Chapter 138: Data Ascension Unveiled Ahead of Time

Ji Cheng leaned into the most comfortable position on the sofa, recalled Shana and An Chan, opened the planetary local area network access pod, and began searching for that string of garbled characters.

Sometime ago, Ji Cheng had provided Ji Ruoyue with the technical key points regarding "digital ascension". Now, after all this time, it was almost time to see results.

The garbled name was quickly found. He took a deep breath, and with a tap of his finger, the glowing screen stopped flickering, and the beep of the access pod extinguished.

Silence. Peace.

His consciousness began to rise and levitate, entering the Gaia network.

Moments later, Ji Cheng recovered his five senses and arrived once again in the boundless, pitch-black void.

Before him lay the magnificent and mysterious headquarters of the Mechanicus.

He stretched his limbs and walked inward.

...

The council hall was remote, ancient, desolate, and infinitely vast. The mechanical torches remained unlit.

Ji Cheng sat upright on the throne like a monarch.

"Let's pull in two more people this time; it's about time to build a small foundation."

Using his administrative authority, he sent a message to Ji Ruoyue, casually selected two deep-space black-spot channels, revoked their encryption keys, and waited briefly.

...

In the Milky Way Empire's Shuofang Province, inside a war planet undergoing emergency repairs.

Nie Yuanlong finished submitting a maintenance report and rubbed his temples.

He wore the attire of a mid-ranking imperial officer. Attached to his scapulae on his back was a mechanical arm. Even when he closed his eyes to rest, the mechanical arm playfully tapped against a light screen.

"Two more turrets damaged in my sector... those damn bugs..."

Just then, the mechanical arm inadvertently triggered an option.

A black halo flickered across Nie Yuanlong's body, and he instantly collapsed onto his chair.

...

Tianqi Province, Outer Bay Star.

"You damn scumbags, search more carefully! My performance quota for this month is still more than half short."

"If we can't find two hundred units of flesh-gold today, none of you will have a good time!"

Niu Xin sat atop a hovering craft, shouting at the top of his lungs.

After circling once above the sea of dark heads, he opened a light screen and muttered,

"Bloody hell, the monthly quotas keep going up. Even if we strip this patch of land bare, we won't find that much. They're all damn capitalists, vampires!"

He slammed his fist against the light screen in frustration.

...

"Master!"

The moment Ji Ruoyue entered the Gaia network, before she even had time to open her eyes, she cried out with a thrill of excited trembling.

Huh?

She suddenly realized that the mysterious hall, which ought to have been vast, empty, and profound, now contained two slightly blurred and ethereal figures in addition to the Master.

New members had arrived.

Ji Ruoyue felt a passing pang of loss at the thought of losing her exclusive favor, but she quickly adjusted herself, obediently bowing to Ji Cheng to pay her respects and greet him.

"What... is this place?"

"Am I dead?"

Nie Yuanlong and Niu Xin spoke successively.

The empty, dark nihilism upon entering the Gaia network had terrified them.

That peculiar sensation of levitation—lacking vision, hearing, and the ability to control even the smallest muscle in one's body—felt just like death.

Ji Ruoyue looked at the two of them.

She felt as though a scene from when she was first pulled in was being replayed. Anyone waking up from such deathly stillness to find themselves in a strange place would inevitably try to figure out what was happening.

Ji Cheng, seated upon the throne, clearly paid more attention to observing their detailed reactions than Ji Ruoyue did. He could clearly see everyone's true appearance and facial expressions.

"A young officer from Shuofang Province. Seems relatively calm—well, relatively, of course."

Wait, if this face were a bit more mature, wouldn't it be Nie Yuanlong?

Someone whose name he remembered wasn't necessarily a major figure who would shake the winds and clouds in the future; they could just as easily be a running joke.

In the early game versions, this person was an NPC officer who needed to be protected during an escort mission. If you failed the mission, he would deliver the line, "I never expected that the future Grand Marquess would die today." Because of this, he had enjoyed a brief spell of popularity on the forums.

Things were getting interesting. The corner of Ji Cheng's mouth twitched as he looked at the other person.

"The other one is... ordinarily dressed, ordinary looking, impossible to tell what he does."

Probably not a terribly significant figure.

Ji Cheng silently made his judgment.

He had no interest in chatting individually with either of them, so he simply tapped the long table with his knuckles, letting the distant, heavy thuds echo through the hall.

Ji Cheng glanced at Ji Ruoyue, then slowly shifted his gaze to the two newcomers.

Where's your situational awareness, little imperial princess?

Ji Ruoyue understood Ji Cheng's look; it was a prompt for her to do the introductions.

"This is a higher-dimensional space."

No longer facing Ji Cheng, her tone and demeanor turned icy and detached, as if she were speaking to two inanimate objects.

"Do not make wild conjectures about the Master's identity. You only need to know that everything about you is no longer under your own control."

"Therefore, maintain your awe, and maintain your humility."

This speech completely stunned Nie Yuanlong and Niu Xin.

Although they didn't quite understand what a higher-dimensional space was, the scene before their eyes and the changes in their bodies were indeed unprecedented, miraculous spectacles.

Nie Yuanlong, in particular, discovered that the artificial arm he had implanted, along with his entire body, had become ethereal and illusory.

Furthermore, the mechanical arm that should have been controlled by his neural chip refused to move at all.

These scientific-defying changes to his body led him to classify Ji Cheng as some mysterious bigwig belonging to an ancient civilization's remains.

And at the very least, an ancient civilization with a technological level far surpassing the Empire.

With Ji Ruoyue providing heavy assistance from the sidelines, the two men soon expressed their willingness to submit and pledge their allegiance.

However, when Ji Cheng uttered the words "Belong to me as your god", the two of them suffered yet another shock.

Could mythological creatures actually exist in the universe?

Was this person truly a legendary deity?

Impossible, right...

Ji Cheng ignored their lingering skepticism and turned to converse with Ji Ruoyue instead.

"The personality anchors—have you figured them out?"

Hearing Ji Cheng address her, Ji Ruoyue's cold and noble face instantly melted away like ice under the spring sun: "Master! When I first proposed this academic hypothesis at my coming-of-age ceremony, it completely terrified those old fossils at the Royal Academy of Sciences."

"Not only did they invest all their scientific research resources, but they also pulled personnel from numerous subordinate research institutes to conduct massive experimentation and verification. The latest progress reports show that we are very close to success."

"President Yang said that this personality anchor hypothesis has brought the 'Digital Ascension' project to completion at least a century ahead of schedule."

"Master, you are simply too great!"

Hearing that the Milky Way Empire's "Digital Ascension" project was nearly finished, Ji Cheng breathed a quiet sigh of relief inside.

This was a fairly crucial link in his grand scheme.

The Gaia network was divided into deep and shallow layers. Their current location was the deep layer, which was the true Gaia network.

Beyond that, there was the shallow layer that provided support for the deep layer. Objects weren't modeled there; it was a hazy, gray expanse everywhere.

And digital ascension was the technology that allowed indirect entry into the shallow layer of the Gaia network.

If entering via the deep-space black spots was equivalent to eating cake with a spoon, then digital ascension was roughly equivalent to borrowing someone else's used spoon just to smell the cake.

The gap was massive.

The proposal of this technology stemmed from an accident.

Many years ago, while developing data-ether entities, researchers of the Milky Way Empire had stumbled upon observations of the shallow layer of the Gaia network.

Even as researchers dominated by atheism, they had never imagined that this boundless behemoth wrapping around the real world was actually a virtual network.

They mistook the shallow layer of the Gaia network for a new world, a new universe.

And they began searching for ways to enter this new world.

After years of research, some scholars proposed that if a portion of human consciousness could be converted into a form close to a data-ether entity, it might be possible to indirectly enter the new world via instruments.

This project was officially approved not long ago and named "Digital Ascension".

However, according to the original timeline, the Milky Way Empire never produced any results right up until its demise.

In the game, it wouldn't be until several centuries later, following the outbreak of the Great Galaxy War, that the "Digital Ascension" technology would barely mature, allowing a small portion of consciousness to be temporarily converted into a form close to data-ether entities.

Back then, players like Ji Cheng who lacked deep-space black spots could only indirectly access the shallow layer of the Gaia network through digital ascension.

And this time, Ji Cheng had used Ji Ruoyue's mouth to feed the technical key points to the Royal Academy of Sciences.

His goal was precisely to bring this method of entry into existence—

Ahead of time!