Chapter 75#

Gears of Fate 17#

The slideshow continued. In the next image, the shadow of crystals appeared as expected.

The image’s main body was still a complex large machine, but this time the power source was no longer human. The original power crank became an abstract representation of bi-colored crystals. Black was shown as empty circles, red as filled circles. The small people from the previous image who had labored at the crank were now scattered across various machine parts, in twisted, grotesque poses.

Zheng Yuan: “Red-black crystals became the power source, completely liberating human labor. So what are these people doing now?”

Lillia whispered: “They seem to be dancing.”

Lingwei: “Demons dancing wildly.”

Big Brother Chen Tong studied the blackboard from nearly up close for a long time, pointing at a small figure with raised hands: “This guy seems to be wiping the machine. Damn it, you didn’t even give us a magnifying glass. How am I supposed to understand this slideshow?”

They gathered to look at where Chen Tong pointed. That small figure was indeed in a machine-wiping posture. After confirming one, understanding the other figures’ movements became easier.

“This one’s replacing parts.”

“This one’s lifting its head, probably reading a gauge.”

“This one’s pouring water on the machine.”

“Pouring water? Maybe coolant?”

“These people lifted something and ran with it—does that mean they took the product away?”

As everyone analyzed with back-and-forth commentary, a busy production floor gradually took shape. Except the human population was so numerous that presumably the machinery was presenting every human action it could remember.

“Yu-ge, didn’t you say we should think in the machinery’s way of thinking? From the machinery’s perspective, a bunch of small figures wiping and touching it, looking at it, even pouring things on it, then taking away its products…” Bai Song rested his chin on his hand, thoughtful. “That’s pretty perverted. No wonder it looked like demons dancing wildly at first.”

Chen Tong clicked his tongue, empathizing as if he’d been treated that way himself: “Really perverted.”

Xue Xin and Zheng Yuan looked at them like they were idiots.

On the sixth image, the machine’s size grew again, nearly filling the entire blackboard. But the number of active people decreased—presumably some progress had occurred, liberating more human labor.

Yu Feichen found that “change” in the bottom right corner of the image. Near an oddly-shaped device in the bottom right, several smaller patterns appeared. The first was a simple rectangle, the second a tilted short line segment, the third a teardrop-shaped figure.

Xue Xin: “Papyrus, quill pen… this should be the appearance of the ‘spell’ system. The device next to it looks similar to the spell reader we saw the other day. And this teardrop-shaped thing—”

Yu Feichen: “White.”

The last workshop he and Murphy saw yesterday produced exactly this kind of teardrop-shaped white liquid. It consumed a lot of ore but produced very little. Using Murphy’s theory of matter and power, it meant the “power” it contained was significant.

Yesterday, they couldn’t guess what the white substance in their meals symbolized. This image provided answers.

Apparently, this substance was connected to magic.

“I understand!” Lillia from the magic world wrote rapidly, explaining as she wrote: “Papyrus is a spell medium. Quill pen is a spell-writing tool. But spells are just contract symbols. They work because the symbols invoke magical power. I learned this in my magical principles class! So this white substance is either magical power itself or the medium connecting magical power to spells!”

Lingwei’s brow furrowed slightly. The young Daoist’s face was elegant, his thoughtful expression ethereal. After thinking, he said: “Correct. While we have talisman patterns, they still require the world’s spiritual energy to be effective.”

Xue Xin rubbed his head: “All this talk of spells and magic, it ultimately just acts as signals, right? With various signals, the machine becomes flexible. Production leaps. I say this thing is electromagnetic waves.”

The three people’s theories rested on completely different systems, yet they didn’t talk past each other. They arrived at the same conclusion through different paths. What they described was indeed the same thing: “Spells” invoked a special magical power capable of transmitting signals—activation, shutdown, and various other commands—between machines. The machinery could then flexibly change functions and respond to variations, also making it easier to operate and use.

But this world’s “spells” only worked when two machine parts were extremely close together. They couldn’t transmit across distance like Xue Xin’s electrical signals. So though the fortress had magical enhancement, it remained in that steam-metal era of massive, precise, tightly-meshed gears, unable to cross into another stage.

By this point, more than half the class time had passed. After writing their analysis, Chen Tong stared at the blackboard: “I want to see what other tricks you’ve got.”

Yu Feichen also wanted to see what other tricks it had. Only Chen Tong’s mindset was like watching a movie, while he was thinking: all previous images described the machinery’s step-by-step progression. That meant corresponding raw material input and theoretical progress existed outside the fortress—part of a world’s normal flow. That is, until now, it still maintained communication with the outside. It wasn’t a broken world.

He’d visited complete worlds and fragment worlds but never witnessed how a fragment world took form.

Just then, the slideshow changed. The seventh image.

In the new pattern, the machinery remained the same, but the people weren’t the wildly dancing stick figures anymore. Not only were the stick figure people far fewer in number, they were scattered and collapsed beneath the machinery.

“Dead?”

“Probably dead.”

“They’re definitely dead. The machine’s broken too. Look at the sparks there.”

—The factory workers died. Without human maintenance, the machines malfunctioned. But the image showed even more.

“Look here,” Yu Feichen said.

In the bottom right corner was a gate-shaped pattern, resembling the fortress gate. But this gate had a large “X” drawn across it, even marked with an industrial skull-and-crossbones symbol, indicating extreme danger.

Was it saying exiting was dangerous?

Yu Feichen said: “The world broke apart.”

He looked toward Vincent. Based on past experience, Vincent’s teaching attitude was far better than the gatekeeper’s, and slightly better than Anphiel’s detached observation.

The next moment he noticed Vincent calmly glance at Anphiel. After that glance, Vincent looked back at the blackboard pattern and continued where he’d left off: “The original world broke apart. The fortress began existing as an independent fragment.”

The classroom fell silent. Everyone began listening to his lecture.

Vincent said slowly: “After losing contact with the outside, the original workers in the fortress gradually died. Those who tried leaving through the gates never returned, so it marked the gate with danger warnings. Every fragment world encounters a disaster during its initial formation. After the disaster, the world’s will to survive gradually learns to capture power and humans from the outside, establishing new order, becoming what it is now.”

Sure enough, the next image showed a steady stream of ore entering through the gates. The fortress’s form became even more aggressive, the previously damaged areas were gone.

—More orderly standing small figures had entered through the gate.

“A world doesn’t possess human intelligence. Its cognition is hazy, almost possessing only survival instinct. It craves power and remembers its dead workers, so through the cracks it captured humans drifting in the eternal night.”

Xue Xin opened his mouth: “It captured people, surely thinking they’d work like the original factory members. But according to you, we outsiders come from various worlds. So the reality is these people don’t know anything.”

Chen Tong echoed: “Don’t know anything.”

Bai Song: “Don’t know anything.”

On the eighth image, a brass loudspeaker appeared beside the small figures.

—Knowing nothing, so they had to be taught. A mechanical world clumsily taught and tested humans using mechanical means, trying to recover those familiar workers of old. Thus was born the so-called “Alice Magic Academy.”

Chen Tong couldn’t help but twitch his lips: “Quite touching.”

But the dead would never return. Simple machinery couldn’t cultivate real engineers. Meanwhile, the fortress had no human nutritional materials, only mechanical heat energy, kinetic energy, and magical power to feed humans. Over time, the vibrant humans were assimilated into rigid mechanical dummies by this steel fortress.

The slideshow advanced to the next image. The hour hand was about to become vertical to the ground again—this seemed to be the last image. The history lesson was ending, which typically meant discussing the present.

In this final image, the machinery still operated. Humans still studied. Only one thing was different: in the lower left portion of the image, printed letters formed a question mark—not too large, not too small.

“What does this mean?”

Yu Feichen’s heart stirred. He flipped his notes back to earlier pages, reviewing the fifth sketch he’d simply recorded.

Precisely in the bottom left position of the fifth image was the figure of people moving products.

He pointed that location to Anphiel. Anphiel looked at the slideshow, then back at the sketch. He extended his right hand, his fingertip gently touching the question mark’s location. If Yu Feichen hadn’t misread, the young man’s eyes betrayed a melancholic emotion.

Anphiel said softly: “It spent all its power maintaining machinery operation, continuously cultivating humans, yet forgot… why it originally existed.”

So all machinery spun fruitlessly day and night. So generation after generation of outsiders remained forever in the fortress. Yet no matter how much power it drew from the outside, it could never return to its original state or produce the products it once should have made.

It had no emotions, no feelings, couldn’t even organize language humans could understand. For all of this, it could only leave behind a bewildered question mark on the metal plate.

Was it hoping some human could answer this doubt?

Fragments drifting in the eternal night could never return to original completeness, could only become increasingly deformed to survive. Just like those humans equally lost in the eternal night, unable to return home.

Yu Feichen suddenly understood what Ludwig said to Jasmine in the previous dungeon. He said—

He said they were also lonely fragments. Don’t be afraid.

Lillia’s pen tip stopped. The young girl looked up, her pure gaze piercing through the history classroom’s transparent glass window, lingering long on the endlessly rotating gears.

“…How lonely,” she said.