Chapter 447: Communication
"Where is this?" Not long after, in the observation room, a young woman in a patient gown slowly woke up on another bed.
She squinted, surveyed her surroundings, and asked the same question.
"I'd like to know too!" The man beside her, seeing someone in a similar state awaken, replied excitedly.
An unknown, terrifyingly quiet environment, a cold room—all of these greatly amplified one's sense of solitude. At such a moment, seeing a living, communicating fellow human undoubtedly eased his taut nerves.
"I distinctly remember... I was burned to death by the light surging from within my body! How did I wake up with no scars, and even look over ten years younger?!"
As soon as she woke, she realized something was amiss with this body. The woman in her memories was a professional nearing forty, not the youthful girl she now was.
Although she paid great attention to skincare every day and consumed many expensive beauty-enhancing spirit materials, she lacked cultivation talent. Furthermore, her demanding work had robbed her of time to exercise, causing her figure to severely decline.
Time had left indelible marks on her. Yet, this delicate skin, fair arms, and slender waist clearly didn't match the image of her past self.
She remembered her name, Liu Laiya, and everything related to herself: parents, lover, child... but she simply couldn't recall what exactly she had experienced.
Her obsession with this question, for a moment, even surpassed her attention to the live person beside her.
"Are... are you alright?" Watching the beautiful girl beside him incessantly losing her mind, the man prompted in a slightly graver tone.
"Ah!" Snapping out of the joy of returning to eighteen, Liu Laiya realized her earlier loss of composure. After all, regaining youth and beauty was a dream every aging woman tirelessly pursued.
Now that this dream seemed to have come true, she couldn't help but feel a little lightheaded.
"My name is Ning Tongxuan, and I'm from Tianqing, Huaxia..." The man in the patient gown began to introduce himself.
In such a completely unfamiliar place, he felt that his first priority was to stick together with a companion. Even if the person next to him didn't seem entirely reliable, at least they were human.
The surrounding environment was truly eerie. At first, he guessed it was a hospital room, but he quickly dismissed that idea, because Ning Tongxuan noticed there wasn't a single superfluous sound outside.
No matter how quiet a normal hospital room was, there should still be faint sounds of nurses walking around. But he had listened for ten full minutes, and there wasn't even the sound of an insect crawling within dozens of meters.
Ning Tongxuan certainly didn't believe that, as a Third-Tier ability user, he wouldn't detect the presence of anyone outside.
"Mm, I'm Liu Laiya. Do you know what's going on here?" Even though she was just an ordinary person, she instinctively sensed something was wrong, because it was simply too quiet.
...
After chatting for a short while, the two decided to open the door together and look outside.
"While sharing the burden of Daoization, do they also gain power?" Bai Mo could sense that ever since the two of them awoke, the pressure on him had indeed decreased by an almost imperceptible amount.
Correspondingly, a minuscule portion of his power was also transferred to the two test subjects, slowly transforming their bodies.
Of course, the test subjects he had spent a vast amount of time creating wouldn't possess only such minor functions.
In Bai Mo's vision, each of them was a cell that constituted his own existence. However, self-serving humans, scattered like loose sand and engrossed in various forms of mutual harm, were not the optimal choice.
What he needed was a super-collective, one that possessed independent will yet allowed individuals to achieve maximum mutual understanding, trust, and cooperation.
Only in this way could he, as the central link of the entire collective, evolve at the optimal speed and find a way to escape the state of Daoization.
But it had to be said, this was inherently a somewhat contradictory proposition.
Possessing independent will meant the emergence of diverse values, and for numerous individuals with differing values to understand each other... the difficulty would likely be sky-high.
Nevertheless, no matter how many difficulties he faced, Bai Mo was determined to complete this task with all his might, because only beings that retained their independent personalities and wills were qualified to share the burden of Daoization emanating from the world.
Things without independent will could not be said to possess true emotions or self-awareness. In other words, they were essentially puppets that had been completely Daoized.
And to enhance the synergy between his "cells," he envisioned a long-term plan divided into many stages: ultimately transforming all intelligent life he encountered into truly perfect "cells" suited for himself, rather than loose individual clusters.
The birth of these two modified humans marked the completion of the plan's first stage.
...
After stepping out of the room, seeing the futuristic, sci-fi architecture everywhere, the two felt they weren't on Earth at all.
"Have we arrived on an alien spaceship?" Ning Tongxuan, realizing how terrifyingly quiet it had been along the way, switched to a more covert mental wave to communicate with Liu Laiya behind him.
Almost all Third-Tier and higher-tier ability users had mastered this skill, capable of externalizing their mental waves to directly transmit their thoughts into the minds of those around them.
But for ordinary people, such a thing still seemed fantastical.
"I'm a little suspicious too." The instant his gaze met Liu Laiya's behind him, Ning Tongxuan read those six words in her eyes.
At that moment, he still hadn't processed why he was able to understand the other person's meaning so clearly.
"Which way should we go next?"
"That path, I feel like it might lead to the cockpit."
"Aren't you afraid of encountering aliens?"
"I'm a Third-Tier ability user. I can punch out ordinary aliens one by one."
...
"Something feels wrong. You didn't speak, did you?!"
"Didn't you also not speak?"
They had never imagined that with just a glance, they could complete a conversation of more than ten sentences with another person.
"The mental wave resonance system works well." Bai Mo, observing the two in wave form, continued his test records.
Leveraging the subconscious connection, they appeared to be communicating through eye contact, but in reality, all information transfer was completed within the subconscious network.
This was an important optimization feature Bai Mo had designed for the prototype modified humans in the first stage, by referencing the mental wave communication of superhumans, allowing them to accurately and efficiently convey their thoughts to others, transcending linguistic barriers.
PS: Recommending a book, "Apocalyptic Star Calamity." According to the author, it's quite an interesting apocalyptic novel... with a style somewhat similar to "Dark Blood Era."
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