Chapter 570: Generation Gap
Unlike the two individuals before her, their lives spanned two distinct eras. Ni Lu’s consciousness, starting as a blank slate, had from the very beginning been educated in the new, mainstream values of the Land of White.
With her worldview deeply ingrained, she, like other members of the new generation, integrated into the new system far more easily than the previous one, and genuinely believed in the Holy Progenitors' rhetoric.
As for Lin Yuedong, no matter how much he proclaimed himself a young otaku, he was, in reality, already a middle-aged man with a psychological age nearing forty.
Although he quite enjoyed his current life and largely agreed with the Land of White's values, he wasn't so easily converted.
...
"Let's go." Lin Yuedong gently waved to the cat-girl behind him.
After undergoing the nebula's mind-cleansing, his inner world became utterly serene, and some of his thoughts regarding the beast-girl beside him were temporarily extinguished.
At this moment, he no longer wished to think about anything, or do anything, or say anything; he simply wanted to wander aimlessly, dispelling the boredom in his heart.
Having just experienced a brush with the gates of hell, he had, at the very least, exhausted all his emotions for the day.
"..." Unfortunately, Ni Lu didn't understand much of the "human mind" and wasn't quite sure what she had done wrong.
...
"Sun."
"Su~n~"
"Star."
"Sta~r~"
...
Not long after Lin Yuedong and the other departed, Ni Lu returned to the kindergarten's lounge, quietly listening to the sounds of classes from the surrounding rooms.
When she felt bewildered, she liked to listen to everything around her in this manner.
The unpleasant parting of the three ten minutes ago made her ponder the term "generation gap" for the first time.
Two generations, raised under different systems, possessed different understandings of many things. The ingrained logical thinking of Lin and her were fundamentally different, after all.
Not long ago, Ni Lu had happened to browse several economics books in the history library, but those were printed more than ten or twenty years prior, still discussing the market economy system.
However, she had no personal experience with any of this, and even with abundant video and audio data, it remained somewhat unimaginable.
Why, according to the records in the books, could a mere few stacks of worn-out paper printed with numbers make so many people risk their lives to strive for them?
This point was utterly incomprehensible to her, who had been "born" into a semi-distributional society.
In her eyes, money was merely something that could facilitate small-scale exchanges, used for buying some trinkets or for trivial matters like tipping favorite authors.
As for daily necessities like food, clothing, housing, transportation, and even education and healthcare, they basically didn't require the involvement of the legendary "money"; as long as one completed the work tasks assigned by the system, everything needed for survival was amply provided.
...
"Daddy."
"Da~ddy~"
"Mommy."
"Mo~mmy~"
Ni Lu heard a teacher in the kindergarten classroom leading a group of toddlers, who could barely walk steadily, in learning to speak.
Although with the help of the system, adults could cross language barriers and understand most of their meaning, allowing for limited conscious communication beyond language.
But language, after all, was the carrier of civilization; without it as a tool, the meaning humans could express would be little more than that of monkeys, and the vast majority of information was recorded in written form.
"Teacher, what's a daddy?" Several children suddenly transmitted this question to her through the system.
"Uh..." The young female teacher pondered, seemingly unable to think of a good answer.
"It's the person who brings you yummy food on the weekends!"
After the parental right to raise offspring was stripped, she was momentarily at a loss as to how to explain it to these children who couldn't even articulate themselves clearly. She could only, in a moment of quick wit, produce such an answer.
"Oh!"
"Then what about mommy?"
"The other person who brings you yummy food on the weekends!" At that moment, she couldn’t help but admire her own cleverness.
"Oh!"
And then, there was no "then."
These children had little to no special parental affection left for their birth parents who visited on weekends, apart from a few traces of instinctive fondness.
The aura of ruthlessness stemming from Daoization enveloped everyone through the God Body network, constantly eroding the humanity of each node at a slow pace while granting them power.
"Good thing they didn't ask any more questions, otherwise I might have had to explain it to these little ones starting from the fertilized egg."
"It's also fortunate that people are less and less willing to have children nowadays, otherwise we wouldn't have enough staff in our kindergarten."
The teacher's thoughts swirled.
...
After the new regulations were introduced, with parents losing custody, giving birth, in a sense, almost entirely became about bearing children for the state.
Even if children grew up, they wouldn't have much affection for their parents.
Under such circumstances, it was natural that many people abandoned the idea of having children.
Especially after returning from the virtual world, they learned that their bodies had undergone extensive modifications, and their youthful physiques could be maintained until the day they died due to the soul’s lifespan limit.
Right up until the day before their death, countless nanomachines, both inside and outside their bodies, maintained their physical youth, and even peak fertility.
Since they had one or two hundred years to squander, it wouldn’t be too late to leave a descendant a few decades later.
...
Through decades of research by Earth scholars, the limit of an ordinary person's soul and cognitive lifespan was approximately two hundred and fifty to three hundred years.
If one couldn't embark on the transcendent path to transform their soul, this was the human lifespan limit, the best result achievable purely through physical modification.
Because once this limit was exceeded, excessive memories would begin to crush their fragile minds, and their souls would gradually collapse.
Even if the soul was protected with vast amounts of rare spiritual materials, and the body maintained to forcibly extend life, the soul, out of self-preservation instinct, would extensively erase past memories to make space for new information.
As long as life existed, it would actively or passively acquire information.
In a sense, it could be seen as a mobile phone running out of memory, with the system automatically deleting previously stored content to load new information.
As for the actual manifested situation, it was memory loss coupled with a drastic change in personality; aside from their appearance, everything else bore little resemblance to the original self.
To those around them, and to the original owner of the memories, this was essentially no different from complete death.
PS: Daily Recommendation, "Ice Descends on American Comics." Fans of related genres might enjoy it.
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