In the night sky of Lower City, you will never see the brilliant neon lights of Upper City at night.
In other words... it doesn't make any difference to Xiacheng District whether it's day or night.
Anyway, no matter when I raised my head, I could only see the dark ocean that kept roaring.
The Paradise Bird huddled in his room, sitting on the bed with his hands on his knees.
What was placed in front of her was a quiet, shimmering angel halo.
"dad……"
She murmured in a low voice, her young face showing unprecedented wavering.
"What should I do..."
From birth until now.
——Paradise Bird has never wished for a moment that he was a real angel.
A few days ago, I heard the news about Angel's return. I happily put on the halo left by my father and headed to Uptown openly as an "uncensored person." However, my joy was diluted by the difficulties I faced now.
She is not a mechanical angel affiliated with the church, and neither is her father.
In other words, her father used to be.
After the war, the church decided to freeze all angels.
Her father didn't want to be frozen, and he didn't trust the church. So before that, he quietly escaped.
After being classified as a defector, he was removed from the angel register and his halo was banned by the church, but he was not further traced.
——But that level of ban doesn’t matter.
He was originally a very good engineer. Relying on the advanced instruments he took with him when he was running, he easily cracked the ban restrictions from the church server and changed it into a "stand-alone version".
Generally speaking, the public moral understanding of the general public is constantly changing... This also means that the criteria for determining Holy Orders will be skewed.
In order to prevent the sudden loss of power, the Cyber Church has been maintaining the entire "divine descending device" system - they will collect relevant information and constantly fine-tune the personalities included in the angel halo.
Even if the angel has been frozen and sealed, this process has never ended.
This also means that when the angels are thawed and come out, although times have changed a lot and their moral values have also changed dramatically, their power will not weaken much.
Of course, there will still be a certain degree of weakness. After all, the original fit is high enough, but it does not mean that you can adapt to the adjusted new personality.
As for Paradise Bird's father, because he was using the halo from a hundred years ago, he never carried out "driver updates"... Therefore, as the times change, the power he can use becomes weaker and weaker.
But even so, he still relied on the power of Holy Order to continuously repair his body and lived easily for more than a hundred years.
Even though he is eighty or ninety years old, he looks like he is only in his fifties.
In order to hide his obviously abnormal lifespan, he will continue to move to various empty islands, experiencing first-hand the era that is becoming increasingly chaotic.
Not long after he arrived at Happy Island for the second time...he fell in love with a woman in her fifties.
She is a pharmacologist. Both of them took a fancy to each other's wisdom and felt comfortable getting along with each other.
Because he has a longer lifespan than ordinary people, he has always kept his distance from others.
And when his power of holy order weakened to a certain extent and he began to clearly realize his impending death, he no longer rejected others.
It was the first time in his life that he fell in love with someone. Although both parties were old and looked haggard, age and appearance no longer mattered to him - he had stayed young for too long and had long since lost sight of it.
Skin.
After aging to that extent, they are no longer able to have children.
But Paradise Bird's mother felt the decline of her body, and desperately hoped to leave a child...
The technology of in vitro fertilization is not allowed - because that means that there may be new children born who will not be implanted with a chip.
So they entered Xiacheng District. Relying on her mother's connections, they found a wanted black market doctor.
With the help of a doctor codenamed "Paradise", Paradise Bird was born as a test-tube baby.
Strictly speaking, Paradise Bird can even be said to be a "synthetic human" because she did not grow up in a human belly, but was born in an artificial womb - a taboo technology held by "Paradise".
When Bird of Paradise was born, her father was already one hundred and five years old.
Even taking into account the continuous repair of the body by the power of the Holy Order, he looked like an old man in his sixties or seventies, and his body began to decline rapidly... and her mother was almost sixty years old.
Although they are parents, they are older than their grandparents.
In order to take care of the Paradise Bird, which was born without a microchip, they moved into the lower city.
Unlike normal uncoded people, she at least has a safe place to live. Her mother also has a chip, so she can keep going back to the uptown area and sell her inventions to buy daily necessities.
Compared with other people born without coding, the life of the Paradise Bird family is relatively stable.
Paradise Bird has never been to school or even interacted with peers.
It was all her parents who taught her all the knowledge, skills and fighting skills in her life.
It wasn't until three years ago that her father finally died of old age. He had lived for one hundred and sixteen years, which was an extremely long life for a short-lived species.
Due to grief, her mother also passed away half a year later.
She inherited her father's aura, but the too-weak healing holy order could no longer cure that level of disease.
"Angel" has completely become a legend. She can no longer enter the upper city with a halo, and she dare not reveal the identity of the angel in the lower city...
After losing the protection of his parents, the eleven-year-old Paradise Bird relied on his extraordinary intelligence to survive as an uncoded person in the lower city.
Their family once joined a small mutual aid organization called "Cave Home". Before Paradise Bird's mother died, she also asked her old friends to take care of Paradise Bird.
She lived very happily there, as if she had a home for the second time.
My parents' old friend is also a very good person. Although her life is very poor, she is happy... Her healing power can help others.
She originally hoped to maintain a stable life like this and live a stable and happy life... It didn't matter even if she never saw the bright sunshine in her life.
But just six months ago, that organization was also destroyed by the "veil of ignorance."
——Not for annexation, but for torture.
It has no meaning. It is just for fun and "rehearsal of crime" to destroy, tear into pieces and torture those uncensored people who live a stable life.
In the unbridled laughter, in the whines and screams of those former friends and elders...record all this into a video, keep it as a souvenir, or sell it to others.
With the help of her elders, she barely escaped.
But her second home was destroyed again.
She was like a bereaved dog, hiding in a shabby room that no one knew about, spending every day as dark as the night in fear and hatred.
She saw the notorious "Bad Man" leading a group of men in black to carry out raids and massacres in the Lower City.
The nearest bullet had penetrated the wall, missed her, and hit the wall at the other end of the shelter.
She looked through the holes made by the bullets, curiously and timidly, at what was happening outside.
Then, she saw the "devil" walking on the ground.
Those bullets fired at him in fear meant nothing to the man - those bullets were knocked down by the ripples in the air before approaching him, and he just slowly approached the opponent, like the god of death, with a light touch
Just explode other people's bodies.
Like sausages split in boiling oil, those who attacked him with guns were torn into such miserable shapes by invisible forces.
After they dispersed, Paradise Bird went to examine the bodies of those people.
Their internal organs and brains almost exploded, and their fat seemed to have boiled. It was as if they were put in a microwave oven and roasted alive.
This only exacerbated her fear.
Every day when I close my eyes in exhaustion and confusion, I will dream of the Veil of Ignorance or the Inferior.
She dreamed of the wailing screams of her friends and elders who were tortured to death by gang members, and how those gang members who she thought were too powerful to resist were easily torn into pieces and exploded by the inferior ones.
——Paradise Bird was very happy when she accidentally learned the news that the "angel" was resurrected again.
Because this means that she can return to the uptown area under her father's halo to collect some materials!
She escaped in such a hurry that she didn't take anything with her. She had a smart mind, but she couldn't do anything without materials and instruments.
The environment is different from the environment more than ten years ago and more than twenty years ago.
At that time, discrimination against uncensored people was not that serious, so her parents dared to give birth to her.
But after that, things quickly changed.
As the last batch of residents born before 1123 died, and as the crimes caused by the uncoded people in the lower city became more and more intense, people's attitude towards the uncoded people became more and more dissatisfied. Now "not holding a chip" has become a
A crime worthy of deportation - this was not the case even ten years ago.
Because there is no chip, she certainly has no credit points, so she cannot use normal channels to shop.
But as scholars, her mother and father also held "credit sticks," items used for anonymous transactions.
This is usually left over from an anonymous purchase by a certain director.
Just a few days ago, when she came out of the prosthetic shop with a few bags of stuff in her arms, she had a pleasant chat with an older brother she didn't know.
——She is an angel now and can live uprightly under the sun!
This was a wonderful feeling she had never experienced before.
But before she could say a few words, she saw the "bad guy". The man who often appeared in her nightmares.
Only then did she realize that the friendly older brother was from the Special Operations Department.
At that time, the bird in paradise suffered a cardiac arrest due to fear.
There is no doubt that it is impossible for angels to have chips, nor to go shopping. Because they have been frozen for so long, they do not understand the current era, let alone have anonymous currency such as "credit sticks"... Because angels
There is no need to deal with the company at all. They have nothing, let alone sell anything to the directors.
In the past, prosthetics were used as assistive devices for disabled people, rather than as body reinforcements as they are now.
The Paradise Bird realized very clearly that he had made a big mistake.
She even thought about how she would be torn apart after her disguise was discovered and she was touched by an inferior person...
But fortunately, the bad guys don't seem to be interested in this...
In other words, he didn't realize that he couldn't be a real angel.
But he will eventually realize this. When he does, he will no longer be able to go uptown.
Therefore, Paradise Birds began to stock up on large quantities of goods.
Food and weapons are things that can be easily obtained in the lower city.
The most lacking items are wine, precision instruments and medicines. These are all products only produced in the upper city.
At that time, she saw a man suffering from a heart attack on the road.
She didn't know him, she had never met him before. She didn't know what force he belonged to or what he wanted to do.
Although she knew it was dangerous, she couldn't watch others die in front of her... she still couldn't bear to step forward to help them treat them.
But this revealed that she was holding precious medicines, and as expected, she was robbed by the other party - not only her medicines, but also herself.
She felt remorseful and regretful for her stupidity and naivety...but if it happened again, she would still treat that person.
Only this time, she would run away immediately after feeding the other party the medicine.
Fortunately, with the help of passers-by, she solved the problem and barely gained the trust of the fierce guy...
But after that, she came into contact with some high-level officials of the organization.
Then she suddenly realized something:
The "mage" defeated by his father a hundred years ago was born again among the uncoded people in the lower city.
Although the word "lover" was unclear, she had the knowledge she got from her father. She immediately realized that this was a gathering of mages.
She originally planned to crash the party.
But after she sneaked into the Veil of Ignorance warehouse and obtained the chip sample...
With the mood of being idle, Paradise Bird tested the psychic energy stored in this chip.
——The result made her panic.
At this moment, the dim light beside the Paradise Bird was still shining quietly on the workbench.
There were instruments that looked very professional and advanced, completely different from the simple environment she was in. There was a white chip embedded in it without any markings.
Paradise Bird is very sure that this chip has been tampered with.
It contains powerful healing powers that can heal yourself and others.
But if this chip is used to treat people, it will make the healer go crazy, and the person being treated will gradually be infected with a soul-based poison, which will gradually make the person lose their fighting spirit in three to five years, and their spiritual power will gradually become...
The body becomes weak and hollow... and eventually loses all consciousness and becomes a vegetative state.
——There is no doubt that this is also a method from the mage.
This is the conspiracy of the wizards and elf directors from Uptown!
They did not turn a blind eye to the chaos in the lower city, but had prepared a big plan.
By poisoning the treatment chip and then pretending to be kidnapped, the number of residents in Xiacheng District was slowly reduced!
Although she doesn't identify much with Xiacheng District, she was born in Xiacheng District after all.
And she was smart enough to realize that...these chips actually came from the game between the mages from the upper city and the mages from the lower city.
The mages in the upper city are sure that the mages in the lower city will accept these problematic chips out of greed - they can't find out the real problem with the chips, because they don't have any control over the chips from the church, which are used to resist spells.
Transformation technology.
If you remind or help them destroy the chip, this means that all the gangs in Xiacheng District, including the "Veil of Ignorance", will be preserved; but if they acquiesce in their distribution and use, it means that the residents of Xiacheng District will be massacred.
It's okay if you don't know...but once you know about it, the Paradise Bird can't just sit back and ignore it.
Watching others fall into a trap you've already discovered - how is that different from participating in it yourself?
"What should I do..."
It would be great if I really was a mechanical angel.
It would be nice if there were reliable comrades behind me.
It would be nice if I had the power to change everything... instead of just having the useless ability to heal other people's wounds.
"dad……"
She stared blankly at the halo left by her father and murmured in a low voice.
She seemed to be asking about the halo, or about her dead father.