Chapter 320: Airport
Chapter 320: Airport
Madam Tree was someone that Adam had seen in Liu Shouyi's memories back in Shadow City.
She was a high-ranking figure in the Gaia Corporation, which was the founder of the Metaverse.
All of the Gaia Corporation's subsidiary companies worked on different parts of the Metaverse, such as constructing the basic framework of the Metaverse, or exploring ways to better preserve the data of the psychic bodies of the deceased.
At the moment, the Gaia Organization was the organization with the highest market value in the entire world. Virtually all of the people in the vast majority of the world used the Metaverse as a form of entertainment during their living days, and as a way to extend their lives after death.
In particular, the service offered by the Metaverse to grant one immortality in cyberspace was one that was endlessly lucrative. Every single living person was saving up money for a chance at immortality, and after they died, their life savings would fall into the hands of the Gaia Organization.
In a sense, the Gaia Organization owned the exclusive rights to immortality, and as a result, it controlled the fate of the entire human race. Everyone was essentially working for the Gaia Organization, offering up their life savings to them upon death.
Liu Shouyi was once an employee at the Gaia Organization, and he had been working in their "immortality" department.
However, his work was far from glamorous. He had been responsible for data compression, a job that was essentially no different from murder in his eyes.
With each data compression that was performed, thousands of people were "killed".
Essentially, the concept of psychic immortality was nothing more than a scam proposed by the Metaverse. What the Gaia Organization promoted was that everyone could upload their memories and personalities onto the Metaverse following the demise of their physical bodies. After that, they would be able to begin a new life in cyberspace.
The Metaverse's slogan had always been: "Death Equals Rebirth."
However, due to the internal storage crisis, this so-called "rebirth" was nothing more than a sham.
According to Liu Shouyi's memories, a person's full personality and memories would generate an enormous amount of data, thereby taking up a huge amount of internal storage.
Every single person had countless memories, and those memories weren't always in the foreground, but they still existed and could be brought to the fore by certain trigger conditions. For example, visiting a certain place could evoke memories from previous instances where that person had visited the same place.
All of these memories took up far too much internal storage for it to be feasible for the Metaverse to record everyone's complete personas.
Hence, compression was required.
The clearest parts of one's memory data were extracted, while all of the other parts were compressed. In fact, sometimes, even the clearest parts were compressed, and they were only extracted again when required. This type of "optimization" strategy allowed the Gaia Corporation to save an astronomical amount of storage space.
However, was a compressed person still a person? Definitely not.
Regardless of whether one looked at this from a scientific perspective or a moral standpoint, they were no longer people.
However, the compressed individuals themselves had no idea this was happening. After all, they were just strings of data. Their family and friends were also unable to detect anything amiss as all of the most important memories of those individuals still existed.
This was how the Gaia Organization had managed to fool the entire human race.
Furthermore, no one was allowed to touch the organization's internal database. Even their internal employees had had their memories altered, and the one carrying out these memory alterations was none other than Madam Tree.
Adam had only seen Madam Tree in Liu Shouyi's memories, but he had already placed her on the same tier as the director due to the incredible abilities that she had displayed.
Not only was she able to alter memories, she was also capable of planting parasites on one's psychic body.
As soon as Herman pulled out the seed and pressed it against his own forehead, his entire psychic body began to undergo a drastic change. Vines began to sprout out of his destroyed legs, and his body also swelled in size, becoming stronger and more physically imposing.
It was clear that this seed was capable of enhancing the psychic body of the host that it attached itself to.
As for how much the host's psychic body would be enhanced, Adam had no interest in finding out.
Herman had already been a force to be reckoned with prior to this, and now that he had received an enhancement, Adam was clearly not going to have a good time.
However, that didn't matter to him. His primary objective for coming here was to gather information.
I'm not just going to stand around and wait for you to complete your transformation!
Adam instructed his anomalies to attack Herman, who was in the midst of his transformation, and at the same time, he split up from Sludge before fusing with Hellhound, then rushed out of this area.
After fusing with Hellhound, Adam transformed into a three-headed werewolf, and he was able to display incredible speed thanks to Hellhound's Hyperspeed ability.
Adam had chosen to fuse with Hellhound as it was the fastest of all of his anomalies, and also because Sludge was too enormous and cumbersome, making it very difficult for him to gather information while fused with it.
After rushing out of this psychic module, Adam quickly sped toward the other psychic modules. Having engaged in so much illegal activity, even if Herman had no conscience whatsoever, he would still be sure to remember the majority of the details of his crimes in order to avoid legal prosecution.
Sure enough, Adam had only passed through two psychic modules before he arrived in an important area.
This was an old-school airport, and even though most of the planes there were for public use, there were also some privately owned planes interspersed among them. The privately owned planes didn't have any logos on them, and in order to board a plane here, all one had to do was display their identification document. Aside from that, there were no other security checks in place.
In this memory of Herman's, a group of people in black clothing were loading a series of huge suitcases onto a plane.
Adam swatted the security guards aside before opening the suitcases, and sure enough, they were filled with unconscious children. After verifying this information, Adam quickly committed the layout of the airport to memory, as well as memorizing the faces of the child traffickers.
After that, he crashed through the wall and forced his way into the airport in order to gather more information.
However, right at this moment, the ground split open, and a seed rapidly grew into a wall of vines that stood in his way. Simultaneously, the flow of time began to slow, and Herman appeared behind Adam.