"What are you doing here?"
Just as Orion was studying how to enter the Fatui's laboratory, a voice from down the mountain suddenly called out to him.
Orion looked toward the source of the voice and saw, to his surprise, two Millelith soldiers.
Orion jumped straight down from the three-meter-high steep slope, startling the two soldiers. It wasn't until they saw him land on the ground without even bending his knees that they realized he was an expert.
The two Millelith soldiers saluted and said to Orion, "Are you a visitor from Mondstadt? Please do not linger in this vicinity. For some reason, many Ruin Guards have been wandering around this area lately. Even we Millelith have suffered quite a few losses here. Please, come with us to Liyue Harbor."
Orion smiled upon hearing this: "I think you have misunderstood; I am not a tourist."
As he spoke, he rolled up his sleeve to reveal the emblem of the WangSheng Funeral Parlor.
One of the Millelith soldiers quickly realized: "Oh, I heard that a foreign priest recently arrived at the WangSheng Funeral Parlor. That would be you, right?"
Orion nodded: "Yes, the WangSheng Funeral Parlor has been… collaborating with the Qixing recently, and I was entrusted by Keqing to come here to investigate a matter."
The two Millelith soldiers immediately exchanged glances, then leaned in closer and asked: "Are you here to investigate the child disappearances in Liyue Harbor?"
Orion frowned slightly but immediately relaxed. He didn't confirm or deny it, but asked in a low voice: "If you have obtained any intelligence, speak quickly."
The Millelith soldier pondered for a moment before speaking: "Actually, since a few days ago, children have been going missing one after another in the villages near Liyue Harbor. By the day before yesterday, children also began to disappear within Liyue Harbor itself. We realized something was wrong and mobilized a large number of personnel to search everywhere. We only recently locked onto this vicinity, which is why we concentrated our forces here, but we didn't expect…"
"We didn't expect there to be so many Ruin Guards nearby! Even though we have reinforced our numbers, we are still outnumbered, and our firepower is far from sufficient. Plus, most of our forces have gone to the Guili Plains to clear out monsters," the other Millelith soldier added quickly.
Orion nodded. It seemed these Ruin Guards had indeed walked out from inside.
Afterwards, Orion said to the two: "Do not treat this as an ordinary case anymore. This matter involves the Fatui. Go back and report this immediately; treat it with the utmost importance."
The two exchanged glances, then asked: "What about here?"
Orion put his hands behind his back, and ripples of the Gate of Babylon slowly emerged behind him.
"I will handle it."
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Deep underground, at the end of the veins formed by countless pipes and steel, a laboratory was brightly lit.
At a console, a boy about 1.45 meters tall stared coldly at the test readings on the screen. His red eyes were as clear as bloodstones, yet they flickered with a light devoid of humanity.
Finally, the boy let out a heavy sigh.
"It's about to necrotize; this brain isn't very good either. Should I have let them eat more after all? Although the rejection rate decreases if they are starved for too long, the endurance is really not up to par."
"But I really should have just injected Childe with a sedative, then tampered with his cognition and replaced his limbs. I truly wonder if the bodily tissues of a Harbinger would bring about any positive changes to the experiment."
On one side of the laboratory, behind the positions guarded by numerous Fatui, a dozen children were huddled together in fear—except for two of them.
"Mom!"
"Bad guy, let Mom go!"
Yixian and Yizhu were gripping the cold iron bars, trying with all their might to shake them, but their young bodies could not shake the steel in the slightest.
At the end of their line of sight, in the corner of the wall, a robot—with half its body almost reduced to scrap metal and the other half barely maintaining a humanoid shape—slowly raised its head. On the right side of its face, where the biomimetic skin had been stripped away, the artificial visual neural component was slowly glowing with a blue light.
"Oh?" The blue-haired boy—Dottore's boy segment, or as we might call it, Zandik—turned back, somewhat surprised.
His cold, inhuman face rarely showed an expression of astonishment. He walked over with his hands behind his back and finally crouched down in front of Huayan's imitation robot, looking at her at eye level:
"How was your nervous system calibrated? Is this what's called an emotional module? Or have you truly developed emotions? What kind of technology is this exactly?"
The remaining half of Huayan's face showed an expression of disgust: "A monster like you, devoid of humanity—how could you ever understand us, Machine Intelligence!"
"Machine Intelligence?" Little Zandik was stunned for a moment, then frowned and clapped his hands: "A good name, truly a good name. It describes your characteristics with extreme generalization. Hmm, Machine Intelligence, very nice. The fact that your emotions can enable you to resume program operation under these circumstances only further proves that my research direction is correct."
Huayan's eyes glanced at Yixian and Yizhu, who were calling out to her worriedly. She gritted her teeth and asked: "What exactly do you want to do? You kidnapped over a dozen children from all over Liyue; what do you want to do with their bodies? They are all only just over twelve years old!"
"The necessary emotional learning has already been completed, hasn't it?" Zandik immediately replied, causing Huayan's expression to freeze.
Little Zandik thought the other party hadn't understood, so he thoughtfully continued to explain: "I mean the necessary emotional learning has been completed, right? Although a mature outlook on life takes a few more years, the foundation of their personality has already been built."
"You see, disciplining children needs to be completed before the age of six. If a six-year-old child still has certain obvious early education defects, they should be corrected before the age of twelve, otherwise, bad character habits will accompany them for life. That's why I specifically sought out twelve-year-old children. I don't see any problem with that, do I?"
Huayan's eyes widened, her thought programs running frantically, attempting to understand the boy's meaning. The boy in front of her simply took out a tablet on his own and displayed the images on it to her.
They were the corpses of three children, with everything above the bridge of their noses cleanly excised—two boys and a girl. And… inside the chests of three Ruin Guards, soaking in culture fluid, were young brains plugged with countless wires.
Huayan's thought programs almost crashed. The remaining half of her face became incredibly hideous. She roared, a sound so harsh one could almost hear the grinding of metal: "How dare you! Why, for what purpose?! How dare you!!!"
"Just a small experiment; I haven't finalized the direction yet." Zandik poked his hair with a pen: "I anticipate two directions. One is to attempt to have humans abandon their flesh. I know very well where the limits of the flesh lie; perhaps I can surpass that limit, but most of my soldiers cannot. So, I am trying to find another path. That is all."
Huayan shook her head: "That is all? For a reason like this, you took the children's lives and stuffed their brains into jars?"
"I need to correct you; they have not died." Zandik pointed at a string of readings on the screen with extreme seriousness: "Look, you should be able to understand; they are still alive."
"Hmm, although they are indeed dying, but that is normal. Experiments, after all, are bound to have failures. No one can succeed all the time, can they?"
After finishing this sentence, Zandik suddenly retreated a distance, then slowly stood up.
It was Huayan who had suddenly lunged forward, wanting to crush his throat, but obviously, she had failed.
Huayan looked at Zandik with eyes full of hatred: "Easy for you to say, you madman who stole their lives."
"I said, they are not dead."
"Even if they survive, are they still human?!"
A roar that silenced the entire room.
Zandik was expressionless, just staring straight at the hideous female Machine Intelligence before him.
A moment later, he finally spoke.
"Brain in a bone."
"What?"
Zandik turned around and pointed to a large screen, which displayed a single brain soaking in culture fluid. It looked as if it had been removed not long ago, still attached to spinal nerves and two eyeballs.
Zandik explained carefully: "Look, this brain and its nervous system are soaking in a vat. I use nutrient solution to maintain its life, and then use electromagnetic signals to stimulate its thinking."
"So, suppose that I can subsequently create a space similar to Aaru, and then project his consciousness into it. He is, in fact, still alive; he has just changed to a different space. And as long as I can generate signals for hearing, touch, and smell, then in his brain's sensory perception, there will be no difference."
Subsequently, he pointed his finger at his own brain and said to the dumbfounded Huayan: "And you and I—oh, excuse me. And us humans, isn't this brain of ours also stored in bone, soaked in cerebrospinal fluid, and using bio-electric signals to control the state of the body?"
"So, how much difference can there be between a brain in a vat and a brain in a bone?"
Finally, he pointed to the Ruin Guard: "This time, I only changed their bodies. I didn't even make them live in a virtual space. How can this not count as being alive?"
Huayan fell silent.
She could not say a word.
Cannot communicate. This was simply not a madman who could be reasoned with through language.
In the mind of such a madman, even if a thought imprint were planted, he would naturally resolve it. Even implanting a compulsion to avoid killing would not stop him from doing evil.
At this moment, Zandik suddenly looked at her.
"By the way, I still have a second research direction I haven't mentioned."
"My second research direction is actually you, or to be precise, creating 'Machine Intelligences' like you."
"But now, it is no longer needed."
Zandik reached out and pointed; a blue beam suddenly pierced through Huayan's head, and her consciousness began to fade away.
Before shutting down, she heard only the last sentence, a sentence with a calm yet incredibly sincere tone.
"Now, I only need to reverse-engineer your construction technology. Thank you for your staunch support of scientific research. Thank you."
And, the helpless cries of the children.
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