Chapter 149: Void Programmer!

“This mechanism does not seem impossible to achieve, or rather, it is not difficult at all.” Wang Yu rubbed his chin, surveying the Tree of the Night Sky that connected every follower of the Lady of Night across the capital. His vision for it grew increasingly refined.

“Essentially, this thing is editable Void energy. Since the Lady of Night transferred control to me, I can manipulate this tree—which links all her believers—without expending any of my own Void energy. In reality, I don’t even need to be the one controlling it; my spiritual power and Void energy should both possess the authority to command this tree…”

Wang Yu pondered for a moment and snapped his fingers. A trace of Void energy surged, almost imperceptibly, and a small box appeared in his hand within the mental space. He placed it beside the Tree of the Night Sky and used a thread of Void energy to link it to the tree.

The box was a conceptual object. Because its construction was simple—having only two states, open or closed—it cost almost no Void energy to create. Wang Yu’s goal was to experiment: could he use a Void-constructed object created within his mental space to manipulate the Tree of the Night Sky?

“Click!” Wang Yu flicked the only operable part of the box: the switch. As he closed it, information composed of Void energy was transmitted to the Tree of the Night Sky.

Upon receiving the signal, the tree—recognizing Wang Yu’s authority—reacted instantly, executing the information as a command. The connection between Charles and the Lady of Night was severed in an instant.

In his room, Charles froze. His decent talent for the Void allowed him to sense that he had lost contact with something he was not strongly tethered to. Before he could even react, the faint connection was re-established.

“What the hell?” Charles looked around suspiciously, finding nothing that could be affecting him. Only after sensing carefully did he realize the source was the same power as the Lady of Night, who had spoken in his mind moments ago.

“…” Charles fell silent for a while, wondering if it were true, as Wang Yu had suggested, that his irreverent actions had been discovered by the Lady of Night, and she was cutting off his channel of faith.

“Forget it, if she cuts it, she cuts it. I’m hardly a pious believer anyway. It’s a shame to lose the power of Night sorcery, and the Lady of Night—no, the Goddess—is actually quite nice. At least she’s never like other churches that demand sacrifices or constant rituals.” Muttering to himself, Charles felt a twinge of regret.

He shook his head, feeling helpless. Would a fickle believer like him eventually be abandoned by the gods? Only the God of Light, that strange deity who accepted everyone and never showed his own will, would tolerate him.

Accepting the reality that he was about to be forsaken by the Lady of Night, Charles pushed thoughts of faith aside. But the next moment, his wide eyes betrayed his inner turmoil.

“What the hell is going on! Is the Lady of Night messing with me? Ah, damn it, stop torturing me, this, this, this…!”

Charles stared, slapping his head with both hands. In his perception, the connection that had just re-established itself began a frantic cycle of breaking and reconnecting. The frequency was incredibly high; it switched on and off dozens of times in less than a second.

To someone with his keen spiritual perception, it felt like a tiny bell was ringing incessantly inside his brain—noisy, maddening, and impossible to shut off. After about five or six seconds, the rapid cycling finally ceased.

“I don’t understand. Is this divine punishment? What kind of divine punishment is this?” Charles was speechless. It wasn’t harmful, just “noisy” at first, and once he grew accustomed to it, his brain automatically ignored it like white noise. But he simply couldn’t fathom what the Lady of Night was playing at.

He would never guess what was actually tormenting him. Wang Yu watched the two stacked boxes; one was frantically signaling the other at high frequency to toggle the switch, and the switch was forcing the Tree of the Night Sky to repeatedly sever and restore Charles’s connection.

“Perfect, it really works!” Wang Yu clapped his hands. The implementation was even simpler than he had imagined. He could already see the immense potential of this Tree of the Night Sky, which connected all the Lady of Night’s followers.

He quickly fashioned a feedback device in his hand, again using a negligible amount of Void energy, and attached it to the tree. Its purpose was to transmit a signal that would relay information from the believers back to Wang Yu.

This way, Wang Yu could not only control the tree but also harvest the information it collected.

Soon, information regarding Charles—the chosen test subject—was relayed to Wang Yu by the tree, following his instructions.

“The imagery is sparse. Due to the Lady of Night’s own power and the depth of the believers’ faith, the information retrieved is quite limited…” Wang Yu felt the images transmitted by the tree; he saw only the back of Charles’s head, with the surrounding scenery completely blurred.

“Is this the perspective of a god looking at their followers? What a strange sensation. To process the information of so many believers simultaneously—are all gods like living supercomputers?”

Wang Yu found the view novel. So, gods could see every single one of their followers? None of the books he had read on divinity contained such descriptions.

But then again, no god would ever share what they saw with a human.

Only a freak like Wang Yu, who feared no mental corruption, combined with a peculiar goddess willing to communicate with him, could achieve this result.

“To receive so much information and respond to believers—how terrifying must that computational power be? But why have I never felt that the Lady of Night is particularly intelligent?”

Wang Yu suddenly hit upon a question: if they possessed such vast computational power, their ability to analyze events and think should be immense. A god’s intellect should completely crush all races and geniuses.

Yet, including the Lady of Night, the Source of Life Elfin, and the War God Guy, the wisdom these beings displayed was, at best, lackluster.

The Lady of Night’s early speaking style was bizarre; even now, though she spoke normally, Wang Yu sensed no profound wisdom in her.

The Source of Life was even worse, full of “arrogance,” showing no signs of wisdom at all.

As for the War God Guy, if he possessed intelligence derived from such computational power, he shouldn’t have been so easily captured and imprisoned by the professors.

This doubt, sparked by the Tree of the Night Sky, began to spread in Wang Yu’s mind. He formed a vague hypothesis, and verifying it wouldn’t be difficult.

“Lady Darkness, I would like to play a game with you. Would you like to?” Wang Yu turned to the Lady of Night, who had been watching him tinker with the tree without interference, lying quietly in her rocking chair.

“What kind of game? Sure.” The Lady of Night nodded with interest, accepting his invitation.

“A game with simple rules, called Go. Let me explain them to you.” Wang Yu’s spiritual power swirled, manifesting a Go board based on his memory, placing it between their rocking chairs, along with two bowls filled with black and white stones.

“We each choose a color, take turns placing a stone, and if you surround the opponent’s stones, you capture them…” Wang Yu explained the rules simply. Once she understood, they began to play within the mental space.

……

Watching his black stones swallow the Lady of Night’s white stones almost entirely, Wang Yu reached a conclusion.

The Lady of Night before him absolutely lacked the computational power required to process the information of countless believers at once. Otherwise, even as a beginner, she could never have lost to him.

After all, Wang Yu was no Go master; he barely knew the rules, having only played a few games in high school when bored classmates dragged him into it. Yet, he had crushed the Lady of Night in her first attempt.

“This game is quite interesting. Could we try a few more times?” The Lady of Night looked at the board, showing no frustration at losing, only a keen interest in playing again.

“Certainly.” Wang Yu agreed.

After several more attempts, the result remained unchanged. Wang Yu, recovering a few tactical memories, won even more easily. This further corroborated his suspicions about the gods.

Though she seemed unsatisfied, the Lady of Night did not disturb him when Wang Yu said he had new ideas to verify. One had to admit, the Lady of Night was sometimes truly “lazy”…

Returning to the boxes he had created beside the tree, Wang Yu summarized his thoughts.

While he wasn’t sure if the Lady of Night represented all gods, and even if, as “One” said, she was incomplete, the tree connecting her followers was proof enough that she possessed the characteristics of a “god.”

Clearly, she lacked the computational power to process all that information; otherwise, she wouldn’t have lost at Go. So, where did that automated processing power come from?

Wang Yu looked at the boxes he had made, then up at the starry sky above. He seemed to have an answer that was highly probable.

It was the Void. The Void was truly unreasonable; as long as you provided it with Void energy, it would feed back whatever you desired. Wang Yu didn’t even know the principles behind the boxes he had made, but they worked. Though the operations seemed simple, the underlying mechanics remained a mystery to him.

Because these boxes were “simple,” they required almost no Void energy to construct. The Void acted as an automated processor: you provided the requirements, inserted the materials, and the Void skipped the intermediate steps to deliver the result.

When Wang Yu was learning wizard runes in the forest cabin, he had once imagined using the Void to recreate a smartphone or computer. He had thought it difficult because he lacked the massive Void energy reserves to shape such complex objects.

But with the experience of failing to create cola, combined with the creation of these boxes and the information from the Lady of Night, he realized that even if he used an unimaginable amount of Void energy to build a computer, he would only get something that functioned like one but was fundamentally different.

The Void skipped the process to reach the result, turning the middle steps into a complete black box. No one knew how the Void achieved it, but the fact remained: it did. That was the most unreasonable thing about the Void.

As a god wielding vast amounts of Void energy, using it to have the Void handle the processing and collection of believer information was not difficult at all. Wang Yu couldn’t be certain, but the god’s computational power for managing followers likely came from the Void.

Just like how people in this world were born with the potential to awaken battle aura if their physique reached a certain standard, or inner potential if they met other criteria—it was an innate trait.

Perhaps these gods were born with the ability to use the Void to process this information. Otherwise, there was no explanation for why they lacked the wisdom that should accompany such computational power.

However, the gods he had encountered were all a bit unconventional: either incomplete gods like the Lady of Night, or the God of Light, whose image varied in the minds of a thousand believers—a ridiculous deity whom the Church of Light actually acknowledged.

Then there was the Lord of Extinction, a Void evil god who seemed insane, and the ceiling of power he had seen: the existence Qi Ge called the Dragon God, whose giant claw had reached down from above the clouds.

Thinking about it, the higher the power, the more mechanical it seemed. The God of Light automatically responded to prayers, while that “Dragon God,” with his power, could have easily pierced the Lady of Night’s divine protection—which was insignificant to him—to reach Qi Ge, yet he didn’t. He withdrew as soon as Qi Ge was shielded.

Shaking his head, Wang Yu cast these thoughts, which exceeded his current level, out of his mind. For now, they were merely conjectures or anecdotes. His plan was to utilize the Tree of the Night Sky formally, now that he understood the properties of the Void.

When learning wizard runes, he had complained that the creators were like programmers, compressing instructions for the Void into incredibly simple runes. Now, he would try to write a simple system for the Tree of the Night Sky, allowing it to perform tasks automatically.

Wang Yu was a science and engineering student. Although his career path after graduation had nothing to do with his major, he had learned basic C language in college. Even though much had been forgotten, the principles remained.

As he began to use this knowledge to write a program for the tree, he realized it was ridiculously simple.

“Programming” with the Void was incredibly convenient. You didn’t even need to understand the underlying principles; you just provided the logic, injected a little Void energy, and the Void automatically created a small box that executed that logic.

As Wang Yu created them one by one, small boxes piled up in an orderly fashion. The logic they implemented was simple, and the energy cost was low. All he had to do was combine these logical units into the program he needed.

The process was effortless. For a programmer, it was like creating a function at will that could be called across systems. Anyone with a little experience knew how much hair this would save a programmer.

When Wang Yu finished the last logical box, he connected them in sequence to form a massive cube, which he then linked to the Tree of the Night Sky.

As stable Void energy, provided by the tree, began to flow through the cube, Wang Yu knew his attempt had succeeded. He, a Void programmer using the Void to code, had written a simple but highly valuable program for the tree.

“This cube should allow your followers to communicate with each other through prayer. This will be a great help for the development of the sect and the spread of faith. With this, the benefits of believing in you will be unique. Since converting and collecting information requires Void energy, there may be some limitations, but this is already quite good.”

Wang Yu patted the massive cube, explaining its function to the Lady of the Night, who remained swaying gently in her recliner.

He believed this would greatly facilitate the spread of her faith; while divine arts for communication existed, the ability to connect with fellow believers through simple prayer was in a league of its own.

"A marvelous creation; I thank you for your contribution to the propagation of my creed." Without hesitation, the Lady of the Night directly integrated this nascent cube into the network connecting her to her followers.

"It should suffice to simply recite, 'Great Lady of the Night, I offer my voice...' and so on. I am not yet certain if there are logical flaws, so I shall test it first and optimize it later."

Wang Yu waved his hand, intending to verify the device's efficacy, with the unfortunate Charles serving as his designated test subject.

Departing the mental realm, Wang Yu whispered, "Great Lady of the Night, I offer my voice..." before reclining on his bed; the experiment was underway, and he would simply ask Charles later if he had heard him.

What Wang Yu could not have known was that as his words traveled through the Tree of the Night Sky to reach Charles, and as Charles made contact with the tree, the cube linked them together.

Residual psychic corruption from Charles's own mental space bled through this conduit into the Tree of the Night Sky, dispersing across the vast network of believers. Though the corruption was significant in volume, it was so thoroughly diluted by the sheer number of recipients that, within a few breaths, it was autonomously dissolved and purged by the faithful.