At the same time, outside the simulation, the Messenger watching him felt her heart tighten. She had a bad feeling, like she was about to witness something she absolutely shouldn't see.
Several Aeons watching from outside the Memory World also fell silent.
In the eyes of intelligent beings, Pei Guang had always acted lawfully in the past, but no one knew what a Pei Guang plunged into chaos would do now.
Within the Memory World, Pei Guang moved.
First, he found a decorative street tree, chopped it down, tore up the road, and used the materials to make the most basic version of a Pet Ball.
With the Pet Ball crafted, Pei Guang's descent into madness began.
"Holy Light!!!!"
He raised both arms high, and at that moment, he activated his new skill: Holy Light. But while others used Holy Light to heal, his Holy Light caused instant social death.
Everyone within a ten-meter radius collapsed into social death the moment they were hit. To widen the radius, Pei Guang used Holy Light while darting around, and within seconds, the number of people socially annihilated on the street had caused some to faint from shame.
And once these ordinary people lost all resistance from their embarrassment, Pei Guang started throwing Pet Balls.
Some were caught immediately. Some took several throws. But thanks to the game's relatively realistic physics engine, the people who needed multiple throws ended up with giant welts on their heads.
After capturing over a hundred average humans, Pei Guang, who had started out happy, now looked annoyed.
"'Fragile Constitution'? What the hell is that?"
"Too much… 'Solo exercise'? What?!"
"'Hypertension, Diabetes, Infertility'... seriously? Wow, just wow!"
"Come on! So negative traits are linked to personal condition? Then how many people are even gonna have good traits?"
Looking at the pets he had collected, Pei Guang was thoroughly disappointed. Most of the people on the street had negative traits. The rest mostly had none, and only a few had positive ones.
But even those positive traits were things like:
[Hasn't wet the bed since age three]
[Can roll over once every five days]
[Elementary schooler in senior kindergarten]
These traits did give stat bonuses… but the bonuses were complete garbage.
Pei Guang lost all interest just looking at them.
These weak traits had nothing to do with the system or the Aeons: the traits of the pets were entirely dependent on the original talent and capabilities of the targets.
The planet Pei Guang was on was still one enslaved by the Company.
Even though most people seemed to live decently on the surface, in reality, everyone worked a minimum of twelve hours a day just to pay off debt. From the moment they were born, every person owed the IPC, and they would keep owing until they died.
Those with talent had long been taken away by the Company, leaving behind only basic laborers. They toiled day after day, barely surviving under the crushing burden of centuries-long debt.
In this situation, it was already a miracle if the people he captured didn't have negative traits. Anyone with even a slightly positive trait was practically someone who'd slipped through the Company's net.
Pei Guang wasn't satisfied with this outcome, but as a player, he understood: sometimes these kinds of settings were partly to make players "act human," and partly to match the inherent logic of the game.
But among the people he'd captured, Pei Guang did find one special individual.
[Android]
This android had two traits: [Dreams of Electric Sheep] and [Working-Class Android]: one boosted rest efficiency by 20%, and the other increased work efficiency by 10%.
These two traits made Pei Guang's eyes light up.
Pei Guang: "Nice. Really nice! So the reason the pet ball isn't meant for capturing humans isn't because it's inhumane, but because humans don't even have attributes? That's just an excuse!"
While ranting, Pei Guang was already admiring the android's stats.
Increased rest and work efficiency? The boosts weren't huge, but they pointed in a clear direction.
"Right, if humans don't cut it, then I'll just use robots. As for the others…"
Pei Guang didn't plan to keep capturing these nobodies with poor traits, but that didn't mean he'd let them go. He'd caught these laborers fair and square, and he planned to use them to rapidly build up his forces.
At the same time, Pei Guang also had some experiments in mind.
He wanted to see if humans with negative traits could be trained into having positive ones, and if those could be passed on genetically. Just imagining a workforce where everyone had a 30% boost to efficiency made him giddy.
This round of experiments also cemented Pei Guang's future strategy: only capture elites.
First, normal people had bad stats. Second, there were too many of them: it was a waste of time. Catching a few elites was far more practical than catching a swarm of mediocrities.
In a typical game, Pei Guang might have considered just working these people to death, then harvesting their parts before getting a new batch.
Even though this memory world was fake, it preserved the logic, reactions, and conversational patterns of real humans.
In such a setting, even if Pei Guang fully abandoned his humanity in pursuit of efficiency, he still didn't want to use the "work-until-death" method, because it was simply inefficient.
The crafting station came with unlimited mining fields, and from the resources mined there, higher-grade materials could be synthesized. If space was limited, then maximizing individual efficiency mattered more than sheer numbers.
As a survival game veteran, Pei Guang saw the android's traits and immediately realized that brute-force labor was the least efficient method.
During the last Swarm Disaster event, the Zerg had already done calculations on how to best distribute work among normal humans for maximum productivity across the universe.
The simplified conclusion? A 7-hour workday, weekends off, two bonus days off per month, and standardized seasonal holidays and planetary orbit holidays.
There were many other policies too and Pei Guang couldn't remember them all, but his system log had them recorded.
Once he got things up and running, he could just copy-paste.
According to the Zerg and their Swarm's calculations, even if this work model reduced individual productivity by 50%, the total output still exceeded that of exploitation-based models.
And was that "inefficient"? Maybe to a capitalist, yes—but to a player, it was pure profit.
Sure, players could be crueler than any capitalist or slaver, but as long as their needs were met, players could also be the most generous beings in the universe.
The downside of this approach was rapid population growth. Toward the end, even without considering the Swarm's breeding rate, humans alone could fill an entire planet in a year.
But Pei Guang didn't care.
What? Overpopulation? There are so many planets in the universe, just let it expand.
He's a player, why should he care about overpopulation? If the universe bursts from the pressure, then he'll deal with that when it happens.
Besides, this is just a memory world. Why worry about whether it'll explode?
All Pei Guang wanted now was to make more pet balls and catch more people. He even wanted to test whether the Aeons in this instance could be captured.
If this kind of brain-off temporary event doesn't even let you mess with the background characters, Pei Guang's rating is going to tank!
Making Aeons into pets?
Just thinking about it was thrilling!