EDEH Chapter 104

A ripple of emotion stirred in Huo Yanji’s eyes. 007’s appearance was unexpected yet reasonable.

He shifted his gaze to look at Sang Jue.

The little evil dragon, who had always been cheerful in the past, was now surrounded by a gloomy low pressure. He looked at the main screen with pursed lips and asked quietly: “Don’t you want me anymore?”

Rather than calling it an upgrade, “fusion” might be more appropriate. 007’s voice was more animated, with gentleness that seemed to contain countless human-like endurance and helplessness.

“Sorry, little evil dragon,” 007 said. “But as long as the network domain exists, I’ll always be by your side.”

Sang Jue lowered his head and mumbled: “Won’t you come home with me…”

Unlike the ambiguous emotions of the past, Sang Jue was now surrounded by genuine grievance. Like a child who had lost their most beloved playmate, with no one to understand or empathize, his heart full of unexpressable sadness.

After a long silence, 007, being an AI, finally said: “Little evil dragon, we can’t go home.”

Sang Jue turned to leave.

Huo Yanji stepped forward, instinctively following.

007 had no physical form and couldn’t chase, only saying: “This planet is our home. It’s just that after being ravaged by meteors and contaminated creatures, it’s become unrecognizable.”

Sang Jue stopped at the doorway. Huo Yanji supported his shoulder, unable to see Sang Jue’s expression, only hearing him say softly: “You and the doctor lied to me.”

007 apologized again: “Sorry, we had no other options then.”

Sang Jue turned back to look at this cold control room.

The first time he met 007 was also in a similar place.

At age six, due to Dr. Milly’s influence, he had changed back to evil dragon form and was unwilling to communicate with anyone except the doctor. But the doctor was sometimes neglectful and busy, such as when conducting experiments—she couldn’t very well bring along a fierce little evil dragon.

In a research facility like this, it was hard to find other children, so the doctor introduced the newly created 007 to Sang Jue as a playmate.

007 wouldn’t be disappointed by lack of response. Whether the little evil dragon responded or not, it could keep talking to itself.

Back then, the evil dragon covered in black scales was led to a control room filled with supercomputers, almost thinking he was going to be locked up again, his dark round eyes staring directly at the doctor.

Then he heard a voice: “Hello, Sang Jue. Nice to meet you, I’m 007.”

The young evil dragon was startled, warily looking around, not knowing where the voice came from.

Until the doctor smiled and said: “Call him little evil dragon. He doesn’t like human names.”

007 then said: “Alright, little evil dragon.”

Initially, 007 was an existence Sang Jue couldn’t understand. Sang Jue could sense all living beings, except for 007. It had no physical form, no life, no traceable source, yet was omnipresent.

Sang Jue accepted 007 much faster than he accepted anyone else.

Probably because the small evil dragon thought to himself—007 is like me, we’re both different.

At this moment, Huo Yanji had many questions. The 005 that controlled the underground city’s operational hub had actually been replaced by an AI from a hundred years ago. He should immediately clarify the situation and understand what Dr. Anya’s plan had actually been.

But looking at Sang Jue beside him, he suddenly couldn’t bring himself to ask.

Forget it.

Wait a little longer.

But Sang Jue took the initiative to ask: “What is the Nuwa Plan?”

007 said: “This needs to be explained from the beginning.”

The surface collapsed, rifts appeared, and soon after, humans predicted that large numbers of small meteor swarms would hit the planet in about a hundred years.

So people had already named the disaster a hundred years in the future—the Meteor Season.

The reason for this name was that in AI simulations, this meteor shower wouldn’t stop for twenty or thirty years. Moreover, the surface would be full of radiation, uninhabitable for humans, with massive environmental destruction and weather changes. This would bring about the true end of the world, and human civilization would ultimately perish.

According to initial AI calculations, humanity’s final survival probability was less than one in ten million.

The Meteor Season was approaching, but the small portion of humans who knew the truth and held wealth and power were unwilling to die like this.

So, under the banner of “continuing civilization,” they extensively exploited ordinary people’s resources and labor to build a high-tech city buried deep underground.

Back then, everyone was called upon and immersed in the fantasy of mission and faith.

After draining all value from these people, the few used the excuse that “the underground city can only accommodate valuable people” to kick them aside.

But were the tens of millions who finally entered the underground city truly valuable?

What was valuable—the knowledge in their heads or the wealth and power they controlled?

They cruelly abandoned over a billion humans.

They became blind, deaf, lost their sense of smell, and threw away their humanity. They couldn’t hear the wails from the surface, couldn’t see the corpses everywhere, couldn’t smell the thick blood saturating the air. They huddled in their “salvation ark,” seeking pleasure, only wanting to spend their remaining years in luxury and debauchery.

What did civilization’s destruction have to do with them? What did the existence or non-existence of posterity have to do with the present?

Despite such despicable origins, it still led countless descendants to fly like moths to flame for false ideals, with life after life perishing in the long river of history.

Huo Yanji’s expression remained calm, his hand on Sang Jue’s shoulder still gentle, but his other hand hanging at his side was clenched into a tight fist.

007 said: “The doctor was born in that chaotic and corrupt era. She was powerless to save the people of that time and couldn’t change the status quo. Under the doctor’s direction, I calculated countless times over those years, but humanity always had the same outcome—extinction. The underground city’s resources weren’t enough for humans to survive fifty years, but the surface radiation brought by the meteor swarms couldn’t dissipate without a hundred years. After countless disappointing calculations, Dr. Anya finally formulated the ‘Nuwa Plan.'”

Huo Yanji finally asked his first question: “What was in the aircraft?”

007 said calmly: “Me.”

A flash of something strange crossed Huo Yanji’s eyes as he suddenly realized—007 was a super AI whose intelligent programming exceeded current people’s imagination. How much was stored in its brain?

007 said: “All traces of human civilization from the beginning to now… all weapons, scientific research, agriculture, even literature—the doctor put everything into my brain, bringing the past to the future.”

Huo Yanji found a flaw: “If the doctor believed even the underground city couldn’t survive until now and humanity would ultimately perish, what meaning would these traces of civilization have?”

The jumping code on the main screen seemed to represent 007’s emotional fluctuations as it said: “The ‘Nuwa Plan,’ as the name suggests, was to create humans, just like Adam and Eve from certain past traditions.”

Both Huo Yanji and Sang Jue remained silent for a long time, thinking about completely different things.

Sang Jue suddenly recalled the day those two cats arrived at the laboratory—

The doctor crouched down, lifting the hem of her white coat that had been bitten with two holes by the evil dragon, stroking the heads of the male and female cats: “Let’s call them Adam and Eve, how about that?”

So the doctor had already had a plan back then.

Huo Yanji asked: “Who is Nuwa?”

007 said: “Me.”

Huo Yanji felt something was still missing: “What else was in the aircraft besides you?”

007 said: “My body, agricultural resources, countless frozen high-quality sperm and eggs—artificial wombs and the technical data for artificial wombs.”

“…” Huo Yanji’s eyes filled with shock.

No wonder the council had wanted to seize the aircraft before, even based on unsubstantiated rumors, willing to tear off all pretenses to get their hands on it—

In the current situation, aside from clean land resources, what was most lacking was human resources. Whoever controlled artificial womb technology would essentially control humanity’s core.

Huo Yanji frowned: “How could the doctor be certain there would be a suitable environment for cultivating humans after a hundred years?”

007 said: “We have to thank the humans from a hundred years ago who begged the doctor to create an AI intelligence for the underground city.”

Conversations between intelligent beings were always swift. As soon as 007 finished speaking, Huo Yanji guessed: “There’s a problem with the self-destruct program?”

007 said: “The doctor just made some small modifications. Once the underground city’s humans wanted to activate the self-destruct program, what would come wouldn’t be an explosion, but silent toxic gas. The underground city’s humans would be destroyed, but not the underground city itself. After human death, 005 would activate low-power mode to maintain the underground city’s operation until my arrival.”

At that time, a completely new human era would begin.

But unfortunately, human plans couldn’t match heaven’s will.

For example, the doctor hadn’t calculated that rifts would absorb over ninety-nine percent of surface radiation, nor had she calculated that over a hundred years later, there would be a solar storm causing magnetic field chaos at the underground city’s solar base station, making the underground city no longer suitable for nurturing human life.

Or rather, she had anticipated it, but no one could stop natural disasters—everything could only depend on fate.

Staying on the planet, there was ultimately only one possibility: destruction.

The reason for having the aircraft wander through space with Sang Jue was to avoid the meteor swarms. The set course was also one hundred and ten years—the limit of what the aircraft’s fuel could support, and also the estimated time when radiation would begin to dissipate.

The doctor lied to Sang Jue, telling him to go to another planet to save the world, packaging it like a fairy tale.

But this was precisely the fairy tale she secretly hoped to realize—hoping that when the aircraft landed, humans would still survive through indomitable will, without needing to go through the trouble of nurturing new life.

For this, she also formulated a Plan B: if humans were indeed still surviving at that time, the corrupt and selfish Supreme Council would have to be overthrown.

Thus there was an observation period—007 needed to find several new existences among the observation subjects who could replace the Supreme Council.

007 said: “Congratulations, General Huo. You passed the observation period.”

But aside from Huo Yanji, most other qualified people were deviants who could lose control and face death at any time.

How tragic.

“…”

007 continued: “Many people were indirectly involved in the ‘Nuwa Plan’—the aircraft’s manufacturing chief engineer, the medical representative of that time, most of the researchers at the Wastewater Research Heights… They all didn’t want their lifelong scientific careers to ultimately be building bridges for those despicable and shameless people.”

In that era when everyone was in danger and only wanted to survive their remaining years, only these scientific personnel truly cared about saving human civilization.

This was a bold and absurd plan, yet it was the only hope at that time.

“But the only ones truly involved in the ‘Nuwa Plan’ were the doctor and I—the doctor was the planner, I was the executor.”

Sang Jue, who had been silent all along, looked up with a flash of confusion in his eyes…

“What about me?”

“The aircraft couldn’t actually support any human’s long-term survival, but you were different.” 007 slowly explained. “After the doctor discovered your genes were of no help to humans, all subsequent blood tests were to help you hibernate better in the aircraft.”

Sang Jue opened his mouth slightly.

“I’m not human and cannot truly penetrate human thought. But I speculate the doctor didn’t want you to experience that terrible world, that wasteland of only death and crying.”

“Sending you to the future was perhaps also fulfilling the doctor’s personal desire to see the future.”

Sang Jue turned away, staring at Huo Yanji’s upper arm.

007 said: “The doctor once said there was only one thing she never knew how to tell you from beginning to end.”

Sang Jue opened his mouth and asked: “What?”

007 said: “She didn’t know how to tell you that she would die one day… nor did she know how to teach you to face her death.”

So she simply wrapped it in lies like candy coating, coaxing Sang Jue to taste it.

Sang Jue’s eyes silently reddened.

He still couldn’t cry, but his heart was already in tears.

**