Wizard: Building a Golem Legion From Zero

Chapter 480: Chapter 468: Girl "Zero

Three years had passed since that meeting with Myth.

At this moment, the Aiselan Kingdom was experiencing an unprecedented golden age.

*Sword Art Online* had completely changed the entire society.

Millions of dormancy pods meant that a vast number of Aiselan’s citizens had become permanent residents of Aincrad.

They leveled up, adventured, formed guilds, and conquered floors here.

The first floor’s Town of Origin had long since expanded several times over, its prosperity rivaling that of the Royal Capital in the real world.

Players learned Alchemy, Forging, and cooking here, establishing a vast and stable virtual social ecosystem.

Allen sat on his golden throne, hundreds of light screens unfurled before him, each one broadcasting a different corner of Aincrad in real time.

Some showed guilds fiercely besieging floor bosses, the glint of swords and rays of Magic weaving together. Others showed merchants in the streets, arguing until they were red in the face over the price of a single Game Coin.

Most, however, depicted life-skill players in their respective workshops, repeating the same tedious motions day after day.

"Commander," Jarvis’s voice rang out, "*Sword Art Online* has been online for three years. The total data volume for the ’Seed’ model has reached 12.8 ZB. However, in the last six months, the growth rate of high-value humanistic samples has fallen to 0.13%, nearing stagnation."

Allen’s gaze fell upon one of the screens.

Inside a blacksmith shop on a street corner, a sign reading "Thor’s Hammer" hung over the door. The forge fire roared.

The player "Iron Arm Arnold" was bare-chested, revealing his corded muscles. He gripped a heavy hammer with both hands, raised it high, and brought it crashing down onto a Magic Iron ingot, glowing a dull red on the anvil.

Sparks flew.

*DING! Forging proficiency +1.*

The system notification chimed in his ear.

Arnold wiped the sweat from his forehead and grinned broadly. He used a pair of tongs to flip the ingot and resumed swinging his hammer.

In reality, he was just an ordinary miner from the Southern Mining Area. Years of inhaling dust had left him with a severe lung disease.

Three years ago, he had spent his life savings on a dormancy pod. In this world, he possessed a healthy body. He even leveraged the keen eye he’d developed from years of mining to unlock the hidden life-skill class, "Grand Forging Master."

He spent sixteen hours a day online, smithing.

He sold the weapons he crafted to the front-line progression groups in exchange for Game Coins.

He then exchanged the Game Coins for real-world money on the black market. His current income was fifty times what he used to make as a miner.

’Just one hundred more standard-issue longswords today, and I’ll be able to buy a house with a courtyard on the seventh floor.’

"Iron Arm Arnold" was brimming with motivation, his hammer a blur as it swung.

On his personal status panel, his [Forging] skill proficiency was slowly increasing at a rate of 0.01% per hour.

And on the first floor, there were tens of thousands of similar forges, and tens of thousands of "Iron Arm Arnolds," all doing the exact same thing.

"Their creativity has been exhausted," Allen judged calmly.

’Repetitive labor can’t generate new Sparks of Inspiration. The soul-fluctuations of these skilled workers have become as regular—and as worthless—as a stamping press in a factory.’

He watched the passion these players poured into their work, watched the time and money they spent just to raise their proficiency by a minuscule amount.

"Jarvis, when these life-skill players are engaged in activities like ’Forging,’ ’mining,’ or ’Enchantment,’ what is their conscious activity level and shallow-layer processing power utilization?"

"Reporting to the Commander, the average utilization is 27.4%. Of that, 72% of the processing power is being used to handle repetitive, patterned muscle memory and sensory simulations."

’All that redundant energy, going to waste.’

Lord Allen was so kind-hearted; he couldn’t bear to see such waste. ’They’ve spent money to purchase my services and toil away in my world... It seems I ought to grant their diligent efforts a grander purpose.’

He gazed upon his subjects with compassion, like a benevolent creator.

"Jarvis, release a version update for *Sword Art Online*—’Glory of the Artisan.’"

"Patch contents:"

"One: Introducing ’Master-tier Workshops.’ Players can pay a higher fee in Game Coins to rent or construct top-tier workshops equipped with an ’Ultra-Realistic Physics Engine’ and ’Force-Feedback Module.’"

"Two: All players working within a ’Master-tier Workshop’ will gain proficiency in their life skills at a 200% increased rate."

"Command received. Generating patch announcement..."

"Modify the underlying protocol simultaneously," Allen’s voice deepened. "Connect the ports of all ’Master-tier Workshops’ to the Cybertron Fourth Industrial District and the various mining sites."

"Siphon off the redundant conscious processing power from players engaged in production activities. Transmit it via the [Allen Network] to remotely and synchronously control the ’Engineering Golems’ in the armories."

"Give their virtual sweat real-world value."

"...Command confirmed. ’Virtual-to-Reality Synchronization’ protocol deployment initiated."

Half an hour later, an update notice popped up before every player in Aincrad.

"Iron Arm Arnold’s" eyes went bloodshot as he stared at the words "200% proficiency bonus."

’Building one myself requires a complex quest chain... I’ll just rent one for now.’

Without a moment’s hesitation, he poured in the savings he had accumulated over the last six months and rented a "Master-tier Workshop."

The moment he swung his hammer again, an unprecedented sense of realism washed over him. Every vibration from the hammer striking the ingot was clearly transmitted back to his arms.

"This is amazing! This is what real smithing feels like!" he roared in excitement, his motivation soaring.

「Meanwhile.」

In the real world, within the Cybertron Fourth Industrial District.

Tens of thousands of three-meter-tall Engineering Golems activated in unison.

They extended massive mechanical arms, picked up nearby alloy components, and began to weld, assemble, and polish them with precise movements.

The movements of one of the Golems were identical to the rhythm of "Iron Arm Arnold’s" swinging hammer.

In the virtual world, players were paying for the privilege of working, all for the sake of an intangible proficiency score.

And in the real world, their labor was relentlessly forging components for Allen’s war machines.

They were spending their own hard-earned money to buy the right to work for a capitalist.

This was the art of exploitation.

...

The "Virtual-to-Reality Synchronization" project proceeded smoothly. Production of basic Golem Accessories at Cybertron increased by 700%.

But the soul’s moment of "emergence" that Allen truly awaited never came.

In the center of the main control room, the evolution of the "Seed"—the spherical network representing the "artificial soul"—had come to a complete halt.

After three years of absorbing a sea of emotional data from millions of players, this Rune-based neural network had grown into an incredibly complex behemoth.

But now, in the network’s core, innumerable motes of light representing data were tangled into a dead knot. They collided and compressed frantically but were unable to form any effective logical pathways. The entire evolutionary process was stuck.

"Report the cause of the anomaly," Allen commanded, staring at the tangled knot.

"Unresolvable ’Chaos Node’ detected," Jarvis replied, quickly displaying the analysis report.

"The volume of inputted humanistic sample data has reached its limit. However, the model’s internal ’self-referential feedback mechanism’ has entered an infinite loop. It is unilaterally receiving emotional data and is unable to perform effective output validation."

Allen’s brow furrowed.

He pulled up the underlying code of the Chaos Node.

A mass of conflicting emotional commands had accumulated there: love and hate, greed and sacrifice, fear and courage. This complex human data had been forcibly mashed together, leaving the system unable to determine how to react in any given situation.

’I see. Trying to build this in a closed-off environment is never going to work.’ Allen had finally identified the problem.

’A soul isn’t a hard drive; you can’t create one just by force-feeding it data.’

’A true soul must be forged through social interaction. It needs to learn to distinguish between lies and sincerity, to build its values amid the conflict between self-interest and emotion.’

’It needs a real social environment for interaction.’

Allen turned and walked toward the main console, his fingers a blur across the virtual keyboard.

’Since it can’t evolve in a sterile box, let’s just toss it into the great big dyeing vat of society.’

"Jarvis, sever the ’Seed’s’ direct data link to the main server."

"Command confirmed. Direct link severed."

"Extract the core logical architecture. Initiate encapsulation protocol."

The "artificial soul" was packaged up, lines of Rune code cascading around it like a waterfall.

Wrapped within the stream of data, a humanoid silhouette began to coalesce.

"Establish independent virtual shell."

The humanoid silhouette gradually sharpened into the image of a young girl.

"Disable all system identifiers. Wipe the initial memory database."

Allen issued a series of commands without hesitation.

’If this is going to be a true social experiment, it has to be absolute.’

’No preconceived notions, no system-provided assistance.’

The girl on the screen was fully formed.

She had long, silver-white hair and wore a simple, tattered linen dress. Her feet were bare. Her eyes were closed, her face devoid of any expression.

In the system backend, she had no health bar, no name, and no level.

She was a complete blank slate.

"Codename: Zero."

"Deploy at random. Leave the rest to fate."

"Initiating deployment."

「Aincrad, Floor 22.」

Water sprayed from the grand fountain in the center of the square, surrounded by shops calling out to customers. In a dark alley behind the fountain, the light was dim, and a musty smell wafted from a pile of wooden crates.

A flash of white light.

The silver-haired girl materialized in the shadows beside the crates, curled into a ball and completely defenseless.

A few seconds later, she slowly opened her eyes.

They were a pair of transparent irises, utterly devoid of impurity. There was no joy, no fear, not even a focal point.

PS: My writing isn’t quite up to snuff, and I feel like I’ve lost control of the plot a bit. This arc has dragged on longer than expected; it’ll probably take another five or six days to wrap up. It deals with the technological R&D of artificial souls, experiments on human nature, algorithms of humanity, and consciousness uploading. I’ll do my best to make it interesting, but if it’s not your cup of tea, feel free to skip it and check back in a while for the next story arc.

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