Chapter 95: Dreamscape: Is This an Intergalactic War?

Even though it was a meal among long-time friends, Du Qiu did not drink excessively.

Having had the experience of missing a chance to enter the dreamscape due to overdrinking last time, Du Qiu was now unwilling to waste another night.

Ever since the successful development of the new material, Du Qiu has been absorbing knowledge of the dreamscape’s technology with an even greater thirst.

For him, losing a night without learning this cutting-edge black tech that surpasses the era of Blue Star would be more painful than death.

The last time Du Qiu used his replicated crystal pillow to enter the dreamscape, and in the following two nights, he conducted comparative tests and found that the replicated crystal pillow seemed to take longer during the phase of crossing the universe.

For this reason, he carefully compared it with the original crystal pillow and finally discovered that the placement of the white dots on the replicated pillow had extremely subtle deviations.

The hexagon formed by the facets, when looked at from various angles, deviated by an extremely small degree compared to the original.

When Du Qiu replicated another crystal pillow and used it, everything went back to normal.

From then on, Du Qiu had completely mastered the use of the crystal pillow.

Tonight, using his homemade crystal pillow, Du Qiu arrived as scheduled in the super machine producer role within the dreamscape.

After Du Qiu’s continuous in-depth research, he discovered an additional material repository in the super machine that wasn’t listed in the production task list.

The materials and production processes here far surpassed what was in the task list.

Undoubtedly, the elements in the task list were merely what could be collected on this resource planet.

From the vast numbers in the super machine’s material repository, it is evident that this super machine has been through who knows how many resource planets.

Facing such a super material repository, Du Qiu initially planned to memorize all the material combinations and production processes in the super machine.

Now he could only abandon this thought, as completing this task has become an impossible short-term mission.

Du Qiu decided to spend part of each night looking for and memorizing new materials.

With the rest of his time, he planned to study the intelligent core of the super machine.

This was because, with Du Qiu’s design and development of automated production lines, as well as actual manufacturing, he felt that he had reached a bottleneck.

That is, with the current electronic components of Blue Star and his Heavenly System software version 1.0, there’s no more room for improvement in the automated production lines.

However, the current automated production line is far from meeting Du Qiu’s expectations, and even further from the intelligent production program of the super machine.

The intelligent core of the super machine, due to its very powerful computational hardware and sensory systems, seems to be much weaker in its internal software intelligence.

But this was because Du Qiu’s perspective was limited, after all, the performance of computer intelligence is often demonstrated in dealing with external changes or emergencies.

Merely from the various functional sub-intelligence cores, Du Qiu could understand some of the intelligence level of the super machine.

It was definitely beyond what is recognized on Blue Star as weak artificial intelligence, reaching a level close to that of strong AI.

Even if Du Qiu could not implement hardware of similar standards, the internal software part should be perfectly replicable.

At this point, Du Qiu was very proficient in the software technologies of extraterrestrial civilizations, with all sorts of algorithms and programming concepts fully under his control.

When he accessed the intelligent core and swiftly read the corresponding intelligent program cores, he finally understood that the intelligence of the super machine was restricted.

This restriction was what he previously discovered as grade constraints.

If Du Qiu removed the grade restrictions of the super machine, letting it operate without constraints, he believed the super machine would definitely qualify as a strong AI.

After realizing this, Du Qiu was puzzled.

Why would an extraterrestrial civilization want to limit the grade of the super machine, and it seems they have it limited at the lowest level possible?

Just as Du Qiu was unable to make sense of it, suddenly, he felt a violent shaking of the planet through the sensory systems of the super machine.

Could it be an earthquake?

Du Qiu, not concerned about the possibility of being discovered, immediately accessed the sensory system’s imagery.

Previously, Du Qiu would use the visible light sensory sub-systems according to the habits of Blue Star to observe the outside, but after familiarizing himself with and trying the various sensory sub-systems, Du Qiu found that the most useful was the super-magnetic Induction imaging subsystem.

Its maximum sensing distance is limited, but can be increased from the default 10 kilometers to 1000 kilometers, and it reveals everything above and below the earth clearly.

The only issue was that the mechanism had been previously locked at default values by the maintainers.

Now faced with a possible earthquake, the 10-kilometer distance was certainly insufficient, so Du Qiu decisively unlocked it.

Considering his current mastery of extraterrestrial software programming, he could effortlessly reapply the locking mechanism without anyone noticing.

Just as Du Qiu was about to view the imagery, the intelligent core of the super machine suddenly received a high-level command.

“Alert! Alert! Resource planet 2100 is under attack by enemy guerrilla warships. All units immediately switch to transport mode and prepare for evacuation!”

After the intelligent core received this instruction, and since Du Qiu did not issue a command to refuse execution, it immediately sent a shutdown command to all the sub-intelligence cores.

To Du Qiu’s surprise, the spiraling white vortexes began to fade slowly until they disappeared, leaving only the external three and several internal ones, including the sensory system’s sub-intelligence core, the one through which Du Qiu had come, and the underlying shape transformation module, among others.

Du Qiu had no time to study these because the sensory system had already displayed the outside world.

“My God, that’s a huge space battleship!”

Du Qiu felt as though he exclaimed loudly, but in reality, since he was present in the intelligent core of the super machine, he would not emit any shouting sound.

Du Qiu could see a 360-degree panoramic view, and the part of the image above his head showed:

About 800 kilometers above the ground in space, a vast super space battleship nearly obscured Du Qiu’s view of the stars.

This was a ship that appeared to be rectangular in shape but actually consisted of multiple sections and layers in a long bar form.

Although it was more than 800 kilometers from the ground, its immense frame made Du Qiu feel as though it was bigger than the moon, at least its length surely exceeded the moon’s diameter.

It was as if the moon suddenly approached 800 kilometers above the Earth; that feeling was definitely oppressive.

People on the ground would surely think that they were going to collide.

At that moment, in the surroundings of the super machine on the resource planet, including the iron forest three kilometers away, there was no one else apart from Du Qiu observing through the sensory sub-system.

Hence, only Du Qiu was left with that feeling, but when he accessed another sub-system that could view even farther in order to observe the space battleship, he gasped in shock.

The imposing form of the space battleship stood across the front of the resource planet, and through the edges of its shadow, Du Qiu could see the distant starry sky.

Since the sensory system didn’t have a telescope, Du Qiu couldn’t see the faraway stars clearly; he could only look up at the sky as humans do.

Using the sensory system at that moment, Du Qiu saw what seemed like countless rays of light shooting toward the resource planet.

Could it be a meteor shower?

But the high-level information mentioned an enemy guerrilla warship attack!

Du Qiu diligently searched, and suddenly, in the farther reaches of space, he noticed a small bright spot moving swiftly.

At this point, Du Qiu could only lament that the super machine’s sensory system was not an astronomical telescope, thus he couldn’t clearly discern what that bright spot was.

However, by observing the position of that bright spot carefully, it seemed that beams of light were continuously shooting towards the resource planet where he was.

Could it be that the enemy warship was attacking the resource planet from a distance?

Du Qiu felt that the bright spot was at least twenty million kilometers away from the resource planet.

This was calculated by Du Qiu based on the time it took for the light emitted from the spot to approach the resource planet, which was about one minute—after all, the speed of light is constant.

What relieved Du Qiu was that those beams of light didn’t hit the resource planet but were instead blocked by the gigantic super battleship.

When hundreds of rays converged within a hundred meters of the space battleship, a stunning net of light exploded in space, a brilliant glow flickered, and then everything was silent.

It was as if, in the void, the hundreds of beams of light had never existed.

Damn, that was thrilling!

Du Qiu thought it was too cool; the space super battleship must have used an invisible energy shield to block those beams.

Soon, Du Qiu noticed that the bright spot began moving at a higher speed, and it diminished in size.

Huh, it’s running away?

Right at that moment, Du Qiu suddenly noticed in the corner of the image about five or six bright spots approaching the position of the initial bright spot.

It seemed that some other warships were closing in on the enemy’s ship, thus the enemy could only retreat.

Is this intergalactic war about to end so soon?

No, what kind of intergalactic war is this? At most, it’s like a sneak attack that got countered.