Chapter 336: Anna’s New Plan
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After getting back to Mom’s palace, we were greeted by her cute smile and a big hug from her. She congratulated me and petted my head, grooming my hair with her beak.
She can’t give me kisses like a human can, but her gently pecking my hair and tidying it with her long beak is not so bad; it makes me feel like I was her baby chick for a moment…
“Welcome back; well done, Anna,” she smiled. “I can feel within you that you’ve become incredibly stronger than before. Even your eyes tell me that.”
“Yeah, but I kind of failed to get the Imperial Armament; it’s so hard…” I sighed. “Three days is so short; it’s just not fair.”
“Hahaha! Well, what you’ve accomplished in three days took me hundreds of years! Can’t you give yourself a break? You’re insulting me here…” The heavenly demon complained. “Anyways, is dinner ready? I’m starving.”
“Yes, it is, but… what are those manners?” asked the heavenly empress. “I’m allowing you to eat with us out of the kindness of my heart, so behave better. Don’t ask for dinner as if it is your right.”
“W-What? Why are you so moody out of nowhere? So you’re only nice with Anna and Song?” Mr. Crowface complained.
“Well, of course, they’re my kids,” she said. “But you better behave; don’t try getting too comfortable…”
“Hmm, alright, alright…” he sighed. “Sorry.”
Although I get that she got a bit mad at that, I think it was a bit excessive. Is she really moody today? Or perhaps she’s testing his patience?
It seems he didn’t make a huge fuss about it this time and even apologized. Perhaps she’s really testing him.
“May I have a meal?” he asked, scratching his head. “P-Please?”
He was very embarrassed, making her very happy for some reason.
Perhaps she enjoys subduing his demonic will or something?
Damn, she has a sadistic side…
“Of course,” she smiled, patting his shoulders. “Come in.”
As we made our way inside, a huge feast awaited us. We sat down hurriedly and greeted the rest of the disciples and my friends.
They seemed to be rather exhausted as they had been training as diligently as I had.
“Hah, I’m beat…” Wai Tian said, resting her head over the table. “Ah, Anna!”
“Hey! How has it been?” I wondered.
“Good… fine?” she muttered. “Well… I’ve mostly mastered an internal meditation technique, but now I have to master my skills and transformation and apparently combine it with my normal martial arts. That’s what master said, but it’s so complicated… How do you even do it? Using skills is so easy that I can’t really think of a different way.”
“I was wondering the same thing,” said Yin Sheng. “How can you use a skill… without activating it, young lady?”
“Hmm…” I rubbed my chin. “It just kind of comes out of me naturally, hahah… However! From what I can recall from each time I’ve done it, you have to visualize how the skill is, how it works, and how you use it, and then bring it out without using the skill activation mental command. Like trying to conjure fire without wood but with… uh, leaves.”
“Hmm…” Wait Tian was caressing her long whiskers. “I don’t get it.”
“Okay, me neither, but we’ll try to do what you said,” nodded Yin Sheng. “Better than nothing…”
“Haha, well... Perhaps like trying to visualize fire but without outright saying the name. Like trying to bring what the fire creates, burning pain, heat, and warmth, right? Something like that.” I said. “Anyway, I can feel you two are very strong, so you’re doing really well. Keep working hard!”
After that, Zero One and Zero Two wanted to talk to me about something.
“Anna, the Mechanical Tree will be ready in a couple of hours, which translates to around two days inside the inner realm,” said Zero One. “Or so told me Zero Two.”
“Due to the time flow differences, I receive messages veeeery slowly from Mother, which is really annoying,” said Zero Two. “But yeah, that’s it.”
“Nice, I guess it’s about time I tell them, right?” I asked. “Although that alone won’t do it. I also have another plan, which I hope can work.”
“Another plan?” wondered Zero One. “Ooh, what do you have in mind this time?”
“Is she the one that always makes the plans here? Seriously, she’s always scheming…” Zero Two glared at me while squinting her eyes.
“Heheh, that’s how Anna is… Sometimes she only communicates her plans in the very last moment!”
“Ah, come on now, I do it, so I don’t confuse you with the sketch process of the plan,” I said. “But I’ve thought it enough… Anyways, they’re here now, so let’s talk about it with them.”
As my family and friends sat down to eat after Song finally came from his room, looking a bit sleepy as he had been taking a nap after today’s training, we started chowing down as if our lives depended on it.
And quite literally it did, because everything was so good I couldn’t stop eating! Once I get back to Earth, I’m going to miss this food so goddamn much; nothing else will taste the same ever again, seriously!
But anyways, back to business.
“Erm, we wanted to tell you two something we had been planning with Zero One and Zero Two,” I said, looking at my masters. “It’s about the nanomachines inside of your bodies.”
“Huh?” the Heavenly Empress wondered. “Planning?”
“…What is it?” the Heavenly Demon asked.
I glanced at Zero One.
“Well, it should be possible to extract the nanomachines inside of you,” she said. “If we use the… the technology of the Mechanical Tree I took over with the help of Zero Two’s mother. She’s been working on creating the devices for the extraction, and it’ll be done in a bit more, two days in here.”
“Wait, what? Really?!” asked the Heavenly Demon. “B-But that’s… can your technology truly heal us? I’ve tried every single thing, and I had even considered tearing apart my own body to free myself, but these things… they’ve been eating away at us since the beginning, and no matter what I try, nothing works.”
“They’re fueled with cosmic energy,” I explained. “That is one reason why they’re capable of draining away your power so easily and why they had weakened you to this extent… My sponsorship alleviated your symptoms, which were greatly deteriorating, but in a couple of weeks you’ll probably go back to the same state as before…”
“…” Song looked at his parents worriedly and then at me. “S-So you’re saying we can heal them, big sis?!”
“We… we can, right?” I asked Zero One and Zero Two.
“Um, yes! There’s… of course!” Zero One nodded.
“I’ll be blunt because my sister and Anna are simply too soft,” said Zero Two. “There’ll be at most a forty percent chance of success…. The other sixty percent, you’ll die in the process of extraction.”
“…” Song dropped his beak in shock. “Wait, so low?!”
“Hmm…”
“I see…”
However, the Heavenly Demon and the Heavenly Empress nodded calmly.
“Is it worth giving it a shot?” wondered the Heavenly Demon.
“It is… It might be the only chance we ever get,” said the Heavenly Empress. “And when we confront the last tree, the army of robots there might be tremendously strong, even more so than our son… which we’ll need to subdue and save. We need that power.”
“But if it fails, we’ll die, and they’ll be unable to fight without our aid…” sighed the Heavenly Demon.
“I know… But either way, it's either that, or we have low chances of success anyways,” said the Heavenly Empress.
“Yeah…”
“Hm.”
“B-But mom, dad, it’s too dangerous!” Song insisted. “Y-You can’t!”
They smiled at Song and then at me.
“Hah! What are you taking me for, Song?” His father asked. “I am the Heavenly Demon! I am no coward! Forty percent chance?! Higher than my success at ascending to an immortal back then! I might be an evil demon, but I am blessed with demonic luck, kahahaha!”
“That’s right,” nodded his mother. “And I possess the power of Hope! Don’t think I can’t use that to somehow increase our Luck… Even though Heaven’s Will is dead and the Fate it controlled has been shattered, the power of the Luck Dao is still strong. Through spending large quantities of Hope Essence and using the Cauldron of The Seven Lucky Gods, it is possible to boost our own Luck slightly. Better than nothing, right?”
“I have Skills… and Privileges too,” I explained. “I could probably buff them to increase their Luck a bit more… Perhaps those forty percent could go as high as fifty… maybe sixty? Or that would be too much of a stretch, normally.”
“The thing is…” said Zero One. “The success chance varies depending on their body’s strength. Because they have grown so weak, the chances of dying have greatly increased. Buffs alone… I don’t know if they could compensate. They’re still external forces. They need something internal.”
“Oh…” I muttered. “Well! Then I guess the plan I’ve devised could work…”
“Plan?” asked Mom. “What plan, Anna?”
I looked at Song and patted his head, calming him down.
“Just like I was able to summon Song from the Simulated World made using a Fragment of the World’s Records with my Sponsorship…” I said. “I’ll sponsor you two using that power and then bring doubles of you!”
“EEEH?!”
Both of my adoptive parents gasped in disbelief and shock over such a ridiculous idea.
Even my friends, and Song too!
Yeah, it was pretty crazy, but that didn’t end there.
“So you’re saying you’ll bring doubles of us in case we die? Hmm, I guess that wouldn’t be so bad-” the Heavenly Demon muttered.
“Nope,” I interrupted his words. “It’s not that; it’s different. You’ll absorb them like we’re planning to do with Song.”
“Wait, absorb them?!” asked Wai Tian. “Is it possible? I mean, it should be if you’re planning to do it with Song, but…”
“It still seems risky, yes,” nodded Yin Sheng.
“However, what else can we do?” asked Fang Shuan. “I believe it’s a good idea.”
“Me too! I hadn’t thought about it!” said Zero One.
“But the thing is, if it works or not…” sighed Zero Two. “However, if it does, they could absorb the double’s power and body strength and strengthen themselves a lot more. If they were at least twice as physically strong and tough as they are now, it could work, and I mean in terms of mostly Vitality and Stamina.”
“Hmm… It’s worth giving it a shot, yes,” said mom. “However, dear, do you even have the points for that? Don’t you need them for what you’re going to do?”
“I… uh, yeah, I kind of don’t know if I’ll be able to afford it,” I said. “I got some Points completing the quest for the mechanical tree we conquered, but I’m sitting at 150k right now.
“Oh no! I’m so sorry, Anna, I was the one that asked you to spend the points on Zero Two…” sighed Zero One. “I’m really sorry…”
“It’s fine,” I said, smiling. “I would have done it either way. Zero Two is your sister, right? And she’s happy she got new strength too. We’ll help her find a new purpose as well.”
“Hmph, I never… asked you for this power…” muttered Zero Two, although she was blushing.
“Hmm…” Sara, who had been silent this entire time, looked at me. “Do you need any help regarding the process? I doubt it’ll be easy to get back into that trial… right? How can it be reversed or whatnot? Nobody had asked these things...”
“Yeah, it can be reversed,” said the Heavenly Empress. “Right now time has “stopped” within the Trial as it ended. It has no “continuation” past its current point. Anna must be inside the trials to give sponsorships, right? So we’ll have to reverse the time of the trial a few minutes before and help her sponsor us… within that simulated world.”
“Then it’s decided! We’ll see if I can afford it or not once we’re there,” I said. “Let’s do that tomorrow morning, alright?”
At the end, they accepted my plan and nodded.
As they said, it was worth giving it a shot.
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