CHAPTER 542: CHAPTER 52 THE GENDER OF RAPHAEL

If you were to ask what players favored the most, it would probably be the task reward list.

"Rocket Jet Backpack, capable of supporting up to 340kg for flight."

"Adaptive Optical Camouflage Generator, rendering the user invisible in optical terms."

"Microwave Oscillator..."

Aske put down the list and asked,

"Can you provide all these items as spot goods immediately?"

"Of course not," Valian Bishop said seriously, "The Magic Tide just passed yesterday, and the production lines in the factories haven’t been restored yet. We can only postpone delivery."

"Then that settles it," Aske said. "While these items are useful, they’ll turn into scrap metal once the next Magic Tide hits. Speaking of which, we haven’t even used the Adaptive Force Field Shield that the Holy Throne rewarded me with last time. I suppose it got destroyed in this Magic Tide too."

"It’s inevitable," Valian Bishop said with a wry smile. "Do you want mechanical products that don’t contain electronic components? Sure, but those would be mainly cold weapons, and their value is much lower than the items on this list."

"No, I mean, I don’t want finished products," Aske said with a smile. "I want ’Holy Temple Privilege.’"

Holy Temple Privilege? Valian Bishop was slightly startled before realizing what he meant.

At this time, the entire continent’s advanced manufacturing was concentrated on the small Italian peninsula.

Whenever the Temple Knights stationed in the dioceses’ branches across countries needed to replace high-tech prosthetics such as artificial eyes or limbs that were damaged due to the Magic Tide, they had to place orders back to the headquarters in Italy and then have them delivered through the Temple Knights’ specialized logistics network.

At the same time, in the nations of the continent, many of the princes and nobles who had friendly relations with the Church Court, such as those wanting to buy high-end military equipment or military vehicles, had to get approval from their local dioceses before placing orders through the trading network of the Temple Knights. This is what’s referred to as "Holy Temple Privilege."

Of course, this privilege wasn’t something just anyone could obtain.

For example, last year, when The Azure Longsword Mercenary Corps tried to exchange materials with the Night Watchman’s Eastern branch, they were told that all extraordinary items above Sequence III didn’t have spot goods available and had to be ordered from the Night Watchman headquarters in Florence, to be transported through the Temple Knights’ trading network—and that privilege was absolutely not available to outsiders.

For any other mercenary group, Valian Bishop certainly wouldn’t agree to open this channel.

One should know that buying technological equipment was at most useful for a year before becoming obsolete in the next Magic Tide. However, trading rights of the Temple Knights? That meant as long as one had money, they could order any kind of advanced technology equipment at any time. It could easily end up supporting the enemy.

Yet The Azure Longsword Mercenary Corps was definitely not an outsider. Not to mention anything else, just the fact that our family’s little sister Nora was in the team—could the family really refuse to grant her a smart firearm she might want to play with?

Reaching the position of Cardinal, the "Holy Temple Privilege" that the princes and nobles of various countries longed for was just a matter of a few words for Valian Bishop, and so he readily agreed,

"Sure, I’ll speak to the Holy Throne about this."

After settling on the task rewards, Aske proceeded to the Church Court, accompanied by Nora and together with Valian Bishop.

"This is an information linkage pod," Valian Bishop led the two into a room. "You just need to stay inside and put on the helmet. We will construct a body for you in Raphael’s database."

Aske: ...

What information linkage pod? Isn’t this just a game pod from ’Song of Iron and Fire’?

He thought of how "Song of Iron and Fire" also contained this thing, and then the players undertaking this mission wouldn’t be able to help but enter another virtual world within the virtual holographic world... He suddenly felt the profound malice of the game developers.

Lying down in the gaming pod, Aske fitted the helmet on. Valian had already gone to the monitoring room, while Nora had moved a chair over, sitting next to him.

Although her brother had repeatedly assured that Aske would be safe and even promised to immediately terminate the plan and extract Aske should he be damaged by the encryption fragment, Nora couldn’t help but worry.

The squad leader... should be fine, right?

She stared pensively at Aske inside the information connection pod, when suddenly her gaze was drawn to the monitoring screen opposite her.

On the screen, within a world constructed from data stream, the figure of Aske had already appeared.

"This place, seems to be a storage room?"

Aske surveyed his surroundings, he was currently in a very square room, the walls were a pure white without any cracks, as if they were poured as a single piece.

"Hello, Lord Aske," said a humanoid figure that appeared out of thin air next to him.

This was a shapely female, with waist-length silver hair, about the same height as Aske, with six pairs of soft light wings spread out behind her.

"I am a special process of the artificial intelligence Raphael, temporarily appearing before you in the form of a twelve-winged Blazing Angel, to guide you to potential locations for finding the encryption fragments."

"Why choose this angel’s form?" Aske teased, asking.

"Because according to my analysis of you, you seem to have a special preference for beautiful female companions," Raphael responded, her voice cool, showing no sign of sarcasm.

Aske: ..........

"You’re definitely mistaken," he quickly retorted, "Actually, I’ve never cared about a companion’s gender..."

"Then even when I appear beside you in the form of a beautiful woman, you should not mind it at all, right?" Raphael’s tone carried an elegant indifference.

"Forget it, let’s just move on," Aske realized that this AI was somewhat cunning and quickly brought the topic back on track, "Where are we now?"

"We are currently situated in the DM layer, also known as the ’Data Market’," Raphael answered, "All data here has been visualized and categorized, and presented fully to the Church Court’s clients. Chaos data is not on this layer."

With a graceful wave of her hand, a staircase leading downward appeared on the floor before them: "Let’s go."

Aske followed her down the stairs and arrived at a vast plain. The room they had exited was a cube suspended high above the plain, connected to the ground by stairs.

There were thousands upon thousands of such cubes, impossible to count with the naked eye.

"What you see, all the cubes floating in the sky, each one represents a data market storing tens of thousands of ’surface data’," Raphael explained nonchalantly.

"Their existence is maintained by the plains under our feet, the DW layer, namely the data warehouse. The data warehouse records all organized data and distributes it to the designated data markets."

"Below this plain is the ODS layer, the Operational Data Storage. There, every second, a massive amount of real-time generated Chaos data flows out of the data sub-library, and my processes are responsible for summarizing and extracting it to support the data renewal of the data warehouse."

"The encryption fragments you are going to deal with this time are located within the ODS layer’s data network. They have strong anti-injection features and will continuously attempt to cross boundaries to ’code inject,’ ’communication isolate,’ and ’data cleanse’ your informational body."

"Please be extra cautious moving forward."