Honkai: Man(Sludge) From Future

Compared to the unlucky souls caught in the second wave, Noldrei's life was far more comfortable.

He lived the simple life of an emperor with a beauty on each arm. These days, besides educating his new little protégé in the mindset of a ruler, he spent his time working with Elysia and Mobius.

He was in charge of signing off on documents, whether paper or digital. Noldrei's main job was to turn plans into tangible black-and-white text.

The rest—the entire implementation process—was handled by Mobius.

It was just like in the Previous Era: Dr. MEI was responsible for guiding the overall plan, while Mobius was responsible for bringing it to fruition and giving hope to their civilization. The current situation was no different. In fact, Mobius's patient intake program was even more effective than anticipated.

Naturally, many people were unwilling to participate in this "experiment." As a last resort, Noldrei would use the Herrscher of Sentience to pull everyone in a given region into a dream.

Compared to violent conflict, the Herrscher of Sentience's large-scale consciousness manipulation was far better suited for this kind of work.

Whenever resistance flared up somewhere, he would dispatch the Herrscher of Sentience, and soon enough, the resistors would all be fast asleep.

A simple "Good night, Makka Pakka" was a greater threat than a Honkai Fission Bomb.

There were many people in the world who didn't fear death, but they did fear powerlessness—the knowledge that even dying would change nothing.

This was how most people felt when facing a Herrscher. It was also why the world's nations allowed Schicksal to conduct all sorts of insane experiments, and even participated in them directly. After all, when faced with the Honkai, conventional methods were completely useless for protecting human society.

Elysia felt that something about this situation wasn't quite right. Why did it feel like she was colluding with the Honkai to make herself seem more important?

So, Miss Pink Elf shared her thoughts with Noldrei.

"Aren't you a Herrscher?"

Noldrei gave her a strange look, wondering if Elysia's brain had broken. After playing human for so long, she had almost forgotten what her original identity as a Herrscher entailed.

"Oh, I almost forgot about that." Elysia finally realized that Mobius had become just like her. She now had her own Herrscher friend.

Kevin, on the outside, didn't count. To be precise, Kevin had usurped the authority of Finality but had never accepted his own identity as a Herrscher. A man who only wants to die isn't going to feel any sense of belonging to a label attached to him.

After a period of this "decadent" lifestyle, Noldrei's complete lack of need for sleep or dreams naturally became crystal clear to Mobius and Elysia.

Although they were memory constructs, they... still had to sleep.

Noldrei didn't understand why they engaged in such a pointless activity. They clearly didn't need it to recover physically, yet they persisted in the boring and time-wasting act of sleeping.

During this time, the thing Elysia pestered him about most was getting him to sleep for once. The problem was, Noldrei genuinely couldn't sleep. The function had been completely optimized out of his biological makeup.

And now these women wanted him to... devolve?! That was absolutely out of the question. If Noldrei slept, wouldn't that mean a third of his day would be used up by them?

Just think about it: an emperor's time being occupied by some random people for a third of the day. That was a truly terrifying prospect. Who knows, he might even be overthrown and have his power usurped.

"Why won't you just sleep? Aren't you supposed to have everything you could ever want in your dreams?"

Elysia seemed to have long since figured out that Noldrei had little interest in typical human women, so she acted like a seductive consort, always trying to tempt His Majesty into depravity.

He replied nonchalantly, "I already have everything in reality. Why would I need to dream?"

How could Noldrei fall for such a blatant trick? He righteously refused her, of course.

Just then, Mobius found him again. "Could you let me run an experiment on your body?" she asked. "I want to see if you have the ability to dream. Since Honkai Beasts think by dreaming, I want to see if your dreams can produce the same effect."

This put Noldrei in a difficult position. He thought about it and decided to go along with Mobius's proposal, to see if he could "fall asleep."

Elysia watched with wide eyes as Noldrei simply lay down to sleep.

She rubbed her dry eyes, which she'd been staring with for too long, and began to doubt her own charm.

"That works too?!"

Elysia looked at Mobius in shock. She couldn't detect any hint of happiness on Mobius's face; instead, there was a faint trace of mockery.

"Elysia, come and give me a hand. I need to see if he's really asleep."

For once, Mobius didn't bicker with Elysia. She genuinely wanted to study Noldrei's body. And just like that, she got straight to work.

Noldrei's intention was to sleep, but he felt no "sleepiness" whatsoever. It was a strange way to put it; perhaps it was more accurate to say he didn't even understand what "sleepiness" was. There were no impurities that needed to be flushed from his brain.

And so, the research came to a standstill.

Mobius wanted to see what changes would occur in Noldrei's body after he fell asleep, but the problem was that Noldrei couldn't fall asleep at all. They considered using the Herrscher of Sentience to help, but it was impossible to affect Noldrei's consciousness.

"What do we do? It seems we really can't make him fall asleep."

Elysia was troubled. She had also been curious to see if Noldrei would look cuter when he was asleep. But alas, the two of them were truly powerless, having never even seen a life form like him before.

"It's strange. Even aliens need to sleep. Why doesn't your body?" Mobius felt that Noldrei was a complete fake alien.

"The aliens you're talking about, do their brains have a hippocampus?" Since he couldn't sleep, Noldrei could only chat with Mobius, discussing topics related to the physiological changes that occur when humans sleep.

Since his body had no need to worry about the brain's energy consumption, he naturally didn't need sleep to perform brain recovery functions.

"For example, the expulsion of amyloid-beta proteins produced by the brain? But that shouldn't be right. What are you relying on to think? Could it be that something has replaced the brain's method of information exchange?"

Elysia couldn't understand what Mobius was saying. She still hadn't caught up with Mobius's research progress.

What a lazy pink elf! Even if she'd studied a little in the Elysian Realm, she shouldn't have learned absolutely nothing.

If everyone had just studied with Dr. Mobius for an hour every day for tens of thousands of years, everyone in the Elysian Realm would probably be a brilliant doctor by now.

Elysia probably just spent all her days in the Elysian Realm having fun.

Unfortunately, Mobius had lived her entire life in the Elysian Realm with no opportunity to communicate with the outside world. Her thinking was locked in the mindset of fifty thousand years ago. Even the upper limit of her power had stagnated at that moment.

Noldrei, on the contrary, felt even more pity for Mobius. For such a brilliant researcher to have her thirst for research pent-up for so long... she must have been incredibly oppressed.