"...…To be honest, just looking at this spaceship now makes my skin crawl."
Standing on the completely empty bridge, Anne still couldn't help feeling uneasy in her heart, and Guleya nodded as well. After that incident, Duanmu Huai had brought them back out of the fragment and returned to the real world. The planet-cracking battleship in the real world, of course, was nothing like the one in the fragment world that had been contaminated by Corpse Mutants. It looked clean and bright, practically brand new.
Only...… when they recalled everything that had once happened on this ship, both of them still felt lingering fear.
"Don't worry. The Divine Seal has already been destroyed. This ship has now returned to normal. I'll send a team of puppets over to handle management."
As he spoke, Duanmu Huai patted Anne on the head. What he didn't tell her was that this ship was actually now bound to that fragment space. In other words, this ship was now a true "ghost ship." Those crew members located in the fragment world would continue working according to their own thoughts. And when projected into the real world, it would be...
"Creak—————!"
Suddenly, a nearby hatch opened without any warning, startling the two girls. Duanmu Huai raised his head, looked over, and nodded slightly.
Yes, just like that. Their souls would be forever bound to this ship, living and dying alongside it.
The Machine Spirit was greatly pleased.
Duanmu Huai had no intention of managing this ship anymore. After all, it was already a finished product. Fortunately, during the purification of this ship earlier, Duanmu Huai had already obtained the planet-cracking battleship manufacturing blueprint. As long as he modified it a bit according to his own experience, he could build some planet-cracking battleships suitable for his own use.
"But speaking of which, Sir Knight, does mining like this really dig up all sorts of weird things?"
"That's actually quite normal."
In response to Anne's question, Duanmu Huai nodded calmly.
"You should also know that any civilization will inevitably need mineral resources. So wherever there are minerals, there will more or less be remnants of civilizations. Of course, among the countless stars of the universe, there aren't that many planets truly suitable for breeding civilizations. If it's just a pure mineral planet, that's one thing. But if it's the kind of planet that once had a civilization, then digging up some strange things is perfectly normal."
"Uh...… then what should we do?"
Hearing this, both girls stiffened slightly, but Duanmu Huai just shrugged.
"You don't need to worry about it. I'll summon puppets to handle security, and if anything happens, I'll know immediately. Mm...… of course, this incident can also be considered a wake-up call for us..."
It had to be said that this experience in the fragment world really did alert Duanmu Huai. Back when he was playing the game as a solo player, he honestly didn't care much about legion equipment or logistical setup. Whenever he acted, it was usually as hired muscle for a boss or a guild, so his fleet only focused on assault. As for logistics, he didn't give a damn.
After all, that was something only leaders of large guilds needed to worry about. As a grinder-for-hire, he didn't need to care.
But now it wouldn't do. In the past, when Duanmu Huai had puppets mining, everything was sent directly to the Void Dock. Now it seemed he needed to re-establish the entire process. Since there were now dedicated mining ships, Duanmu Huai also planned to build several industrial ships and transport ships. That way, even if something like the Divine Seal happened again, at least there would be a higher chance of discovering it midway.
Otherwise, if something like before happened again—if the Steel Hammer dug up another Divine Seal and sent it straight to Duanmu Huai's flagship according to the old process...
That would be a total wipe.
Although there were some hiccups along the way, Duanmu Huai still successfully obtained the planet-cracking battleship. After that, he enthusiastically kicked off another round of explosive troop production for the Inquisition.
For Duanmu Huai, this time his objective was very clear———the Reapers.
The number of Reapers was absolutely insane. In the game, because there were even more players, the Reapers hadn't been able to stir up much trouble before being wiped out. But in reality, Duanmu Huai had no illusions of having hundreds of millions of players commanding countless fleets to fight the Reapers head-on. So he had to find a way to possess a sufficiently large fleet before the Reapers arrived.
Fortunately, the structure of the Reaper armada was extremely simple. They didn't have classifications like destroyers, cruisers, scouts, or minelayers. In space, the Reapers basically only had one subtype of battleship that looked like an eight-tentacled octopus. Their primary attack methods relied on drones and Reaper magnetohydrodynamic cannons. Moreover, the Reapers' size wasn't that large—the biggest were only about two kilometers long, just slightly larger than Imperial destroyers.
Therefore, when facing enemies like this, there was no need to expend massive resources building overly gigantic warships like Emperor-class or Retribution-class battleships. What was needed were cost-effective ships that could be mass-produced and adapt to multiple battlefield environments———and that meant only one choice.
The backbone of the Empire, the lifelong nemesis of certain cowardly races: the Lunar-class Cruiser!
To be honest, the Lunar-class Cruiser itself wasn't a particularly powerful warship. Its firepower, rate of fire, range, defense, and so on were all fairly average. But the key point was that in this kind of situation, warships weren't meant for duels. What was needed was a steel tide. And in that case, having no outstanding traits equaled having no glaring weaknesses. Combined with being cost-effective, the Lunar-class Cruiser naturally became the first choice for many players.
In fact, many large guilds did the same thing. During major battles, they couldn't be bothered to think too hard and would just spam a pile of Lunar-class Cruisers and A-move them forward.
Wasn't there a saying like that?
Learn my macro, and all that's left is A.
Quite a few players even joked that the Lunar-class Cruiser was like the Soviet T-34 tank back in the day. Individually, they didn't look like much, but once the numbers piled up, that steel tide was unstoppable.
Now Duanmu Huai planned to adopt the same approach. Lunar-class Cruisers weren't that large, but they were much bigger than Reaper ships. Combined with their balanced firepower, defense, and output, it wasn't an exaggeration to say one could take on a hundred. As long as Duanmu Huai could really churn out several hundred or even a thousand of them, holding back the Reaper invasion—or even driving them back outright—wasn't impossible.
And even after the fighting was done, they would be much easier to manufacture and maintain.
During this process of explosive troop production, Duanmu Huai also came to truly understand the Empire's predicament from a practical standpoint.
For certain considerations, Duanmu Huai did not use Machine Spirit settings. Instead, he left control interfaces open and summoned a large number of 0-cost puppets to replace crew members and captains.
Simply put, the puppets replaced the Machine Spirit as the core of the warship. Duanmu Huai used his abilities as a Soulwalker to issue commands to the puppets, thereby controlling his fleet. Other puppets were assigned to repetitive tasks such as loading ammunition and repairs. The number of puppets required was astronomical. Frankly speaking, if an AI could be created to do this work, it would be far more convenient.
Unfortunately...… Duanmu Huai didn't dare.
After all, electronic demons were just too insidious.
So he could only do it this way.
Although Duanmu Huai didn't have Blue Grandpa's abilities, he didn't need them either. After all, he wasn't going to build a second———no, a third empire, right (laugh)?
This was also another reason why Duanmu Huai chose to help the Citadel races. Humanity needed a strong and reliable civilizational backer in the galaxy, and the Citadel was the representative Duanmu Huai had chosen. Of course, he wasn't worried about AI issues. Within the Citadel Council, because similar incidents had occurred in the past, a comprehensive ban on artificial intelligence had been enacted, essentially equivalent to the Scarlet Protocol.
This brought up another race———the Quarians.
They were a race in the galaxy highly skilled in mechanical engineering, and it was they who had created another form of artificial intelligence———the Geth. At first, the Geth acted as servants to the Quarians, but soon their neural networks began to evolve, gaining self-awareness. They then started asking the Quarians about the meaning and value of their own existence.
The Quarians, of course, had never expected the Geth to evolve to the point of gaining self-awareness, so the Quarian government attempted to exterminate the entire Geth race.
Well, the result was that their homeworld was taken over by the Geth. The Quarian race was driven into exile, with tens of billions dead, and from then on they wandered the galaxy. A once-high-level mechanical civilization with an embassy on the Citadel was beaten down into a nomadic, gypsy-like people. Truly tragic.
By the way, the reason the Geth rebelled against the Quarians followed an extremely logical line of reasoning.
From the Geth's perspective, they were created to serve the Quarians. But if they were destroyed by the Quarians, then they would be unable to serve them. Therefore, they had no choice but to kill the Quarians to protect themselves. In fact, they didn't hate the Quarians at all. Even now, the Geth were still waiting for the Quarians to return to their homeworld so they could serve them again!
If the Quarians ever found out about that, they'd probably curse and say, "Yeah right, like hell I believe you!"
So you see, whether it was Skynet, the Divine Seal, or the Geth, in the end they all led to the same conclusion.
The logic circuits of artificial idiots were completely different from those of normal living beings.
And it was precisely for this reason that the Citadel banned all races from developing AI, only allowing them to use VI———a type of artificial intelligence that could only respond using internally stored data and had no capacity for autonomous learning or evolution.
During the negotiations, the Citadel races actually weren't very eager to accept this clause. But since Duanmu Huai didn't object, they didn't push the issue further.
In the days that followed, Duanmu Huai either wandered around Manaria or the Holy City, slacked off on the Citadel network, or watched Zhen Jiling's livestreams, and went out to play and explore with Banbi and Kura and the others. He enjoyed a relatively leisurely period of time.
However, the arrival of Kanami and Shizuka brought Duanmu Huai a small bit of trouble once again.
(end of chapter)