With deep confusion and curiosity, the audience kept watching.
On screen, Reca had already led the group to the principal's office.
Just as he had said before, after pushing open the door, they saw the principal inside, wearing a "Slumbernana Monkey" headgear… or rather, perhaps his head had already become that of a Slumbernana Monkey.
This principal, was none other than the person who had appeared several times before: Profnana.
"What a surprise, my dear students. Hmm, no appointment or a polite knock on the door ... but, I welcome you banantheless." the principal greeted.
He didn't seem surprised at all by their sudden appearance.
Rappa spoke up sharply. "Cease the shady evasion! I urge you to come clean now! You're Evil Ninja Osaru's Fiendling Chief, aren't you !?"
Profnana let out a sigh and turned towards Dan Heng asking him,
"Excuse me dear student, could you help me translate that?"
Dan Heng spoke up, "The short story is that a memetic virus has broken loose in Paperfold University. It's going around infecting the students minds as we speak."
"Slumbernana Monkey is that virus, Profnana. And its transmission was orchestrated by none other than your BananAdvisors."
"Ah."
The professor suddenly sighed. "I had thought this class would last a little longer than this."
"Your confession came sooner than we expected. So, is this one of Dr. Primitive's schemes?"
Dan Heng pressed on.
"A scheme?"
The professor chuckled, as if he'd heard a joke. "Bana tsk, you're thinking too highly of this place! Penacony is nothing but a cesspool of riches. It will never be worthy of the great Doctor's sublime experiments on humans!"
He glanced over the group before continuing:
"Here, it's just me. A second class research ape working in Penacony on my graduation thesis: An atavistic experiment centered around memetic entities."
When his words ended, The audience weren't surprised much.
...
Dr Primitive wasn't involved after all.
Finally, everyone could relax. They had suspected from the start that the "Slumbernana Monkey" antics were far too low-level to be the work of someone like the Dr Primitive.
So it turned out, a graduate of Dr Primitive was simply completing his research in Penacony.
Based on the intelligence we've heard, whenever the Doctor makes a move, it's always on a planetary scale. If it were truly him, the whole of Asdana already be in peril.
It might even spark another interstellar war.
Good. The misunderstanding about Dr Primitive has finally been cleared up!
...
Because of those ridiculous "words," from the Galaxy Rangers, even the audience had been misled.
Now, thanks to Profnana's own words, the truth had come out, clearing that Dr Primitive wasn't here.
At first, when the terms Genius Society and Dr Primitive appeared together, everyone froze.
After all, the Genius Society, whether people liked or hated them, was filled with the universe's top minds.
But the whole "Slumbernana Monkey" affair felt too absurd. The manipulative methods used were impossible to imagine coming from someone of a Genius's stature.
Now that it was revealed to be a mere underling's doing.
On screen, Profnana continued, speaking in a calm, instructive tone.
"My research is going along smoothly. People here adore Slumbernana Monkey, especially students from the youth demographic group. Soon, they'll create a new Synesthesia Dreamscape, "the Moment of Slumbernana," and foster its growth, expansion, and evolution..."
When he mentioned "evolving," his tone suddenly rose with excitement.
Rappa, however, calmly interjected: "The endless atrocities that Osaru unleashed onto the world... just to build an Evil Realm where a hundred malevolent spirits prowl at night?"
Even Profnana seemed fed up of Rappa's talking style, he spoke up in a sharp tone at Rappa: "Girl, I cannot begin to fathom your cryptic speech. It doesn't sound like you're speaking ill of me... Or are you?"
Then Profnana clicked his tongue, shaking his head. "...Never mind. Ordinary folks will never understand the great cause of our atavistic experiment. How about a pop quiz before I clarify your doubts? Who knows how bananas reproduce?"
Dan Heng exchanged a glance with Stelle.
Although this professor could still communicate normally, they could feel that his mind was deeply trapped in his own delusions.
Even with the three of them confronting him aggressively, he was still trying to preach his so-called Banana and Monkey Logic.
But that was fine. Stelle had her own weapon up her sleeve.
"Through Mokuton: Banana Jutsu."
Rappa: "A terrible ninjutsu."
"To maintain their taste, the majority of commercial bananas are produced through "asexual reproduction." Lacking seeds and pollen, they are grown from the same rhizome." Dan Heng feeling the situation would go nowhere spoke up.
"Correct!"
The professor clapped his hands. "That's correct. Five Amber Eras ago, the Intelligentsia Guild cultivated a banana species that humans deemed perfect: the golden Slumbernana."
"The golden Slumbernana swiftly dominated the fruit market. Nutritious, sweet, and its peel gives off a mesmerizing golden sheen. It transformed every interstellar banana plantation into a spectacle akin to the Golden Hour at night."
"But it eventually became extinct."
His tone remained flat, though strangely persuasive.
Stelle and Rappa both looked interested; they'd never heard such a story.
Dan Heng explained, "Because it was cultivated by humans, the Slumbernana lacked room for evolution. Having the same set of genes also meant sharing the same vulnerabilities. And when a fatal cosmic fungus wormed its way into the production line ..."
Profnana nodded approvingly. "Precisely. With no genetic diversity, they had no resistance."
"The same genes that made them identical also doomed them. When a deadly space fungus spread through their production lines…"
"This once-dominant species perished within mere months."
As his story ended, silence filled the scene.
Not just on screen, the viewers outside were lost in thought.
The story Profnana told, many recognized it.
The banana variety Gros Michel once faced extinction in real life for similar reasons, its genetic uniformity made it helpless against the wilt disease.
Clearly, Honkai: Star Rail had drawn inspiration from this real-world banana tragedy to craft the tale of the golden Slumbernana.
"Are you saying humans will suffer the same fate?" Dan Heng frowned.
"Of course," said the professor. "The golden Slumbernana's predecessor was the highly reproductive jadegreen banana. If not for human intervention, it would have blossomed much more vibrantly over the years, much like Penacony as we know it."
He spoke with genuine regret.
Penacony was blessed with unique advantages, massive reserves of memetic matter.
And later, it even developed its own meme domain.
To Profnana, this should have been Penacony's great chance,
To use its gifts to achieve life's next stage of evolution, to become beings of memory itself, or perhaps something even more advanced.
"However, the people here chose only to imitate crudely, building tall towers, establishing cities, printing money, and then believing all their wishes had come true."
"Following the exact path of the golden Slumbernana, stubbornly holding onto the status quo, creating fatal vulnerabilities for themselves, and ultimately becoming useless."
"Having undergone a flawed Bananenlightenment, the Doctor seeks to return these misguided worlds to their embryonic potential, giving them a fresh chance to develop. This is the atavistic experiment."
The two ideologies merged as the Banana Master spoke.
In that instant, both the Profnana's own thoughts and Dr Primitive's ideals became clear.
...
: Holy crap! So the Dr Primitive is actually Nietzsche's Übermensch?!
: This totally enlightened me, I instantly get what kind of person the Dr Primitive really is now.
: If that's the reason, it really fits his status as a member of the Genius Society.
: That's exactly it! The road to disaster is often paved with beautiful ideals!
: Because he saw humanity as fragile as a golden Slumbernana, unable to resist calamity, he chose to devolve them into monkeys, to start evolution over again?!
: That's insane, but it's also exactly the kind of thing a true genius would do. Hard to even criticize it.
: The most insane genius so far , Dr Primitive, without a doubt!
: I just realized, miHoYo really buried a ton of philosophy between all these geniuses.
...
The comments flooded the screen, all focused on Dr Primitive.
Though he had never appeared, at this moment, his image had become vividly clear.
Some well-read viewers, after hearing the Banana Master's words, immediately thought of one person, Friedrich Nietzsche.
In Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, there's a passage quite similar to this:
When Zarathustra descended the mountain and met people for the first time, he scolded them outright, saying they were inferior to monkeys.
"I come to teach you about the Übermensch."
"Humanity is something that shall be surpassed, but how will you, yourselves, surpass mankind?"
"Until now, every living thing has created something beyond itself. Do you wish to be the ebb of that great tide, returning to the beasts rather than surpassing man?"
"Once you were apes, but even now, man is more ape-like than any ape!"
This is an inherently extreme interpretation of evolution.
Whether right or wrong, such a thought arose from deeper causes, it was Nietzsche's response to the growing nihilism of his time.
During that era, humanity's shared beliefs were collapsing under the weight of the Industrial Revolution.
Moral ethics could not compete with gunpowder and bullets.
The Earth was known to be no longer the center of the universe. There were no religious teachers, even the Pope was merely a mascot.
As these centuries-strong beliefs crumbled overnight, people gradually realized, the only thing left to do was to live for themselves.
Hard work brought no reward.
Effort led to no results.
Love brought no true affection.
Helping others brought no gratitude.
And those who remained kind were mocked for being fools.
That's how nihilism was born.
To solve this, Nietzsche proposed three solutions, and one of them was the doctrine of the Übermensch.
Evolution could solve everything.
If apes evolved into humans, couldn't humans evolve into something greater, something beyond?
A superhuman.
When this concept is reflected onto Dr Primitive, it becomes crystal clear.
...
Just like the golden Slumbernana metaphor, the universe of Honkai: Star Rail faces endless catastrophes.
Ninety percent of civilizations are wiped out in the process. Countless lives give up when facing despair.
So, if humanity can't overcome these difficulties as they are, then perhaps it's better to devolve.
Return to monkeys. Start over.
There's always that one-in-a-billion chance that a new lifeform will emerge, one capable of overcoming it all.
Of course, Dr Primitive's idea might not be that extreme. Perhaps he wasn't disappointed in life, perhaps he was simply trying to "solve the problem."
Yet as the saying goes,
"All disasters are built upon beautiful ideals."
Isn't the Dream of Nietzsche the same?
What Dr Primitive sought to solve, what question lay at the heart of his experiment, no one knows.
Maybe it was a rebellion against nihilism.
Maybe he just wanted to recreate the flourishing life in his mind.
Or maybe he only wished to discover where the true limit of life lies.
Whatever his motive, the disaster he caused to the universe's lifeforms far surpassed any traditional "villain."
And that's exactly what makes the "villains" of the Star Rail universe so different, and so fascinating.
All in all, after listening to Profnanas' analysis, the audience on the barrage could only say one thing:
They understand, but they could not agree.
On screen, Rappa's stance was the same as the viewers'.
"However I visited those planets."
Rappa stepped forward, speaking each word with conviction:
"As I traveled from one planet to the other, a prevalent but unpalatable observation struck me: Not a single ninja could speak, they had all become fiendlings..."
"And you!"
"You know for a fact that they were not born this way."
"The monkey that scurried past you was once a sailor. He knew how to ferment his own wine, and would do so regularly."
"The one in the distance, fighting with other monkeys over a piece of fruit, used to be the smartest person on his planet, even having the knowledge to send people soaring into the sky."
"But from now on... they're monkeys. Just monkeys."
Before anyone noticed, Rappa's speech had become normal, without her usual tics.
Yet Profnana only laughed when he heard her words.
"Am I imagining things? Or did you learn how to speak like a normal person?"
"Or... could it be that this familiar scene reminded you of your past?"
Profnana knew Rappa. He knew about her past?!