Chapter 133: Expert Xicao
It wasn’t just the Institute of Technology and the Agricultural College. Many other departments were also eager to join this massive development project.
Cheng Qisheng was looking through the research materials when suddenly, her thoughts stirred.
She sensed a new chain of faith.
The important thing was that this chain of faith came from a child of the Duxi Civilization.
Cheng Qisheng shifted her attention to a large kindergarten.
It had been nearly half a year since the infants and toddlers of the Duxi Civilization arrived in Blue Sea. So far, the children of the Duxi Civilization appeared to be growing at roughly the same rate as children of the Blue Sea Civilization.
The half-year-old babies had now entered the babbling stage.
Although they couldn’t speak yet, they could make various unconscious sounds. Every day, aside from eating and drinking, they spent their time crawling around and playing under the guidance of their nursery teachers.
And right now, it was “playtime.”
In reality, this meant the nursery teachers were waving various toys in front of the children—colorful tracking cards, rattles, hand bells, pull toys, grasping balls, and so on.
Among Blue Sea’s “toys,” there was one more item.
A wooden statue of Cheng Qisheng.
When she looked through the perspective of her believer, she happened to see a nursery teacher holding a wooden statue of the Blue Sea Creator God and teasing the children one by one.
“This is the Great Creator God. Come on, little one, watch the shape of my mouth. Great~ Cre~a~tor~ God~”
The Duxi child being teased giggled happily from inside a baby walker, reaching out to grab the statue.
When she reached for it, the teacher gave it to her.
Blue Sea might not have much of anything else, but when it came to statues of the Great Creator God made from all kinds of materials, they had as many as anyone could possibly want.
Cheng Qisheng watched with a baffled expression.
Babies didn’t know any better. If they kept seeing the same toy, it was indeed possible for them to develop an instinctive fondness for it. That vague, innocent fondness could perhaps even turn into faith.
But could simply having a wooden statue make a six-month-old child believe in her?
Cheng Qisheng observed carefully, and then she noticed that the rattles had images of the Creator God carved onto them. The opening scene of the cartoons showed the Creator God lifting up the Safe City. The colorful tracking cards contained various pictures of the Creator God caring for her believers.
On top of that, before meals and before bedtime, the teachers would pray to the statue of the Great Creator God.
The children saw all of this every single day.
Wasn’t it only natural that they would develop an instinctive fondness for the Blue Sea Creator God?
What left Cheng Qisheng both amused and speechless was that the teachers weren’t actually trying to preach. This was simply how the Old Eighths’ kindergarten was set up.
Cheng Qisheng was fairly good about keeping her promises. When she had issued her divine oracle back then, she had ordered that the children of the Duxi Civilization be cared for in exactly the same way as the children of Blue Sea. She hadn’t expected there to be this unexpected bonus.
Perhaps the child didn’t even know what faith meant. But in her innocent confusion, perhaps because she liked Cheng Qisheng, or perhaps because she had developed an attachment to her, she had somehow become one of Cheng Qisheng’s little believers.
Sometimes, planting a willow without intending to only results in shade.
Cheng Qisheng looked at the chubby, fair-skinned little girl who was currently hugging her own foot and trying to chew on it, and gently patted her head.
The little girl froze for a moment, then began giggling happily at the pleasant sensation of having her head patted.
Cheng Qisheng watched as she caught the attention of one of the teachers. The teacher picked her up and started playing the “toss-you-up-high” game with her, making her even happier.
Only then did Cheng Qisheng slowly withdraw her gaze.
She had been deliberately holding back from “booting up” the expert sent by the Duxi Civilization.
For one thing, Blue Sea wasn’t particularly short on water resources anymore.
For another, she still couldn’t completely let her guard down.
Besides, Blue Sea had either been drifting through the vast universe or secretly plotting something on Moon Silk Star, so the matter of “booting up” the expert had simply been put off again and again.
Now, this new chain of faith at least proved that the child really was just a child—the genuine article. Blue Sea had also firmly established itself on Moon Silk Star and now had its own “territory.”
There was also plenty of contaminated wastewater on the wasteland that needed to be “detoxified.”
It was time to awaken that Duxi expert.
Moreover, with Blue Sea going all-out to conquer these new technologies, having an expert from an interstellar civilization around might perhaps provide some additional help.
The divine oracle was issued.
The Blue Sea official assigned to make contact with the Duxi expert entered the room and flipped the switch on the back of the robot in front of him.
The light on top of the robot’s head lit up.
The expert from the Duxi Civilization, Xicao, opened his mechanical eyes, which glimmered faintly with a pale-white halo.
He froze for a second, as though the soul that had once belonged to a human needed a moment to process its current situation.
Soon, Xicao, whose body had the appearance of a robot, looked at the Blue Sea official standing before him.
“Hello. I’m Xicao. My specialty is purifying water resources contaminated by subspace.”
“Hello, I’m Hu Jing. We’re from Blue Sea Safe City.”
Xicao accepted this very smoothly and remained perfectly calm.
“Yes. It seems my civilization has entrusted me to you. Rest assured, I will serve you to the best of my ability.”
He looked around. Since his head was mechanically constructed, the movement appeared somewhat stiff.
“If there were no unexpected incidents, there should be a thousand children who came with me. I’d like to see them.”
As expected, these Duxi experts were fully aware of their mission.
Cheng Qisheng gave the order: “Take him to see the children.”
Hu Jing gestured for him to follow. “Please come with us.”
Xicao followed behind them. To be honest, although he had undergone a period of training after becoming a mechanical lifeform, the memories from his time as a human still accounted for the vast majority of his existence, so he wasn’t particularly accustomed to this body.
But compared with that minor discomfort, Xicao was much more eager to see whether the children were doing well.
Although he had only just awakened, as a mechanical civilization, his system automatically recorded the time when he was brought online.
The record showed that he had left the mechanical hibernation pod 170 days ago.
In other words, the Duxi Civilization had handed him over to this Safe City 170 days ago.
But why was he only being brought online now?
Had this Safe City encountered some unexpected incident, or had they decided that it would be better not to activate him for the time being?
One hundred and seventy days had passed. Without him there to supervise them, had the children who came with him been properly cared for?
Xicao ran through all kinds of possibilities in his mind, but he didn’t ask the people of Blue Sea about it.
There was no point in asking such questions before he had seen the children.
His mission was to take good care of these children, and he would use his own judgment to determine how they were doing.
Xicao’s database contained a detailed set of criteria for making that assessment.
He didn’t expect the children to eat well, drink well, and live lives of pure comfort. That was simply impossible in the apocalypse.
What’s more, this was a Safe City belonging to a lower-level civilization. The environment in which the children grew up wasn’t going to be particularly good.
But there was nothing to be done about that.
To avoid attracting the attention of higher-level civilizations, the Duxi Civilization would only send him and the children to civilizations that were somewhat lower in level.
Within a lower-level civilization, if the Duxi children were abused, Xicao would immediately destroy himself. A lower-level civilization would have no way to stop him from doing so. With so much at stake, those civilizations would naturally abide by their agreement.
But if they were sent to a relatively higher-level civilization, things would be different. If the other side possessed even slightly more advanced technological means, Xicao could be forcibly activated and have his memories extracted.
After all, he was now a mechanical lifeform, making memory extraction much easier.
And Xicao wasn’t the only one who might meet such a fate. The vast number of “experts” stored by the Duxi Civilization would also be viewed as “prey” by higher-level civilizations.
So all Xicao needed to know was that the children were able to live lives that weren’t too different from those of the children in this Safe City.
Or even a little worse was fine.
It was understandable that children from one’s own civilization might receive different treatment from children of another civilization.
As long as they weren’t deliberately abused and weren’t allowed to go too hungry, it was all within Xicao’s acceptable range.
As long as they could survive, that was enough.
As he walked, Xicao looked at his surroundings.
Wasn’t this decorating style a little too… white?
This Safe City was living through the apocalypse, yet it could still maintain an aesthetic like this?
At this moment, he even had the strange feeling that he was looking at a technology company from his mother civilization.
Xicao had never been brought online before, so naturally, he had no idea that the pure-white corridor he was seeing had been hastily built by Blue Sea specifically to disguise itself as the “Company.”
He simply made a note in his database: “This civilization places considerable importance on the appearance of its buildings.”
As they passed a glass window, Xicao happened to look up. His mechanical eyes caught sight of a gigantic “spaceship-like object” high in the distant sky.
He was a mechanical being now and, in theory, had no emotions. Yet the data streams inside him became thoroughly scrambled for several seconds at the sight.
For an object that large to be flying through the sky, Xicao couldn’t calculate any possibility other than a spaceship.
How could this be?
According to the plan, wasn’t he supposed to be sent to a somewhat lower-level civilization?
Blue Sea Safe City shouldn’t have spaceships.
Cheng Qisheng noticed Xicao looking up at the sky outside, so she had Aether pull up the surveillance footage from the location corresponding to his line of sight.
Oh! He was looking at the floating farmland!
This thing was a specialty of the world where the Safe City and the Kingdom of Lilith were located. Moon Silk Star didn’t have it.
But the reason floating farmland was called “floating farmland” was because, unless it crashed, it was destined to remain floating in the sky. There was no way to hide it.
So one of Blue Sea’s higher-ups had come up with a brilliant idea.
They incorporated the shape of an airship into the exterior of the floating farmland, designed a shell to wrap around it, and then used tow lines to make the shell “inflate.”
From the perspective of the locals on Moon Silk Star, the floating farmland looked like an enormous flying object when viewed from a distance.
They might assume it was an airship, or perhaps some other high-tech flying vehicle developed by the [Company]. Either way, there was no way they could tell from its exterior that there was actually farmland inside.
What?
You ask what would happen if someone looked at it from up close?
They couldn’t get close. Not even a little.
When Blue Sea had “entertained” Lord Broken River back then, they had taken him through a specially constructed pure-white passageway. From the angle of that passage, there was absolutely no way to see outside.
And once outside the city, the view from ground level was blocked by the towering city walls.
Even from farther away, all they could see was the exterior of the floating farmland, which looked like some kind of enormous flying vehicle.
Even the suspended roads had been fitted with tunnel-like barriers, with the exteriors painted white. From a distance, the entire Blue Sea Safe City, from top to bottom, had the sleek, high-end, pure-white aesthetic of advanced technology.
What if a real airship approached Blue Sea?
If it hadn’t gotten too close yet, they would communicate with it first. If communication failed, they would attack.
And if they couldn’t beat it, they’d simply run away with the entire city and everyone in it.
Cheng Qisheng and everyone in Blue Sea maintained the same mindset at all times: “Stay if we can; run if we can’t.”
—But wasn’t this Duxi expert spending a little too long staring at the floating farmland?
The official leading the way, Hu Jing, turned around as well.
“Expert Xicao?”
“Sorry, I’m coming.”
Xicao temporarily stopped his calculations and continued following behind Hu Jing, the data in his database still slightly scrambled by what he had just seen.
He told himself that none of this was important. What mattered was first making sure the children were safe and finding out what kind of environment they were growing up in.
—At last, they arrived at the indoor kindergarten. As the teacher opened the door, Xicao followed them inside.
He saw a whole room full of Duxi children who had been raised by Blue Sea to be plump and healthy, just like the other Blue Sea children. They were laughing and giggling as they crawled all over the floor, clinging to climbing frames and rocking them back and forth, then rolling around on the floor from time to time.
They were incredibly lively.
Expert Xicao felt that his already-confused database had become even more chaotic.
These children had ample biological mass, normal skeletal muscle tone, and hair that was glossy with health. Blue Sea had genuinely taken excellent care of them.
Blue Sea could construct such an enormous complex of buildings in the middle of the apocalypse, possess gigantic flying objects, and even raise infants and toddlers from another civilization until they were plump and healthy.
—Blue Sea really was a higher-level civilization, wasn’t it?
What was his mother civilization thinking?
How had they somehow sent him to a higher-level civilization?
The data streams inside Expert Xicao’s body went haywire, and for a moment, he had no idea what he was supposed to do.
—Clap, clap, clap, clap!
A Blue Sea child about six months old was crawling rapidly across the carpet, grabbing toys with great determination. When the child passed by Expert Xicao and found him blocking the way, the little one charged ahead with the unstoppable spirit of someone hacking through every obstacle, crawling straight over his mechanical feet.
—Clap, clap, clap, clap!
Behind the Blue Sea child, a Duxi child with pale-green hair and two tiny antennae on their forehead waving energetically followed along with exactly the same swagger, crawling rapidly after them.
When the Duxi child passed him, they even looked up at him. After confirming that he wasn’t going to move out of the way, the child simply shifted one palm, made a slight detour around him, and continued crawling forward with the same unabashed confidence.
Expert Xicao: “…”
He looked around the spacious kindergarten playroom.
On the left, a Duxi child was furiously shaking a furry climbing frame standing in the room.
On the right, a Duxi child was rolling around on the floor with a Blue Sea child in a tight embrace.
They rolled once, then again, and again, and again… completely enjoying themselves and showing no sign of getting tired of it.
Expert Xicao: “…”
No matter how he calculated or assessed the situation, these children really had been raised extremely well.
Every single one of them was chubby and plump, obviously very well cared for.
They weren’t merely healthy.
They were lively.
Lively, lively, and lively.
Before becoming part of a mechanical civilization, Expert Xicao had never had any experience taking care of children. At this moment, he couldn’t help searching through his memory database, trying to find an answer.
The proportion of non-directed exploratory behavior among Duxi children at this age…
Had it always been this high?
