Chapter 563: Light and Shadow
"Let's go!" Lin Yuedong pretended not to hear Chocolate's last words, grabbed her hand, and was about to head out the door.
He was already impatient to share this great discovery of his with his colleagues at the research association.
"Wait a minute, I haven't put on my shoes yet!"
"Here." After he reacted, he skillfully retrieved a pair of black stockings from the wardrobe.
"You're hopeless!"
Though she said that, the girl still casually took the stockings and unconcernedly put them on slowly in front of the "young man."
"Speaking of which, you humans are truly strange. You actually think a body wrapped in many layers of fabric is more sexually alluring than one completely unclothed." Chocolate, using her small foot adorned with stockings, lightly nudged him. Then, with an unsurprised gaze, she stared at a certain spot.
"This is humanity's great culture!" Witnessing this scene, a certain "young man" was moved to tears, almost having the urge to go up and lick for a bit.
"I feel like you've ruined the reputation of cultured people."
"Do you want me to give you a new name?" Lin Yuedong suddenly said.
"Why?"
"Chocolate doesn't look like a human name..."
"As you like then, but I'm warning you, don't give me any more weird names. Don't forget what happened two years ago."
She had been kept in the dark until then. It wasn't until two years ago that Chocolate accidentally discovered in a small forum that her name actually originated from an R-18 cat-girl game released ten or twenty years prior.
At that time, because of this, she chased Lin Yuedong around, "biting" him for several weeks in the virtual world, forcing him to stay at a friend's house.
"How about when you become human, you're called Lin Xianglan?"
"Your character setting is your sister?" She breathed softly into his ear, her breath like an orchid.
"Hmm... no! Not sister!" Lin Yuedong subconsciously blurted out his true thoughts. Then, he instantly realized that he shouldn't have answered that way.
"Black stocking fetishist, beast-girl fetishist, foot fetishist, and now a sister complex." The girl eyed him with a look usually reserved for trash.
Lin Yuedong was completely powerless to refute. He could only silently lower his head and leave.
...
"Ni Lu, why are you the only one here today?" He excitedly brought his "new sister" to the research association, only to find a sky-blue, translucent humanoid present.
"They saw the message you sent, but every single one of them said they weren't free."
Because they had only recently awakened from their slumber, apart from a very few oddballs like themselves, most ordinary people were still busy completing the transition from the virtual world to the real world.
"This is...?" Ni Lu saw an unfamiliar face.
"Lin Xianglan, my sister."
Ni Lu looked at him with a gaze that suggested, "Someone like you actually has a 3D girlfriend?"
...
"It's actually me, Chocolate!" The girl, trying to alleviate the awkward atmosphere, attempted to speak in her familiar tone.
"So it was you! It seems the great achievement 'Little Linzi' spoke of is this form of yours."
The sky-blue humanoid, whose gender was unclear, had met Chocolate in her cat form many times before. So, as soon as it heard the voice, it immediately understood the full context of the matter.
"Do you want to try it? I've already uploaded the principles of the Spirit Art to the association's database." Whenever he talked about his research, Lin Yuedong would instantly become serious.
"By the time you arrived, I had already dedicated two-thirds of my body's processing threads to learning this Spirit Art."
"How are the results?" he asked eagerly.
"The theoretical derivation looks good, but it's estimated to take a month to fully master."
Ni Lu snapped her fingers with a soft pop, and the 3D projector behind her slowly began to display her envisioned transfiguration effect—a sky-blue-haired youth with shoulder-length hair, exuding a neutral beauty (boy/girl?).
"So beautiful!" Lin Yuedong and his "sister" exclaimed in unison.
"Even you need a month..."
"This is the fruit of your more than ten years of hard work. What's a month for me?"
"For a super genius like you to need a month, an ordinary demon beast wanting to master the art of transfiguration would probably need at least three years, wouldn't they?"
"If you could convince the System to add this Spirit Art to the twelve-year compulsory education for awakened demon beasts, what's three years then?" Lin Xianglan finally found an opportunity to interject her own words between the two, who were becoming increasingly flirty.
"Agreed to be an elective course for Holy Progenitor education." In less than five seconds, without Lin Yuedong submitting any application, the System popped up a notification.
"It truly is omnipresent..." People living in the Land of White had long grown accustomed to the System being omnipresent, like a lingering spirit. Sometimes, it would even unexpectedly reply. So now, they could essentially treat it like air.
Even when being intimate with their partners, or during other private moments like bathing or using the restroom, they could mostly manage to ignore it.
In their view, this was a worthwhile price to pay for the eradication of all crime and mutual harm among humans.
The System regulated everyone's behavior. From petty littering to robbery and murder, anything that violated the rules would be stopped preemptively at the very moment the perpetrator truly acted.
After all, all evil originated from humans harming each other. Whether it was plunder or bullying, none escaped this concept.
That light dispelled all shadows, but unfortunately, it was a little too dazzling.
...
"What a pity, it's only an elective. How great it would be if it were a compulsory course."
"My dear brother, if it were a compulsory course, how many avatars would you have to properly teach all the demon beasts on Earth?" Lin Xianglan emphasized the words "dear brother" with malicious intent.
"..."
"Ni Lu, can you contact your kin?" Lin Yuedong tried to promote his Spirit Art to more people. He knew that Ni Lu's race, due to their extremely unique body structure, possessed far stronger abilities in thought, analysis, and learning than ordinary demon beasts.
"I have no kin." After hearing the word "kin," the translucent humanoid's tone suddenly turned cold.
Only then did Comrade Lin Yuedong, who had been overly excited, remember that he had inadvertently stepped on a landmine.
Ni Lu, who looked like a blob of slime, was essentially a collective consciousness formed from Earth's bacteria, fungi, and other microorganisms after undergoing spirit energy transformation.
Soon after the Spirit Tide erupted, a very small number of microorganisms had actually undergone spirit energy transformation. Unfortunately, the structure of individual microorganisms was overly simple, making it difficult for them to support an independent self-consciousness even after initial spirit energy transformation.
Under a mysterious, unseen pull, these microorganisms, tainted by spirit energy, began a long journey of consciousness integration. They instinctively assimilated the alien elements around them, strengthening themselves.
This assimilation was not a simple mutual devouring, but a more complex form of consciousness overlay.
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