Players Invade Cyberpunk-Chapter 802 - 259: The True Legend

My name is Kai Lister, born on March 12, 1992.

Since my father went to Los Angeles for work, I lived with my grandfather in a nondescript coastal town in southern California. My grandfather used to be a sailor in a deep-sea fishing fleet and told me countless amazing stories about the ocean.

The Nautilus, stealthily traveling beneath the sea for twenty thousand leagues

A giant octopus whispering among ancient ruins

Fishmen who sing to enchant sailors

He often boasted about how he once rowed a small boat to sea and encountered a marlin weighing over a thousand pounds. He fought with that fish for an entire day until dusk before capturing it, but unfortunately, on the way back, it was devoured by sharks, leaving nothing but a pile of bones.

One thousand pounds, weighing more than twenty of me at the time. That night, I had a nightmare of falling into the sea and being eaten alive by a thousand-pound fish, and I cried in my grandfather's arms for most of the night before falling asleep again.

The vast blue sea harbors endless stories and mysterious creatures. Even teachers in class said that life walked ashore from the sea.

A naive and ignorant boy was filled with longing for the ocean, hoping to grow up and explore the boundless sea like his grandfather, to witness with his own eyes the legendary stories hidden beneath the ocean's depth.

Until that ship appeared, turning the seawater black.

The noxious black sludge covered the blue sea surface, and seagulls soaring in the sky struggled in the sludge, their white feathers stained by the black mud. Schools of fish floated to the surface, ceasing to swim forever.

My grandfather passed away in his bed alongside the sick sea.

I asked my father, who rushed back, what that was.

My father replied that it was oil, the blood of human industrial society, and without it, more people would die.

I do not hate oil, nor that ship, because everyone makes mistakes.

Just like when I spilled olive oil on the ground as a child, but as long as the floor is cleaned again, it will be as good as new.

I no longer desired to go to the sea; instead, I hoped to develop cleaner and more efficient energy to reduce pollution, so I delved into nuclear engineering and materials science.

But not many people are interested in "clean"; they prefer "efficient."

To cut costs, nuclear wastewater was discharged into the sea without treatment. To monopolize oil resources, oil fields were blown up, and subsea oil and gas were blasted, spewing black oil like magma, with tens of millions of tons of solid waste dumped into the ocean daily, eventually forming a drifting continent.

Marine life species were going extinct at a massive scale. I no longer saw whales breaching to breathe; I no longer saw dolphins migrate.

The birthplace of humanity is weeping, yet no one is willing to listen.

My purification materials were unsurprisingly rejected again, but I did not give up because I really wanted to see the thousand-pound marlin my grandfather spoke of, even if on this journey, I was alone.

October 23, 2022

I succeeded.

By utilizing Prometheus for two hours at dawn every day for a month, the tritium activity in filtered seawater dropped from 1,370,000 Bq/L to 80,000 Bq/L. The levels of dozens of other radioactive elements also significantly decreased. Although it still doesn't meet the standards of the past, it is now safe for normal long-term contact.

October 24, 2022

I uploaded the experiment report to my supervisor. If it gets approved, it can change the world!

October 27, 2022

The report was rejected. The company issued a notice stating that I had stolen company property without permission and must compensate 370,000 Orokin for the use of Prometheus. They didn't even look at a single word of my proposal. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

October 31, 2022

I met a mysterious group... people? in Cyberspace.

They want me to share the technology with them to undertake a world-changing endeavor.

I don't trust a group that won't even tell me their real names. Maybe they are just like those companies, looking to exploit my technology for profit.

Besides, I haven't released the technology, not even a paper, so how do they know about it?

November 4, 2022

They came again, bringing along many other people's technical information to prove they are not lying. Turns out, I'm not alone.

But it's too late, today I was ordered by the company to stop using company assets, wait for the individual property to be settled, and get kicked out of here. All the technical data is on my office computer and the Prometheus database...

November 7, 2022

[This is my last attempt to log into this computer after breaking into the company. If anyone sees this message in the future, please do not let my technology gather dust in the server room; even if used to make money, it should be put to use.]

[I do not know what they want to do, what they can do, but I know that there is no Jesus in this world. The only ones who can save us are ourselves.]

[Kai Lister]

Lin Miao closed the log, speechless for a long time.

"..."

The amount of information unraveled from Prometheus exceeded the Sea God's processing capacity, almost overloading the server room. Fortunately, the machine Lucy enabled a backup server before the control center was burned down to alleviate the stress, or Lin Miao would have taken a severe hit in profits before even gaining a return.

The significance of these materials far surpassed Lin Miao's expectations.

The terminal, once held effortlessly in hand, now felt as heavy as a thousand tons, even like a hot potato.

One person's dream could actually weigh this much.