Chapter 681: Temporary Enlightenment Technique

In the laboratory, a row of Prowlers lay neatly arranged on the workbench.

Jie Ming picked up the final modified Prowler and placed it into the scanning chamber of the inspection equipment.

The chamber door closed, and a pale blue scanning beam descended slowly from the top, combing over the Prowler inch by inch from its outer shell to its core like a fine comb.

Data began fluctuating on the control panel.

Soon, a green light lit up on the adjacent panel, indicating that every aspect of this Prowler had passed inspection and perfectly matched Jie Ming’s original design.

Jie Ming placed each Prowler into the inspection equipment one by one, verifying them individually.

All eight Prowlers passed inspection, with core metrics deviating by no more than five parts per thousand.

Such consistency in a biochemical modification project indicated that his current modification scheme was stable at the foundational architecture level, rather than relying on coincidental adaptation of individual specimens.

After shutting down the inspection equipment, Jie Ming gathered the eight Prowlers into a transparent culture box.

The silver-gray bullet-shaped creatures lay quietly at the bottom of the box. The rune rings on their tails had been uniformly changed to a dark gold color, emitting a restrained glow under the lights. Since the results had fully met expectations, the next step was simply mass production.

The basic template for the Prowlers was now set; the incubation pools only needed to replicate according to the template.

With the current production capacity of the automatic factories in the Infernal Sulfur plane, the first batch of five hundred units could be completed and equipped within three months. After that, the scale could expand exponentially.

Jie Ming closed the lid of the culture box and handed it to the black giant priest beside him.

“These are the finished modified Prowler prototype samples. Deliver them to the incubation pool supervisor for standardized expansion. Produce the first batch of five hundred units. Once complete, send them to the testing ground for batch verification.”

The black giant priest accepted the culture box with both hands, the vertical slit on his chest opening slightly. “Yes, Master. Should priority be set?”

“Highest,” Jie Ming said. “In the pending production queues of all military factories, Prowlers take first place. Yield to them for other productions for now. Focus on establishing the reconnaissance network first.”

The black giant priest bowed and accepted the order, then turned and headed toward the laboratory door.

After making these arrangements, Jie Ming glanced around the laboratory.

Scattered across the workbench were various rune carving knives, elemental resonance calibrators, and several depleted test crystals used during the Prowler modifications… along with a full set of miniature disassembly clamps.

In the corner lay several spare rune boards from the replaced inspection equipment and some old-version Prowler shell clamps that had been removed.

After several days of modification testing, the laboratory was not particularly messy, but it could hardly be called tidy.

“Just as well… I can test it now.”

With that thought, Jie Ming raised his right hand and snapped his fingers.

A crisp sound echoed through the laboratory.

In an instant, the entire laboratory seemed to be injected with a restless vitality.

The first to react was the rune carving knife closest to him.

A pair of round eyes suddenly opened on the silver handle, followed by a second and a third.

The three eyes blinked twice. Two soft bulges swelled at the end of the handle and rapidly elongated into two slender silver legs. It used these legs to prop itself up, shakily standing straight on the table. All three eyes looked toward Jie Ming at once, then it leaped off the workbench with a “whoosh” and scurried toward the toolbox on its tiny steps.

The rune scanner followed right after. Bulges swelled on both sides of its square metal casing and quickly stretched into two long, thin metal legs.

Three-toed claws extended from the ends of the legs, tapping out crisp “ding ding” sounds on the surface.

It shook its body, like a person stretching after waking up.

Then two small hands of the same material extended from the top of the device, braced against the table, and pushed it from a lying position into a standing one. The three culture tank controllers transformed almost simultaneously.

These cylindrical devices had thicker limbs than the scanner. Their movements while getting up carried a clumsy, reckless energy. The one on the far right used too much force, knocking over a nearby sample rack with a loud “clang.” Several empty petri dishes rolled off and spun across the surface. It froze for a moment, then quickly retracted its limbs, pretending nothing had happened.

The energy spectrum analyzer was the fastest.

Its compact body sprouted four slender mechanical legs. Like a metal spider, it flipped over several pieces of equipment, nimbly jumped to the floor, and scurried toward the equipment cabinet in the corner on tiny steps.

The cabinet door was already open—that was its designated spot.

But halfway there, it stopped.

Then it turned around and ran in the opposite direction.

Jie Ming’s brow furrowed slightly.

Even greater chaos erupted almost at the same time.

The equipment that had just managed to stand shakily on the table suddenly seemed to realize the existence of “freedom” and scattered in all directions.

The rune scanner ran toward the edge of the workbench on its metal legs, only to be tripped halfway by a culture tank controller. It flipped onto its back, its thin legs kicking uselessly in the air.

The controller that tripped it fared no better. One foot stepped into a petri dish and got stuck, forcing it to hop along on one leg.

The test tubes on the sample rack were the most active. They had been neatly arranged; once they grew limbs, they jumped down all at once like a flock of startled birds, scattering and rolling everywhere.

Jie Ming watched the scene, his temple twitching.

Then he sensed movement beside him and looked at the three test tubes next to him.

These were high-purity crystal test tubes he had previously used to hold Strange biological tissue samples, each twenty centimeters long.

Not only had they grown slender limbs, but they had also formed a triangular formation on the table: two on the outside and one in the center. The outer two waved their hair-thin arms, gesturing at the middle one, while the central test tube kept spinning in circles, occasionally stopping to point and gesture back at them with its tiny hands.

…They were holding a meeting.

After realizing what these three test tubes were doing, the corner of Jie Ming’s mouth twitched.

He watched them gesture for nearly two minutes, yet they showed no intention of returning to the test tube rack.

The rack was less than half a meter to their left—within easy reach.

“It seems this technique still has quite a lot of room for optimization,” Jie Ming muttered to himself, a trace of helplessness in his tone.

He had originally intended for these tools to move on their own and tidy themselves up.

They were indeed moving.

The problem was that their own ideas were clearly far removed from the “self-conscious return to position” he had expected.

The energy spectrum analyzer had already run to the other side of the laboratory and was trying to squeeze behind a pile of spare rune substrates.

Several test tubes had rolled to the edge of the sink. One nearly fell in but was frantically pulled back by its companions, after which they continued running around aimlessly.

Many of the larger instruments had actually found their proper positions.

Although the culture tank controllers moved unsteadily, they were mostly heading in the right direction. Two out of three had already returned near the equipment cabinet. The rune scanner finally managed to flip itself over after much struggling and was inching toward its charging base.

But the small items like test tubes, petri dishes, sample tweezers, and pipettes had no intention of returning to their places at all. They had even started playing.

The three test tubes that finished their meeting lined up and rolled from one end of the table to the other, as if racing to see who could roll faster.

A pipette treated itself like a slingshot, launching a small wad of cotton everywhere.

Two petri dishes stood face-to-face, pushing each other with their newly grown hands in what resembled a primitive wrestling match.

Jie Ming sighed.

When he had studied Strange creatures in the Strange plane, he had noticed another characteristic of The Strange: under the right conditions, inanimate objects could also gain life. As long as the conditions were met, even ordinary dead objects would suddenly develop their own will.

This trait had greatly interested him.

Because the Spiritual Qi he controlled possessed similar capabilities.

High-tier cultivators could use Spiritual Qi to enlighten inanimate objects, granting them spirituality or even complete intelligence.

Many famous swords and treasures in the cultivation world had come into being this way.

However, Spiritual Qi enlightenment had a major drawback: it required extremely high-precision Spiritual Qi control techniques and enormous amounts of Spiritual Qi investment.

The cost of enlightening a single item was often higher than simply refining a better one from scratch.

Thus, it had always been impractical.

Even when Wizard Starfall later developed the Enlightenment Technique based on this trait, the high-cost drawback remained unchanged.

The mechanism of The Strange’s trait, however, was completely different.

It did not require massive external energy infusion. Instead, it rewrote the target’s interface with the world rules, allowing the target to “learn” to come alive on its own. Low consumption, low threshold, and highly replicable.

Each mechanism had its strengths and flaws when used alone.

While in the Strange plane, Jie Ming had already begun researching corresponding techniques. However, due to issues with the internal rules of that world, crossing a certain boundary would instead create genuine Strange entities.

Therefore, only after returning did he truly begin preparing to fuse the two technologies. The research from the Strange plane combined with the perceptual leap brought by the Dao Integration Realm finally allowed him to complete the fusion scheme.

He named it the “Temporary Enlightenment Technique,” capable of temporarily granting sentience and mobility to various objects.

The experimental equipment currently running amok across the floor was the first large-scale practical application of the Temporary Enlightenment Technique.

The results were indeed good.

Spirit activation success rate: 100%. Mobility granting: complete. Duration: stable. No cases of information structure collapse or premature failure.

It was just that in terms of “tidying up”…

It seemed rather ineffective.

Jie Ming stood with his arms crossed, watching one test tube attempt to climb back onto the sample rack, only to choose the wrong direction and crawl farther away.

Another test tube nearby clearly had better directional sense, but its target was not the rack at all. It was heading for the ornamental fluorescent moss in the corner pot—it was trying to plant itself inside.

Sense of direction, common sense, judgment—all lacking.

“The intelligence granted is too low,” Jie Ming stroked his chin, mentally noting the first direction for improvement.

The wizard world actually had similar techniques—puppetry, manipulation spells, and even high-tier animation sorcery could make inanimate objects move. However, the underlying logic of those techniques was that the wizard used their own spiritual power to control the material’s actions. The material itself had no will and was merely a puppet pulled by strings.

The Temporary Enlightenment Technique was different. Although the objects it animated looked similar externally to those from puppetry, these enlightened objects truly had their own thoughts… even if those thoughts were something as baffling as holding a meeting with nearby test tubes.

The problem lay here: the enlightened objects had their own ideas, but those ideas did not necessarily align with Jie Ming’s expectations.

These enlightened objects were like newborn cubs—possessing instincts but not knowing where to direct them, resulting in them running wildly around the room.

He casually grabbed a test tube that was rolling across the table nearby.

The test tube struggled in his hand for a moment, then…

Began hitting him.

Its two newly grown hands were only as long as matchsticks, and its tiny fists at the tips were smaller than rice grains.

Yet it hit with great seriousness, one blow after another, alternating left and right. The dense strikes landed on the back of Jie Ming’s hand, producing faint sounds like raindrops hitting glass.

Jie Ming looked down at it.

Faced with the threat of this “colossus,” the test tube paused for a moment.

Then… it did not stop. Instead, it hit even faster, its tiny fists leaving afterimages.

“Loyalty of the creatures during enlightenment also needs improvement,” Jie Ming added expressionlessly as the second point in his mind.

At the current stage, the sentience granted by the Temporary Enlightenment Technique was completely independent. In this test tube’s “eyes,” Jie Ming was merely an obstacle preventing it from running freely and needed to be driven away.

While thinking, he released his spiritual power.

Vast spiritual power surged out like a tide, precisely enveloping and locking onto every small moving object in the laboratory. The spiritual power gently yet irresistibly lifted them from every corner and suspended them in mid-air.

Some small objects continued to struggle, their limbs flailing in the air, but they were held firmly and could not move.

Most of the larger equipment had already stopped near their correct positions; only the energy spectrum analyzer needed directional correction.

It had somehow crawled into the gap beneath the sample refrigeration cabinet. Jie Ming’s spiritual power gently hooked it out, shook off the dust on its body, and placed it back into the equipment cabinet.

Jie Ming shaped his spiritual power into tendrils, precisely picking up every tool, sorting them by size and frequency of use, and returning them to their designated storage positions one by one.

He used spiritual power for fine adjustments on the positions of large instruments, reinserted rune boards into their numbered slots, and hung the clamps uniformly back onto the magnetic strips on the wall. The entire process took only a few seconds, and the laboratory was restored to cleanliness.

Except for the test tube still in his hand.

Jie Ming walked toward the cleaning device by the wall.

The cleaning device was a half-person-height metal apparatus with a circular slot on top, specifically for washing and disinfecting laboratory test tubes. The effects of the enlightenment technique had not yet worn off on its outer shell. It was standing quietly in place on its four short legs. It was probably one of the few that had not run around; from the beginning, it had simply stayed in position and extended its legs to steady itself.

Jie Ming walked up to it and pushed the test tube toward the slot.

The cleaning device suddenly raised a metal hand that had extended from its side and steadily blocked the slot.

Jie Ming’s movement paused.

He changed angles and probed down from the upper right of the slot.

The cleaning device’s hand moved over again and blocked once more.

Horizontal insertion.

Blocked.

Diagonal insertion.

Blocked.

Jie Ming’s eyelid twitched.

He tried using his other hand to push aside the cleaning device’s metal hand, but the seemingly clumsy hand nimbly bypassed his attempt and once again protected the slot.

The cleaning device even took half a step backward on its four short legs, tilting its entire body slightly in what resembled a defensive stance.

“You don’t want to wash it?” Jie Ming asked.

The cleaning device had no vocal organs and could not speak.

However, several indicator lights on its side flickered, changing from standby blue to a rejecting orange.

Jie Ming looked down at the test tube in his hand, which was still baring its fangs and brandishing its claws.

The test tube had given up pounding the back of his hand and now stood with its arms akimbo—though it had no waist—looking completely justified.

He looked at the cleaning device again. Its indicator lights continued flashing orange, and the metal hand guarding the slot remained motionless.

Jie Ming straightened up, his expression complex.

“…We also need to add a mechanism for immediate release,” he silently added the third improvement direction in his mind.

Enlightened individuals might refuse commands that contradicted their own will. A mechanism to release the enlightenment state at any time must be added.

At that moment, a light knock sounded on the laboratory door.

“Come in,” Jie Ming said without turning his head, maintaining the coverage of his spiritual power restraints.

A black giant priest stood respectfully at the doorway.

“Master.” He bowed slightly, his voice steady. “The world fragments you ordered earlier have arrived. The merchant caravan is waiting for delivery at the material receiving station. The goods have passed preliminary scanning and testing, confirming that the energy frequency matches the order. They are currently at Receiving Station No. 2, awaiting your personal inspection…”

Upon hearing this, Jie Ming’s brows relaxed.

World fragments—these were items he had ordered before entering seclusion.

They were extremely rare, remnants left after planes disintegrated under special conditions, yet still retaining complete world rule structures inside. In the words of the trade platforms, such goods usually took hundreds or even thousands of years to become available.

A three-hundred-year wait was considered fast on this timescale.

He immediately turned and looked outside.

In the corridor outside the laboratory, several other black giants were carrying out patrol duties according to the daily schedule.

“You lot,” Jie Ming pointed at the black giants outside the door. “Guard this laboratory. Before I return, do not let a single thing inside run out. Have the others seal all exits, including the ventilation ducts.”

The black giants in the corridor immediately stood at attention, their chest slits emitting low, unified acknowledgments: “Understood.”

Jie Ming casually stuffed the still-struggling test tube into the hands of the black giant priest who had come to report, then strode out of the laboratory.

The black giant priest instinctively held the test tube with both hands.

The instant it landed in his palm, the test tube bounced up, clenched its tiny fists, and delivered a barrage of fierce punches to his fingers.

Matchstick-sized fists struck the skin covered in black liquid metal, producing sounds like raindrops hitting stone.

The black giant priest lowered his head to look at the test tube in his palm and scratched his head in confusion.

Seizing the moment while he scratched his head, the test tube flipped over, jumped down from his palm, and ran up his arm, striking his forearm as it went.

The black giant priest came back to his senses. He carefully pinched the test tube’s “waist” with one hand, refusing to let go no matter how it flailed. With his other hand, he quickly tapped on the control panel, activating the laboratory’s outer sealing arrays.

Pale blue energy barriers extended from around the doorframe, completely sealing all entrances and exits of the laboratory.

After completing this and instructing his kin to watch the movements inside the laboratory, he hurried after Jie Ming while still holding the test tube that continued relentlessly attacking his thumb.