"Huh?"
Han Te and Coloured Glaze both exclaimed, "Does Master A Boxing Champion know the truth of 'Judgment Day'? What exactly is going on?"
Li Yao also said, "So, you know so much. So, what you said in Great Iron City last night was half true and half false, and you were hiding something?"
A Boxing Champion shook his head and said, "What I said was true, but it was not what I wanted to say but what the real Lei Zonglie wanted to say. You will know what I mean if you listen to me.
"I opened the underground shelter that had been sealed for a long time, only to discover that the place had a history of at least hundreds of years. All the facilities had been destroyed, and the people inside had all turned into piles of bones. They had been dead for hundreds of years.
"However, they left a lot of jade chips that recorded the history of their civilization, the Martial Meritocrats Civilization, from its rise to its decline, as well as the diaries and last words of the refugees.
"When their lives and their civilization were about to come to an end, everybody was filled with the desire to talk. They left a lot of things behind."
A Boxing Champion groped on his body for a while and found a dim light beam.
In the mottled light and shadow, hundreds of faces popped up.
Men, women, the elderly, and children. They were smiling miserably, frowning in pain, hoping for a slim hope in desperation, only to fall into the deepest desperation in the end …
Han Te and Coloured Glaze stared at it in a daze. They could not help but reach out to touch the light beam, only to find that only ripples were spreading out. "Are they our ancestors?"
"Yes. They are the natives of the Martial Meritocrats Sector in the past."
A Boxing Champion said, "The earliest history of this shelter can be traced back to more than a thousand years ago. At that time, the 'Martial Meritocrats Sector' below our feet discovered another Sector that was relatively underdeveloped, 'Sand Primitive Sector', and a lot of young adults were recruited from the Sand Primitive Sector to solve the shortage of labor. However, the policies went out of control, and the natives of the Sand Primitive Sector flooded into the Martial Meritocrats Sector like a flood, causing a lot of acute social problems and triggering a chain reaction, which led to the confrontation between the Cultivators and the ordinary people."
"Cultivators?"
Han Te and Coloured Glaze clenched their fists at the same time. "They really exist!"
"Since you know about cultivators, then it's easy."
A Boxing Champion continued calmly. "At that time, the Martial Meritocrats Sector was chaotic and uneasy. The conflicts between the natives of the Martial Meritocrats Sector and the natives of the Sand Primitive Sector, the conflicts between the Cultivators and the ordinary people, and the conflicts among the Cultivators due to different ideologies were all entangled together. It was like a crystal bomb that had been completely activated and could explode at any moment.
"Therefore, a small group of people planned ahead and built a shelter deep underground. They wanted to wait until the conflicts on the surface were resolved before they went out.
"In the hundreds of years that followed, no matter how chaotic the situation on the ground was, the shelter was modified and expanded time and time again to accommodate more and more people. When 'Judgment Day' took place, it became the last home for the natives of the Martial Meritocrats Sector.
"What exactly is' Judgment Day '?" Han Te asked.
"I don't know."
A Boxing Champion said, "In their dizziness, the people who escaped to the shelter couldn't explain it clearly, either. Also, 99% of the information has been destroyed in the hundreds of years. From the incomplete information, I can only speculate that 'Judgment Day' was not a civil war of the natives of the Martial Meritocrats Sector but involved the forces from the sky.
"The people who call themselves' angels' right now, who built the Heavenly Rails and Manjusaka and blocked the entire sky of the planet, and who were my creators, couldn't have been the descendants of the natives of the Martial Meritocrats Sector at the beginning but another group of people from the depths of the sea of stars.
"As to why they created 'Judgment Day' and almost destroyed the entire planet of the Martial Meritocrats Sector, it is not something that I can analyze."
Han Te and Coloured Glaze were silent, feeling humiliated as if they had been played and manipulated.
"In the hundred years that followed," A Boxing Champion said, "I stayed in the underground shelter and studied the knowledge and culture left by the natives of the Martial Meritocrats Sector in the past, including their diaries and last words.
"The people in the shelter died of starvation and suffocation because of the shortage of food and the serious damage of the air filtration system. But they left abundant crystals and various kinds of energy.
"I did not need to breathe air or swallow biological materials. As long as there were crystals and energy, I could live and move. Also, I maintained my body functions with the components in the shelter."
"Wait —"
Li Yao asked with great interest, "You stayed in the underground shelter for a hundred years. Was it because you couldn't escape?"
"No."
A Boxing Champion shook his head and said, "After finding enough crystals and components in the underground shelter, I repaired myself in only three days and found a route to return to the surface in one month. But why did I do that?"
Li Yao thought for a moment and asked, "Didn't you want to be the strongest at any cost?"
"Yes, I did want to be the strongest, but what is real 'strength'?"
The Fist King said solemnly, "Before that, I always believed that a harder body, fiercer firepower, and sharper sabers and swords represented 'strength'. In the past fifty years, I had indeed been upgrading myself on that path.
"But in the last battle, faced with the overwhelming iron tides, the storm of bullets that were enough to rip apart the sun, and the blades that were as dense as a primitive jungle, I had new doubts.
"At that time, my computational ability was already quite advanced. I calculated in the blink of an eye that, with the barren resources on the planet, no matter how I upgraded myself, it was barely possible for me to evolve into an invincible and invincible being, and there was always a force that could destroy me.
"And it was true that I was almost destroyed by the war.
"Therefore, was it real 'strength'? Was it possible that I had been studying and upgrading in the wrong direction?
"I began to think quietly in the darkness. As it happened, I discovered the essence of the Martial Meritocrats Civilization a thousand years ago in the underground shelter, the diaries and last words of the Cultivators and ordinary people of the Martial Meritocrats Sector, the debates and reflections on the mistakes of the past, and the different choices that they made when they were faced with desperation."
Li Yao's soul was excited. "So, you got in touch with the ideas of the Cultivators?"
"You could say that."
A Boxing Champion said, "The jade chips included the essence of the thoughts of multiple generations of refugees in the past hundreds of years. Many of them were at loggerheads on the surface of the planet. But when 'Judgment Day' arrived and they were butchered and destroyed without discrimination, the people who luckily escaped to the underground world had to drop their conflicts and reflect on what they had done in the past hundreds of years. Some of them even included the natives of the Sand Primitive Sector who were outsiders.
"I was a spiritual puppet that could learn and upgrade on my own in the first place. 'Learning' was one of my instincts.
"I began to study their diaries and last words and studied their ideas and spirit. Then, I discovered that the people who called themselves' Cultivators' were entirely different from the sinners in the Land of Sins.
"The strong protecting the weak? Everything for the civilization? The real strength was not the strength but the mind?
"Those theories that could almost be called 'absurd' truly baffled me, especially the last one.
"My logic circuits immediately sent out alarms. If the real strength was not the strength but the mind, it would be terrible because I did not have a mind."
A Boxing Champion's voice was still cold, calm, and indifferent, like a lifeless mechanical puppet.
But for some reason, Li Yao, Han Te, and the Coloured Glaze all detected feeble bitterness in his cold voice.
The Fist King paused for a moment before he continued casually, "In the past, I was only focused on getting stronger, and I never considered the definition of 'strongest'. However, in this sanctuary, a lot of people are arguing about what real strength is from different perspectives, what the strength of an individual or even a certain group means for the entire civilization, and where the civilization will be led to even if the strength of the whole is stronger … Mixed with the personal experiences of countless low-level Cultivators and ordinary people, the negative side of strength is the feelings, fear, and sorrow of the 'weak', and the soul-stirring journey of life that is full of ups and downs.
"I was fascinated by those things and pondered the definition of 'strong' for a hundred years in the darkness below the ground."
Li Yao said in excitement, "I understand it now. So, although you are an artificial intelligence, you are a kind artificial intelligence, a righteous artificial intelligence, and an artificial intelligence that is on the Cultivators' side!"
"Kind? Justice? "
A Boxing Champion shook his head. "Your logic circuit is very weird. Is kindness and justice something that we should consider when we are of the same kind? I don't care at all, and I have never believed that the Cultivators' ideology is correct.
"You must know that not only were there Cultivators in the sanctuary, there were also a lot of people who were on the opposite side of the Cultivators. Many of them were still stubborn even when death was at hand. I think that what they said was not entirely unreasonable. Perhaps the Cultivators were both hypocritical and stupid, and they were the culprits of the destruction of the civilization.
"The simplest reason is that if the Cultivators really represented 'strength', how could they have been beaten so badly that they couldn't even protect their homes and families? How could they have fled to the underground and died without a sound in the end?"
Li Yao was rendered speechless for a long time, unable to say anything.
"All in all," A Boxing Champion said, "I began to doubt whether or not the upgrade path that purely pursued strength was correct. But I did not accept the Cultivators' idiotic ideology completely. I simply stored their theories in my database, colliding, condensing, and reflecting on them.
"Right. There were a lot of remarkable techniques and magical equipment technologies of the Martial Meritocrats civilization in the underground sanctuary. I studied them for a hundred years and finally grasped them. I also strengthened and upgraded my core crystal processor time and time again.
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