The "Charging Grounds" on the 61st and 62nd floors was the dining venue designated by the Transcendent Temple, and because no delivery service whatsoever was provided, Yaxiu and the others had no choice but to come to the Charging Grounds to eat.
Although they had already spent two days here, Yaxiu still found it hard to accept this dining environment—the uniform, synchronized sound of eating, with not a stray noise floating in the air. Sitting among them, Yaxiu felt like an unemployed idler looking for an internet café to game all night, only to sit down and find himself surrounded by office workers who had come over to pull an all-nighter of overtime because a power outage struck their nearby company.
The atmosphere was so stiff and solemn that for the past two days, Yaxiu had not even dared to snatch food from Igola's plate.
Apart from that, there was another thing Yaxiu found difficult to accept: they were literally charging.
Here, it was necessary to describe the appearance of the Transcendence believers—unlike the ascetic style of the Calamitous Fire believers, the Transcendence believers looked remarkably futuristic. The back of the neck, both ears, the lumbar spine, elbows... many parts of their bodies were externally fitted with silvery-white metal prosthetic augmentations, adorned with breathing lights that pulsed in streaming lines. Paired with their uniform blue-and-white apparel and the lightning patterns on their skin, they looked like futuristic soldiers who had traveled back to the apocalypse.
While these prosthetic augmentations certainly had their uses, they consumed electrical energy during daily life. Thus, mealtime for the believers doubled as charging time. Beneath the dining tables ran numerous charging cables; the moment they sat down, they would automatically charge, electrical currents coursing over their entire bodies—something even more important than eating.
People like Yaxiu and his companions, who ate without charging, were like customers coming to an internet café just to eat instant noodles without turning on a computer.
Compared to Yaxiu's restlessness, Igola and Harvey seemed entirely at ease.
The Swindler went without saying; throw him into Hell and he could still talk and laugh freely, so this minor scene was hardly worth mentioning. Harvey was even less of an issue—as a ruthless man who could sleep and eat among piles of corpses, Yaxiu could not imagine any spectacle in this world capable of spoiling the necromancer's appetite.
As they ate, a middle-aged woman beside them suddenly spoke up: "Travelers, your stay permit expires in 29 hours and 43 minutes. Please depart as soon as possible within that timeframe, or you will be subject to forcible eviction. If you wish to join the Transcendent Temple, please report to the Rebirth Office on the 32nd floor before 17:00."
By now, Yaxiu and the others were no longer surprised that any random believer could act as a spokesperson. Igola asked, "May we first tour the interior of the Transcendent Temple or review its achievements before deciding whether to formally follow the grand law?"
The middle-aged woman immediately shook her head. Only after a moment of silence did she say, "No. If you wish to obtain the protection of the Transcendent Temple, you must attend evening worship and complete the rite of allegiance, striving together with us to transcend consciousness. Otherwise, you will still be treated as outside travelers."
"Understood," the Swindler said. "We will give it serious thought during our remaining time. By the way, do you have any needs? If we are to continue traveling as merchants, perhaps we could obtain the supplies you desire."
At this point, the middle-aged woman acted as if she had not heard them, lowering her head to continue eating.
Dozens of seconds later, a man entered the cafeteria and handed a document file to Igola, leaving swiftly without looking back the moment he handed it over.
Igola looked through it; inside was an illustrated supply requisition list. In addition to common resources, it included sorcery spirits, legacy creations, mechanical parts, and even non-human populations. He raised his eyebrows—from this requisition list alone, he could deduce which items were of high value across the Senluo wasteland.
"I'm done eating," Harvey said, lifting his tray. "I'm going to smoke a pack of cigarettes before heading back."
Igola said, "There are smoke alarms everywhere here. You can't even smoke in the restroom, can you?"
"I found a place without alarms, and sunlight from the surface is routed in." The necromancer uttered words wholly unfitting his identity: "I'm taking Alice to sunbathe. Both of us are a bit calcium-deficient."
"I'm coming too!" Yaxiu hurriedly wolfed down the remainder of his food.
"You're going to smoke too?" Igola frowned at Yaxiu.
"I want to sunbathe too!" Yaxiu said. "I'll leave bringing food to Tamaxi to you!"
"It was me last time and the time before that. You just don't want to carry the meal..."
Tamaxi was unwilling to come to the cafeteria to eat, not because he could not bear the atmosphere here, but for religious reasons—he claimed that believers of Slay All Crows were forbidden from dining with others.
He had offered no elaborate explanation, but Yaxiu and the others had already imagined various possibilities: 'Refusing to socialize with pagans enhances internal cult cohesion,' 'Eating exposes vulnerabilities,' 'The original Slay All Crows grand law was an introverted social phobe'... At any rate, it was not an intolerable flaw, and Yaxiu and the others were willing to respect Tamaxi's religious beliefs.
It was just that the Charging Grounds offered no delivery service, so they had to pack meal boxes themselves. Yaxiu's refusal to carry food each time stemmed not only from his laziness, but also from his desire to watch the Swindler meticulously arrange the food in the meal box, neat, tidy, and aesthetically pleasing.
For some reason, the sight always struck Yaxiu as hilarious. In truth, he also wanted Igola to bring meals back for him as well, but the Swindler clearly would not indulge the cult leader in such a petty whim.
Yaxiu and Harvey left the cafeteria and took the elevator, catching one just in time. Inside stood believers dressed in identical uniforms. The two entered silently, and Harvey pressed the button for the 95th floor.
Several minutes later, as soon as Yaxiu stepped out of the elevator, he braced himself against the wall and panted heavily. Harvey looked at him strangely and asked in confusion, "Did someone fart in there just now?"
"No, I wasn't holding my breath," Yaxiu waved his hand. "Don't you find it suffocating? Being in a cramped elevator with them... If it were just dozens of seconds, I could endure it, but staying in there for several minutes this time was truly more than I could take."
"Suffocating?" Harvey walked ahead, gesturing for him to follow. "What's suffocating about it? Can't you just treat them like a bunch of corpses?"
"If they were corpses, I actually wouldn't mind," Yaxiu sighed. "The problem is, they're human beings. It's just..."
"It's just that they no longer want to be human." Harvey could not wait to pull out a cat grass cigarette and hold it between his lips, speaking offhandedly.
For while cults like the Four Pillar Cult, Slay All Crows, and Calamitous Fire all had their inhumane aspects, they still broadly fell within comprehensible bounds, allowing Yaxiu to quickly blend into this land of Senluo. It was not until he encountered the Transcendent Temple that he realized he could never be anything more than an outsider.
As a primary cult of the Harp Sun Alliance, the Transcendent Temple was already considered a decidedly lawful good faction. As could be seen from its formal regulations for receiving traveling merchants, it enjoyed the trust of many powers—it had to be mentioned here that the Calamitous Fire Temple had previously belonged to the evil alignment, specializing in robbing traveling merchants, such that no one was willing to trade with them.
Yet despite being a lawful faction recognized by all, the Transcendent Temple's doctrine was radically extreme: transcending consciousness.
What did that mean? The Transcendence grand law posited that wisdom and consciousness were not inextricably linked; consciousness was in fact a shackle binding intelligent life. If they wished to evolve into a higher race, they had to transcend consciousness and shed the self.
At first glance, it sounded like utter nonsense, yet they had a self-consistent logical system: when a sorcerer learned any art, though they relied on conscious effort to study and absorb it, once they thoroughly mastered the art, they needed to abandon conscious thought to execute it better. In the realm of art, a musician did not ponder which note to sound next, but played purely by feel; in the realm of combat, a sword sorcerer did not deliberate on where to strike next, for in the hair's-breadth split-second of a clash, the thought process had already concluded before conscious intent could even form.
The Transcendence Cult believed that consciousness was like a beginner's tutorial in a game, a baby walker, or a product manual. It was a stage intelligent life had to undergo, but it was merely a stage.
Consciousness could lead to wisdom, but wisdom did not require consciousness. Once wisdom had initially gestated, consciousness became an encumbrance instead—distracting thoughts, desires, cravings, emotions, all of which were obstacles preventing intelligent beings from further advancement.
The ideal of the Transcendence Cult was for all people to shed the self, transcend consciousness, and evolve into more intelligent beings.
Outlandish as this cult's ideal was, outlandish ideals in Senluo Land had been countless, and adding one more made little difference.
Reason dictated that an ideal three somersaults ahead of its time would soon be drowned out in the fiercely competitive wasteland, yet the Transcendence Cult had found their optimal utopia—an intact Grey Fox Divine Era skyscraper.
Within this skyscraper, an intelligent computing hub still existed. As long as one's consciousness was linked to the hub, humans no longer needed speech to communicate, conveying their intentions to each other directly and without error. Moreover, whatever problem one encountered, one could seek aid from the hub, which would promptly provide a solution.
Yaxiu and the others guessed that this building might once have operated in the service industry, perhaps as a hotel apartment, and the intelligent computing hub had likely been a butler system. But in the wasteland era, this intelligent computing hub had become the great vessel for transcending consciousness.
The Transcendence Cult's concept was not complex: they had all believers link into the intelligent computing hub, progressively reducing the influence of self-awareness and surrendering all actions to the hub's charge until the self completely dissolved. In that way, even without linking to the computing hub, they would transcend the shackles of consciousness and elevate their intelligence to a new level.
To achieve this goal, they fitted themselves with prosthetic augmentations and engraved lightning patterns, all to allow the computing hub to control them more thoroughly. By standard logic, the computing hub was forbidden from controlling living humans, but they were not "legal citizens" in the first place—a disadvantage that ironically served as an exploit to bypass safety restrictions.
This was why Yaxiu felt the cafeteria and the elevator were so suffocating: although the Transcendence believers looked human, felt human, and were biologically human inside, they were gradually ceasing to be human.
And for precisely this reason, all Transcendence believers could be regarded as one. Everyone they met could act as the cult's spokesperson; even a cafeteria lady was qualified to negotiate major business worth thousands of gold coins with them. The believers were mere carriers for the intelligent computing hub, and all vital actions were determined by the hub itself.
However, the intelligent computing hub had also become the Transcendent Temple's shackles. After all, every believer had to stay inside the skyscraper to link with the hub; they could not leave the building at all, invisibly locking the cult within its walls. Unless the first evolved being truly emerged, the Transcendence Cult was nothing more than the wild fantasy of a dozen generations.
Suddenly, Yaxiu squinted. He found himself entering an indoor grassland, above which shone a blazing... sun?
"The sun is fake." Harvey lit his cat grass cigarette, produced a coffin from a spatial card, and called for Alice to wake up. "But the sunlight is real. It seems to be routed in from the surface via reflections, or perhaps it's a light sorcery miracle... I don't know much about that stuff."
Yaxiu drew in a deep breath of fresh air. Looking at the lush green grass before him and feeling the gentle sunlight kissing his face, he said excitedly, "I'm going down to bring Igola and Tamaxi up here!"
"Why?"
"What do you mean 'why'...? If you had such a nice place, you should've said so earlier! Trying to keep it all to yourself without telling us!"
"What I find nice, you might not necessarily find nice." Harvey sat down in the shade of a tree, and Alice gathered her skirt to sit beside him. "What they find nice, you might not necessarily find nice either."
Yaxiu blinked. "Beating around the bush isn't your style. Have you picked up bad habits from Igola too?"
"Do I need to learn from him?" Harvey exhaled a ring of smoke. "You, on the other hand—have you picked up bad habits from him?"
"What on earth are you trying to say?"
"Do you trust Igola?" the necromancer asked earnestly. "To you, what kind of person is he really?"
Chapter 550