Capítulo 611: Chapter 533: Heat Death

“Ever since we entered this town, I’ve felt something strange. Why do we all feel increasingly fatigued, and our Physical Value consumption is so rapid?

Later on, I saw the high-pressure gas cylinder usage method from the store owner Robinson and learned that our bodies have also been replaced with mechanical parts, linking the cylinder, lungs, and Physical Value together.

But this also brought up a new problem, the air composition.”

Li Cheng said casually, adjusting his lying position, reaching out to pull the surgical table’s surrounding brackets toward himself.

Each bracket was fixed with a prism, a microscope, or a medical mechanical arm.

“In this world’s atmospheric composition, from highest to lowest, is nitrogen, helium, argon, hydrogen, oxygen, and ozone. On Earth, the proportion of oxygen is replaced by helium.

This is easy to understand: for silicon-based mechanical life forms, oxygen that can oxidize metals is a kind of toxin, and water that can corrode metals is also poison liquid.”

“Oxygen and water are toxins…”

Wanli Sealed Blade’s pupils shrank, immediately thinking of the dried moat in front of the castle.

The bottom of the riverbed was covered with a pungent yellow residue, which was not river water but an acidic liquid like sulfuric acid.

“Helium is extremely stable in chemical nature, so it’s the primary respiratory gas for mechanical life forms. The interesting part is, despite the high-pressure cylinders being filled with pure helium, it seems the town residents haven’t made any effort to cycle the gases.”

Li Cheng said to himself, adjusting the prism on the bracket into position, he could clearly see the back of his head through the reflections of several mirrors.

Upon hearing this, Claudia’s heart fluttered, as helium atoms have only two electrons in their outer layer, making them extremely unreactive, only reacting with a few elements under extreme pressure and ultra-low temperatures.

The town’s residents, along with the Players assimilated by the Land of Beautiful Dreams, inhale helium, and exhale helium as well.

Considering the town has highlighted a series of technology trees like hydrogen energy vehicles, gas wells, and electricity, they can completely modify their bodies to recycle the exhaled helium or re-purify helium from the atmosphere.

Since they haven’t done so, it can only prove one thing—

“The importance of high-pressure pure helium cylinders lies not in the helium itself, but in the high pressure.”

After speaking, Li Cheng grasped the control lever on the bracket, remotely controlling the medical mechanical arm, and gently pried open his own skull.

Mian Yue gasped sharply, and Claudia instinctively let out an exclamation as Li Cheng’s skull contained no wrinkled brain matter, but a mechanical structure infinitely more complex than watch dials or differential machines.

Indeed.

Li Cheng’s face showed no surprise, he controlled the mechanical arm to gently open the outer layer of the mechanical brain, revealing the core structure inside.

The structure was a grid woven from metal wire, above which hung densely packed gold filaments like brushes; under the microscope, it showed each filament growing miniature elliptical leaves.

The high-pressure helium expelled from the bottled lungs slowed down through the trachea and flowed into the brain “blood vessels,” namely the capillaries.

The capillaries continuously delivered airflow to the metal grid, causing the gold filaments to flutter and guide trillions of miniature leaves to expand and contract at speeds invisible to the naked eye.

Like a lightning bolt across the mind, Wanli Sealed Blade’s body trembled, exclaiming in astonishment: “Logic gates?!”

“Exactly.”

Li Cheng replied in a lively tone: “Inside the bodies of Players assimilated by the Land of Beautiful Dreams, they’ve been transformed to the same structure as the town residents.

Their brains are extremely precise and complex mechanical calculators, with airflow driving the filaments, filaments driving the leaves, leaves driven by airflow, and the ultra-high frequency expansion and contraction,

each switch creates a vortex, driving nearby leaves to switch between AND, OR, and NOT states back and forth.

Trillions of gold leaves operate every minute and second. The next second’s state depends on the calculation of the previous second, forming stable memory, emotions, and even personality.”

“…”

At this moment, the shock in Claudia’s heart was akin to reading Qin Shi Huang’s Man-Array Computer in “Three Body,” as she took a deep breath, seemingly feeling the tremors of countless leaves in her brain.

Li Cheng admired the spectacle in the mirror, speaking slowly: “Gold possesses strong ductility and flexibility, able to withstand high-frequency leaf movements. The golden fragments sprayed by the Priest in the church upon death were actually his core processor.”

“Wait,” Mian Yue recalled something, earnestly asking: “Earlier when Reyes was injured, he also sprayed out golden fragments. But you gave him a bottle of Life Potion, right?”

“Yes, the Killing Field System’s rules can penetrate the Land of Beautiful Dreams, theoretically, that bottle of Life Potion did heal Reyes’s brain.

The reason he’s still in a vegetative state is because, after being injured, no gas flows into the brain,

all golden leaves inside the grid stopped moving, clearing out from countless 0s and 1s calculation states back to zero.

At this point, repairing the core processor can only fix the processor itself, but not restore the calculation state.”

Li Cheng rotated the microscope’s knob, carefully observing the leaf motion spectacle, “This is also what store owner Robinson said, town residents must regularly replace cylinders, they cannot stop breathing for a moment, otherwise they would immediately die and become vegetative.”

“…”

The mystery lingering in the Players’ hearts was mostly unraveled; Mian Yue paused in silence, then hoarsely asked: “But there’s one question, why is Physical Value consumption accelerating?”