Stars, Players and Immortals

Chapter 10: The Shining Saint Sophia

Leader recruitment isn't like in a game where you can just click and get a free leader; Zhang Qiming will have to recruit them personally.

If he really wants to bring the leader into his camp, he has to approach him like a real politician, exchange interests, and sometimes even consider the issue of loyalty.

Zhang Qiming looked at Saint Sophia's name and opened her leader information.

——【Leadership Traits (5)】——

【Great Engineer - World Shaper】: Terrain transformation speed +25%, terrain transformation cost -20%, adds 100 production capacity to projects under construction in the region, and reduces the number of construction [turns].

[She has an almost instinctive grasp of large-scale engineering systems, whether it's urban expansion or underground industrial networks, she can quickly clarify the structure and ensure the entire system operates efficiently.]

【Great Scientist - Learned and Knowledgeable】: +1 research option, reduces the number of research [turns], and has a certain probability of triggering the "Engineering" technology discovery moment.

[Her knowledge base is extremely broad, enabling her to quickly identify new technical approaches during the research process.]

【Charismatic】: Faction support +10%, political negotiation efficiency +15%, loyalty in regions with followers of the Myriad Machines +10%.

[She often has a knack for quickly building consensus in meetings, negotiations, and public settings, bringing together previously hostile factions for temporary cooperation.]

【Machine Spirit Prayer - Precision Strike】: Weapon damage +15%, hit rate +5%, all machine spirits have an initial affinity of 60 towards her.

[She possesses an extremely strong ability to soothe machine spirits, enabling weapon systems to operate at their optimal state—in the Stars, even a gun can potentially give birth to a machine spirit.]

[Guardian of Order]: Stability +5%, Crime Rate -20%.

[The areas where she lives are generally orderly, and the efficiency of social operations is significantly improved.]

……

[Personal Template: The God-Hailer]

[Specialty: Blood of the Machine God/Clockwork Machine Virus I]:

Endurance +50%, Physical Defense +40%, immune to toxins, diseases, and mental erosion; her body will slowly undergo mechanical reconstruction, and her body itself is a running mechanical system (evolvable).

[Specialty: Mecha God's Words]:

All Class I and higher-level AI units will instinctively feel awe towards her and be more likely to accept her commands. When interacting with high-level AI, the priority of her commands will be naturally elevated, and many control processes that originally required complex permissions can be completed by her directly with extremely high efficiency.

[Leadership Modules: Military (C), Production (B), Municipal (C), Scientific Research (A), Culture (C), Religion (A), Economy (D), Psionic (D)]

[Note: Wow, double A in science and education, a golden legend!]

-

A person with top-notch scientific research capabilities, top-notch engineering organization capabilities, the ability to maintain social order, and near-abnormal control over mechanical systems... she's practically a superhuman!

"The Radiant Saint Sophia..." Zhang Qiming murmured Saint Sophia's nickname from her previous life.

The Radiant Hagia Sophia earned this nickname not because of her dazzling brilliance, but because she once illuminated an era briefly, like a true flash of light, before quickly fading away.

Saint Sophia didn't even have a surname at first; she was originally just the daughter of an ordinary pair of miners on Mars.

The Martian subterranean people know one thing from birth: knowledge belongs to the church.

For the church, knowledge is never free; knowledge is sacred, especially knowledge about the God of all agencies.

If ordinary people want to learn these things, they must be certified by a church seminary to prove that they are devout enough.

The church told the Martians, "Everyone is born with original sin, and knowledge is a gift from the machine gods. If you want to access these gifts, you must first atone for your sins."

Don't ask the church what original sin is; if the church says you have it, then you have it!

The church will not tell you how original sin came about, but only how to atone for it.

As long as you are willing to spend money to buy indulgences issued by the church... original sin and such will naturally be redeemed.

In theory, anyone can redeem their original sin and have a bright future by purchasing indulgences, provided they work hard enough.

The problem is that the means to make money are controlled by the church itself.

Even if workers in mines, factories, transportation lines, energy stations, and other low-level jobs work their hardest, the money they save at the end of the year is only enough to cover the most basic living expenses, let alone the ever-increasing atonement donations.

Many people struggle within this system their entire lives.

Ironically, on Mars, selling counterfeit sunglasses only results in detention, but printing and disseminating knowledge-based printed books is a serious crime.

For people at the bottom of society who want to atone for their sins, the fastest way is not through hard work, but through taking out a loan.

Yes, the church also provides loan services, ostensibly to support believers and illuminate their path, as if they are not lending money but distributing mercy on behalf of God.

But once you've signed that contract, you'll realize that the so-called bright future mostly means mortgaging your entire future and using the rest of your life to repay the church's kindness.

And Saint Sophia grew up in such a world.

Logically speaking, her life was predictable and predictable. If nothing unexpected happened, her life would have been like that of countless children of miners at the bottom of society, starting from the mines and slowly being consumed by factories, bills, and indulgences. At most, she would have been a little smarter than others and realized how rotten the system was earlier.

Until she was ten years old, a mechanical disaster erupted on Mars, a disaster that changed the girl's life forever.

When Sophia was ten years old, a strange virus began to spread in the Martian subsurface. At first, people only felt stiff joints and couldn't sleep well, but soon things became increasingly strange.

Some people heard a ticking sound coming from their bodies, while others felt cold, metallic tissue under their skin.

Later, the changes became visible to the naked eye.

The infected person's heart begins to transform into a structure composed of gears and pipes, joints rotate like mechanical hinges, muscles are replaced by metal fibers, and even the eyes transform into a structure resembling a hand-cranked camera.

It's a virus that slowly turns people into machines; this virus is called the "Wind-Up Machine Virus."

The church was initially afraid of this thing because the virus not only infects humans, but almost all animals, and once fully mechanized, the infected would become a bizarre life form made of gears and metal.

The most deadly thing is that infected people gradually lose their sense of self and soul during this process, until they are completely transformed into mechanical structures.

Initially, the church was indeed afraid of the virus; they even considered destroying the entire infected area.

But this fear only lasted a short time, because the higher-ups soon discovered something.

The bodies of those infected will gradually develop an extremely rare organic metal structure. This material retains the self-repair properties of biological tissues and has strength and energy conductivity close to that of high-end alloys. Even the most advanced industrial systems on Mars would find it difficult to synthesize artificially.

As a result, things gradually changed, and the locked-down area became a cleanup area.

The church began to claim that the infected were not cursed people, but people chosen by the machine god, and that they needed to be centrally managed and purified in order to prevent the virus from spreading further.

As a result, infected individuals from the mining areas and underground factories began to be taken away in batches.

The church established containment facilities, medical stations, and research institutes for them, claiming it was to protect the safety of Martian society and to provide salvation for these poor people.

But in the eyes of the church, they are all—talented individuals.

Sofia was also one of the infected.

Her body also began to change; metallic tissue appeared under her skin, and her bones slowly became mechanized. Everyone thought she would eventually become a living clockwork machine, like the other infected.

However, things didn't go as planned. Instead of being corrupted by the virus, Sofia tamed it.

After she appeared, the out-of-control infected people gradually stabilized, the virus stopped spreading, and the people in the entire purification zone were the first to realize what had happened.

So some people began to pray quietly, while others began to shout.

"The Holy Maiden..."

"The Saintess of the Machine God..."

Soon, the name spread throughout the entire purification zone.

They began to call the little girl Saint Sophia.

To be fair, the church's starting point was bad, but the result was good.

If the church hadn't concentrated all the infected people in the purification zone for virus research, if they hadn't treated those people as "talents" and taken them in together, it would have been a great relief.

Therefore, it would be impossible for Sofia to come into contact with all the infected people in one place, let alone quell the entire plague in a short period of time.

Then things started to get very awkward.

When the news reached the ears of the church's leadership, they suddenly discovered that the entire purification zone had come to regard the little girl as a miracle.

Those infected individuals who were originally considered experimental subjects by the church have become the most fervent supporters of Hagia Sophia overnight, and their ability to survive the Wind-Up Machine virus is itself proof that a miracle has occurred.

These people now possess highly sophisticated mechanized bodies. If the church continues to insist on treating them as human talents, a riot will immediately break out in the purification zone.

The church was certainly unwilling to take a hard line at this time.

Therefore, faced with this situation, the church made an extremely skillful and shameless move.

They acknowledged the miracle and declared that it was the will of the Machine God, that the church was establishing purification zones and focusing on treating the infected.

This great achievement belongs to the church, while the little girl who came out of the mine was merely a vessel for the miracle.

In other words, credit goes to the church, miracles to the gods, and suffering to the people.

The girl was then canonized.

She was taken out of the mine, placed in the care of a seminary, and declared a chosen one of the Machine God in a grand ceremony.

At the same time, the church also gave her an ancient and solemn surname: Paleologina.

From that day on, the miner's daughter without a surname disappeared, and in her place came a new name—Saint Sophia Paleologina.

Interestingly, the so-called "deification" was merely a means to appease the emotions in the purification zone, while simultaneously bringing this out-of-control variable under their own control for easier observation and utilization later.

They just didn't expect that this doll, which they had casually labeled, would soon slip out of their control, leading to the emergence of a real saint in the fake church.

After joining the Mechanical Church, Saint Sophia demonstrated an almost instinctive understanding of mechanical systems in a very short time. This ability quickly extended to the most core system on Mars—the intelligent hub [Ares] that runs through the entire industrial and information network.

By the time the seminary realized something was wrong, it was too late.

No one expected that Ares, with his thick eyebrows and big eyes, was actually a "lolicon" (a person who is obsessed with young girls), and that he actually managed to embed Saint Sophia's consciousness into the mechanical network of Mars.

Ares, a traitor like Morro, ignores rough men but fawns over pretty little girls, willingly submitting to their treachery.

Once this connection continues to deepen, she will no longer be just one person, but will gradually transform into a distributed existence, with her consciousness able to spread along the data link and enter control nodes at all levels.

At that point, even erasing her body would be of no use.

The church's attitude changed quickly; they abandoned their initial plan and chose to treat her as a true saint.

She received higher levels of protection, stricter schedules, and a near-complete monitoring system.

On the surface, she is a saint of the church and a symbol of the god of machines; but in reality, the higher-ups are always on guard against this saint.

Everyone knows that once this girl who came from the mines truly gets involved in the power structure, she can't just remain a symbol.

And just as the church had predicted, the little girl who had saved countless infected people in the purification zone did not choose to stay comfortably on the altar after entering the church. Instead, she began to do something that the church considered extremely dangerous—she tried to change this corrupt and decadent system.

Initially, she started with technology, proposing to open up some mechanical knowledge, relax the learning permissions of the lower-level people, and promote the upgrading of industrial automation, in an attempt to free the Martian people from being locked in an inefficient and cruel production structure.

These proposals were logically sound and could even significantly improve the overall productivity of Mars, but they were suppressed by the College of Cardinals as soon as they were submitted.

Because in the eyes of those in power, the distribution of technology is never the problem; losing power and control is.

They rejected the little girl's whimsical proposal and also gave her a few warnings, telling her not to interfere too much with the church's decisions.

But Saint Sophia did not stop her transformative efforts; she began to advance change on Mars in a different way.

Since top-down reforms were not feasible, she decided to start from the bottom up.

She began to quietly build up supporters within the church, focusing her attention on young engineers who had not yet been fully tamed by the system, people from the lower classes, and church reformers who were dissatisfied with the status quo...

Hagia Sophia is vying for the support of the Martian populace, hoping to achieve Martian transformation by having the lower classes surround the upper classes.

However, the longer this change continues, the more vigilant the church's leadership becomes.

Everyone could see that Hagia Sophia was bypassing the entire power structure and reshaping how Mars operated on another level—she was trying to seize power from the Church!

The Church, of course, could not tolerate this situation. In order to restrict Saint Sophia, the higher-ups decided to banish her to the heavens, making her stay obediently in the high-altitude orbital base. At the same time, the higher-ups also began to look for a way to break her bond with Ares.

Later, the conflict between Hagia Sophia and the Church intensified, and the conflict finally broke out in 2199.

At a public meeting, Hagia Sophia directly proposed a plan to reorganize the College of Cardinals, demanding the unification of the power structure of the four major sects, the elimination of technological monopolies, and the advancement of Mars into a true mechanical age.

At that moment, everyone knew that the church leadership and Hagia Sophia had entered a vortex of endless political struggle.

What followed was almost inevitable: the court began investigating her research projects, the media adopted a unified narrative, and the traditional labeling process began.

Traitor, warlord, anti-church element, ambitious schemer, traitor to the Mechanism faction...

Next came a more direct approach.

The church began a large-scale crackdown on reforms, ordering arrests, interrogations, and blockades of mining areas, and even using armed knights to forcibly take over key factories.

However, suppression did not bring peace; instead, it provoked a stronger backlash, with those infected people she had once saved actively fighting against the church's forces.

For the first time, a true revolutionary wave swept across Mars.

At this point, Saint Sophia made a judgment: she realized that proposals and negotiations were meaningless—the entire Martian system was rotten to the core and needed to be forged in flames; it needed to be transformed in a more radical way.

So she chose the most direct method—armed seizure of power!

Before the annual Council of Cardinals of the Church, she joined forces with the reformists and grassroots forces, secretly mobilizing the thirteen mobile units she had established, armed with the latest SA mobile suits, in preparation for a decisive coup at Mount Olympus, the Mars hub.

Unfortunately, there were bad people among the Martian population; some betrayed Saint Sophia.

Of the thirteen forces, one chose to betray at the last moment. The intelligence for the operation was sent out in advance, the Church completed its pre-deployment, and the entire Olympus Hub was sealed off before the operation even began.

The military coup was quickly suppressed. Saint Sophia's third-generation fighter jet, Joan of Arc, ultimately failed to break through the layers of electric nets set up by the Martian Covenant Army, and she was eventually captured by the Church.

After the revolution was suppressed, the Church began to try Hagia Sophia and her disobedient followers, and the trials were broadcast live worldwide.

The disobedient were executed with the highest level of church discipline, the traitors were spared, and the remaining followers were taken to the execution ground in batches and shot one by one on public screens in all cities on Mars.

As for Hagia Sophia, what the Church truly feared was never her armed forces, but Ares behind her.

In order to completely sever her connection with the Mars system, they chose to resort to the last resort—formatting.

The Martian Church leadership had always been reluctant to resort to such a mutually destructive tactic, but the revolution in St. Sophia had crossed a red line for the Church, and they ultimately had no choice but to painfully format Ares.

In the instant of formatting, the entire Martian industrial network experienced massive disruption in a short period of time. The scheduling system collapsed, production lines stopped, and even life support and agricultural systems were affected, leading to a great famine on Mars.

But the church has to do this; everything is to maintain the church's rule.

Ares was reset, and Saint Sophia lost her last trump card.

She was then taken directly to a top-secret facility, where her body was dismantled and her consciousness was forcibly extracted and transformed into a special kind of human brain tissue.

And so, it all came to an end.

The shimmering Hagia Sophia is like a flash of light, briefly illuminating the darkest place before quickly fading away.

Moreover, fearing that Ares might lose control again, leading to the emergence of another Saint Sophia, the Martian Church went down another extreme path, which is the final situation of Mars in Zhang Qiming's original timeline—the era of human brain wetware (post-AI era).