Chapter Ninety-Seven: This World

Mr. Clever Hands considered it for a moment, then nodded. “It should be possible to reactivate them through the control core. As long as the chips are undamaged, there ought to be no problem.”

“The control core?” Sun Licheng asked, puzzled, his hand holding the puppet’s head frozen in midair.

Twenty minutes later, Sun Licheng’s mouth was wide enough to take an entire duck egg.

At that moment, he and Mr. Clever Hands stood with several others on a suspended control platform. Before him rose a colossal pillar more than ten meters thick, so tall it seemed to link the earth’s core with the sky itself. This was the command center of the underground fortress; it had another name as well, the Cloud Pillar. From time to time, pinpricks of light flared across its surface. In the pitch-black control chamber, they shone like countless stars, radiating a breathtaking beauty.

Clinging to the railing, Sun Licheng looked down. Even with his night-vision eyes, he could not make out how deep the darkness beneath his feet went, while above him there was at least fifty meters of height.

“Boss, the Cloud Pillar has one hundred thousand goblin CPUs,” Mr. Clever Hands said softly as he flew to Sun Licheng’s side.

“One hundred thousand CPUs? Isn’t that basically a supercomputing center?”

Sun Licheng was utterly stunned by the explanation. In his former life, he had known that companies like BAT would build supercomputing centers with nearly one hundred thousand servers at a time, but in this primitive world, and moreover in a magical one, the appearance of such a cutting-edge technological marvel was enough to leave him speechless.

Now he understood as well that although the underground fortress was immense, compared with the central fortress of the Goblin Empire it was still only a younger sibling, at most able to contend with those places such as the goblin aerial base. If this place already possessed such a super command core, one could imagine just how formidable the computing power of the true heart of the Goblin Empire must have been.

“No wonder the Goblin Empire of old was able to stand against the gods. They really were too advanced. In less than a thousand years, they developed to this degree. It’s truly unbelievable.”

Sun Licheng gave voice to his amazement.

Because Sun Licheng had completely conquered Commander Ret’s brain and possessed the highest-level access code, he was able to issue commands to the control core with complete ease. Before long, the control core produced an entire restoration plan for the mechanical puppets. Looking at these plans, Sun Licheng was immensely pleased; his soldiers would soon be returning to him.

After checking the records, Sun Licheng browsed the control core’s database once more, and his excitement nearly made him leap into the air.

Although the underground fortress’s control core was not the most central computing hub of the Goblin Empire, it still preserved more than eight centuries of accumulated knowledge. Leaving aside the secrets behind how they had risen to power in such a short time, the materials stored here were invaluable.

Inside the control core were complete records for production and daily life. With these, Sun Licheng could even rebuild a new Goblin Empire from scratch.

Beyond those records of production and daily life, the control core also contained a complete biological archive of this world. The archive was extraordinarily comprehensive; although ten thousand years had passed and some species had changed, it could still be used as the data model for the battle testing device. In the future, whenever he faced all manner of magical beasts and monsters, Sun Licheng would be able to obtain the enemy’s strength in time through the battle testing device, and would no longer be thrown into confusion as before.

What thrilled Sun Licheng most was that he had finally found a world map.

This world was not a planet like the Earth where Sun Licheng had lived, but a flattened world, with the sun, moon, and stars surrounding it from beyond. The Goblin Empire had once dispatched aerial fleets to explore the outer void, but to this day no news had ever returned.

In this world there was a vast continent at its center, called the Continent of Erasinos, which in the goblin tongue meant “the place where dreams begin.” Many races also called it the Splendid Continent, meaning a glorious land always bathed in sunlight. Besides that, this world also had three smaller continents: Enlostinda, Jedarith, and Endaleris.

Apart from the four continents, this world also had five great seas: the Storm Sea, the Tranquil Sea, the Hero Sea, the Warm Sea, and the Arctic Sea. Among them, the Storm Sea was the largest, greater than the other four combined, while the Warm Sea was the smallest, yet astonishingly rich in resources.

With this world map in hand, Sun Licheng was no longer completely blind to this world. Perhaps many landforms had changed over the past ten thousand years, but Sun Licheng believed that unless there had been violent tectonic upheaval, the general layout of the world should still remain in accordance with the map.

“So vast!”

Only after reading the map’s scale did Sun Licheng realize that this world was fully five times the size of Earth. That raised the question: in such an enormous world, how was he supposed to find the remaining six fragments of the godhood?

“Damn it, isn’t this like fishing a needle out of the ocean?”

Sun Licheng cursed in frustration.

Besides the world map, the control core also preserved an incomplete overall chart of the Goblin Empire’s military installations. Although the last war had destroyed the vast majority of them, many still remained hidden all over the world. Sun Licheng did not want to be an explorer, but he still decided to have Mr. Clever Hands copy the chart. Perhaps one day it would come in useful.

If the hardware supplies of the underground fortress had made Sun Licheng feel that he had profited beyond measure, then the materials copied from the control core made him feel as though he had sprinted straight into utopia, and even stirred within him the delusion that he might one day dominate the entire world.

But almost at once, he snapped awake.

Back in the day, the Goblin Empire had been so powerful, and yet the gods had wiped it out with a mere wave of a hand. To rely on these scraps and leftovers, and still think of challenging them, would be courting death without even knowing how to spell it.

Once Sun Licheng had calmed himself, he called Mr. Clever Hands to return with him to the repair workshop and began repairing Mechanical One.

After the very last screw had been tightened, Sun Licheng nervously pressed the activation switch on Mechanical One’s body. With a tremor running through its frame, its red electronic eyes slowly opened.

“Commander? I never thought I would see you again. This is wonderful.”

Seeing Sun Licheng and Mr. Clever Hands standing before him, Mechanical One’s electronic eyes flashed wildly, and even his normally calm synthesized voice trembled.

“Yes. Being able to see you again is wonderful.”

Sun Licheng replied, his voice thick with emotion, tears glistening in his eyes.

He walked over to Mechanical One’s side and struck its body hard several times, then pointed at the mechanical puppet heads scattered across the floor and shouted to everyone, “From today onward, we will rebuild the mechanical puppet legion, and make our voices ring throughout this world. Gentlemen, please strive together with me!”

After hearing Sun Licheng’s cry, all the movable mechanical puppets in the repair bay stopped their work at once. Electric light surged in their eyes, and then the entire workshop rang with the clangorous thunder of their iron arms striking their chests.