Spaceport Defense Officer, the lucky Katu Demara has just replaced so components.
teor Moonlight Butterfly is not a martial study suitable for use within the atmosphere. Although teor Moonlight Butterfly and RX Pegasus were both developed by His Highness Godspeed King, the conditions for using these two martial studies are actually the opposite. The design concept of RX Pegasus’s prosthetic body focuses on "reduction," achieving the highest acceleration effect by discarding all unnecessary weight, including "armor," with the only addition being a sturdy long tail to assist in controlling the balance. In contrast, teor Moonlight Butterfly achieves both "speed" and "agility" by constantly attaching additional accelerators and fuel tanks.
However, this makes teor Moonlight Butterfly not very suitable for use in the atmosphere. The air continuously strips kinetic energy from the body and may even tear apart a fast-moving prosthetic body. The presence of the atmosphere also complicates the handling complexity of teor Moonlight Butterfly’s movent technique exponentially.
The martial studies of Godspeed King have always been on the edge of "losing control." The speed at which current humans maneuver, it’s as if ancestors from a hundred thousand years ago were attempting to ta a wild bull.
For this martial study, the atmosphere is akin to injecting excessive adrenaline into that bull.
But Katu Demara dared not refuse.
At this mont, with communication lines cut by the enemy and a clear sign of nuclear detonations on the ground, as per the prior order, she had to go down and provide support.
If she hesitated now and didn’t fight, the King would certainly burn her prosthetic body later and hang it in synchronous orbit as a cautionary example.
"The Black Death God Thanatos and Bodhi Dharma Gao Tian shouldn’t be defeated so quickly, right?"
The last information she received indicated soone had invaded the command system, issuing chaotic commands, while Thanatos and Bodhi Dharma Gao Tian went to clean up the aftermath.
The record of senior military officers like Jangar dying in battle suggests there are top martial artists within the Hero Faction. But she also reviewed that battle report; the martial artists achieved such results clearly relying on extraordinary speed and surprise attacks.
In terms of speed, the senior military officers never feared anyone.
Even if things are beyond control, she has the chance to retreat.
Katu Demara nodded at her assistant, then leaped down, accelerating along with gravity.
Just like a small bead of rcury at the tip of a drain stick, falling towards the endless blue planet.
Soon, she breached the atmosphere. The hot red air enveloped her like a veil.
This layer of "red gauze"—a plasma ford by charged particles—will block all electromagnetic signals. In this instant, she lost communication with the spaceport. For warriors in ancient aerospace fields, this was an unavoidable disaster, an area revered by the ancients during spacecraft re-entry, called the "blackout zone."
Katu Demara would never know that she thus avoided a deadly attack.
At that mont, Xiang Shan began his internal attack on the spaceport.
Xiang Shan’s current prosthetic body was really poor, and when using the Eighth Martial God’s personality mask to employ internal strength, his brain would undergo electron virtual brain circuit reconstruction, causing a decline in external strength levels. In such a situation, he truly feared a high-speed martial artist might rely on a firewall to resist him and then end him in seconds.
According to the information given by Niyaguti, senior military officers in the Earth-Moon system all have "customized" firewalls. King Aqini frequently rewards different "patches" to officers who achieve battle rits—as if this can maximally prevent enemies from probing his weaknesses.
No one knows King Aqini’s mastery over his firewall’s vulnerabilities. If he has subordinate defectors, the Heroes can analyze the firewall to locate specific vulnerabilities. But no one dares assure that this vulnerability is also effective against King Aqini himself.
A backdoor on one senior military officer might lead to a honey pot, a trap, on another senior military officer!
This is why Xiang Shan chose to avoid temporarily. Not everyone was like Bodhi Dharma Gao Tian, handing the "knife" into his hand.
Katu Demara brushed past a rapidly rising space elevator in mid-air.
She never saw the figure inside the elevator door.
The fortunate Katu Demara thus avoided another deadly attack.
She broke through the clouds and began to decelerate. The "red gauze" dissipated, and what greeted her was the extrely harsh electromagnetic environnt after the nuclear explosion. She opened the jet group on her back, resembling a multi-winged archangel. Katu Demara fired several signal flares, attempting to take over the ground forces’ command.
Niyaguti roared: "This is the final obstacle! Kill Katu, and we’ll have no more hindrances! Tear her apart!"
Tuoba Xuanyuan Fourteen and another martial artist took to the air simultaneously.
Katu Demara used the firearms fixed on her waist to kill a hero who dared to snipe her, but she did not see Thanatos and Bodhi Dharma Gao Tian. She looked around and shouted: "Useless! Did both of them die so quickly?"
Due to the extre widening of individual power by technology, the military demonstrates polarized trends when facing powerful martial artists—an orderly operating force can easily encircle and kill powerful martial artists. Yet, powerful martial artists can also plunge into a chaotic battle formation repeatedly, as if into an unguarded domain.
As long as there is a senior military officer commanding, the army will not instantly collapse in the face of a nuclear explosion!
Katu Demara just took a glance to determine the general status of the troop.
It’s already been devastated.
As long as there is still one First Heavenly Layer martial artist to entangle the enemy and give those mid-level officers a chance to regroup, everything can still be salvaged. However, officers with battle formation command experience can imdiately discern sothing is wrong, even without being connected to the network.
The enemy’s attack purpose is very clear. Most of the mid-level officers have already perished. The ground defending troops can only be used as mobile obstacles on the ground, incapable of executing slightly complex commands.
In the battle of a First Heavenly Layer martial artist, this kind of army is of no use!
—— We have to leave!
Katu’s heart thought turned, and from the magazine attached to her back, several signal flares shot directly into the sky. The combination of these special-colored signal flares conveyed new information to the surroundings, indicating "defeat here, but reinforcents are necessary," and "upon seeing the signal, it must be relayed and spread."
Earth is a terrestrial planet with an active magnetic field. Here, any First Heavenly Layer martial artist can easily stir up an EMP storm. Military martial arts practitioners have specifically developed thods that are unaffected by EMP.
After completing all of this, Katu wanted to retreat. Even King Aqini wouldn’t criticize her now.
But a figure approached quickly. The two originally brushed past, but a hook claw firmly gripped Katu’s shoulder.
Tuoba Xuanyuan Fourteen sneered, "Oh, since you’re here, why don’t we have a fight before you leave!"
"Such complete combat power..." Katu Demara was startled, "Those two useless guys, did they not fight you at all?"
........................
"Never afraid... never surrender... fight valiantly... hm hm hm hm hm hm hm..."
Xiang Shan humd the song he heard when he was very young, as he walked openly through the spaceport. Because Benchmark n generally don’t need to breathe, the existence of air here serves only to "dissipate heat." With the elevator operating and filling air into this port, the oxygen is quickly depleted, with almost no combustion, but the heat generated by overload truly lts electronic components.
Xiang Shan’s mind raced through the local network. It seed like so remnant programs and internal martial artists were trying to resist, but how could Xiang Shan’s internal martial arts be matched by these people?
Gunshots gradually rang out. It looked like the disconnected enemies had already reacted. Apparently, there was a rule even before the secret war that a portion of soldiers must remain disconnected while on standby, to prevent enemies from capturing them all in a single net using inner strength.
"Hm hm hm hm hm hm hm... Listen, the wind howls as the bugle sounds..." Xiang Shan’s posture was as if he were on a leisurely outing. With his left hand behind his back, he reached out with his right hand to grab as if a child reaching for a butterfly in the air, and a loaded rocket launcher fell into his hand.
Xiang Shan effortlessly unlocked it, then without turning his head, fired to the side. Three soldiers searching for the enemy beca floating fragnts in the explosion. The blast wind swept up a large amount of floating debris, and Xiang Shan tossed the fired rocket launcher like a ball, pushing away the incoming prosthetic bodies and catching rolling firearms.
"Comrades march in step towards the battleground of revolution... hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm hm..."
Xiang Shan casually secured the firearms on his back, thus walking forward step by step, occasionally firing randomly. Those disconnected defenders couldn’t connect to the monitoring system, while he could directly read all the networked caras, as if he were playing an FPS ga with "wallhack" enabled.
Most of Xiang Shan’s ntal effort was on suppressing the port’s counterattack, and he half-heartedly sang his song, humming as if singing a nursery rhy.
Xiang Shan pulled a heavy prosthesis that seed to be a mid-level officer, and then kicked open the door of a room. The team inside imdiately raised their guns and fired together. However, Xiang Shan hid behind that officer, firing back.
"Alright, it’s safe now." Xiang Shan threw away the corpse of the shot-up mid-level officer, waved his hand, brushing away the splinters of flying components like shooing away flies.
A forr Scientific Knight apprentice who followed him opened his eyes wide, praising loudly, "I only heard that martial artists with strong inner strength are nearly omnipotent in such an environnt... and it’s all true!"
In an environnt like the spaceport, to maintain operational capability, smart system assistance is necessary. Such a purely artificial environnt is a realm for internal martial artists.
And another forr Six Dragons Sect undercover agent, just recruited by Xiang Shan, trembled in his legs, seemingly about to kneel.
As soone with combat unit experience, he knew better what Xiang Shan’s display signified.
"Walking through this side hall, there’s a straight corridor. This corridor leads directly to the main control room, with the database next to it..." the other undercover agent whispered.
"Yes, yes, you’ve made a contribution." Xiang Shan patted this hesitant Fire Line Hero, almost scaring him to the ground.
"Don’t be so afraid. Think of your identity. You are now a hero, my comrade, and partner." Xiang Shan smiled as he urged a few people to continue forward.
What Xiang Shan truly needed to obtain were the contents stored within the database. This database contained a vast amount of important yet infrequently used information, such as the secret keys for dormant state devices, the spaceport’s work logs from recent years, and the cumulative operational data of space debris near Earth since the satellite system’s collapse, among other things.
"Hmm, very good." Xiang Shan smiled.
In the warehouse, the reserves of rocket fuel were more than ample. The chemical propellants consud by the Earth-Moon system heroes in the past twenty years were less than a tenth of the reserves here.
Thus, drones departed the spaceport like worker bees.
The drones targeted large, static space debris, those with relatively slower speeds and larger masses. The drones attempted to cluster these pieces of debris together using gel and alloy locks, solidifying them into rod-like shapes, attaching a disposable thruster to one end, and gathering high-strength, heat-resistant materials at the other end as much as possible.
In space, to push sothing in one direction, one must bear an equal thrust in the opposite direction. Past space-based weapon launch platforms relied on massive flywheels to stabilize themselves. However, those orbiters with large flywheels had long joined the ranks of space debris due to the internal martial strikes from the Paradox City event.
Now, to use orbital debris as space-based weapons, propellant consumption was still necessary.
"You guys just watch here." Xiang Shan reopened the door, "I’m going to change a prosthetic body."
...........................
"Are all of you here?" The AI Xiang Shan, disguised as Bodhidharma Gaotian, looked coldly at the team in front of the weapons warehouse.
A mid-level military officer nearly burst into tears: "Your Excellency... Your Excellency... It’s so good to see you! After Lord Katu left, we suffered the most terrifying attack... Oh God, it was so terrible..."
"I asked you a question, answer , soldier!" Xiang Shan interrupted.
"Yes, this is the thirty-three people I gathered, all here..."
Xiang Shan suddenly asked, "Why don’t we turn to the right path! Beco a hero."
"Ah?" The mid-level officer was stunned, he yelled, "What are you thinking, Your Excellency, now is just..."
With a "boom", the mid-level officer shattered there.
The prosthetic body of a First Heavenly Layer martial artist, combined with powerful martial arts. Xiang Shan shattered thirty-three soap bubbles with a wave of his hand.
Nearby magnetic instrunts activated, gathering the scattered parts with a strong magnetic field. This was maintenance equipnt to prevent secondary damage to the spaceport from combat wreckage.
anwhile, the warehouse doors opened.
AI Xiang Shan shrugged and walked in.
In the darkness, a chair slowly turned around.
The AI looked sowhat helpless at its own body: "Is it so ceremonial, benchmark ?"
Xiang Shan said, "Clearly, the ’criminal’ is in charge now. Don’t mix it up next ti."
"The suppression is complete now, and the surrounding machines are working at full capacity to produce components. You should have switched back to the personality side with stronger engineering applications by now." The AI was sowhat helpless: "Is this a test?"
"This place counts as the Earth-Moon system, after all. I need to make sure you haven’t been tampered with, or caught so virus." Xiang Shan gestured, and synchronization began between the two prosthetic bodies, uploading the AI’s experiences into the biological brain.
Then, there was the storage device sent by Tuoba Xuanyuan Fourteen.
"I preprocessed the content on the AI avatar at the base, and then so... hmm? New mory files?" Xiang Shan closed his vision, focusing on browsing.
After a mont, he said, "It turns out to be you, kid, Tuoba... tsk tsk."
He fully recognized the disciple he had never t, even acquiring so mories of interacting with him.
Part of the mories from the tenth martial god.
"Eek! There won’t be any new ’roommates’ this ti, right?" The "fervor" Xiang Shan showed a disgusted expression, "Tenth martial god..."
"Doesn’t seem like it?" The "criminal" Xiang Shan scanned around—the hallucination of this action represented him sensing brain activity.
"Indeed not, which is good, indicating the condition hasn’t worsened." Xiang Shan nodded: "And judging by the technical data of the Eighth Martial God, this size of mory files wouldn’t suffice to form a personality mask for human brain fusion."
Xiang Shan inherited part of the social connections of the tenth martial god. Now, in his mind, Tuoba Xuanyuan Fourteen was already the "little brat I painstakingly raised."
And then...
"Old Ten, you rascal, what on earth were you researching..." Xiang Shan murmured softly.
The mory also contained the most important thoughts of the tenth martial god.
On the directed distillation of mories and information.
According to the Six Dragons Sect Leader’s research, "experiences," "knowledge," "ability," and "personality" were interconnected yet independent modules. "Experience" was the foundation of "knowledge," "knowledge" was the operating environnt for "ability," and "personality" was more like the user interface of "ability."
The tenth martial god clearly noticed this as well. In fact, the direction of "functional and modular models of the mind" was an old concept from the 21st century.
Xiang Shan rembered how Chen was convinced at the ti that the parts truly determining one’s personality—naly the "paraters" in "personality"—had a very small data size.
And early 21st-century AI also proved through the achievent of "large language models" that the data size of human "language ability" might not be large either.
The famous Chat-GPT had only 175B in core paraters, with model code possibly requiring just a few hundred to a few thousand lines of Python code. However, the code supporting this "large language model" to converse with humans, such as databases, as well as configuration files and scripts providing the operating environnt, server-side code, and front-end code, were quite large, almost beyond what a ho computer could handle.
Human "personality" should also have an extrely small data size, and "ability" might not be very large either. The human brain, in terms of performance, couldn’t compare with computers long ago, but it had capabilities not yet achieved by computers and operated efficiently and energetically on this basis.
The Six Dragons Sect Leader realized this. From the beginning, he targeted the standard of "personality." What he wanted to do was extract "personality" to achieve infinite reincarnation, manipulating the boundaries of life and death.
While the tenth martial god’s direction wasn’t as clear as the Six Dragons Sect Leader, he continuously "distilled" human "ability" using a different approach.
He tried to separate the "martial techniques of the martial god" from "Xiang Shan’s personality."
This is another piece of the cognitive revolution puzzle.
The tenth martial god’s approach had a marked difference from the Six Dragons Sect Leader. The Six Dragons Sect Leader had locked onto the cultural phenonon of "martial god reincarnation" from the beginning, starting from Xiang Shan’s mories and past martial gods, attempting to separate "Xiang Shan’s personality" to study this process. He sought a complete personality, looking for "the data that makes Xiang Shan Xiang Shan."
In contrast, the tenth martial god located the "martial" part by comparing himself with his various disciples, persistently removing the parts "that might belong to Xiang Shan."
At this point, Xiang Shan felt a sharp pain—a heart-piercing anguish.
To achieve this purpose, the tenth martial god had many disciples.
But the vast majority of them died, perished in the asteroid belt.
The agony of the tenth martial god during his lifeti, the pain of constantly losing disciples and children, suddenly exploded within Xiang Shan.
"This kind of thing... should have been accustod to." Xiang Shan visualized deep breathing, calming himself down.
"That’s right, how many have you killed? How many people you knew in the past? How many friends have you killed? You still feel pain for this level of sacrifice?"
Perhaps due to an imbalance of the mind, the red-clad fierce ghost erged once again.
The "fervor" Xiang Shan smashed a guitar onto this hallucination, dispersing it.
Yet, the fierce ghost’s laughter echoed in Xiang Shan’s mind: "Do you think ’smashing one hallucination with another hallucination’ can alleviate symptoms? You’re indeed quite ill! Hahahahahahahaha!"
"The production line’s." Xiang Shan shook his head, "At least this ti the harvest is substantial. Old Ten’s external strength... at least so of it was recovered."
"The subsequent mory is... holy crap, mass-production Xiang Shan, Six Dragons Sect, impressive..."
Xiang Shan wished he could bang his head against the wall a few tis to relieve the discomfort brought by the Six Dragons Sect Leader.
"Thereafter is..." Xiang Shan was silent for a while, then felt utterly creeped out.
"Sothing’s about to happen... Prepare for battle!"
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