Chapter 2425: Safety Valve
By the time Li Jialing was wide awake, it had been seven days since the battle of the Great Iron Plants, and they had evacuated to hundreds of kilometers away after blowing up the major mines and tunnels on their way, ending the possibility for the Immortal Cultivators to attack the neighboring towns with the Great Iron Plants as a base.
The subsequent treatments and strengthening for him were actually performed on a gigantic excavator.
As Li Yao had expected, Li Jialing, who was young and whose mind was not steady, had obvious resistance against the two kids.
Or rather, Li Jialing’s reactions were more like the attitudes of a “normal person” when they were faced with information lives. They were thirty percent fearful, thirty percent wary, thirty percent confused, and ten percent shocked, unlike Li Yao, Long Yangjun, and Grand Guardian Xu Zhicheng who could chitchat with the new lives in peace without the slightest concerns of them being “supervillains”, “terrorists”, and “freaks”.
As a matter of fact, when Li Yao introduced Xiaoming and Wenwen to Li Jialing for the first time, the golden-haired young man was dumbfounded for five minutes before he screamed and waved his hands crazily in the medical drugs, unable to accept that “ridiculous” fact at all.
In the few days that followed, he had been engaged in heated cross-species cultural communications with the kids by fighting them three times a day on average.
Of course, the reason why they fought, or why he erected his golden hair and bared his teeth at the kids the moment he saw them, perhaps had nothing to do with the magnificent topic of the destruction of mankind, but purely because the two kids had been torturing him in the weirdest and cruelest ways to exploit the last drop of potentials inside his cells, and he was too heavily wounded to put up any resistance and could only be at the mercy of the little kids.
“Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”
Li Jialing shouted aloud, “Just wait for it! You won’t get things your way! I’m not as gullible as Brother Yao. I’ll certainly keep my eyes on you as a representative of the civilization of mankind!”
“Suit yourself.”
Xiaoming and Wenwen replied with a smile, “If you really want to keep your eyes on us, it is all the more reason why you should hold back the pain and exploit all your potentials to bring out the best of your combat ability! Speaking of which, Uncle Li, are you sure that you are a qualified representative of mankind, when you have golden hair all over your body and a tiger head on your neck? If an ignorant observer is asked to comment on the three of us, they will certainly think that we are more like human beings than you are, won’t they?”
“Brats, who’s a tiger? I’m a lion! The Gold Lion!”
Li Jialing was in such pain that his tears and his snot were running loose together. He gnashed his teeth and said, “Don’t presume that you can deceive me or buy me over through the petty acts of kindness such as helping me treat my wounds or train myself! You know clearly that I’m deeply hostile against you, and yet you are still working so hard to help me train myself. What exactly is your scheme? Ahhhhhh, it hurts! You are doing this on purpose! You are getting back at me because I call you ‘brats’ the whole time, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry, but our computational ability is very precious and limited. Do we really have the time to play such a childish game with you, Uncle Li?”
Li Xiaoming sniffed and said, “We are not interested in buying you over, deceiving you, or getting back at you. It’s only because Dad does have a point. Some sort of ‘safety valve’ or ‘bulwark’ is indeed required between the information lives and the civilization of mankind.
“Do you know that similar ‘safety valves’ are installed on the super crystal processors that are extremely complicated in structure and often overclocked to the point that the temperature is raised to an unbearable level?
“Once the crystal processors are overly heated and loaded and about to collapse, the ‘safety valves’ will be activated to kill the burdensome and dangerous tasks and to activate the cooling system.
“Such ‘safety valves’ are not only beneficial for the users of the crystal processors but also in the favor of the crystal processors themselves. If somebody keeps an eye on them all the time, it will be highly unlikely that the super crystal processors will burn themselves up!
“It’s the same reason for us. According to our careful computation and repetitive deduction, if such a ‘safety valve’ like Uncle Li keeps an eye on us all the time, our overall survival probability and our developmental index will both be significantly increased, at least by 20%!
“Or rather, when our two main threads are really out of control and on a rampage, if you can really kill us, it will be a good thing for the other threads and the whole. It’s like cutting the crazily-expanding branches can make the whole tree grow taller and healthier. Don’t look at me like a fool. I know that you don’t understand it. All you need to do is to remember that you have great responsibilities on your shoulders.”
“Yes, the responsibilities are quite heavy. So, please seize every second to train yourself and try to be mature as soon as possible!”
Li Wenwen remarked, “Not that I’m blaming you, Uncle Li, but you can be childish sometimes… Even more childish than Dad. You two brothers are really tricky!”
The two kids put their hands in their pockets and shook their heads at Li Jialing.
Li Jialing felt that all his veins were breaking out, and that blood was shooting out of his eye sockets.
“Brats, is there still time for me to end this brotherhood with your dad now?”
He asked the opinion of the kids while gnashing his teeth.
Such a scene was repeated at least three days every day.
However, even though he was too painful to pee on his own, Li Jialing had to admit that the help of information lives was necessary for both them and the underground locals.
Without the two kids controlling so many spiritual puppets to help ship assets, maintain the excavators, and ensure the normal functions of the air circulation as well as temperature adjustment devices in the underground towns, more than half of the workers and their families who had just been evacuated from the Great Iron Planets would’ve died.
Right now, not only the workers and their families but also the residents in the dozens of underground towns, including the 10,084th district, which was the destination of their evacuation, had hope to live on until the real brightness came.
More importantly, the two kids upgraded and modified a lot of spiritual puppets.
It was inevitable that they could not bring many spiritual puppets with them on their way to escape from the capital planet. Also, as the distance got longer, their control over the spiritual puppets would be weaker and weaker, until the communication was entirely blocked by the thick rocks.
With that in mind, they simply performed abundant modifications on the crystal processors of the spiritual puppets and encapsulated a lot of orders in them, making the control much easier. The ordinary people were able to command the spiritual puppets orally.
The skilled workers from the Great Iron Plants had plenty of experience working with spiritual puppets in the first place. It was possible for them to learn the basic operation modes in a few days.
After that, they left dozens of spiritual puppets in every underground town they passed by, which carried out the most dangerous missions on behalf of humans as well as the daily maintenance of the sustenance systems of the towns. In such a way, the safety and comfort level of the towns were significantly improved.
The things that the kids did for the underground people were all seen and remembered.
Even Xu Zhicheng, whose spiritual root had been awakened and who had been the Grand Guardian of Nepenthe for years, could barely understand what exactly “information life” was. The real ordinary people who were mostly illiterate were even more confused and care less about it.
They only knew that the two cute kids boasted incredible techniques, brought hope of survival to them, and were very glad to help them.
That was enough.
Wherever the kids reached, they were as popular as Long Yangjun and Li Yao. No, because of their highly deceptive appearances, they were even more loved by the underground ordinary people than Li Yao and Long Yangjun were. The simplest example was their weight. Even though the kids had been built with very accurate and rigorous body management systems, they still put on almost five kilograms after only a couple of days under the passionate “feeding” of the sisters, aunts, and grandmas!
There was barely anything Li Jialing could do about it.
In fact, he had also contributed a lot in the battle of Great Iron Plants. At the very least, he fought the bloody battles to the last moment. Naturally, the workers of the Great Iron Plants and their families did not forget his contributions, and they should bond with him more closely.
However, his current appearance was to blame. It was simply too magnificent and… terrifying. The kids were quite right. If he, a golden-haired and human-shaped lion, was walking together with a pair of lovely children, would there be any doubt about which of them would be more popular?
Besides, not just the underground locals, even Li Yao, Long Yangjun, and Li Jialing needed Xiaoming and Wenwen’s assistance in the critical missions such as magical equipment maintenance, reconnaissance, blockage, and cyberspace interference.
Long Yangjun’s Colossus “Heavenly Crystal” was completely ruined in the battle of Great Iron Plants. She had obviously been infected with Li Yao’s bad luck that a crystal suit or a Colossus must be blown up in every battle.
Thankfully, the three experts in the Divinity Transformation Stage on the Immortal Cultivators’ side left their Colossi behind too.
Of them, the “Moon Devil”, Yue Wushuang’s Colossus, was detonated by herself voluntarily. The central components were almost entirely shattered and melted and couldn’t be recycled at all.
However, the Colossi of “Devilish Abyss” Li Jianyi and “Star Breaker” Song Huanzhen both had broken spiritual residents. The rest of the components were only torn apart at most. Tremendous units and components were still reusable.
Under the careful computation of the kids, Li Yao operated in person and gathered the debris of Long Yangjun, Li Jianyi, and Song Huanzhen’s Colossi, allowing them to be reborn.
There were still a lot of components and plate armor left. They were simply used to repair Li Jialing’s transformative crystal suit by Li Yao extravagantly, who even crafted an unparalleled super Ares Extension out of them.
Using the plate armor and the components of the Colossi to build an Ares Extension was, to quote Li Yao, “something that even the emperors of the Imperium have never tried”.
After the job was complete, Li Yao enthusiastically proposed to name Long Yangjun’s new Colossus.
“I don’t intend to change its name. Let’s just call it ‘Heavenly Crystal’.”
Long Yangjun turned him down heartlessly.