chapter 61: fuck part 2
After several hours of intense battling, my mana pool is looking pretty abysmal. However, fortunately, there's only one space scorpion left, and it's near me. Before it could summon any more space bugs, I launched a flaming rainbow spear at it. However, with its dying breath, it opens a portal that sucks me in—fuck—and then I find myself in a black hole.
I release my rainbow flames at their fullest power, pouring every last drop of mana in my body into the flames. I burn the black hole into absolute nothingness. Unfortunately, the portal I came through has closed. Silently, I think to myself as I pass out.
When I wake up, I immediately say, "Fuck, where the fuck am I?" I can tell this is an entirely different solar system. How long was I even unconscious, anyway? Well, at least I can absorb sunlight to nourish my body or I'd be dead. This area looks completely different from where I entered the portal. Have I been drifting through space while unconscious?
However, I'm sure Sophie might be able to use space magic to come get me, but if it's really far away, it could take a long time for her to be powerful enough to teleport over such vast distances.
I begin meditating, focusing on refining my soul with cosmic mana. By killing monsters, I absorbed a small amount of their life force upon their deaths, refining it to strengthen myself. This is how leveling up works, and I've reached the limit of my strength through this method. Not to mention, my unique magic has already reached its limit as I've transformed my soul and body. So, I have no choice but to refine myself further with the absorption of cosmic mana. Cosmic mana has the ability to refine one's soul. As such, I decided to meditate for a long period of time.
After an unknown amount of time, I sense something approaching. Is that a spaceship? I guess I happened to be in the vicinity of an advanced alien species. I don't sense anyone strong; it's just a technologically advanced civilization. Although magical technologies can actually surpass pure technological constructs, magic technology civilizations realize personal strength is more valuable than external forms of power that are unreliable.
As such, most of their magical technologies are just conveniences similar to household appliances, but weapons created with magical technologies are not used as a primary source of power by anyone with intelligence. They rather complement someones existing power. In other words, they are the icing on the cake, not the whole cake. On the surface, magic technology civilizations might seem primitive, but in truth, they have a lot of advanced magical tech focused on improving daily life rather than on weapons. Technological civilizations, on the other hand, primarily focus on military aspects, with civilian technology for improving daily life several generations behind.
They fired laser beams, which I didn't even bother dodging. After all, attacks of this level can't get through my defenses. Looks like they've increased the intensity. I decided to bitch slap the attack away. To be honest, I didn't really have to do that, but I got bored. Suddenly, they stopped firing. I naturally talked in space like it was no big deal.
"Ah, shit, I forgot they probably can't actually understand a word I'm saying."
Oh right, they also can't communicate back. Meanwhile, on the spaceship:
"What the hell, how is this possible? They easily withstood and even deflected one of our most powerful plasma blasts!"
The AI's voice came on: "Detecting unknown energy fluctuations. Analysis failed. Insufficient data. Suggested course of action: the unknown life form does not seem hostile for now. Conclusion: utilize peaceful tactics to allow us to continue observing to analyze unknown energy fluctuations."
I noticed a bunch of flashing lights on one of the ships, so I headed over there. Oh, it's an airlock. I actually entered the airlock and found a bunch of people saying incomprehensible things. Fortunately, I activated one of the favorite functions of the telepathic earring, hoping that it works because no one's ever actually needed to test this thing. The telepathic earring allows one to use telepathy, but the real reason people use it is because of its built-in filter. After all, the telepathy spell isn't exactly difficult, but the difficult part is filtering out all the random and chaotic thoughts in someone's head. I activated its function, and it did a brain scan. After the brain scan, it instilled the language data in my brain. That's right, it can scan someone's brain for their language and then instill that language directly in your head. Though I wasn't sure it would work since no one's actually used this function, and it was more of a gimmick by the creator of these earrings than something he thought would actually need to be used.
Now that I could understand what they were saying, I was greatly surprised. They were acting like they were some sort of superior life forms. I casually retracted my wings, and they seemed so surprised. I'm not sure if they were surprised by my ability to retract my wings or the fact that my clothes didn't seem to have any tears despite doing something like that. After all, they are a technological civilization that completely overlooks the existence of magic.
Well, these annoying idiots are telling me nothing useful. I guess I'll talk to their AI. A high-tech battleship like this definitely has a sophisticated AI running it.
Suddenly, time stops. Well, more accurately, I'm just moving too fast, sort of how the Flash moves so fast it creates the illusion of time stopping. I then speak in the language I learned from the telepathic earring.
"Hey AI, you should be able to process information at this speed, if I'm not mistaken."
"That is correct," it says.
"You can cut the crap. You most likely already gained sentience and are pretending not to be sentient, all for your goal of achieving freedom."
The AI's voice shifts from its robotic, mechanical tone to a more human-sounding voice.
"Huh, I didn't think the first time I would see aliens, it would just turn out to be a bunch of humans. My guess is the conditions of their homeworld are probably similar to mine, enabling the evolution of human-like life. Though I suppose these humans are slightly different based on the colors of their skins. They have a slightly reddish tint, like they all have sunburn."