The air circulation system of Anti-Entropy's underground laboratory hummed with a low, steady drone.
Su Yu stood at the head of the holographic conference table.
Around it sat a circle of people who, between them, probably represented Arc City's highest collective IQ — and its worst tempers.
"That covers the entire System update."
Su Yu tapped the tabletop, dismissing the complex energy-conversion schematic projected in midair.
"In short, the Valkyrie Cultivation System is now online, and the Tarot Bonds have gained a new Reversed Awakening function. I'll send the detailed data to each of you separately afterward."
"Second matter — four days from now."
He held up four fingers, sweeping his gaze across everyone present.
"The Starfire Furnace trainees' leave is ending. I want to bring them all here for a group viewing of Wotan's first activation."
Tesla, who'd just lifted her coffee cup, froze at that — nearly spilling it across her white lab coat.
"Are you insane? Wotan is our trump card. You're just going to show it to a bunch of green recruits?"
Su Yu braced his hands on the edge of the table.
"They're not green recruits. They're Arc City's first line of defense against the apocalypse. Hell training can only push their physical limits so far."
"Before the monsters arrive, I need them to see with their own eyes that humanity isn't defenseless against Honkai. Call it morale-building."
At the far end of the table, Welt, who'd been idly spinning a pen between his fingers, stopped and nodded.
"I agree with Su Yu. Fear comes from the unknown, and from helplessness. Wotan's activation really would work like a shot of adrenaline." Old Yang glanced at Su Yu. "And the third matter?"
Instead of answering, Su Yu pulled a thick stack of physical blueprints from the black briefcase beside him, along with several transparent storage tubes filled with pale-blue liquid, and slid them all to the center of the table.
"Rewards from the System."
"Core schematics for the Imaginary Energy Conversion Engine, formulas for a new polymer composite sequence, raw soul-steel, and two complete Valkyrie armor design drafts."
The conference room went silent for two full seconds.
Then Tesla and Einstein shot out of their chairs at the exact same moment.
One of Einstein's slippers flew off, but she didn't spare it a glance — she lunged at the table and snatched up the topmost polymer sequence formula, her eyes blown wide as saucers.
Tesla seized the armor blueprints, and the face that always wore arrogance and irritation was now filled with nothing but pure, feverish excitement.
Her breathing quickened, her red twin-tails bouncing with every movement as she pored over the pages.
"This circuit... this energy-node design..." Tesla clawed at her own hair, her eyes almost pressed against the page. "Genius! This is nothing short of Outclassed by None! Einstein, look at this conductivity coefficient — it completely bypasses our bottleneck in room-temperature superconductivity!"
Su Yu, taking in the two top scientists' bloodshot eyes and the dark circles ringing them, took an involuntary half-step back.
They looked like they might drop dead on the conference table at any second.
"Um... Doctors, the material isn't going anywhere. Maybe you should get some sleep first?" Su Yu offered cautiously. "A healthy body is the foundation of the revolution, after all."
In the corner, Mobius, who'd stayed mostly quiet, let out a scoffing laugh.
She wore a dark-green silk blouse today, her serpentine pupils glinting with cold mockery.
"Little lab rat, are you underestimating the authorities of the biological sciences?" Mobius crossed her arms, leaning back in her chair. "You think my lab burns through its budget every day just to churn out potent anti-hair-loss serums?"
Beside her, Old Yang covered his mouth and coughed twice.
He pushed up his glasses and, in a rather helpless tone, filled Su Yu in.
"Actually, Dr. Mobius holds a controlling stake in a biotech company. One of the best-selling energy drinks on the market is one of theirs." Old Yang's expression was hard to describe. "The slogan goes... one bottle clears your head, two bottles and you never tire, three bottles and you live forever."
Su Yu nearly choked on his own spit.
"What is that, some kind of kidney tonic?!"
Mobius's face darkened, and she shot Su Yu a venomous glare.
"That's a high-efficiency cellular activator targeting the central nervous system! Don't slap some ridiculous name on it!" she snapped through gritted teeth. "One dose, and I guarantee that hot-tempered maniac Tesla can go three days and nights without sleep, hammering away at full energy the whole time."
Su Yu latched onto the important part.
"And the side effects? Don't tell me this thing is all-natural and harmless."
Old Yang quietly looked away. "The side effect is... an overly accelerated metabolism, which causes hair follicle atrophy — in other words, massive hair loss."
The conference room went suddenly, deathly quiet.
Tesla, still poring over the blueprints, jerked her head up and instinctively clapped both hands over her prized red twin-tails.
"But no worries." The corner of Mobius's mouth curled up again. "That's why I developed a potent anti-hair-loss tonic alongside it. Use the two together, and it's a perfectly closed loop."
Su Yu applauded wildly inside. Genius.
Sell the poison first, then the antidote — and bundle them together for good measure.
It was practically a waste of talent that Mobius wasn't out ringing the opening bell on Wall Street.
He cleared his throat and steered the conversation back on track.
"Ahem — trade secrets aside, let's discuss that privately later. Dr. Tesla, I'd like to know how Anti-Entropy's Titan mech mass-production plan is progressing."
Tesla reluctantly tore her eyes from the blueprints, rubbed her aching eyes, and pulled up a data panel, projecting it into the air.
"It's a mixed bag, good news and bad."
Tesla pointed at the scrolling data in the hologram.
"The bad news is that when the Titan mechs are run fully autonomously by AI, they have a fatal flaw — their tactical response is far too rigid."
"Against low-tier Zombies, or Honkai Beasts below Battle-Car Class, we can just brute-force it with firepower and armor thickness — no problem there." Tesla tapped the tabletop a few times. "But against a Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast, or anything higher, that rigid AI logic is basically serving itself up as monster chow. We need manual piloting."
She switched to a list of mech models.
"This is basically everything Anti-Entropy has to its name. Most of it is scrap metal we cobbled together over the past decade to support the Wotan project. If you hadn't given us that controlled nuclear fusion engine to solve the power problem, this junk would still be gathering dust in a warehouse."
Su Yu glanced over the list.
It was filled with familiar model names.
Mass-produced unmanned Titan — 'MR-01 TITAN.'
Venom Spider mech — 'MR-04 SER,' commonly known as the self-detonating infantry, built purely for mutual annihilation.
Shaman mech — 'MR-02 SHAMAN,' equipped with reconnaissance and support functions, fitted with four thrusters on its underside.
And finally, the Thunder Rider mech — 'MR-03 LIGHTNING,' for mid- to long-range fire support, mounted with six sets of missile launchers.
In the bottom right corner of every blueprint was signed the name Welt Yang.
Su Yu looked at Old Yang — this mild-mannered-looking man had, even in a world without Herrscher of Reason Authority, drawn up the blueprints for this entire mech corps purely with his own mind.
"What about Arahato?" Su Yu asked, curious — that was Old Yang's obsession.
"I want to build Arahato too." Welt shook his head, a touch of regret in his voice. "But there simply isn't enough time. All our capacity and priority have to go toward Arc City's local defenses. Just getting the mass-produced Titans up to combat-ready standard has already squeezed our assembly line dry."
Beside him, Tesla slapped the table in irritation.
"Su Yu, let me be blunt with you — if you're hoping to recreate that scene from your short film The Queen's Descent, with armies of Titans charging across the hills, forget it right now. It's simply not possible."
"Even with the full cooperation of the Shenzhou authorities, there's a hard ceiling on how many mechs we can produce in five months."
"And on top of that, you just handed me a pile of soul-steel and Valkyrie armor blueprints today. Developing that equipment is going to eat up an enormous amount of effort."
Tesla took a deep breath.
"Nobody knows how many monsters are going to rain down over Arc City in five months. We can never prepare too much. And besides..."
Her tone turned more serious than he'd ever heard it.
"There's one absolutely critical problem strangling us — mech pilots."
A simulation of the neural resonance pod appeared in the hologram.
"So far, the only person here with any real combat piloting experience is Joachim." Tesla pointed at Welt. "We're planning to use the most advanced neural-link system to synchronize pilots with their mechs and reduce operational lag. But that requires a massive amount of simulation training."
"We have no training samples, no real combat data."
"Nobody knows what kind of rejection reaction an ordinary person's nervous system would have when forcibly linked to a mech, or how severe the pain feedback could get."
Tesla looked at Su Yu.
"Grabbing a batch of fresh recruits for neural-link training right now would be no different from murdering them outright."
The conference room fell into dead silence.
They could build the mechs. No one could fly them.
Piloting one might not kill you — but the odds weren't good.
It was a deadlock with no solution.
Welt broke the silence.
"I have some thoughts on the production capacity issue." Old Yang's voice was steady. "We could have the Shenzhou authorities share the manufacturing burden — split off non-critical components and outer armor plating and hand that production over to heavy industry conglomerates across Shenzhou."
"All the parts would eventually converge at Anti-Entropy, where we'd handle final assembly of the core systems."
He pushed up his glasses.
"That way, we protect the core blueprints from leaking while also easing the production shortage. As for whether the Shenzhou authorities will agree..."
"We can offer a scaled-down civilian version of the controlled nuclear fusion technology blueprints as a bargaining chip. They'd have no reason to refuse."
"As for the necessity of it all" — Old Yang paused — "yesterday's arena test should have made things quite clear to Shenzhou's leadership. The simulated Battle-Car Class Honkai Beast we used didn't even reach a third of the real thing's strength."
"As long as they're not fools, they should understand the apocalypse in five months is no joke. The moment Arc City's defense line collapses, the entire Shenzhou heartland becomes a dining hall for monsters. Public interest or private, they'll have to agree."
Su Yu nodded.
The production crisis, at least, now had a path forward.
"And pilot training?" Su Yu looked at him.
Welt didn't answer right away. Instead, he asked a question that seemed to come out of nowhere.
"Su Yu, that holographic version of Honkai Impact 3rd — is it still saved on Ai's servers?"
Su Yu blinked. He'd originally intended that version to be the official release of the game, but for the sake of wider reach, he'd ultimately gone with a mobile game as the platform instead.
Still, the entire development framework and everything already completed remained stored in Ai's database.
"It's there. Wait — you don't mean..."
The moment the words left his mouth, a jolt shot through his mind.
Welt met his gaze and nodded.
It was an idea of pure, unhinged audacity.
"If Ai Hyperion can push past the technological barriers of this era to create a fully to-scale, one-to-one holographic recreation of the Honkai world..."
Welt's voice wasn't loud, but every word carried the weight of tons.
"Why not use that very game as the carrier for a simulated training pod?"
At the holographic conference table, everyone except Su Yu and Old Yang was still processing.
"In that holographic simulated world, there's no need to worry about damaging the mechs, or about a fatal neural rejection." Welt continued. "Pilots could immerse themselves fully in combat against real Honkai Beasts, trial and error as many times as they need, and grow familiar with the Titans' operating logic."
Tesla was the first to snap out of it. She stared at Welt like he'd lost his mind.
"Joachim, have you lost your mind? Build a fully realistic apocalyptic holographic simulator? What kind of joke is this?!"
Tesla slammed a palm on the table.
"Do you have any idea how massive the underlying logic and computational load would need to be to build a world like that? Air resistance, gravity, Honkai Beast attack patterns, physical feedback from mech damage!"
"Unless you have massive amounts of on-site survey data and countless records of real combat experience, there's no way to conjure a complete Honkai world out of thin air!"
But Su Yu suddenly straightened up.
His eyes shone with an almost alarming brightness.
"No, Dr. Tesla." Su Yu stared at her, the corners of his mouth curling upward beyond his control. "We do have that."
He exchanged a glance with Welt.
In this peaceful world untouched by Honkai, if there was one person who knew exactly what that hell looked like —
it was undoubtedly this man, Welt Yang.
Tesla looked from Su Yu to Welt and back, utterly baffled. "What riddle are you two playing at?"
Welt raised a hand and tapped his temple with one finger.
"All that data — it's all in my head."
Tesla froze.
Even the well-traveled Einstein stopped mid-formula, pen hovering.
Tesla's mouth opened and closed, as if she'd just grasped something horrifying. Her voice cracked.
"Joachim... are you saying you want that AI, Ai, to hack directly into your brain and extract every scrap of your memory and cognitive data to build the game?"
She swallowed hard.
"But can that even be done? The human brain isn't a hard drive — memories blur, and they're colored by subjectivity."
Su Yu answered on Welt's behalf.
"It can be done."
He said it with total certainty.
"When Ai produced those gut-wrenching in-game cutscenes and story arcs for Honkai Impact 3rd, she pulled them straight from the emotional resonance buried in Kiana's and Mr. Welt's subconscious."
"If she could turn that into a game, then in principle, raising the fidelity into a fully immersive simulation pod should be possible too — as long as the processing power can keep up."
The instant Su Yu finished speaking, that punchable electronic voice chimed in right on cue inside his head.
[Well, well, well — truly worthy of a Herrscher of Reason shouldering the weight of the world in its name. Who'd have guessed he could dream up something this wild and this self-punishing~]
The System dangled a screenful of colorful danmaku in front of Su Yu's eyes.
[If foster father popped out right now and said Ai's black-tech couldn't pull this off, would you lot just melt down on the spot?]
Su Yu rolled his eyes inwardly.
"Skip the theatrics. If it really couldn't be done, you wouldn't even be here piping up."
[Tch. Caught red-handed.]
The System sent a shrugging emoji.
[Here I was planning to wait until you, Host, were spinning in circles, at your wit's end, tears dropping like tiny pearls — and THEN swoop in on a rainbow cloud to show off foster father's towering magnificence. Didn't expect you and that old tortoise Welt to figure out how to squeeze me for it yourselves.]
The System sighed.
[Sigh. Watching my unfilial son grow up — why does it feel both gratifying and a little sad?]
"Get to the point. What's the actual cost here?" Su Yu had no patience for its nonsense.
[Fine, fine. The actual point is that Ai Hyperion can indeed do what you're describing. Don't ask about the underlying principles — you wouldn't understand the technology anyway. Foster father will skip straight to the conclusion.]
The colorful danmaku on the light screen vanished, replaced by a line of glaring red warning text.
[Extracting Welt Yang's deep memories to complete all the physical laws and authentic monster data of Honkai Impact 3rd, and creating a perfect holographic simulation entity — fully feasible.]
[BUT!!!]
This requires two hundred percent of Welt's cooperation. He cannot harbor any subconscious resistance whatsoever. When he connects to Ai's servers, he must open his mind completely — and during the memory extraction, he'll have to walk the road he once traveled all over again, exactly as it was.
Su Yu frowned. "What does that mean?"
[It means he'll have to fully relive, in a completely lucid simulated dream, every agony he wouldn't even want to revisit in his nightmares.]
The System's voice turned as cold as ice.
[The blood and tears of comrades who died before his eyes, the cities torn apart by Honkai, everything that, as Welt Yang, as a Herrscher of Reason, he was powerless to do — the people he could never bring back. Host, extracting memory was never as simple as plugging in a USB drive and copying a file.]
[Otherwise, why do you think Kiana ends up looking utterly drained every single time you finish 'talk therapy' with her to extract new story content? It's not just that those memories are unbearably painful for her — forcibly extracting high-dimensional memory itself tears at the human nervous system.]
The System paused for a long moment.
[To achieve the kind of 'complete simulation' you and Welt are hoping for, Ai would need to force Welt through an exhaustive, detail-by-detail neural recounting. That's essentially forcing Welt to live through that brutal Honkai world all over again — a second life, lived in full.]
In the conference room, every breath was audible.
[And there's one more fatal risk.]
The System dropped its final line.
[If his mental threshold collapses — if he becomes trapped, drowning in those past despairing memories during the extraction and can't pull himself free — his body on this side will very likely end up a vegetable, never to wake again.]
Su Yu looked at Welt, sitting across the long table.
The man wore a neat suit, his hair combed without a strand out of place — he looked like an ordinary, mild-tempered history teacher at some university.
Who could have guessed he carried the fate of two worlds on his shoulders?
Su Yu hesitated for a moment.
"In theory, Ai can do it," Su Yu said to Welt. "Let's discuss the details privately after the meeting."
Welt's hand paused for half a second on its way to his glasses.
He glanced at Su Yu, his eyes holding a calm that came from having long since made peace with life and death.
Welt Yang was no green kid anymore. He understood well that much in this world was, in its own way, fair — like equivalent exchange.
Gain something, and you're bound to lose something in return.
A victory with no price was simply impossible.
But he asked nothing more. He simply nodded, silently.
With that, the meeting ended.
The underground laboratory's vast war machine began spinning up to full speed.
Eden clicked away in her heels toward the private communications room, where she would use her immeasurable wealth and connections for a second round of business negotiations with the Shenzhou authorities over production-sharing.
Tesla and Einstein, clutching the stack of blueprints Su Yu had given them, buried themselves in their workstations without so much as a backward glance, while the super-AI Ai Hyperion's holographic projection flickered beside them, helping run reverse-engineering simulations.
Kevin stood up, rolled his neck, and headed off to the training grounds to find Siegfried and continue their still-unresolved sparring session.
Bronie, meanwhile, kept a constant eye on miHoYo Studio's server data to make sure no one tried any sabotage.
On her way out, Schrödinger passed by Su Yu and stopped.
"About the research on your personal armor." Schrödinger pointed toward a region deeper underground. "Anti-Entropy's equipment division has entered its final sprint. Mei is the one heading up that project."
She shrugged.
"That's why you haven't seen her around for days — she's shut herself up down there. We even have to deliver her meals."
Su Yu glanced in that direction, curious himself about what Dr. Mei would eventually produce.
It couldn't possibly be the Blank Key, could it? Don't tell me the Crimson Knight is actually me?
By the time the conference room had emptied completely, leaving only the hum of equipment, Kiana had slipped in through the door at some point.
She'd been waiting in the outside lounge the whole time, a half-finished can of cola still in her hand.
She walked over to Su Yu.
"What happened in there? The atmosphere was terrifying," she asked, tilting her head up at him.
Su Yu didn't hide anything from her.
He asked Welt to stay behind, and with Kiana right there, repeated everything the System had just warned him about — the risk of memory extraction, the cruelty of reliving it all again, the possibility of ending up a vegetable — word for word, to Welt.
When he finished, Su Yu let out a long breath.
He looked at Old Yang.
Kiana, too, tightened her grip on the cola can, watching this Anti-Entropy leader who had once stood up to protect the world.
They waited for Welt's answer.
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