Chapter 2337: Intelligent Mechanical Apostle (2)

But as for reproductive rights, you might as well hope for a stroke of good luck someday, since it seems to be randomly distributed.

However, apostle rights are truly a distant dream for most people.

Someone calculated that if you’re not a genius, just by mechanically fulfilling your heavenly duty, you would need to work continuously without taking a single day off for a hundred years to accumulate enough contribution points for apostle rights.

A hundred years, missing even a single day is not an option. Is this something humanly possible?

As for geniuses…

Sigh, even though the Alliance has forcibly put all newborns on the same starting line with genetic equality, talent and genius are not entirely determined by genes. There are always some who are innately different. Even if everyone uses the same hardware, their achievements surpass others.

Common people need a century of hard work to accumulate contribution points, while those geniuses might achieve it in decades, or even a few years for some exceptional talents, which is extremely enviable.

How can one not be envious? The difference between apostles and common people is just too vast.

In Dorothy’s view, even the lowest level apostles wield power at the Great Witch Level, which, in most worlds, would be considered as deities, while ordinary Alliance people, even with extensive cybernetic modifications, might not even reach the power of an average witch.

It’s the chasm between heaven and earth, gods and mortals.

On one hand, there’s a sickeningly enforced equality, and on the other, an ascension-to-godhood mechanism that takes you to the top in one step. Dorothy can only say this Alliance is truly twisted, as if they are on the verge of writing out that “some things, if you aren’t born with them, you’ll never have in this life,” which is even more talent-based than the Witch World.

However, when the homebody witch went to review the soul digitization documents again, she suddenly understood.

This information is top secret, invisible to ordinary people. Dorothy could only gather a glimpse of it thanks to Zero, but it was enough to clear her doubts.

“Tsk, I thought there was no such thing as a free lunch. While the one-step ascension is enjoyable, there must be limitations or costs behind it. It turns out the heavenly duty and points are essentially a prelude to red dust heart refining.”

Dorothy sighed, once again realizing that equivalent exchange is the truth.

According to the data she saw in these top-secret files, the soul digitization modification carries extremely high risks. The early success rates were even less than one in a thousand.

Later, after long-term research by the Church of Machinery’s Priests and Nuns, they were reluctantly forced to discover that the problem wasn’t technological, but due to a mystical factor inconsistent with science.

The issue was that those failed converters had too fragile dispositions. Their weak minds couldn’t allow their souls to reunify after digitization, resulting in them being completely decomposed into useless scattered data during the transformation.

Only those with strong enough hearts, with powerful beliefs or pursuits, can withstand the transformation of soul digitization.

Moreover, disposition largely determines your mechanical load capacity.

The Alliance has always found a strange phenomenon, that those who undergo high degrees of cyberization have a significant probability of experiencing mental issues, or even become homicidal maniacs.

Hmm, Dorothy is quite familiar with this setting; it’s cyber mental illness.

In the early days of the Alliance, cyber mental illness was an incomprehensible disease. Some people remained normal even at 99% cyberization, yet most showed loss of control signs once cyberization exceeded 50%.

At first glance, this seems like a talent issue, but the genetic talent of the Alliance people is the same.

This question has plagued many Priests and Nuns, causing them to lose count of the hair they shed, but once the concept of disposition was proposed, this issue had an answer.

The idea is that the human body influences the soul, and the soul affects the mind.

Once the human body begins cyberization, the soul will also change to adapt to the body. Initially, this small change doesn’t affect much.

But when the degree of cyberization exceeds fifty percent, changes in the soul reach a mental warning threshold, and continued cyberization can affect the heart greatly.

You might start to waver in your human identity, feeling you’re a new species beyond humans, with ordinary people becoming like ants in your eyes. You might start pondering whether to try killing humans as if crushing ants.

After all, it’s indeed a physical speciation difference. Just as you can’t expect humans to empathize with an ant’s feelings, you can’t expect highly cyberized superhumans to empathize with ordinary people.

Of course, modified humans might think they’re quite normal, but in others’ view, they’ve lost humanity and are already mentally ill.

And a system whose heavenly duty is protecting human civilization will not tolerate a threat capable of slaughtering humans at any time. Thus, such cyber mental illnesses will be purged, since the system requires apostles to retain human nature.

Therefore, the system ultimately set a high threshold for apostleship to filter out apostle seeds capable of enduring soul digitization from the populace.