Honkai: Man(Sludge) From Future

Bronya was keeping an eye on things in the Academy City.

Noldrei, naturally, didn't know that Bronya was so busy she was practically spinning like a top. Even if he did, he wouldn't pay any attention to it.

He was in Sapphire City, observing a local Chinese trial. You could get in to watch just by applying, but you couldn't bring your own recording equipment.

"Rita, are the people in Sapphire City also docking the rations of foreign personnel? I heard that foreigners are treated more favorably here."

Noldrei asked a question that was difficult for Rita to explain clearly.

Rita could only choose her words carefully and whisper, "The bosses here withhold pay equally, but the officials here play favorites when it comes to getting that pay back. Director, my advice is that you only need the cheap labor from China. The rest of this place is completely unnecessary."

Noldrei nodded. "I know what you mean, Rita. The lower the production capacity, the less dignity you have in front of outsiders. This is a dead end for industrial society. The balance of trade is inherently unbalanced. When there's a huge gap in productivity, the wealth produced by a hundred thousand people and the wealth produced by a thousand people may seem balanced, but those hundred thousand people are actually having their wealth extracted through cheap labor."

"But we don't need to play that game anymore. What we want is no longer just the industrial production rights of society. That's something we can pick up at will."

"What I want is more!"

Noldrei wasn't joking. Since he had already taken the Far East, he certainly wouldn't let China go now. Compared to the increasingly chaotic North America, China's population potential was clearly greater.

Rita was a bit speechless. Was it appropriate to say such things on someone else's turf?

Seeing that the trial was about to end, she thought of Sirin, who was out somewhere, and she didn't know where. At this thought, Rita couldn't help but ask, "Director, what level of social structure do you think the current human cognitive level can accept?"

"That kind of question..." Noldrei thought for a moment and replied, "Do you think the Far East and China were ready to accept it when they opened their doors back then? Of course not, but didn't they still accept the new society? Sometimes, whether humans want something or not isn't as important as you think, Rita. They will choose the direction that suits their own interests. It's not up to them to want it or not."

Rita remembered something. Fu Hua had once tried to continue the Previous Era's civilization, giving knowledge and power to humanity in advance. The result was the birth of a Judgment-class Honkai Beast, and the plan ended in a decisive "GG."

Now that this matter had been further exposed, it was rather amusing.

They were all developing technology, so how come this strange phenomenon didn't occur with Otto and Anti-Entropy? You can't say that the floating battleships and mechs they developed don't count as knowledge.

But they kept these things locked up in their own hands and accumulated enough power bit by bit. This fully demonstrated that the means of governance must be adapted to the civilization.

"Fu Hua has also talked to me privately about these issues. She said she wanted to put the well-being of all humanity first at the time. Unfortunately, she failed to weigh her actions properly back then. Even when she realized what her actions would lead to, she didn't make the corresponding trade-offs and stick to them."

Noldrei shook his head and sighed. "Unfortunately, she didn't know how to define the well-being of all humanity. On the two ends of the scale, the well-being of all humanity is not equal to human life. She was far inferior to Overseer Otto in judging the trade-offs of human interests."

"There will always be differences in military branches within an army. Can you say that the soldiers covering the rear are worse than the soldiers charging forward? But when it's time to die, don't you still have to risk your life? The well-being of humanity can only be achieved by humanity itself. Fu Hua was only undertaking one part of the work, and she didn't realize where the trade-off point in her work was. So she lost when faced with those decisive issues. With a侥幸 psychology and a lack of awareness of her own power, her plan was bound to fail."

Mobius and Noldrei had talked a lot about the plans of the Previous Era.

These plans were not wrong in direction, but in execution, the executors often hesitated because they lacked the ability to weigh the pros and cons. Noldrei naturally knew that he was pointing fingers from the perspective of a later generation, because many problems seemed completely avoidable to later generations.

But what you can't cross, you can't cross. The failure of Fu Hua's "Project Ember" was due to the fact that Fu Hua was not good at handling these things.

Rita found that although Noldrei didn't say much, he seemed to have talked to many people about the past.

Even she, who had been in Schicksal for so long, didn't know about the things Fu Hua had hidden in the past, yet Noldrei had dug them up so easily. It seemed Ms. Fu Hua was indeed an honest person.

"Then what should we do next? Will the path you've planned also have some deviations, Director?"

Rita was used to seeing all kinds of changes in plans.

Based on her past experience, so-called plans were actually like a series of revised documents. The essence of a plan was just a future direction inferred from the current material basis.

A large part of its function was to stabilize people's hearts, telling everyone that as long as they followed what he wrote, they would achieve final victory.

But in fact, by the time it was completed, that plan would have long been unrecognizable.

For humanity, the success of a plan was not the norm; the failure of a plan was the true norm.

'My dear Director, not everyone can live as long as someone from the future.'

Rita believed that it was already impressive for a person to stick to one thing for three years and stabilize it. To be able to stick to a project for ten years was simply god-like. To be like Overseer Otto, who persisted for hundreds of years without changing his original intention, just wanting to revive a woman, was even more ridiculous.

She didn't know if Noldrei had some kind of future person's plan, nor did she know how long such a long-lived being could hold onto an idea.

But Rita instinctively felt that it was a very terrifying thing.

"Deviations? Why worry about deviations? Believe me, Rita, my plan is foolproof!"

Noldrei was too embarrassed to tell Rita that what he actually wanted was deviations.

Because a deviation meant that the laws of human society summarized by future people had a different path. It also meant that humanity might have a different future.

This was a completely good thing for Noldrei. How could he be worried about the problem of deviations?

If anything, the current humanity should be worried about the trouble caused by social change that was too drastic.

Noldrei was actually trying his best to hold back in order to let more people live, but the people in the Academy City didn't care about his ideas at all. In fact, many people, especially, thought the Director-General's development opinions were too conservative.