In the year 2995, on a future Earth, an elderly Eastern lady pushed open a door, stirring a faint current of air indoors. To the east, the red silk curtain of a shrine embedded in the wall fluttered slightly, rolling up at one corner to reveal the statues enshrined within—three armored robot warriors, just like Transformers.
"Hey Pudding, why do your Jixi Clan keep Transformers at home? Let me ask you again—are they really your ancestors? Aren't you and us the same humans? How can your ancestors be robots?!"
"Bean, I've told you a hundred times—those are Rencuoqie, Puchongyi, and Jianenghao. They are our ancestors. They have the same brain structure for information processing and storage as we do, the same patterns of thought and memory. They're human, just like you and me."
"Then why do they look nothing like us?"
"When your elders take a family portrait, they dress in their finest, most solemn attire, right? Our ancestors are worshipped by thousands—shouldn't their statues be even more solemn and sacred?"
"But you said those robotic armors aren't their clothes or armor—they're their bodies, their flesh and blood! Now you're changing your tune… it doesn't add up, you're contradicting yourself!"
"I've told you a hundred times—they're our distant common ancestors. We've evolved over thousands of years, so of course our physical forms are different! Like the difference between a dinosaur and a chicken! Hmph, you're just making fun of us on purpose. If you keep this up, I won't play with you anymore—just like I never talk to Sasha Pova again! Hmph!"
…
On a sunny afternoon, two children—a boy and a girl—bickered and frolicked on the open ground of a future community.
"Get me that Puchongyi, the different styles. Yeah, these two."
"Sir, you must say 'invite', not 'buy'—buying is a great disrespect."
"Oh, right, my apologies. 喃础, 生母萨达, 生母萨达!" A young Jixi couple, shopping for statues of their distant ancestors at the highest meditation district in the community during a festival, spoke as the husband instinctively put his palms together in a prayer gesture and bowed twice to the two Puchongyi statues he'd just disrespected with his careless words.
In the culture of the Jixi people, Rencuoqie is known as the Heavenly God, Jianenghao the Earth God, and Puchongyi the Human God—an androgynous deity who presides over fertility, medicine, and the sufferings of mortals. Across the world, people often craft separate male and female statues of Puchongyi, united by the red aurora cannon barrel between their brows.
Yet in today's secular, atheist culture, most Jixi people no longer hold superstitious or excessive reverence for these three robotic ancestors—or at least, not with the same devotion and sincerity as their grandparents did.