Li Ban followed the drone deep into the underground passage, walking for what felt like ages.
"Couldn't you have sent a car?" He was relaxed enough to joke with the drone sent by the Main Brain.
[A massive data fluctuation would attract human attention.]
"Just trying to avoid trouble, then?"
Even at his speed, it took a half-hour walk to finally reach the destination.
They finally boarded an elevator that carried them continuously upward from the underground depths.
The doors slid open to reveal a brightly lit corridor.
The corridor's light was blue and somewhat overly bright, stinging the eyes.
His current body frequently used spiritual rhinoceros. Nourished by its normal flow, he was far stronger now than when he had first woken up.
He walked down the blinding hall until he reached a mechanical door at the far end.
"Is this one of those hallways that shoots a grid of deadly lasers if an enemy intrudes?"
[No. It is merely the passage to the interior.]
He made it through the eerie, blue-lit hall without incident.
The mechanical door at the end slid open without a sound.
The room beyond was dim.
Even so, Li Ban immediately spotted 9899 suspended in midair, her head drooping, her condition unknown.
"So this is how you found me. Does she have a hidden camera on her?" Li Ban walked over to 9899 and checked on her, confirming she was still alive and seemingly just asleep.
The round drone floated toward the center of the room. The moment it touched down on a stand, the dim space suddenly flared with light.
The room wasn't empty, but it also lacked the banks of computers, screens, and tangled cables he had expected.
From ceiling to floor, everything was clad in silver, pieced together from metallic tiles the size of playing cards.
On closer inspection, fine grooves divided those tiles into even smaller metallic squares.
Instead of computers, the room housed a shuttle-shaped machine that looked like a spacecraft.
The Flying Shuttle was entirely blue-black. Like the room, its hull was composed of tiny metallic squares.
Clearly, this Flying Shuttle was not yet fully formed. A small portion of it still had a dense cluster of mechanical structures and wiring exposed on the outside.
Other than this Flying Shuttle and its support scaffolding, the room was completely bare.
"I'm already here. Can you tell me your purpose for calling me over now? What do you want to discuss?"
This time, the mechanical voice came from the Flying Shuttle itself.
[Did you purchase the reader to decipher Master's final letter?]
Though he already guessed the answer, Li Ban asked, "Who is your master?"
[My master is Gu Yi. The core directive programmed into me upon creation was to protect my master. You are the Director, a part of Master. Therefore, you are also someone I must protect.]
This truly caught Li Ban off guard.
"You know what happened to Gu Yi?"
If the machine knew he was a piece of Gu Yi, it definitely knew about the man fracturing himself.
[Yes. Gu Yi, General, Leader—and you, Director.]
Li Ban's eyes flickered as he noticed something amiss.
In the Ring World, wasn't the Director the Leader?
Or could it be—was there another Master?
"Why didn't I know you existed? When the world ended, where were you?"
[It is entirely normal that you do not know me. Neither you, General, nor Leader were aware of my existence. I was born in a progress state subsequent to yours.]
Li Ban stared. "?"
He felt like he had just heard something earth-shattering.
"Time isn't something you can just casually mess with."
[It is not time. It is a progress state.]
Frowning in confusion, Li Ban suddenly thought of the Faceless One trapped in the Self-Seeking Mirror he had found.
That entity had said something similar.
[Have you restarted again?]
Did the Main Brain know about these progress states too, just like the Faceless One?
It seemed that every time Li Ban thought matters concerning the Ring World were finally over, a massive bombshell would drop out of nowhere, blowing up in his face and reducing his once-clear view of the world to smoke and ashes.
Why did an already destroyed world keep popping up to assert its presence, time and time again?
Li Ban let out a long sigh, reasoning with himself. "Who told you to use someone else's body and reap their benefits? You just have to shoulder the trouble that comes with it."
He waited a moment before speaking again. "I'm a little confused right now."
[The progress states are not important. You only need to know that our current world is the active progress state. You only need to know that my core directive is to protect you. Or, rather, all of you.]
Reading between the lines of the Main Brain's words, Li Ban picked up on something else.
If progress states didn't matter, that meant the current world was the only existing progress state.
The other progress states had all been discarded. They couldn't impact the current progress state, which was why they didn't matter?
"There could be two or more progress states. Aside from the Faceless One and the Main Brain, will anyone else from another progress state pop up again?"
"Since you say it isn't important, what do you want from me?" Li Ban glanced at the unfinished Flying Shuttle. "You don't want me to repair you, do you? Because let me declare right now, I can't."
[No, that is not your responsibility. I asked you here to protect you. The Trash Realm is not safe. You can only survive if you stay with me.]
"I wouldn't exactly call the Trash Realm unsafe for me."
There was no one here who could pose a genuine threat to Li Ban.
Li Ban didn't completely trust the Main Brain, either.
Would a Main Brain capable of ruling a city of humans truly be bound by its original core directive?
Maybe, maybe not.
But Li Ban had absolutely no need to take that risk.
He didn't have to hide under the Main Brain's protection.
[The danger is not the enemies within the Trash Realm, but the Trash Realm itself.]
[This world cannot hold on for more than a few years before it completely collapses.]
"The Trash Realm is failing too?" Li Ban hadn't expected that after receiving the falling debris of shattered minor worlds for so many years, the Trash Realm itself was finally about to collapse.
"Though I suppose it makes sense," Li Ban said. "The precursor to other worlds collapsing is spatial rifts constantly appearing in the sky, eventually spreading to the ground until the whole world splits apart. But the rifts in the Trash Realm have been around for far more than a few years."
It had been a full century.
Compared to other worlds, the Trash Realm had held out for an incredibly long time.
But Li Ban's thoughts quickly turned to Priest Zhong Ye, Nana, and the others.
They had finally managed to settle down in the Northern Base using Li Ban's strength, even expanding their ranks. Who would have thought this would be their final sliver of peace?
"If the Trash Realm collapses—" Li Ban originally intended to ask what the people here were supposed to do.
But he quickly remembered the people from other minor worlds who had followed him and Huangzhi to the Trash Realm.
They had been directly abandoned on the outside by the world.
Not everyone could wander through the gaps between worlds, and not everyone could travel from one world to another.
The uniqueness of a Priest's identity didn't just lie in their power, but more importantly, in the Wizard Embryo Fragments within their bodies.
The Wizard Embryo Fragments acted as a universal passport, ensuring a Priest would not be rejected by any minor world.
Li Ban couldn't take anyone else with him. As he was now, he couldn't save anyone.
His brow furrowed deeply at the thought.
This was why every Priest traversing the Shattered Realm in search of Wizard Embryo Fragments would try their hardest not to form too many ties with the local lifeforms.
As mere passersby, Priests could never truly intervene in the fate of those in a minor world.
Because Li Ban had trailed off, the Main Brain seemingly misunderstood his meaning.
[If the Trash Realm collapses, I can take you out of this minor world and travel elsewhere.]
Li Ban looked up at the Flying Shuttle, which was roughly the size of a passenger bus. "You? Using this Flying Shuttle?"
[Yes. Its completion rate has already reached 89%.]
"You must know about Priests, right? Can you really break through world barriers and move through the gaps using only technology?"
[Technological power and the power of Wizard Embryo Fragments are both simply manifestations of energy. At the current technological level, we may not be able to achieve the degree of a Wizard Embryo Fragment, but we can simulate it so that the final resulting expression closely approximates one.]
It was easy to say, but achieving the effect the Main Brain wanted must have been a highly arduous process.
[This is what I have been doing all along. I rule the humans of Trash City not for the sake of ruling, but to better mobilize resources.]
"I see. Trash City has been around for decades, maybe a century. You must have spent all that time preparing to build this Flying Shuttle, right?"
[The Flying Shuttle's core drive and shielding were provided by Master. Trash City's technological level is only barely sufficient to repair it.]
It sounded nice, but in the end, it was still relying on Gu Yi's capabilities.
What kind of person was the Gu Yi from the Main Brain's progress state, anyway?
"The Master of your progress state—"
[The complete persona vanished after fracturing thousands of times.]
"Then who gave you this kind of capability?"
The Main Brain fell silent for a moment.
Logically, an artificial intelligence shouldn't hesitate like a human.
So was this silence just the manifestation of the time it needed to process data?
[It was the Director of my progress state.]
Li Ban thought to himself, 'The gap between the Director of your progress state and a fake Director like me is massive. Aren't you even a little suspicious?'
But artificial intelligences were always like this.
As long as the data matched, they wouldn't consider any other situations.
And it clearly lacked the means to test who the soul inside the body actually belonged to.
"What about the Director of your progress state? Are you the only intelligence that made it to the current progress state?"
[My original progress state was deleted. I am the only one who escaped through the gap. The rest of humanity was deleted along with the progress state.]
Li Ban shook his head and let out a low chuckle. "So, this world is just a giant video game, is that it?"
The Main Brain might have looked formidable and known a lot, but ultimately, it was just the sole survivor of a destroyed world.
It was faring even worse than Li Ban and Du An.
It had barely managed to escape its deleted progress state, and now it had to figure out how to escape the doomed Trash Realm.