The Frailty of Mortal Minds
In the wake of the Goddess Department's war, the minds of humanity in the material realm—those untouched by the administration or domination of the Main Divine Realm or the Demon Realm—were painfully fragile. The mere activation of the simplest divine power or mana was enough to send their psyches to the brink of collapse.
They have zero resistance to presence. Even though I'm restricted to one-tenth of my power, it's completely different from my Lord God nature, which is so overwhelming that superhumans would recklessly charge a high-ranking spiritual being like the Demon Emperor.
Because the machine humans had monopolized every resource for their own advancement and scattered only the byproducts of science among their enslaved ordinary kin, these people's mental barriers lacked all independence. They were practically at the level of catastrophically broken lower animals.
Mental manipulation of sentient beings is difficult even for Creator Gods, yet these humans would drive themselves mad simply from my approach—before any control could even be applied.
The reason they kept their distance now was that witnessing the nature of my defensive magic and the activation of dimensional authority would cause their minds to necrotize. Using any other spell would drive them all insane before its effects could manifest. It wasn't even the direct influence of the Dimensional Lord's Ninth Circle magic, but merely its aftershocks that threatened to shatter their sanity.
This may be the first time I've encountered a humanity with such pathetically weak mental barriers. Still, that same weakness makes it possible to cultivate pure faith.
Faith grows purer the weaker the vessel and the greater the desperation. A frail mind can simply be trained and strengthened.
The Dimensional Lord decided these reckless creatures charging toward him—unaware they might be digging their own graves—had to be stabilized first.
"Diluting the activation should work. I only ever considered strong manifestations before. This will be my first attempt at something gentle."
Wooong—!
No incantation. No willful surge. No rotation of mana circles. He did not even desire it. He simply thought, lightly and without emphasis, It would be nice if this happened. It was neither magic nor authority, but the will of a god expressed with casual indifference into reality itself.
"It would be good to recover every metallic tool used by sentient beings."
Wuuung—!
A faint response answered. This was reality manipulation befitting the highest Lord God.
Throughout the city, every weapon and metallic object in contact with human flesh tore away from its owner and gathered by force in the open air.
"Kyaaaaaaaah—!"
"Aaaaaaaaah—!"
Screams erupted everywhere, yet there were no casualties. He was minimizing sacrifices because these people could become useful believers, supplying high-purity faith and vitality to the Divine Realm.
Hundreds of thousands of weapons, metallic armors, even dining utensils rose into the city sky and fused into a single mass.
Without such metallic weapons, these lower humans could never have approached me while I float in the air anyway.
With one divine utterance ordering the seizure of all metallic tools from sentient beings, he stripped humanity of every means of resistance and resumed resource extraction.
Crack—!
He compressed the collected mass—now a colossal metal sphere—into its most minimal structure, sorting and extracting every piece of information and metallic material within.
This is becoming genuinely enjoyable. The harvest contains an astonishing number of rare metals that require extensive intermediate processing.
There were countless rare finds: metallic alloys that could endure solar heat to a degree—though still far from adamantium—and rubbers possessing extreme elasticity.
A civilization worthy of being called the pinnacle of scientific advancement.
Among them, the most fascinating was this.
Swish—! Swish—!
A scraping sound vibrated through space. Hundreds of thousands of fist-sized black spheres trembled and hummed.
These ridiculous products are the brain chips extracted from the machine humans. Artificial brains built upon a small quantity of biological brain cells.
The repository of memory and soul is the brain. The brain chip represented the ultimate achievement of scientific civilization—partially replicating with machinery what biology alone could achieve.
Because the consciousness of the soul resides within them, these beings can be called machine humans. Otherwise they would be nothing more than robots moved by artificial programming.
The unconscious mind, separate from the brain chip, slept within cryogenically preserved main bodies, assisting these clone-like mechanical forms.
Even if this mechanical body is destroyed, they are not truly dead. The soul does not vanish; it simply returns to the main body.
Of course, the portion of soul consciousness equivalent to the brain chip's capacity, along with any memories not copied to the main body, would be lost. Yet if the body was reproduced, brain cells harvested, and a new brain chip created and installed, they could resurrect—imperfectly, but alive.
This machine civilization had crudely replicated something akin to a god's resurrection. Moreover, these mechanical bodies could even achieve pregnancy.
The mechanical forms carried genetically perfect sperm and eggs.
The child would be grown immediately in an incubation chamber, given a brain chip, and fitted with a mechanical body. In this way, freed from pain or accident, they could live for a thousand years through the continuous harvesting and cultivation of frozen brains.
Pain and pleasure were optional. Death and war were matters of enjoyment and budget.
Under the strict surveillance of the planetary management intelligence and dozens of protective layers from the highest machine humans, every machine human's main body and data were rigorously protected and maintained. They had implemented something resembling a pseudo-Divine Realm through machine civilization, using that power to devour star systems and dismantle stars.
It was a magnificent scientific civilization that even imitated divine miracles.
Yet it was called cowardly evolution because these brain chips—now devoid of their soul's consciousness—were still alive.
Funnily enough, while most of the consciousness returned to the main body, a fragment of the soul remained in the brain chip created by extracting and cultivating part of the main brain and supplementing it mechanically. The memories accumulated in the machine body and the discarded soul fragments maintained a firm sense of self and begged me for survival.
The machine humans had not fully completed their analysis of the soul. The price for embedding their soul's will into mechanical bodies to escape pain and death was the accumulating defects in the soul and the gradual destruction of personality that came with each copy and regeneration.
By extracting part of the brain to create the chip and transferring the soul's will, problems arose in both soul and personality, amplifying base instincts. The final outcome was the mass production of the lowest-tier machine destruction gods.
The most corrupted form of humanity possessing free will had been scheduled from the beginning. These brain chips craving survival even after their soul consciousness had departed were the omen of that fate.
"How utterly ridiculous and amusing. You beg to be revived so you can worship me as the absolute god and serve me? You, abandoned by the soul consciousness that returned to the main body, are already far from normal. The faith I receive from beings who have carved up their own souls is pathetically insignificant."
The millions of brain chips convulsed, transmitting their intentions. For most, with their souls gone, nothing remained but the desperate urge to survive.
These cannot be considered human. They are little more than residual thoughts or ghosts.
They were the pollution spawned by machine humanity. Therefore they were useless.
Crack—!
He crushed every compressed brain chip, returning them to raw resources.
With a little refinement, these are products I could actually use. I see them as similar to the primitive forms of the wave system and Machine Gods he created.
He absorbed every scrap of knowledge and claimed every rare resource. The fragments originally separated from the soul held no value. As the final portion of brain shattered, they scattered and could be seen being sent into the cycle of the four realms.
They will become wandering spirits in the four realms, drifting endlessly—until the soul of their main body descends and merges with them.
Even after merging there would be no normal soul, only a rampaging evil spirit. That was the fate of those who had survived by straying from proper evolution.
Every being desires survival. But this universe that reveres the strong does not heed the desperate cravings of the worthless and weak. That is why I struggle so fiercely to become a strong and valuable existence.
The Dimensional Lord crushed the millions of brain chips tainted with soul fragments and looked down upon the city. Even now, every metallic object continued to rise and fuse in the air. He saw ordinary humans pointing at him, and humans gasping for breath with only their biological parts remaining after the machines that had composed their bodies were dismantled.
These were not people given mechanical bodies at birth, but those who had earned or purchased them through merit or wealth.
Since their lifespans had not yet ended and they had not received brain chips, they still held value. Their screams begging to be spared rang out. They shouted in unison that they would pay any price if only allowed to live.
"Please spare us! Money, resources—anything! We will pay any price!"
They were unconsciously realizing exactly what kind of being hovered above their heads. The instinct for survival was awakening their soul's will, showing them who could save them.
Thousands of humans whose bodies had been reinforced with machines now lay fallen throughout the city, begging for salvation with one unified heart. Though this being had driven them to this state and toward death, they had realized he was the only one who could grant them life—the figure wrapped in light.
The heartfelt cry that they would pay any price is reaching me clearly.
As expected from truly weak beings, their desperation and purity came through without distortion. So he gave them an answer.
"First, repent your sins and swear to help others and live righteously from now on. If you do, I will forgive your attack against me and spare your lives."
"!!?"
"???"
The great High Lord God, descending upon ordinary humans who had lived under the cold rule of machine humanity, was something they could not comprehend.