Chapter 1027: Ideas for the Consciousness Incubation Project
Translator: RaidenTL
Chapter 1027: Ideas for the Consciousness Incubation Project
"Sister Lucine, is this really all the research there is regarding life consciousness?" I asked, looking at the witch sister before me.
She was a statuesque beauty with a perfect figure and a lovely voice, yet the moment she spoke, her tone carried a strangely "maternal" quality that created a striking contrast.
Age is a taboo subject among witches, so I didn't ask. However, she was a very famous Academic Witch, a seeker walking the path of the Great Soul Subject, and a Transcendent Witch with immense achievements in the field of life.
"Is there something you don't understand? I can explain it to you, Xiao Han. I can't say my expertise in life consciousness is particularly deep, but I do have some insights of my own," Lucine replied, addressing my question.
"I can understand the material well enough. It’s just that in the data you provided, Sister Lucine, there doesn't seem to be any detailed information regarding consciousness incubation. I'm more interested in that."
"Consciousness incubation? That involves many concepts. My study of life consciousness was primarily for the field of life research. Most witches categorize the concept of consciousness as a derivative of the life domain, and many prefer to analyze it from a philosophical perspective. As for whether consciousness is 'incubated' or born, most of that is still in the speculative stage..."
Sister Lucine went on for quite a while, seemingly unable to stop herself. The content wasn't overly profound; in fact, she made it sound very simple. She even took care to cover some common-sense points that were easily overlooked.
"Actually, after being called over by Mei, I've gradually become interested in this life consciousness project myself. Especially the concept of a Life Clone—that was the first I'd heard of it. If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would have thought you were just spinning a yarn to fool me..."
"How could I lie to you, Sister? We're here specifically to solve the issues with the Life Clone."
"True. Consciousness incubation... that's the path you've come up with, isn't it? If it truly succeeds, I suppose it will be another witness to the unknown," Lucine remarked with a sigh.
"Sister Lucine, has no witch in our race ever researched this in the field of life consciousness? Not even you have heard of anything?" I asked curiously.
This was a question I had always been curious about. The void was so vast, and the time span of transcendent races so long—had there never been a point in time where a massive explosion of transcendent technology occurred?
Or was it that... so-called transcendent technology also required transcendent power as a threshold for understanding, making a sudden burst of skill and technique difficult to achieve?
"There must be some, but what does that have to do with us? Xiao Han... not all witches are like you, making everything public. Or rather, the things you do are what actually violate common sense," Lucine lamented.
She had seen through my confusion.
However, someone else understanding something and you understanding it yourself are two different concepts. Sometimes, comprehension is an insurmountable mountain. In the transcendent realm, there are many things that cannot be taught even if someone holds your hand and guides you through it.
"Uh... I didn't realize Sister Lucine had looked into what I've been doing?"
"Of course. When the sisters around here chat, the most frequent topic of conversation is you, Xiao Han," Lucine said with a smile, as if she had been waiting for me to say that.
Once it was confirmed that the current data was all we had, we began to get down to business.
Whether the witch sisters present were holding anything back didn't really matter anymore. It was unwise to hold others to one's own standards in a setting like this.
Inside this massive laboratory specifically prepared for the Ancient Remnant Ice King, the witches who had previously assisted in the research of Hexagonal Crystal Amber and its preparation techniques had all departed.
To put it bluntly, a project like Hexagonal Crystal Amber wasn't even fit to hold a candle to the consciousness incubation of the Ancient Remnant Ice King.
The experiment had been officially named the "Ancient Remnant Ice King Consciousness Incubation Experiment."
According to Dean Mei, I was to be the lead, with my ideas at the core. As for the witch sisters who specialized in the life domain and consciousness, they were merely there to assist. In fact, they were mostly there to observe.
She hoped I wouldn't feel too much pressure.
As the saying goes, every witch has her own style. Differences in style can even lead to contradictory theories, yet they can still achieve similar results through their own methods. This was the inclusivity of the transcendent.
Age only affected the accumulation of knowledge and the stacking of experience, but the older one got, the more one was restricted by the shackles of that experience. Once talent took the stage, even hard work had to make way.
After completing the preparations in the lab, I stood before the massive Ancient Remnant Ice King.
Through my Spirit Vision Talent, the Luck entwined around the Ancient Remnant Ice King had become increasingly thick. It was no longer just a superficial display of driving force like pure Luck Threads; it had become a purer form of Luck, transforming from an external guiding force into an invisible internal drive.
To put it another way, its existence now resonated with the Main World Consciousness even more than a Child of Destiny.
If the Ancient Remnant Ice King weren't still a Life Clone dominated by my consciousness, it would have slipped from my control long ago.
As for what I needed to do next... the simplest way to "dispel" a consciousness from a body is to kill it.
However, a pure kill would cause the consciousness to dissipate along with the life essence. That wasn't the development we hoped for, and the world itself cannot inject a new soul into a hollow shell to create life.
The world operates within its own framework; even the World Will cannot interfere with the rules and framework within the world.
To describe the birth of life simply, it generally involves the cycle of Ley Line Soul Essence, using a race as a blueprint, combined with the reproductive instincts of that race to incubate and bring forth life. Injecting a new soul and consciousness into a shell is a miracle that can only be written by those who have peered into the very essence of life.
If the entire world were compared to a person, it would be like how an ordinary person cannot consciously control the flow of blood in their veins, the secretion of hormones, or the recovery from an internal illness. However, a person can accelerate blood circulation through exercise, trigger adrenaline by actively seeking fear, or speed up recovery by taking medicine.
The world is the same.
An invisible hand performs macro-adjustments within the world at every moment, and every adjustment requires a price.
Now, facing the Ancient Remnant Ice King once more, I needed some external force to strip my consciousness's dominance over this existing Life Clone.
The first thing I thought of was... Wisdom Granting.
The Wisdom Granting technique is a very versatile tool. It can combine consciousness and skill to shape a Wisdom of Seed, and it can also be used in reverse to achieve the effects of Wisdom Deprivation or Wisdom Withering.
However, this was the first time I was using this method on "myself."
The "consciousness" dominating the life within the Life Clone was essentially a connection to my own consciousness. Once stripped away, it would still be a part of me. Even if it were destroyed, it wouldn't matter; at most, a few memories would be lost, but those memories had already been instantaneously shared via the Great Knowledge Sharing Spell.
When I extracted the Wisdom of Seed, the Ancient Remnant Ice King fell into an eternal slumber. Yet, its life signs remained.
Was it still considered a life?
Yes, but it was no longer a complete life.
After stepping into the field of life research, my understanding of life made me realize that the concept of life isn't a "1"; it is an individual composed of countless concepts. Just like the concepts repeatedly proposed and overturned in the Life Interpretation Movement, those were all one-sided interpretations of life. Even the concepts of Soul Essence and soul proposed later were merely the "essence" of life, not life itself.
The same applied to bloodline information and racial concepts. They were indispensable frameworks that constituted complex life. Removing these frameworks wasn't a release of life itself, but a liberation of the components of life.
"If I may ask... what is that?"
Seeing the massive Ancient Remnant Ice King collapse as if in a deep sleep, the group of witches, led by Lucine, asked from the side. Although they knew it was quite forward to ask during an experiment, their curiosity about the unknown pushed them to set aside their pride.
"Sister Lucine doesn't know? Didn't Dean Mei tell you?" I asked instinctively.
"Mei is a bit of a chatterbox, but when it comes to this, she really didn't reveal anything to us," Lucine explained with a shake of her head. "She only mentioned that you've mastered many techniques that could be called miracles. I assume this is one of them?"
"Yes. This technique is called Wisdom Granting. It's a product woven from consciousness and memory, and it was one of the first techniques I used to touch upon consciousness. At that time, I hadn't even deeply understood the composition of consciousness; I simply held the philosophy of discovery, utilization, and dominance to weave consciousness and memory into this special creation."
"Is that so? Truly impressive... I imagine you must have been conducting some very deep research when you first discovered it?"
"Mhm. At that time, I was already in the preliminary planning stages of the Fool's Dream life experiment. But back then, the Fool's Dream itself only consisted of consciousness and memory. Perhaps that's why I happened to discover it by chance," I said modestly.
In reality, the situation was far more complex than I was describing, and coincidence played a major role.
"So that's how it was?"
Many of the witches present had at least some understanding of the adorable Fool's Dream. Whenever Xiao Han was mentioned, the Fool's Dream would inevitably come up as well. That Fool's Dream life experiment—which Xiao Han considered more important than finding the World Navel—had been mentioned by Dean Mei more times than they could count.
After that, they didn't ask further.
They felt that even if they kept asking, Xiao Han would likely not hide anything from them, but they weren't about to grill a little witch. Ultimately, they weren't as candid as Xiao Han; they were actually afraid she would tell them everything. If that happened... they would be the ones sweating under the pressure.
The extraction of the Wisdom of Seed went exceptionally smoothly. After properly handling it, the remaining task was the real challenge.
Consciousness incubation.
However, I wasn't without ideas.
Consciousness incubation was a critical stage that had to be completed in my plan because it related to the racial concept of the Fool's Dream life experiment. For the Ancient Remnant Ice King, this was a reverse-engineering project.
The problem I faced now was like a massive, mandatory fill-in-the-blank question.
I wanted to use consciousness as a breakthrough point to construct a racial concept that would work with bloodline information to achieve full Authority and open a Life Sequence. But I didn't understand the specific details of a racial concept. The Ancient Remnant Ice King, however, was a natural race I had already perceived; I had personally witnessed the scene of the Ancient Remnant Ice King's Life Sequence being connected.
Therefore, I needed to use the racial concept within the Ancient Remnant Ice King's Life Sequence to reverse-engineer the birth of consciousness.
Life experiment research is like a game of deduction where you know nothing; all conditions must be summarized and extracted through "observation," "experience," and other methods. While it might seem like a game of stepping on one's own left foot to fly into the sky, once you get down to specific concepts, you realize that every node and every key point is a fulcrum supporting it.
It's like how after the self-awakened Body Cultivation derived Prototype Self-Generated Mana, the Self-Generated Mana Talent could exist independently of the self-awakened Body Cultivation. By switching the foundation to the witch racial concept as a fulcrum, the witch-exclusive Self-Generated Mana doesn't even require self-awakened Body Cultivation; it is born naturally upon advancing to a Transcendent Witch. The witchification of Self-Generated Mana can even indirectly push the progress of Body Cultivation.
Transcendent systems share a crisscrossing derivative relationship. The same was true for Life Sequences.
After stripping away the Wisdom of Seed, the power within the Ancient Remnant Ice King remained, or rather, the power of the Great Spellbook was the very foundation of its existence.
Starting from power, the ability to summon kin within the Great Glacial Throne Technique was a Summoning Authority that borrowed from the racial concept. Even if this wasn't a Primal Authority, it was the root that connected to the Life Sequence of the Ancient Remnant Ice King race.
The witches watching the entire process were curious about how I would proceed. After all, the first step is always the hardest; ideas and inspiration are the starting point for any project. Even mastered techniques, power, and knowledge are merely tools for that inspiration.
Among the witches watching my maneuvers, only Lucine and a few others who had participated in the creation of new races realized what I was doing.
I was using the relationship between the Great Glacial Throne Technique and the Ancient Remnant Ice King race to reverse-engineer and unveil the truth of the Life Sequence!