Elder Cultivator
Chapter 1326

Once they were actually on the surface of the planet, they settled onto an island that was relatively nearby Reneden’s body. It was good to have a base of operations, especially for those who were lower in cultivation. They were still a number of kilometers away from the actual location, but it was a distance that could be traveled by any of them within the course of a workday without needing to call upon Anton or Bear Hug to transport them.

“Take any position you please,” Reneden said through a communications drone. “I only ask that you avoid harming any of the vegetation. It is meant to improve the natural energy of the planet.”

They deployed some shelters using a few small drones that leveled the ground before printing walls and a ceiling. Anton wasn’t sure what the material was, though it appeared quite durable. It seemed to easily respond to their devices for reassembly- there were a few glitches in the process where the drones fumbled. More likely the ones with external connections were better, but they were being cautious.

Tents would have been fine, but the shelters were supposed to be semi-permanent. They could likely be expanded upon later once more material was available. Of course, all of that depended on how things went with Reneden in the near future.

Anton was on everybody’s side here. He wanted Reneden and the people from the Aretis Coalition to join together. Reintegrate wasn’t quite the right word, because Reneden as a person hadn’t existed when their civilization overlapped. He also didn’t want harm to come to Aretis from the theoretical danger Reneden posed, both because it would harm his and Bear Hug’s reputation and because even if they had been overaggressive at first he still just wanted them to prosper.

He would be carefully watching to make sure everything went as well as possible, smoothing out any bumps. He could react swiftly enough and with enough precision to suppress an explosion. Unfortunately, he couldn’t do anything relevant on the software level without probably shutting down all of Reneden’s processing, so it was a good thing they weren’t going to interface in that manner.

There was no rush to get to anything else, but Torqua certainly didn’t see it that way. He took one of the fabricated boats- the engines and other complicated components were pre-built but the hulls were made on-site- loaded it up with drones, and set out right away.

A massive wave rose up as seawater dripped from a writhing green monster.

“Hi!” Bear Hug said. “I mean, uh… Arr! Ye can’t be traversing these seas, matey!”

“... What?” Torqua was still some distance away, but let up on the engine’s throttle.

“I’m salty!” Bear Hug declared. “You’d better darn be prepared for my foul mouth!”

Anton watched while casually striding along behind Torqua’s boat. He walked atop the water near a few other boats manned by the various people that were going to be investigating Reneden. Even if it wasn’t a rush, they didn’t want to be far behind Torqua. Reneden was exciting.

One of Reneden’s communications drones was waiting. “Welcome. You will want to descend directly from this location. Unfortunately, I don’t have any method to accommodate you or your machines.”

It wouldn’t take long, even with the extra effort required to dive, for people to understand why Reneden said that. Only the barest remnants of technology remained, it just so happened that a number of long distance communication drones were functional. No, they were spared the previous calamities precisely because they were away from populated areas. As for actual defenses, mostly shells remained.

There was little in the way of utility remaining. Reneden couldn’t do anything but sit and observe what was around. Reneden had no drones well suited for manipulating physical objects. Nor did Reneden have sufficient spare natural energy to move things with that.

Preprogrammed drones with only physical data connectors began to roam around Reneden’s body. Anton watched careful for any sort of contact, or even particularly turbulent waters. If Reneden was a human, Anton would have thought Reneden dead, strewn about and so barely connected in many places. Some wires were frayed and corroded, with various structural components hanging off of undersea ledges. It was a delicate balance… and nobody knew which parts were important.

Hopefully they could find out, but Anton didn’t want anything to get bumped out of place. He did try to keep his energy out of the way of the scanning process, though.

“This scanning process is… uncomfortable,” Reneden commented. Reneden spoke with synthesized speech with a little bit of energy sign mixed in. Both seemed equally comfortable. At least Reneden didn’t have to use energy to directly manipulate sound like Bear Hug.

“Does it… hurt?” Anton asked.

Reneden didn’t respond for a few moments. Anton wasn’t quite sure whether it was a lot of thinking or a dramatic pause. It could be a mix of both. “I doubt I feel pain like humans do. I can say it is difficult to not try to defend myself.”

“Let me know if you actually notice any damage,” Anton said. He was watching carefully, and there shouldn’t be any problem. Even the active probing was very low energy, in terms of both natural energy and the technological pieces involved.

A few hours later, Torqua popped up to the surface. “I’ve made a determination!”

“Oh?” Anton raised an eyebrow. “And what is it?”

Anton and Bear Hug waited eagerly. Reneden was also listening. However, only Yosef was present of those not actually involved with the scanning process. Felicitas and Janer hadn’t wanted to create more interference. Bear Hug was showing them around to various places they had planted.

“These computer systems… are perfectly normal except for being old and physically damaged!”

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

“... I do not believe I am normal,” Reneden said. “Unless my records are incorrect.”

“Oh, yeah,” Torqua shrugged. “I have no idea where you came from. Your energy flow is all weird. But the physical components all match our older records. Way older. We can definitely perform physical repairs, so at least you weren’t some experimental technology we can’t interface with.”

“Please don’t try to tamper with my physical components,” Reneden said. “Not until you are certain of the results.”

“I can be more certain,” Torqua said. “If… you let us offload a copy of your code.”

“... Can you do it through one of the drones?” Reneden asked.

“Are they you?” Torqua asked.

“No.”

“Ah… well, we can start with that at least.”

-----

Anton was glad to see that they did not rush any process. Torqua and the others spent a full year analyzing the code and other information Reneden had.

“It’s junk,” Torqua declared. “The code. It probably worked at some point. It absolutely doesn’t run now- as a whole. Just to be clear, I’m not saying that it has developed into some sort of form I don’t understand. It’s just nothing, except for a few specific programs and functions. Reneden can access other devices but there’s no way the code can be sending the original signals. Electrical or otherwise.”

“You are already straining the limits of my technological understanding,” Anton commented.

“Hmm. How’s your hardware knowledge?” Torqua asked.

“I understand the signals part. I can even observe the flow of things. I just don’t know what most of it is doing besides mathematical operations.”

“Yeah.” Torqua nodded. Reneden was just listening silently. Anton thought it was like receiving a diagnosis from a confused doctor. Certainly Reneden understood some about their internal parts, but that didn’t mean they could do much with it. Even cultivators with internal sensing ability wouldn’t automatically know how they worked. “So, the code. It’s nothing. However, Reneden’s logs still work fine. But… there’s no way it can cover their whole memory of events. Even if nothing happens…”

“Correct,” Reneden said. “The logs are not my memory. They are just logs. It is like I wrote them down. My sense of time is separate from the timing function. That still works, by the way.”

“Yes, some individual parts seem intact,” Torqua agreed. “Anyway, my thought… and the generally agreed consensus of the rest of us, is that as various things stopped working- including a number of physical connections- Reneden just… kept going. Adder short circuits? Just learn to add. Transmitter broken? Just replicate the effect with energy.”

“But to me,” Reneden commented, “It all feels like moving an arm or leg for you. Presumably.”

“That’s the metaphor we settled on,” Torqua confirmed. “Anyway, we’re finally confident in replacing a part.”

“Which one?” Bear Hug asked. “Is it the lasers? Gravity guns? Moon reflectors?”

“Uh, none of those are part of Reneden. There are some orbital platforms that had those though. No, we’re going to replace a fan and some tubing.”

“That’s so boring!” Bear Hug said.

“Well, it’s still like if we replaced your- okay, you actually don’t have anatomy that’s comparable on a macro scale. For a human, it would be like…” Torqua tilted his head. “Replacing sweat glands? Individually it doesn’t matter if they function. We just need to make sure Reneden can handle parts being exchanged.”

-----

Anton provided his help by keeping water from flowing into the section they were working on. Even if he screwed up nothing should reach the internals, but it would still make it easier for people to work. It wasn’t a very long process, swapping out some external pieces.

“That hurt,” Reneden commented after the process was over. “If anything hurts, that did. But not… much. And it feels better now.”

Relatedly, the parts were working just fine. Critically, the fan was getting power while the wires connecting it to the various power supplies were still severed, at least in a normal physical sense.

“I think I get it,” Torqua said. “We shouldn’t be comparing to the body at all. Or at least not the purely physical body. We should be thinking of the metaphysical. Meridians and dantian. At least, for some things.”

Anton had similar thoughts at one point, but Reneden didn’t conscious do anything akin to cultivation. Using energy? Absolutely. However, even their systems gathered that for them. He hadn’t been willing to suggest gathering and storing energy manually. The current systems worked just fine so it was unnecessary, there wasn’t enough spare natural energy at the time, and it could have been dangerous.

However, Reneden was certainly using energy sign- picked up from Bear Hug- as well as energy projection for communication that had been built into the communications drones. That meant using energy actively was safe. Storing it might not be. Or if it was… it was probably already being done well enough in the batteries.

Active cultivation might be incomprehensible, but Bear Hug was even further removed from a functional biology in that regard- despite being biological. Yet Bear Hug still managed, using energy and intentionally becoming stronger. Anton had paid close attention to Bear Hug’s Body Tempering and while it made sense it certainly didn’t follow human norms. Nor could it. Cell wall fortification wasn’t really like skin tempering except that they were both on the outside. Ultimately, Bear Hug and the others from Klar had relied on their intuition first and broader body tempering second- if they did it at all.

Liberty had more or less jumped straight to pure energy control. That might make for a weaker foundation, but it was impossible to say which things were mistakes when there wasn’t even a vague roadmap in the form of simple cultivation methods.

Anton and Bear Hug had discussed theoretical advancement methods. Reneden had logged those, but had been extremely hesitant to do anything to their body. Torqua and the others had some suggestions, though. They understood enough about how the body should be to know how it might be changed or improved.

“You may want to fuse some wires yourself,” Torqua suggested. “As the first and most basic thing. Even if the path is already working.”

“I don’t have a good sense of what I should do,” Reneden commented. “Both in terms of how and where.”

“Good thing we have maps of you! And random parts to experiment with,” Torqua grinned. “Let’s have you try to fix this faulty indicator light. That’s not really Body Tempering until you try to improve it, but you have to start practicing somewhere.”

Already, they were friends. Anton wasn’t sure if this was supposed to be part of the mission. Torqua seemed to have moved past the suspicion phase and as one of the lead technicians on the task was quite influential in that regard. It was probably Bear Hug’s fault. It usually was.