So, the girl’s spiritual body and flesh began to slowly mutate simultaneously. "Zoe, I’ll take you to find your dad, okay?" Malin felt that if this went on, he would have to fight two Great Demon-level beings at the same time. Therefore, on the principle of a desperate remedy for a desperate situation, Malin decided to find a way to extricate himself from the current predicament. The girl’s soul and flesh had originally been mutating, but upon hearing Malin’s words, the mutation disappeared. "Okay! Let’s find dad!" The girl’s soul instantly returned to her body, and she smiled, showing teeth that only normal people have. Malin could finally breathe a sigh of relief, and in the channel, Bixiu Five asked a very sharp question based on materialist philosophy: "How did you come down? I didn’t know the real projection of this girl in Subspace would squeeze the return cabin during the back and forth." To this, Malin had his own idealist response: "Sostak No.3, you go to the return cabin by yourself first and leave. Jason, once Sostak leaves, disconnect the link between the nursery pod and the stargate, adjust the orbit, and I will open a teleportation channel to leave here." "Fantastic, this is a perfect collaboration between materialism and idealism." Bixiu Five laughed heartily in the channel. When Malin brought Xia Zoe back to the ground, Sostak No.3 was still in the return cabin. In his words, gravity once again bound a soul pursuing freedom—to which, the other three intelligent machines indicated Sostak had the potential to become a post-modern romantic poet, though Malin did discern the meaning behind their words. After all, these words together form an assessment only a standard madman could earn. Meanwhile, Jason had completed the collection of all intelligence, presenting Malin with stories from six months before the Great Cataclysm. Thainan Armed Police Commando Captain, Commander, Senior Police Superintendent, Xia Nantian, a middle-aged man with a strong sense of justice who, in his youth, fell in love with a girl from the France region, and they had a love child. Later, his wife died in a traffic accident, and Superintendent Xia raised their daughter alone. A year before the Great Cataclysm, humanity confirmed the existence of spiritual energy. At that time, Europe and North America were already in the throes of sacrificial rituals, and the world was in turmoil. Superintendent Xia’s daughter’s school organized a grade activity to visit a small island in South Asia to see the sand and sea. For the elementary students, it was a nice holiday activity. Superintendent Xia originally intended to accompany the students as the guard team commander, but a last-minute task forced him to go to Europe to deal with the sacrificial issues. Then, something happened. On the surface, it was the Chaos Cult attack that resulted in the annihilation of the escort team and nearly half of the children dying. But in reality, it was the work of an internal traitor, and the Chaos Cult captured five children with good spiritual energy potential as sacrifices. In Superintendent Xia’s leftover diary, it can be confirmed that he indeed had the strength of a protagonist, discovering the traitor and extracting his daughter’s whereabouts. The diary noted North America, but looking at it now, these high-value sacrifices were centrally transferred to the star ring, presumably for the Chaos believers to make a great offering on the Day of Descent. As for why those children ultimately did not become sacrifices, it’s not a secret known to everyone. However, it should be noted that the data on the No.19 nursery pod had all been copied and downloaded. By unlocking the password, some understanding of the situation at the time might be obtained. Therefore, in the last operation of the Thainan Armed Police Commando, Superintendent Xia chose to lead the team into the ritual site, hoping his daughter might be present. Unfortunately, she was not. Instead, there was a Chaos demon. It was very weak, but to an ordinary mortal, it was a monster. Almost all the casualties of the task force were due to it. Eventually, Superintendent Xia, in a fortuitous situation, killed the demon with a silver dagger. At that time, humans referred to Chaos demons that had not fully entered the human world as Phantasm level and Echo level, the former being weaker than the latter. Thus, Superintendent Xia’s actions back then were incredibly shocking. And precisely because it was confirmed that the ritual could summon Echo level demons, Thainan finally decided to decouple hard—they had lost all hope in their Earth compatriots. They ceased all activities, mobilizing reserves, and recalling their most elite army, trained for cosmic warfare on the stargate, back to the ground—all to exchange with the Peninsula people—they were on the later training list. Therefore, the Peninsula people felt they had benefitted. However, after the Great Cataclysm, the speed of the Peninsula’s destruction surpassed everyone’s imagination, related to their elite forces falling into the trench along with the star ring. The reason Jason and others were so concerned about this number one was that they had confirmed a problem from the latest found diary copy—among the Chaos believers at the time, someone might have signed an agreement with an Evil God. Superintendent Xia found a copy of the agreement at the scene, and questioning participants confirmed their willingness to sign a contract with their faith. Jason and the others feared that humanity before the Great Cataclysm might have signed some contract with Chaos, resulting in such a long and vast invasion. If such a thing exists, it must be destroyed. "We must admit, Superintendent Xia was indeed fond of leaving his diary copies around carelessly. We think he realized this at least six months before the Great Cataclysm. In the last two months, he even stopped searching for his daughter, instead of contacting foreign colleagues as much as possible, but most reliable and career-loyal foreign police officers had already been purged, and his efforts were in vain." Jason finally mentioned Superintendent Xia’s fate—he died in the thirty-first year after the Great Cataclysm in the Hangzhou area, still calling his daughter’s name—Xia Zoe, in his final moments. At that time, Hangzhou was still a large residential area for living people, and the second destruction had not yet occurred. Thainan people were fighting the Chaos Army with high-tech weapons. Though brutal, it was much better compared to other regions. Because the search team found a large post-cataclysm sacrificial site in North America, tens of thousands of skulls were placed in the center of a stadium, weathered corpses covered the whole city—it’s almost unimaginable if North American survivors at that time should thank fate for its mercy or curse their so-called good fortune. "I’ve always been curious why people in that era did such things when they lived lives countless times more comfortable than those now. Why did they provoke Chaos?" Bei Luo expressed his curiosity in the channel. "Of course, it’s because of desire. We are inherently intelligent machines, different from humans. Humans have a mere century of life span, willing to pay any price to live longer, and Chaos Evil Gods are well aware of human desires. They ingratiate themselves, granting humans stronger bodies and greater power. Think about it, that’s why Chaos Cult became popular at that time. They would only think their deity returned, granting genuine power to believers, and non-believers would go to hell... Indeed, that’s how it was." Jason’s voice was full of sighs at this point. "I’ve shared the coordinates to search with Mr. Malin. I hope you can find new intelligence, Mr. Malin, and, no matter what, keep an eye on that child." After saying this, Bixiu Five had already pointed out the coordinates in the channel. Malin downloaded the content with the tablet and then took Xia Zoe to the hotel said to be where Superintendent Xia stayed on the eve of the Great Cataclysm... hoping he didn’t stay on too high a floor and that the hotel still had several floors left.