1000's core biomimetic alloy, which he had recreated using all his connections and resources, perfectly reproducing all of the Terminator's base materials. Yet this seemingly ordinary puddle of metal had left a top-tier genius like him completely stumped.
On the sofa nearby, Rimuru sprawled comfortably, letting the 715 robot massage him and ease his tension, looking lazy and content. His eyes held a trace of barely concealed amusement, and he was doing his utmost to keep the corners of his mouth down.
"Damn it, this makes no sense. There's no logic to it at all!"
Tony ran a hand through his messy hair in frustration, then slammed a thick stack of scan reports onto the table. The densely packed molecular data filling the screen was enough to make anyone dizzy. He had built Arc Reactors, developed generation after generation of Iron Man Armor, and even cracked the internal structure of a brand-new element. He considered himself familiar with most mechanical principles and the rules governing energy flow on Earth, yet today he had been beaten by an unremarkable puddle of liquid metal.
All conventional mechanical logic, the laws of molecular mechanics, the principles of conservation of matter-the entire system of science he had known inside and out since childhood-had shattered completely in the face of the T-1000's properties.
Rimuru changed straight back into his round slime form, his soft body rolling leisurely back and forth across the lab table. His tone sounded innocent and naive, as though he were possessed by a master of playing innocent.
"Mr. Tony, stuck again? You've been staring at that puddle of metal for three whole hours."
"This isn't a question of being stuck! This thing doesn't follow science at all!"
Tony let out a low roar, full of pent-up frustration. Pointing at the gleaming liquid metal flowing slowly across the tabletop, he went back over all his experimental data, looking utterly distraught.
"See for yourself! It has no fixed shape, no skeleton, and not even a core power unit or a separate energy storage module!"
He tapped the holographic screen in the air, bringing up all the results of his research from nights of calculations. His voice was full of disbelief.
"The information you gave me, together with the results of my repeated tests, shows that every drop of the T-1000's liquid metal is a separate processing unit. Countless tiny molecules come together to form a CPU array capable of supporting an entire intelligent operating system. But here's the problem!"
"There are no circuits, no chips, not even the most basic signal transmission structure. How do they transmit signals and synchronize their calculations?!"
As soon as he finished speaking, Tony used a robotic arm to grab an alloy dagger and slashed hard at the puddle of liquid metal.
The instant the blade came down, the continuous mass of fluid split in two, the cut perfectly clean. But after just 0.1 seconds, the two separate puddles of metal began to squirm on their own and rapidly joined back together. The cut vanished completely, leaving the surface as smooth as before, as though it had never been cut.
Even more absurdly, the tiny metal fragments scraped off by the blade were sliding slowly across the tabletop, moving toward the main mass of metal and merging with it. It perfectly matched the T-1000's unique ability to recover its original material.
"Physical cutting is useless. Ordinary impacts can't damage it at all."
Tony stared, dumbfounded, muttering to himself as he tried several more tests in succession.
"Bullets passing through it, blows from blunt objects, parts of it breaking apart-it can heal all of it instantly. Even fragments that fall away can return and reassemble on their own. Is this a machine? A fluid? Or some undiscovered living thing?"
He had spent more than a decade immersed in the field of mechanics, and everything he knew was based on the principle that structure determined function. His armor, drones, and Arc Reactors all had clear structures, definite methods of energy conversion, and fixed operating logic.
But the T-1000 overturned all common sense.
It had no fixed form or stable structure, could reconstruct itself independently at the molecular level, heal itself completely, and flawlessly replicate anything it had touched.
"The most ridiculous thing is its shapeshifting ability."
Tony rubbed his aching, swollen temples as self-doubt finally rose to the surface.
"It can replicate an object of equal volume just by touching it, matching its appearance, texture, and patterns exactly. It doesn't need a mold; its molecules rearrange themselves instantly. Even my most advanced nanobot swarms need preset programs and time to react and reconstruct themselves. But this thing? Zero delay, zero errors. It makes no sense at all!"
He had specifically broken down a tiny sample of its metal molecules, only to find pure alloy particles. It had no embedded program, no energy core, and no driving mechanism, yet it could think for itself, repair itself, and change shape at will. It was nothing less than a mass of scientific paradox with a consciousness of its own.
Rimuru listened quietly. He had long since figured out exactly how it worked, but he still wore a look of innocent curiosity, struggling especially hard to hold back his laughter.
"That sounds incredible. Human science really can't explain it at all?"
It was more than just inexplicable. The difference in dimensions was overwhelming.
Rimuru snickered inwardly, hiding the teasing look in his eyes even deeper.
The molecular synchronization, architecture-free computation, complete self-healing, and operation without an energy source that had troubled Tony for so long were hardly difficult problems in the systems of monsters and supernatural abilities. To put it plainly, this puddle of liquid metal was a highly unified cluster of programmable matter with a basic will of its own. It was essentially the same as a magical creation with fixed rules built into it; its operating system simply fell outside the framework of Earth's science.
Tony was using Earth's common knowledge of physics, chemistry, and mechanics to analyze a product of rules from an entirely different dimension. It was like trying to solve a multidimensional problem with elementary school math-his efforts had been doomed to fail from the start.
But Rimuru had no intention of revealing the truth.
Iron Man, usually so confident and flamboyant, unstoppable and capable of solving the toughest problems with casual ease, had now been reduced to helplessness and self-doubt by a puddle of metal. The contrast was simply too entertaining. The sly little slime secretly enjoyed it all to himself.
"I really don't get it."
Tony slumped back in his lab chair and covered his face with both hands, his voice full of confusion and frustration.
"I can build armor powered by controlled nuclear fusion and develop a new element, but I can't figure out a puddle of liquid robots? Did I completely misallocate my technology tree, or did the laws of physics in this world secretly develop a bug?"
It was the first time in his career that he had felt such intense self-doubt. He had even begun to question whether the genius mind he was so proud of really lived up to its reputation.
Every formula failed, and every experiment yielded no answer. The T-1000 was like a scientific loophole that had appeared out of nowhere, sitting quietly on the table and silently mocking the limits of human technology.
Seeing how dejected and dispirited he looked, Rimuru finally managed to suppress his laughter. He pretended to think seriously and spoke softly.
"Could it be... that it was never an ordinary machine in the first place?"
"Not a machine?"
Tony jerked his head up, his eyes full of confusion.
"But it's a Terminator robot. By definition, it's an intelligent mechanical weapon. Didn't it come from your side?"
"But Mr. Tony," Rimuru said, tilting his head slightly. His tone was pure and harmless, though he deliberately made it a little misleading. "Does something have to have gears, chips, and circuits to count as a machine? Maybe it can drive itself. It carries its own charge, so it can move independently in all kinds of environments and carry out preset tasks without any external force."
The words struck Tony's mind like a thunderbolt.
He stared blankly at the liquid metal before him, his mind going completely blank.
Self-powered, with no external force needed?
If that were true, then all mechanical logic was completely invalid. The thing was almost indistinguishable from a living creature, yet it fell entirely outside the category of biological life.
No answer. There was no answer from beginning to end.
With both physics and biology overturned, Tony was completely trapped in a snare of his own understanding.
"It's over."
He let out a long sigh and collapsed in his chair, looking as though he had lost all desire to live.
"I finally understand how my father Howard felt back then. At our current level of technology, there's no way to decipher this thing. Am I going to have to leave this mess to the next generation too?"
Seeing the great Iron Man so thoroughly crushed that he was questioning his life, Rimuru finally couldn't hold back. A faint, sly smile curved his lips.
I suddenly understand how those villains feel.
One of humanity's greatest geniuses was trapped by the barriers of what he had always taken for granted, tormenting himself over the problem alone, while Rimuru needed only one glance to see the truth of it all.
He intended to keep this rare pleasure to himself and never reveal the truth.
He stretched his soft body, his tone still gentle and harmless, as though he were sincerely comforting the dejected Tony. In truth, he landed another precise blow:
"It's all right, Mr. Tony. There's no need to rush. No matter how much research you do... you probably won't figure it out in this lifetime anyway."
Tony: "???"
After a brief moment of confusion, Tony instantly caught on.
This soft, adorable slime looked innocent and well-behaved, and every word sounded comforting, but he had been mocking him the whole time!
"You're picking a fight on purpose, aren't you?"
But when he met Rimuru's clear, innocent eyes, which showed no sign of anything amiss, he couldn't find a shred of evidence to call him out.
With nowhere to vent his pent-up frustration, Tony simply reached out, grabbed the soft slime, and gave him several hard squeezes to vent his overwhelming helplessness.