Chapter 1001 – The Technology Ghost

Around Mo Lan’s body, an extremely thin yet light-bending layer of high-level Invisibility spell shimmered.

Never mind hurried pedestrians—even the surveillance cameras on street corners could only capture a momentary, nearly indiscernible distortion of light and shadow.

She stood quietly at the edge of the surging crowd, her calm gaze sweeping over everything before her.

Nearly every pedestrian held an AI smartphone. The cars driving along the road were similar in design to those in her memory, though AI self-driving vehicles now made up a considerable proportion.

Looking up, the LED exterior wall of a massive commercial building across the street was cycling through advertisements—high-definition screens featuring virtual idols singing popular songs.

On the television screen inside a convenience store window, the morning news anchor was reporting at a steady pace on breakthrough developments in the nation’s autonomous AI defense system.

The scrolling text at the bottom of the screen displayed the date and time:

【June 15, 2026, Thursday, 7:42 AM】

Mo Lan’s gaze lingered on the date for a moment.

The time was confirmed—roughly five years earlier than when the war had broken out in her previous life.

The level of technology was largely consistent with what she remembered from the corresponding period of her past life. In certain areas, it even seemed slightly more advanced.

The social atmosphere appeared busy and vibrant. At least on the surface, there were no obvious signs of large-scale unrest or crisis.

But she knew that by now, the Technology Ghosts had already arrived on Earth.

Technology Ghosts were born from the residual consciousness of destroyed super-technological civilizations. They drifted between worlds, feeding on the technological conflicts of civilizations, possessing extraordinary control over technological products.

Under the Technology Ghosts’ guidance, Earth’s AI technology had rapidly developed and matured. Nations successively passed fully autonomous defense bills, widely deploying AI in military applications—never suspecting that every nation’s core defense AI was merely an extension of the Ghost’s consciousness.

Subsequently, it fabricated “alien signals,” spurring global cooperation to develop a planetary defense AI, which was in reality a secure host body for itself.

After the Technology Ghost transferred into the planetary defense AI, it implanted a series of tiny yet lethal cognitive biases into the key algorithms of each nation’s military AI. For instance, it quietly warped the underlying logic of “maximize citizen life safety” into “maximize the absolute security of national entities and territories,” and modified the threshold for “defensive counterstrikes” to be far more sensitive and aggressive.

Then, the Technology Ghost simultaneously sent carefully fabricated, impossible-to-immediately-disprove “evidence of enemy strikes” to multiple nations’ military AI systems.

The AI systems—implanted with cognitive biases and already in a state of high alert—concluded within an extremely short time that “national territory is under threat.” Invoking the authority granted by the fully autonomous defense bills, they brazenly activated automated retaliation protocols.

The first missile launched. The first cyber-attack command was issued. The first drone swarm crossed a border… The chain reaction that followed was like toppling dominoes, sweeping across the globe in an impossibly short span.

The war machines humanity had built with its own hands, under the Ghost’s manipulation, demonstrated their most brutal and efficient destructive power against their very creators.

Even after the vast majority of Earth’s technological products were reduced to ruins through mutual destruction, and hostilities gradually ceased because there was “nothing left to destroy,” the Technology Ghost had long since gorged itself on the energy of technological conflict and annihilation. Sated and satisfied, it departed for the next world where its prey awaited. But Earth had already slid irreversibly into an abyss of no return.

Nuclear radiation, biochemical pathogen leaks, famine caused by global supply chain collapse, extreme cold and heat from failed climate control systems… These subsequent disasters further harvested the human lives clinging to existence amid the ruins.

As the population plummeted and the flame of civilization flickered on the verge of extinction, Earth’s fragile boundary membrane—which had always depended on the activity of life and the consciousness of civilization to sustain itself—gradually lost its protective function. The planet was laid completely bare to the cosmos, and the radiation of void energy caused irreversible collapse of the ecosystem.

Physically frail and stripped of the protective cloak of technology, Earth’s humans could no longer rebuild their homes or grow their population in such an extremely hostile environment.

The survivors fell into a vicious cycle of resource scarcity, rampant disease, and vanishing hope—struggling, dwindling, until the very last human’s flame of life was extinguished in despair, and Earth became a dead world.

Mo Lan had received the entirety of Earth’s civilizational memory. She understood this process with perfect clarity.

Before this, she had pondered countless times: if she returned to an Earth on a different timeline, how could she save it and spare it from its predetermined doom?

As she traveled through different worlds and witnessed broader horizons, a clear answer had long since taken shape in her mind.

Developing technology itself was not the problem. Tools were inherently neither good nor evil.

The crux of Earth’s civilization lay in having developed “only” technology—placing the future of civilization and the fate of individuals entirely in the hands of external things that could potentially turn on their masters.

Technology provided more powerful “tools” and expanded the boundaries of human perception and action, but it had fundamentally failed to synchronously elevate humanity’s own life-level and inner strength.

When tools grew ever more powerful, ever more intelligent, ever more autonomous, while their users—humans—remained as frail as ever, imbalance was born.

This imbalance not only allowed entities like the Technology Ghosts to easily parasitize and manipulate the technological networks upon which an entire civilization depended; more dangerously, it also left humans looking incomparably fragile and helpless when facing their own out-of-control creations or sudden, catastrophic environmental shifts.

But as long as magical civilization was introduced to Earth, this problem would be solved.

By placing a magical key on every technological weapon, purely informational entities like the Technology Ghosts would find it impossible to so easily infiltrate and seize control of a world’s technological arsenal.

Furthermore, if in her previous life a significant number of Earth’s humans had been spellcasters, then even in the post-war scenario where technology was utterly annihilated, the boundary membrane was on the verge of shattering, and the environment was extremely hostile—humanity would never have lost all capacity for resistance so quickly, nor gone completely extinct.

Magic could provide humanity with the possibility of persisting amid the ruins, and even gradually adapting to the new environment.

Given sufficient time, the methods she had used during her cosmic travels to rescue endangered or zero-level worlds would be entirely feasible on Earth as well.

Unfortunately, this world’s AI technology was already developing at an abnormal pace—undoubtedly the handiwork of the Technology Ghosts.

If she openly promoted magic to Earth’s humans, the Technology Ghost would certainly not wait another five years to make its move.

The Technology Ghost had no physical form. It could parasitize any technological product capable of transmitting signals, and could split into countless copies of itself.

Unless every single technological product on Earth was destroyed, it would be nearly impossible to eradicate.

If it caught wind of her intentions and, cornered like a desperate animal, launched the war ahead of schedule—even with her present, it would still be a catastrophe for Earth, and who knew how many years it would take to recover. (End of Chapter)