Chapter 551: Transcendent Sect

The Charging Hall on the sixty-first and sixty-second floors served as the designated dining area of the Transcendent Temple, and it offered no delivery service. Ashe and the others had no choice but to come here for their meals.

Even after staying here for two days, Ashe still found the dining environment difficult to get used to. The synchronized sounds of people eating combined with the complete absence of any stray noise in the air. It felt as though a drifter had walked into an internet cafe intending to spend the night gaming, only to discover everyone around him was a group of office workers who had come over after a power outage to work overtime through the night.

The atmosphere was far too serious and proper. Ashe had even been too embarrassed to steal food from Iger's plate these past two days.

Beyond the stifling mood, there was another detail he found equally difficult to stomach. They were actually charging themselves.

The appearance of the Transcendent believers only added to the surreal spectacle. Unlike the ascetic look of Calamity Flame believers, Transcendent believers possessed an unmistakably futuristic appearance. Silver-white metallic implants covered various parts of their bodies, including the backs of their necks, both ears, spines, elbows, and more. Glowing lines ran across the implants like breathing indicator lights. Combined with identical blue-and-white uniforms and lightning-patterned markings on their skin, they looked like futuristic soldiers who had somehow traveled back to the apocalypse.

The implants served various functions, but they also consumed electricity. As a result, mealtimes doubled as charging time. Numerous charging cables were installed beneath the tables. The moment believers sat down, they automatically plugged themselves in, and electricity coursed through their bodies. In fact, charging seemed even more important than eating.

People like Ashe and the others, who came here to eat without charging themselves, resembled someone going to an internet cafe to eat instant noodles without even turning on a computer.

In contrast to Ashe's discomfort, Iger and Harvey seemed completely at ease.

Iger went without saying. You could throw him into hell, and he would probably still chat and laugh. This little scene was nothing to him. Harvey was even more unfazed. As someone capable of sleeping and eating in a pile of corpses, Ashe genuinely could not imagine what sight in this world could possibly ruin the necromancer's appetite.

As they ate, a middle-aged woman beside them suddenly spoke. "The three of you have twenty-nine hours and forty-three minutes remaining on your stay. Please leave as soon as possible before your time expires, or we will forcibly remove you. If you wish to join the Transcendent Temple, please report to the Newcomer Office on the thirty-second floor before five p.m."

By now, Ashe and the others were no longer surprised that virtually any believer could speak on behalf of the Transcendent Temple. Iger asked, "Could we take a tour of the Transcendent Temple and learn about its achievements before deciding whether to formally follow the Grand Law?"

The middle-aged woman shook her head. After a brief silence, she replied, "No. If you wish to receive the protection of the Transcendent Temple, you must attend tonight's service and complete the initiation ceremony, joining us in our pursuit of Transcendent Consciousness. Otherwise, you will continue to be treated as foreign travelers."

"I see," the fraudster nodded. "We'll give it serious consideration before our time is up. By the way, is there anything you need? If we're going to continue traveling as merchants, we might be able to procure some of the supplies you require."

The middle-aged woman seemed not to have heard him. She simply lowered her head and continued eating.

Several dozen seconds later, a man entered the dining hall, handed Iger a document, and immediately turned around and left without a word.

Iger glanced through it. It was an illustrated list of requested supplies. In addition to common resources, it included spirits, legacy artifacts, mechanical components, and even members of other races.

He raised an eyebrow. Just from this list alone, he could already determine which goods were considered valuable in the wasteland that was the Myriad Continent.

"I'm done," Harvey said, picking up his tray. "I'm going to smoke a cigarette before heading back."

Iger glanced at him. "There are smoke detectors everywhere. You probably can't even smoke in the restroom."

"I found a place without any smoke detectors. It also gets sunlight through the landmark." The necromancer said something completely out of character for him. "I'm taking Alice there to sunbathe. We're both a little short on calcium."

Ashe hurriedly swallowed the rest of his food. "I'm coming too!"

Iger frowned at him. "You're going to smoke too?"

"I want to sunbathe too!" Ashe said. "I'll leave bringing Tahmas his food to you!"

"You've left it to me the last two times as well. You just don't want to bring his food, do you..."

Tahmas refused to eat in the dining hall, but it had nothing to do with the atmosphere. It was a matter of religion.

He claimed believers of the Crowslaughter Sect were not allowed to eat with other people.

He never gave much of an explanation, but Ashe and the others had already come up with all sorts of theories. Refusing to associate with heretics strengthened the cohesion of the sect. Eating together might expose some kind of weakness. Perhaps the original Grand Law of Crowslaughter was an antisocial recluse.

Whatever the reason, it was hardly an unbearable flaw, and Ashe and the others were perfectly willing to respect Tahmas's religious beliefs.

The only problem was that the charging hall offered no delivery service, so they had to pack his meals themselves.

Ashe never wanted to be the one to carry Tahmas's food. Partly because he was lazy, but also because he enjoyed watching Iger carefully arrange the food inside the container. Everything would be neatly organized, almost like a carefully plated meal. For some reason, Ashe always found the sight incredibly amusing. He actually wanted Iger to keep bringing Tahmas's food, but the fraudster clearly had no intention of indulging the cult leader's petty whims.

Ashe and Harvey left the dining hall and took the elevator. They happened to catch one just as it arrived, and several believers in identical uniforms were already standing inside. The two silently stepped in, and Harvey pressed the button for the ninety-fifth floor.

Several minutes later, the moment Ashe stepped out of the elevator, he leaned against the wall and began taking deep breaths.

Harvey looked at him strangely. "Did someone fart in there?"

Ashe waved a hand. "No. I wasn't holding my breath. Didn't you find it suffocating? Being packed into that tiny elevator with them. I can handle a few dozen seconds, but we were in there for several minutes this time. I really couldn't take it."

"Suffocating?" Harvey walked ahead and gestured for him to follow. "What's there to be suffocating about? Just think of them as a bunch of corpses."

Ashe sighed. "I wouldn't mind if they were corpses. The problem is, they're actual people. It's just that..."

Harvey eagerly pulled out a Catnip cigarette and slipped it between his lips, speaking in an oddly calm tone. "It's just that they don't want to be human anymore."

The Four Pillars Cult, Crowslaughter, and Calamity Flame all had aspects rejecting ordinary humanity, yet they remained within a range Ashe could understand. That explained why he had adapted to the Myriad Continent so quickly. He never realized he would always remain an outsider here until encountering the Transcendent Temple.

As one of the main sects of the Music Day Alliance, the Transcendent Temple actually functioned as an extremely orderly and benevolent faction. Its rules for receiving traveling merchants alone proved it had earned the trust of many other factions. The Temple of Calamity Flame, by contrast, had once belonged to the evil faction and made a living robbing traveling merchants. No one had been willing to trade with them.

Yet despite recognition as a lawful faction, the ideology of the Transcendent Temple remained extremely radical: transcending consciousness.

What did that mean?

The Grand Law of Transcendence held that intelligence and consciousness were not inherently linked. Consciousness actually acted as a constraint placed on intelligent beings. Evolution into a higher form of life required them to transcend consciousness and shed the self.

It sounded absurd initially, but they maintained a self-consistent line of reasoning.

A sorcerer might rely on conscious effort to learn and internalize any skill, yet complete mastery demanded letting go of consciousness to use it properly. In music, a musician does not consciously think about which note to play next. They simply follow instincts and play. In combat, a swordsman does not consciously think about where to strike next. During a battle where a single mistake spells death, the thought process ends before the conscious mind even forms a thought.

The Transcendent Sect believed consciousness resembled a tutorial for beginners in a video game, a baby walker, or an instruction manual for a product. Every intelligent being had to pass through that stage, but it remained only a stage.

Consciousness could lead to intelligence, but intelligence did not require consciousness. Once intelligence began developing, consciousness instead turned into a burden. All distracting thoughts, desires, cravings, and emotions served as obstacles preventing intelligent beings from evolving further.

The ideal of the Transcendent Sect involved everyone shedding their sense of self, transcending consciousness, and evolving into a more intelligent form of existence.

The sect's ideal was certainly bizarre, but the Myriad Continent had witnessed more than enough bizarre ideals. One more hardly mattered.

By all rights, an ideology three steps ahead of its time should have quickly been swallowed up by the fiercely competitive wasteland. Yet the Transcendent Sect found the perfect utopia for its beliefs—a perfectly preserved building from the Gray Fox Age.

The building still possessed an intelligent computational core. Connecting consciousness to it allowed people to bypass words entirely, transmitting thoughts to one another with perfect accuracy. Encountering any problem meant simply consulting the core, which immediately provided a solution.

Ashe and the others suspected that the building once served some kind of service industry, perhaps a hotel or apartment complex, with the intelligent computational core functioning as a butler system. During the wasteland era, however, that computational core became the perfect vessel for the pursuit of Transcendent Consciousness by the Transcendent Sect.

Their idea was simple. Connecting every believer to the computational core gradually reduced the influence of individual consciousness, leaving the core to handle all actions. Eventually, once the sense of self completely dissolved, they would transcend the constraints of consciousness even without connecting to the core, raising their intelligence to an entirely new level.

External implants and lightning patterns inscribed on their bodies accomplished this goal, allowing the computational core to control them more completely. Normally, the computational core prohibited the control of living humans. However, because safety protocols only applied to registered citizens, the believers' status as unregistered outsiders had become the perfect loophole that helped them bypass those restrictions.

This was why Ashe found the dining hall and elevators so oppressive.

The Transcendent believers looked human, felt human, and remained human inside. Yet they were gradually becoming something other than human. Because of this, all Transcendent believers operated essentially as a single entity. Anyone encountered could speak on behalf of the sect, which explained how even the middle-aged woman in the dining hall negotiated a business deal worth thousands of gold coins with them.

The believers served merely as vessels for the intelligent computational core. All important decisions originated from the core.

At the same time, the computational core became the greatest shackle of the Transcendent Temple. Remaining inside the building was mandatory for every believer to maintain connection, meaning they could never truly leave. Without realizing it, the entire sect was imprisoned within the building. The Transcendent Sect remained little more than the wild fantasy of a dozen generations of believers until the first true Transcender emerged.

Suddenly, Ashe squinted. He found himself standing in an indoor grassland, basking beneath a blazing sun.

"The sun isn't real," Harvey lit his Catnip cigarette, pulled a coffin from a spatial card, and called for Alice to wake up. "The sunlight is real, though. It seems reflected from the surface, or perhaps generated by a Light Class Miracle. I don't really understand this stuff."

Ashe took a deep breath of the clean air. He gazed at the lush grass before him and felt the gentle sunlight brush his face. His eyes lit up. "I'm going to get Iger and Tahmas."

"Why?"

"What do you mean, why? You should have told us about a place this nice," Ashe protested. "And here I thought you were trying to keep it all to yourself."

"I don't think you two would necessarily find the things I like enjoyable," Harvey said, sitting beneath the shade of a tree while Alice lifted her skirt to sit beside him. "It's just like how just because they like something doesn't mean you will."

Ashe blinked. "Going around in circles doesn't sound like you. Have you been taking lessons from Iger?"

Harvey blew a smoke ring. "Do I really need to learn anything from him? You're the one who changed. Have you been learning from him?"

"What are you trying to say?"

The necromancer looked at him seriously. "Do you trust Iger? What exactly is he to you?"