Chapter 149: The Void Programmer

“Secure, real-time communication via this tree doesn’t seem impossible to implement. In fact, it might not even be difficult,” Wang Yu mused, rubbing his chin. He examined the Tree of the Night Sky, which connected all of the Lady of the Night’s followers aboveground.

“At its core, this thing is programmable void energy. The Lady of the Night has transferred control of it to me, so I can manipulate this tree that connects her followers without expending any void energy. In reality, I don’t even need to control it personally. My mental energy and void energy should both have the authority to manipulate this tree…”

Wang Yu thought for a moment, then snapped his fingers. A faint surge of void energy, almost imperceptible, caused a small box to manifest in his hand. He placed the box next to the Tree of the Night and then used void energy to draw a line connecting it to the tree.

This small box was a conceptual construct. It contained a simple switch that could only be in an on or off state, so creating it cost almost no void energy. What Wang Yu wanted to test was whether he could use void constructs created in the mindscape to control the Tree of the Night.

Wang Yu flipped the switch, transmitting a signal of void energy to the Tree of the Night.

Upon receiving the signal from Wang Yu’s void energy, the tree, recognizing Wang Yu’s authority, immediately executed the command. Charles’s connection to the Lady of the Night was abruptly severed.

In his room, Charles froze. His decent void affinity allowed him to sense that he had been disconnected from something he wasn’t strongly tied to. Before he could react, the faint connection was reestablished.

“What the hell?” Charles muttered, looking around suspiciously but finding nothing out of the ordinary. After a moment of focus, he realized it was the same power that had spoken in his mind earlier—the Lady of the Night’s power.

Charles fell silent for a moment, wondering if Wang Yu had been right. Had his disrespectful actions been noticed by the Lady of the Night, causing her to sever their connection?

“Well, if she’s cutting me off, so be it. I’m not exactly a devout follower anyway. It’s a shame to lose access to the Lady’s divine power, though. She’s… well, she’s a pretty decent deity, at least compared to other churches that demand sacrifices and weekly rituals,” Charles muttered to himself, feeling a bit regretful.

Charles shook his head. He resigned himself to the idea that his lack of devotion had finally caught up with him. It seemed only the God of Light, who never seemed to care about anything, would still tolerate him.

As Charles wallowed in his irreverent thoughts, having accepted that he had been abandoned by the Lady of the Night, his eyes suddenly widened in shock.

“What the hell is this?! Is the Lady of the Night messing with me? Ahhh, stop tormenting me!”

Charles’s eyes widened as he slapped his head with both hands. In his perception, the connection that had just been severed and reestablished was now rapidly cycling on and off at an insane frequency, over ten times a second.

For someone with acute mental perception like Charles, it felt like a tiny bell was ringing incessantly in his head, one that was unbearably loud and impossible to shut off. After about five or six seconds, the connection finally stabilized and no longer flickered on and off.

“I don’t get it. Is this divine punishment? What kind of divine punishment is this?” Charles muttered, utterly baffled. The experience hadn’t been harmful, just annoyingly “noisy.” Once he got used to it, however, it became like white noise that his brain automatically ignored. Still, he couldn’t understand what the Lady of the Night was doing.

He would never guess what had just been tormenting him. Wang Yu smiled at the two stacked boxes before him. One was sending high-frequency pulses to the switch box, each of which would toggle the switch. The switch box, in turn, sent signals to the Tree of the Night, causing it to repeatedly sever and reestablish Charles’s connection.

“Perfect! It really works!” Wang Yu clapped his hands, delighted. The implementation was even simpler than he had imagined. There was immense potential in using this tree to connect the Lady of the Night’s followers.

Wang Yu quickly created a feedback device and connected it to the Tree of the Night. Its purpose was to send signals back to Wang Yu, allowing him to receive information collected by the tree.

Soon, in accordance with the programming, information about the test subject Charles was transmitted back to Wang Yu.

“Limited visuals—and the information I can gather about Charles is minimal. It must be affected by the Lady of the Night’s power and how devout each particular follower is…” Wang Yu observed the images transmitted by the tree, which only showed the back of Charles’s head swaying. Even the surrounding scenery was blurry.

“Is this how a deity sees its followers? It’s a rather peculiar feeling. Processing so much information from so many followers at once—are all deities like living supercomputers?”

Wang Yu found the experience novel. He had never imagined that this was the nature of a god’s-eye view. None of the divine research he had read ever mentioned such a thing.

But then again, why would a deity share such insights with a human?

Only Wang Yu, a freak who wasn’t afraid of mental contamination, could casually receive information from a deity—and the Lady of the Night was the unique deity willing to communicate with him. Only together had this unique situation been made possible.

“The computational power required to process so much information must be terrifying, but the Lady of the Night doesn’t seem particularly intelligent…”

Wang Yu suddenly noticed an issue. If deities truly did possess such immense computational power, their ability to analyze and think should likewise be extraordinary, with intelligence far surpassing that of any genius.

But none of the Lady of the Night, the Font of Life Erphine, or the Warlord Gaius had displayed particularly impressive wisdom.

The Lady of the Night had initially spoken in a rather antiquated manner. Though she had adapted readily, she seemed far more humanlike than not to him.

As for the Font of Life, Erphine, there was little to say. He constantly spouted nonsense about “arrogance.”

And the Warlord Gaius wouldn’t have been captured and imprisoned so easily by the Professor and Captain Hugin if he truly did possess the intelligence associated with such remarkable computational power.

So just what was going on? Wang Yu had a vague idea. Verifying it wouldn’t be too difficult, either.

“Lady Darkness, would you like to play a game with me?” Wang Yu turned to the Lady of the Night, who had been quietly watching him tinker with the tree without interfering or speaking. She simply lounged in her rocking chair.

“What game? Sure.” The Lady of the Night nodded with interest.

“It’s a game with simple rules called Go. Let me explain them to you first,” Wang Yu used his mental energy to materialize a Go board between himself and the Lady of the Night, along with two baskets filled with black and white stones.

“Each of us chooses black or white stones, taking turns to place one stone at a time. If you surround your opponent’s stones, you capture them…” Wang Yu briefly explained the rules. Once the Lady of the Night understood, they began playing Go in Wang Yu’s mindscape.

After a few rounds, Wang Yu’s black stones had nearly wiped out the Lady of the Night’s white stones. He had reached a conclusion.

The Lady of the Night before him definitely did not possess the computational power required to process the vast amount of information she received from her followers. Otherwise, even as a beginner, she wouldn’t have lost so badly to Wang Yu.

After all, Wang Yu was no Go master. His understanding of the game was limited to the rules and a few casual games with a high-school classmate. Yet, even with such minimal experience, he had effortlessly defeated the Lady of the Night in her first game.

“This game is quite interesting. Can we try a few more times?” The Lady of the Night looked at the board. Rather than being upset by her loss, she was intrigued.

“Sure,” Wang Yu agreed.

The Lady of the Night lost and lost again. The results hadn’t changed—if anything, Wang Yu, having recalled a bit of his past skills, won even more easily. This further supported Wang Yu’s suspicions about the nature of the Lady of the Night and other deities.

Although the Lady of the Night seemed eager to continue, Wang Yu excused himself, saying he had a new idea to test. The Lady of the Night didn’t press him, and Wang Yu couldn’t help but notice how lazy she sometimes seemed.

Returning to the two boxes he had created next to the Tree of the Night, Wang Yu summarized his thoughts.

It wasn’t clear if the Lady of the Night was representative of all deities. After all, according to “One,” she was incomplete. Regardless, the Tree of the Night was more than enough to prove that she possessed the characteristics of a deity.

Yet, it was evident that the Lady of the Night didn’t have the computational power to process all the information from her followers. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have lost so badly at Go. So, where did her processing power come from?

Wang Yu glanced at the boxes he had created and then looked up at the starry sky above. He seemed to have arrived at his answer: the void.

The void was truly unreasonable. As long as you provided it with void energy, it could give you what you wanted. Wang Yu had no idea how the boxes he created worked. Despite their simplicity, he still didn’t understand the underlying principles behind their functionality.

It was precisely because of their simplicity that the boxes required almost no void energy to construct. In this case, the void acted as an automatic processor. You provided the requirements, fed in the materials, and the void skipped the intermediate steps and simply delivered the final result.

Back when Wang Yu was studying the runes of wizardry in the cabin in the woods, he had once considered using the void to recreate something like a phone or a computer. At the time, he thought it would be difficult to achieve because he lacked sufficient reserves of void energy to create such complex constructs.

However, after his failed attempt to recreate cola and the information he had gained from the Lady of the Night, Wang Yu realized that even if he used an unimaginably large amount of void energy to create a computer or a phone, what he would end up with would be something that functioned similarly but was fundamentally different.

The void skipped the process and delivered only the final result. The intermediate steps were a complete black box. No one knew how the void accomplished what it did: this was the most unreasonable aspect of the void.

As for deities, who controlled vast amounts of void energy, using it to process and collect information from their followers was likely not a difficult task. While Wang Yu couldn’t be certain, it seemed plausible that the computational power gods used to handle the vast amounts of information from their followers came from the void.

It was similar to how people in this world naturally produced fighting spirit at a certain level of strength, or awakened their latent potential at a certain level of fighting spirit.

Perhaps these deities were naturally endowed with the ability to use the void to process information. Otherwise, it would be impossible to explain why they didn’t boast the intellect that should have corresponded to their computational power.

However, the deities Wang Yu had encountered thus far were somewhat unconventional. There was the Lady of the Night, an incomplete deity created by Selwyn, and the God of Light, whose image varied wildly among his followers—yet whose interpretations were uniformly accepted by the Church of Light.

Then there was the Undying Lord, a void deity who was likely insane and whose intelligence was questionable. And finally, the being that represented the pinnacle of power Wang Yu had seen so far—the Dragon God, as Sieg had called it, whose massive claw had descended from the clouds.

It felt as if deities became more mechanical the more power they wielded. The God of Light automatically responded to the prayers of his followers, while the Dragon God, with its immense power, could easily penetrate the Lady of the Night’s flimsy barrier that concealed Sieg’s presence. Yet it chose not to, withdrawing as soon as Sieg was hidden.

Wang Yu shook his head, pushing these thoughts beyond his current level of understanding to the back of his mind. For now, these ideas were just speculation or anecdotes with no real significance. His plan was to further explore the nature of the void and then formally put the Tree of the Night to use.

While he was learning the runes of wizardry, Wang Yu recalled complaining that this was essentially programming: compressing commands for the void into extremely simple runes. Now, he was going to try to create a similarly simple system for the Tree of the Night, allowing it to automatically perform certain tasks.

In his past life, Wang Yu had studied engineering. Though his post-graduation career had nothing to do with his major, he still remembered the basic fundamentals of C programming.

As he began to use this knowledge to create a program specifically for the Tree of the Night, he realized just how simple the void made everything.

“Programming” with the void was incredibly convenient. You didn’t even need to understand the underlying principles. As long as you provided the desired logic, at the cost of a small amount of void energy, the void would automatically create a small box that could execute that logic.

Small boxes began to pile up around Wang Yu in an orderly fashion. Each box was akin to a function that implemented simple logic and consumed very little void energy. All Wang Yu had to do was combine these functions to emulate the program he wanted.

The process was almost effortless. For a programmer, it was like being able to create a function at will, one that could be called across systems—an incredible shortcut.

As Wang Yu finished his last logic box, he connected them in order to form a large cube, which he linked to the Tree of the Night.

Stable flows of void energy began to circulate within the cube composed of numerous logical functions. Wang Yu waited with bated breath, pleased that his attempt might have succeeded. As a programmer coding with the void, he had created a simple but highly valuable program that integrated with the tree’s infrastructure.

“This cube should allow your followers to communicate with each other through prayer, and should greatly aid the development of your faith. I’m sure no other deity offers such unparalleled benefits. However, since converting and collecting information both require void energy, there might be some limitations.”

Wang Yu patted the large cube and explained its function to the Lady of the Night, who was still lounging in her rocking chair.

While communication-based divine magic wasn’t unheard of, the ability to connect with fellow followers through prayer was, as far as he knew, unique.

“A marvelous creation. Thank you for aiding the spread of my faith,” the Lady of the Night replied. Without hesitation, she directly integrated the cube into her connection with her followers.

“All they need to do is softly recite, ‘Great Lady of the Night, I offer my voice…’ and it should work. There may still be some logical flaws. I’ll test it first and optimize it later.”

Wang Yu waved a hand as he left his mindscape. Of course, his test subject would be the unfortunate Charles.

Wang Yu lay down in bed and softly recited, “Great Lady of the Night, I offer my voice…” The experiment was finished. He’d ask Charles later whether he had heard anything.

What Wang Yu didn’t know was that, when his words were transmitted to Charles through the Tree of the Night, some residual mental contamination from Charles’s mindscape traveled back to the tree via the connection that had been established. That contamination was then distributed among the Lady of the Night’s many followers. The contamination, which had been significant in quantity, was split into tiny fragments and, after a few breaths, was completely dissolved by the followers’ own mental defenses…

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