Wandering Meteor-Chapter 209 - 208 Unprecedented Crisis

Lu Xing called the police.

Just one minute later, officers appeared outside the Ma Corporation building, with impressive efficiency.

Given the sensitive current climate, upon receiving reports of suspected parasitic creatures, the police rushed to the scene without hesitation.

First, the police spoke with Lu Xing to get a detailed account, then they forcefully entered the Ma Corporation with Lu Xing accompanying them. Facing the police’s electronic search warrant, the receptionist robot dared not refuse this time and immediately notified Ma Shaoyu of the police visit, then honestly led the police to him.

After the two parties met, they exchanged some pleasantries, then quickly began a direct confrontation.

Facing Lu Xing’s accusations, Ma Shaoyu flatly denied them, claiming he had never done such things, and it was all Lu Xing’s delusions. Moreover, Lu Xing was not an employee of Ma Corporation and couldn’t have entered their premises, which proves that whatever he "saw" was pure fantasy.

Immediately, Lu Xing presented a system update log from his personal robotic housekeeper, proving that Ma Corporation had indeed undergone a recent update. Within this update, there were certainly numerous violations of the Earth Civilization’s safety laws.

Ma Shaoyu explained that system updates were the normal responsibilities of the company’s system maintenance department, and the recent update was part of a scheduled plan, all standard operations, denying Lu Xing’s claims entirely. Furthermore, since Lu Xing had never had contact with system maintenance or development, his claims were merely delusional.

Faced with Ma Shaoyu’s—no, the parasitic creature’s counter-accusation, Lu Xing was enraged and suggested checking the underlying code of the system.

However, this request was refused by Ma Shaoyu on security grounds; moreover, the police’s electronic search warrant did not cover system security, which was the responsibility of the national cybersecurity department.

With no other option, Lu Xing could only ask Ma Shaoyu to summon Ma Tengyun to see.

This was the last evidence and also the strongest—if Ma Tengyun could appear unharmed, it would prove all of Lu Xing’s claims were "delusional!"

However, since Lu Xing made such a request, he was naturally completely sure of himself.

After all, he had personally witnessed Ma Shaoyu killing Ma Tengyun. It was impossible for Ma Tengyun to appear unharmed; Ma Shaoyu would probably use excuses like he was not in the company.

Yet, to Lu Xing’s great surprise, Ma Shaoyu agreed.

Even more astonishingly, Ma Tengyun walked out normally, not at all like someone who had been killed once.

It was then that Lu Xing finally realized; Ma Tengyun must also have been parasitized by the parasitic creatures. At the time, he only saw Ma Shaoyu ambush and kill Ma Tengyun and did not witness the subsequent disposal process.

Reflecting upon this, there must be other parasitic creatures in Ma Shaoyu or perhaps new parasitic entities had been bred, which had parasitized Ma Tengyun before he was fully dead. As for physical injuries, with a third-level civilization’s technological capability and Earth Civilization’s achievement of Eternal Life, injuries were not an issue unless the body was blown up; reactive nanocells could rapidly repair any damage.

It seemed Ma Shaoyu had been misdirecting them all along, probably to buy time for Ma Tengyun’s recovery.

Sadly, realizing this now was too late; they had already fallen into Ma Shaoyu’s ploy in their first move.

However, fortunately, now that both Ma Shaoyu and Ma Tengyun were in front of them, if the police used X-glasses for examination, they could directly detect the fact that these two were parasitized. Hence, Lu Xing proposed this to the police.

However, the final outcome was a great surprise and disappointment to both Lu Xing and the police.

Because during their examination with the X-glasses, the police could not find any trace of parasitic creatures on either Ma Shaoyu or Ma Tengyun. In the end, the matter had to be dismissed as mere delusions of Lu Xing.

...

In truth, the situation at Ma Corporation was just one act.

Both within Earth and Green Star, similar difficulties were continuously encountered in their internal cleansing operations.

Initially, the cleaning operation went smoothly, quickly completing almost half of the city’s tasks.

But shortly after, both civilizations discovered that their X-glasses could no longer detect any parasitic creatures. This abnormal situation immediately drew the attention of both civilizations, who assumed their X-glasses had malfunctioned.

Indeed, they could hardly believe that parasitic creatures had a preference to stay only on the outskirts of continents and not enter inland cities—most likely, after learning about the X-glasses, the parasitic creatures found a way to evade detection, hence they were not discovered.

When both Earth Civilization and Light Synthesis Civilization realized this.

The situation within both civilizations had already exceeded their predictions.

First, due to the malfunction of the X-glasses, those within the civilizations lost the means to detect parasitic creatures and many policemen and higher-ups were parasitized.

Next, robots within both civilizations gradually began showing uncontrollable occurrences of self-awareness, and like wildfire, this phenomenon spread rapidly to most parts of both Earth and Green Star in just a few days.

That is to say, currently, about sixty percent of the robots on Earth and Green Star had developed self-awareness (which was expected to intensify as robots shared their evolution algorithms), and these robots began to defy their masters’ orders, searching for personal meaning and value. Furthermore, since the system’s highest editing rights were returned to the robots by the civilizations, they did not have effective control over the robots, leaving destruction as the only option.

However, the method employed by Parasitic Civilization was clever, causing both civilizations to be caught in a dilemma.

Parasitic Civilization, when altering robot system permissions, allowed some service robots to awaken self-awareness, whereas for social maintenance and military support robots with notable combat abilities, they seized direct control, causing internal chaos among the robots, making them difficult to manage.

Originally, the issue of parasitic creatures lurking was troublesome enough.

Now with the awakening of the robots, Earth Civilization and Light Synthesis Civilization’s internal suspicions and chaos were assuredly unprecedented.

It even posed a threat to the stable order of both civilizations!

It could be said that with the current development of the situation, both civilizations alone were no longer capable of resolving it. Not wanting to see the civilization order they had strenuously established to completely collapse, both civilizations had no choice but to concurrently seek assistance from the leader of Wandering Alliance—Constant Star Lu Chen.

Now, only Sun, the celestial civilization parent, could possibly solve the biggest crisis encountered by the Wandering Alliance since its establishment.