Chapter 152 The Prajnaparamita Mechanical Spirit Tower.
Xue Chao's headset suddenly lit up, its core separated, disassembled and transformed into a mechanical spider. Smelling the "smell" of the wires, it crawled toward his head, seemingly trying to burrow into the temporary connector he had just made, but was caught by Xue Chao.
The spider's eight legs twisted and gripped the watch he had stolen from the block. Electronic ripples spread, forming an invisible electronic space, where Holder's consciousness projection sat beside him.
“You are at Wuliang Temple.” Holder touched the mechanical falcon on his shoulder, the logo of Shenzhou Corporation under its wings.
"You are at the secret headquarters of Shenzhou Company in the Pure Land." Holder's identity was indeed that of the missing shareholder of Shenzhou Company.
Holder nodded: "We just saw off our partners; the locals know a lot."
"Baoxiangyuan Opera House." The troublemakers thought they were buying time for their companions backstage to find weapons, but in reality, tonight's performance was a diversionary tactic by the opera house.
But Holder said, "It's not a theater; the company that partnered with Shenzhou was Vajra Monk."
The Vajra Monks are the same group of monks who hijacked the car. They include wandering monks and monks from various temples. They possess advanced and numerous prosthetic bodies and are knowledgeable in Buddhism, making them truly the best choice for the company…
Xue Chao's focus shifted. Based on the camera angles and the intelligence he had gathered, none of these Vajra monks were from Wuliang Temple.
Vajra Monk and Wuliang Temple are two different things.
Xue Chao: "What are the names of the monks at Wuliang Temple?"
Holder: "Ascetics, people in this world call them the most 'original' practitioners."
Xue Chao understood the mystery behind the name: "They, like us when we first arrived, do not have prosthetic bodies."
Holder: "Attaining enlightenment in this very body, ascetics believe that there is no need for machinery; the physical body can be used to realize the Dharma and attain enlightenment."
Xue Chao: "The monks split into two factions."
One faction adapts to the times, dons artificial bodies to become indestructible, and seeks to sever all dharmas, calling themselves "Vajra"; the other faction follows ancient methods, cultivates Buddhism in the flesh, realizes their true nature, and attains their original state, practicing "asceticism" in the process of destroying dharma.
Xue Chao: "...It wasn't Shenzhou Company that released it."
Holder: "Yes, it was indeed taken away."
Xue Chao's eyes turned cold: "Sha Na was released by Wuliang Temple. The opera house is in cahoots with them."
He also found the surveillance footage, which showed that after the weapons were stolen, they were not taken to the opera house, but were instead sent to the underground waterway network controlled by Wuliang Temple, waiting for the moment to surface.
But why did Wuliang Temple do this?
They are the undisputed rulers of the Pure Land. Whether they are truly compassionate or secretly regard all beings as ants, they possess the Wuliang Temple, which represents absolute power. What threat could these animals or even humans pose to warrant the use of such weapons?
Surely it's not because they think there are too many parasites, or that they're controlling the population... parasite control?
Xue Chao: "What's with the prayer wheel? It doesn't look like the one from Shenzhou Company."
Holder: "Therefore, in the Pure Land, there is only one force that can enable all machines to share the same running code."
Xue Chao: "It's still Wuliang Temple."
Holder: "It seems you're actually in the heart of the dungeon. Impressive."
Xue Chao only understood the meaning of the hands-off manager: "Am I more capable, or are you trying to slack off?"
Holder smiled and said, "Be careful in everything. It's not just the monks who will be divided. After this cybernetic update, the factions between players will become more distinct in the next critical period, and that's when you'll be in charge."
Xue Chao: "What do you mean?"
As Holder had said beforehand, a large number of people in a dungeon will inevitably lead to conflict. Even if there isn't any conflict, the dungeon will create conflict in order to increase activity and give everyone a focal point.
"And you, the host, the only observer, are to maintain the balance of their confrontation, let them go through a tug-of-war, increase the drama, and then, when necessary, directly help one side to bring the situation to a close."
To put it nicely, they're behind-the-scenes manipulators; to put it bluntly, they're troublemakers. It's no wonder that these hosts are viewed with hostility.
Even after Xue Chao left the Guanyin statue, the feeling of being watched did not disappear.
The cold, piercing gaze he felt in the theater was the gaze of a person, but after encountering the Thousand-Hand Guanyin statue, it was the Guanyin statue that was watching him.
It's as if, while he's looking down upon the Pure Land through a thousand Buddha eyes, those thousand eyes are also looking inward at him.
This time, he went around to the Hall of Rebirth.
In addition to caring about the injured, he also paid attention to the condition of the deceased.
The bodies were taken away and collected for "recycling," which means removing their prosthetic bodies and reusing them.
He discovered something very interesting: when the person connected lost vital signs and the prosthetic body was removed, scripture code would fill the entire component, like a virus taking over a computer desktop, and then disappear.
According to the prosthetics business, this is an automatic formatting process, deleting information from the previous host.
Xue Chao saw an NPC whose body was 90% equipped with prosthetics. Based on the ratio of carbon-based to silicon-based prosthetics, he looked more like a robot than a human.
After his death, dense scripture code covered almost his entire body, so from a distance, he looked like a virtual humanoid figure made up of countless codes.
In the surveillance footage, Xue Chao saw a mechanical tower behind the Hall of Rebirth, which enshrines the Three Western Saints. The tower's appearance looked familiar to him.
He had been to the Potala Palace and seen the stupas containing the remains of high-ranking monks or religious leaders.
But this is a very short mechanical stupa, like a memorial tablet or a small tombstone on a barren mountain; it's like an electronic cemetery.
The stone base and tower base that should have been made of stone have been replaced by translucent, off-white metal, with dense electrical panels and wires clearly visible, emitting zigzag strips or dots of light.
The finial, which should have been made of gold, silver, or bronze, emitted neon light. Although it was golden, the closer you got, the weaker the sense of holiness became, and the stronger the cold mechanical feeling became. Every line was an electronic circuit.
All circuits are connected to the black chip suspended in the center.
The chip remained motionless, yet it possessed a sense of presence, neither like a living person nor a dead person, but rather like a breathless ghost somewhere in between.
Xue Chao casually pulled an electrical wire from the Guanyin statue and plugged it into the pagoda's entrance. The pagoda's image was "lit up" like a touchscreen phone, and electronic scriptures immediately flowed across the metal pagoda's body. A virtual human figure was projected onto the pagoda's finial.
Virtual legs overlap with the real spirit tower, blending into the neon light, like a legless ghost floating on its own grave.
Judging from his clothing and appearance, he is a gang member. His electronic circuit runs from his cheek across his neck, with two electrodes below his collarbone.
Xue Chao calmly stepped back a little, but the realistic projection reacted even more strongly than he did, charging forward with a fierce look in its eyes: "Who are you! I will never betray the Razor Gang, I swear to be loyal to Boss Jim to the death!"
Xue Chao dodged to the side, and the person disappeared abruptly after passing six meters around the tower, never to be seen again.
This person is dead. Jim was the former leader of the Razor Claws. He died in a gang conflict before the player entered the Pure Land. The current one is called Neil, and the member he sent to rest in peace in the theater was Neil's second-in-command.
Xue Chao changed to another tower. The homeless man cowered and looked at him, revealing a fierce look, but compared to the gang members, he seemed all bark and no bite.
The homeless man had no obvious prosthetics. When Xue Chao approached, the homeless man subconsciously raised his hand to cover himself, revealing his severed hand. The prosthetics were cheap, so he used a broken claw retracted in his cavity to replace his fingers.
The homeless man quietly backed away, looking around. Seeing that Xue Chao didn't intend to attack him, he cautiously asked, "Where is this? Are you... what kind of experiment are you conducting? I know you go to the slums to collect materials, but I have nothing..."
Xue Chao then adopted the demeanor of a cool lab member: "Do you remember where you ended up?" It was like a routine lab question.
"At the end of Y Street, fighting for food, with sharp glass buildings behind him, sir..." The homeless man retreated to a distance of six meters in diameter and disappeared.
Y Street in the slums had long been absorbed into the gang district, and the glass building must have "once existed," but this homeless man died even earlier.
He tried several more towers, but the mechanical spirit towers were arranged according to the order of death of the deceased, without any further division based on their status.
He found in the surveillance footage that three days ago, spies from the gang infiltrated the theater. A group of apprentices were tricked into the gang's neighborhood, had their cybernetic bodies removed, and were then killed. Their bodies were thrown into the slums and eaten by the homeless.
At the time, Mr. Tang was not at home. One of the staff noticed something was wrong and could not contact Mr. Tang.
Because one of his adopted sons was among those apprentices, he anxiously followed them, but was unfortunately discovered and died.
The troublemakers who stormed the theater today were taken away by the robot and will suffer the same fate. This play is also the theater's revenge.
The person in the costume was an old man from the theater who had been in charge for many years. Xue Chao wanted to find out when Boss Tang had entered the theater, but just as he was about to look at the Spirit Tower area, which was about three days ago, the creepy feeling of the beast secretly watching him came again.
His gaze naturally swept over it, and Holder happened to reappear in the earpiece.
After observing, the old gentleman quickly concluded: "The prayer wheels are collecting their consciousness information and uploading it here after they die."
The prayer wheel program is indeed more than just a fancy "boot screen"; it's a virus lurking within all prosthetic devices.
In other words, there are not only spirit towers here that have collected the consciousness of the dead, but also spirit towers that are collecting the consciousness information of the living.
Those are the towers behind, their finials even dimmer.
Are these copies of consciousness created by code, or are they real consciousness?
Holder fell into deep thought: "The consciousness of the homeless is also uploaded..." What value could they possibly have?
"The consciousness data of all those equipped with prosthetics are here." Xue Chao raised his chin at the few completely dark spirit towers in the distance. "The consciousness of those 'original people' is the ultimate target of Wuliang Temple. Releasing them was to create casualties and accelerate the assembly of prosthetics."
The ascetics are also native, but they secretly control the consciousness of everyone in the Pure Land through prosthetic machines. What do they want to do?
He initially thought that Shenzhou Company was going to take over the Pure Land, but it was the Wuliang Temple that released it, which was much more decisive than the company.
Shenzhou Corporation shouldn't be that stupid. Setsuna was just bait to see how Wuliang Temple would react.
Shenzhou Corporation knew some important information about Wuliang Temple.
Xue Chao: "What is the company's purpose?"
Holder: "Catch the traitor."
Xue Chao thought he had misunderstood it as Infinite Corporation, but when he met Holder's eyes, he realized that Shenzhou Corporation in the instance was also catching traitors.
Holder: "Shenzhou Corporation had a top-secret research project that could achieve complete consciousness uploading, which was handled by the company's most cutting-edge scientific and technological talents. However, he ran away with the research results six months ago, even though it was not yet completed at that time."
"It's finished now." Xue Chao looked at the mechanical spirit tower complex. "And the progress is encouraging. Shenzhou Corporation can even conquer the moon, yet they can't retain their key technical personnel?"
"He is over two hundred years old, and even the most advanced technology can no longer support his life. He is researching consciousness uploading in order to load his consciousness into a robot and achieve immortality."
Xue Chao: "But he ran away... The Pure Land offers him the eternal life he desires."
"That's right. At that time, there was a big rumor that Subhuti, the abbot of Wuliang Temple, had become a Buddha, so he fled here and used secrets to knock on the door of Wuliang Temple."
It sounds so familiar, is Lee Chang-young, the host who defected from Infinite Company, really just a random alternate?
"Encompassing everyone's consciousness is enough to create another Pure Land..." Xue Chao temporarily put aside the matter of the Infinite Company, and a flash of inspiration struck him, "The Spirit Towers record the consciousness of different people, but the rules for their operation are the same. Just like prayer wheels use the Six-Syllable Mantra as their operating code, these Spirit Towers should also have the same 'code'."
The Buddhist canon, comprising the Tripitaka and twelve divisions of scriptures, is vast and complex. However, if we use these as "1"s and "0"s to form a code system, there will always be times when the same phrase is used. Similarly, no two leaves are exactly alike, but many leaves do resemble each other.
Finding the common point among all the leaves is impossible with the naked eye alone, unless one's consciousness is also immersed in this sea of consciousness... Xue Chao acted on his thought, plugging the wire behind his head and inserting the other end into the empty mechanical spirit tower that was not lit.
In an instant, glowing Song-style scripture covered the entire dark electronic cemetery, continuously circulating.
Xue Chao skillfully endured the pain, but the shaking gave him a headache. The tower had disappeared, replaced by a group of living, breathing people, their shadows flickering.
Four words appear repeatedly in the densely packed scriptures, in bold capital letters, at everyone's feet like bamboo rafts carrying them across a river: "Compassionate Ferry Across the Sea of Suffering".
“The Buddha is not far away on Mount Ling, for Mount Ling is only in your heart. Everyone has a pagoda on Mount Ling, so cultivate yourself beneath it.”[1]
A hoarse voice came from behind. Xue Chao turned around and saw a monk sitting cross-legged on the ground. His robe was tattered and he was dirty, but he didn't seem to care. Instead, he stared at Xue Chao for a long time and then sighed, "Benefactor, the sea of suffering is boundless, but turning back is the shore."
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