Mecha Star Wars.

Chapter 1397 The Tragedy of Lyria

"You actually encountered the Lerians?" Rubel immediately straightened his back, his eyes gleaming with a bloodthirsty light. "That's quite rare. Weren't you amazed?"

"Who?" Antonio pressed. "Which one are you talking about?"

“Oh, it’s the jellyfish-like creature you mentioned, the most dreamlike and poetic being in the Nexus—the Rhea.” Rubelu turned halfway to the back to explain to Antonio and the people behind him, “They don’t have physical bodies; what floats are thousands upon thousands of glowing neural particles within their translucent sacs.”

“I’ve seen Rhea beings with a diameter of up to three meters. When all their nerve particles glowed, it was like a miniature galaxy…” Rubel squinted with longing. “Have you noticed that when they move, the edges of their pouches turn gold?”

Everyone shook their heads.

“Ah~” Rubel sighed, “The fluttering gold trim, swaying in the wind like a skirt...tsk, so beautiful! Even the memory is a wonderful enjoyment.”

Rubel closed his eyes gently, his face filled with utter infatuation.

Unable to find any details in their brief recollections, the group felt guilty for their lack of observation.

"Hey!" Antonio slapped Rubel without any politeness. "Is it really necessary? You're acting like you've seen an absolute beauty, still reminiscing about it."

Rubel opened his eyes and saw a group of people staring at him. His old face turned red, and he chuckled to cover his embarrassment before speaking seriously.

"The Lyrians are beautiful, but because they are composed of neuroparticles, they are inherently extremely invasive to neural control, and this invasiveness can happen in an instant. Creatures with weaker mental strength may not be able to detect the alteration of their thoughts and memories in time..."

"That powerful?!" Lin Fan frowned. "Isn't that very dangerous?"

“Yeah, they can mess with someone’s brain in an instant without anyone noticing,” Antonio said, glancing at Jin Sichen. “It’s so dangerous, and they just let them swagger around on the street? Oh dear! Were they looking this way at that time? Could they have already tampered with our brains so we didn’t remember anything?”

Antonio exaggeratedly clutched his head and yelled, causing everyone to involuntarily and quickly check if their memories were wrong.

“It’s not that exaggerated!” Rubel shook his head repeatedly, smiling wryly. “Although the Lyrians have extraordinary talent, they don’t like to cause trouble. The outside world mostly labels them as ‘elegant, aloof, and arrogant.’ As long as you don’t provoke or offend them, they usually think highly of themselves and are too lazy to bother with creatures with low mental strength. Besides, aren’t there the laws of the Nexus Ring to restrain us? Don’t be afraid, don’t be afraid!”

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. If someone had both incredible abilities and a domineering personality, that would be truly...

"Such an incredible ability, doesn't it have any weaknesses?" Lin Fan asked. "Even if the Star Nexus Ring has constraints, how can actions that affect the mind be done so secretly and without anyone noticing? Does it all depend on the Leia people's self-awareness?"

“Of course they are,” Rubel replied. “They are aggregates of particles, without even an external body. Therefore, high-frequency pulses or strong magnetic fields can cause chaos in their internal neuroparticles, leading to loss of mental control. In severe cases, the capsule may even rupture, causing the particles to leak out. So the extraordinary Lyrians are actually extremely fragile.”

“That makes sense.” Jin Sichen nodded. “Generally speaking, mental strength and physical fitness are inversely proportional. The more developed the brain’s nerves, the worse the relative physical condition; it’s no wonder there’s an old saying, ‘Strong limbs, simple mind.’”

“Baby! He insulted you!” Antonio openly tried to sow discord between Lin Fan and his lover.

“I mean usually, relatively.” Jin Sichen slowly pushed up his sunglasses and turned to Antonio, who was smiling at him with ill intent. “Lin Fan is not usually one of us. If we’re talking about insults, you’re the only one here who fits the description I’m talking about.”

Antonio glared, and Lin Fan quickly interrupted, "Alright, everyone! Listen to what Rubelu has to say!"

Rubelu hadn't been a store manager for so many years for nothing, and immediately took over.

"Besides the physical threat, the Lyrians' form makes them extremely dependent on energy. If they cannot replenish their exclusive energy in time, their neural particles will gradually dim and their activity will decrease. At this time, their mental strength will also decrease accordingly, and they may even lose their ability to invade others. They will also become extremely vulnerable and go into hibernation. If you want to capture them at this time, you can capture them every time."

"Why arrest them?" Wu Yi frowned.

“It’s nothing more than resource plunder,” Guan Ying replied coldly. “Given the unique physique of the Lyrians, I have a bad feeling about it.”

“Ugh…” Wu Yi looked disgusted.

Ruberu touched his nose and said helplessly, "The spiritual particles of the Lerean people not only have powerful spiritual power that can invade others, but they can also extract fragments of others' memories and condense them into special image storage prisms without leaving any mental damage or adverse residue on the person involved."

"What do you mean?" Jin Sichen sat up straight. "Biological methods for memory extraction?"

“Similar function,” Rubelu nodded. “The memories of the human brain, or any living organism, usually carry the subjective emotions of the person who experienced them, right? As a collective of spirits, the Lyrians can safely separate their own emotions, or non-private memories. This avoids the ethical controversy of ‘memory plundering’—because it’s just copying and extracting, not depriving or harming. At the same time, it satisfies the needs of other civilizations for knowledge exploration and inheritance…”

"What does that mean?" Antonio looked left and right. "I don't understand."

"So you're saying that memory extraction might involve privacy or harm to the brain, and is illegal in interstellar space?" Lin Fan saw Rubelu nod and continued to explain his understanding, "But the Lyrians can avoid this harm, and even avoid the privacy of the person involved, extracting objective events and recording them in some kind of externally playable medium generated by their neural granulation force, like a videotape?"

“That’s pretty much it.” Ruberu nodded in agreement. “This ability was initially used in formal occasions, important historical events, or in the investigation of major cases. Because the mental particles of the Lyrians are their internal organs, the core of their abilities, and also related to the amount of mental power they have—the more particles, the stronger their mental power. So they don’t give it out easily.”

In its early stages, the memory prism was simply a secure carrier of major events and knowledge.

However, as this ability was spread far and wide with such understatement, it inevitably attracted the attention of some shady and sinister insects. Thus, a frenzy of hunting Lyrians ensued.

"Hunting?" Lin Fan's heart skipped a beat. "But aren't they intelligent beings too?"

“Although we are already an interstellar civilization, the biological hierarchy is everywhere,” Ruberu sighed. “Just as the Lyrians look down on races with low mental strength, other intelligent beings also look down on the Lyrians who don’t even have a physical body. Just like Ango said, they all regard them as jellyfish with high mental strength.”

Antonio scratched his head, suddenly feeling that his description was somewhat sinful.

"Anyway, they used various pretexts to capture the Lyrians. At first, they wanted to force them to create memory prisms. But how arrogant are the Lyrians? They're not people who can be coerced. Later, they even found an opportunity to use their mental power to kill the controller..."

Ruberu sighed: "Those people who came after were afraid of being retaliated against again, so they simply took the mental particles for research... In short, the Lyrians were almost wiped out at one point. After a long period of interstellar civilization evolution, they were not completely extinct."

"After the large-scale hunting of intelligent life was banned by the Interstellar Convention, many vulnerable races, including those in Lyria... well, those that were certainly on the verge of extinction at the time, finally got a chance to breathe. That's how we got the opportunity to witness the beauty of the Lyrians in the Nexus Ring..."

"So the Lyrians can now come and go freely without fear of being hunted?" Lu Xinyuan asked.

"That's roughly how it is. Although there are prohibitions, the physical condition of the Lyrians... well, in the last hundred years, they've rarely left their star. Even when they do travel, it's always in groups," Ruberu replied. "Perhaps their home planet was also plundered badly back then, and they needed to replenish their energy, so they had to come out to exchange supplies... I've also recently heard that they often help the Star Ring with emotional adjustment or mental imprinting work, so it seems that the Star Ring is one of the few environments where they can completely relax."

“Oh! We’re practically colleagues.” Antonio glanced at Jin Sichen and then asked Rubelu.

"Do you know the Oakebers? Their mental strength seems quite formidable. Compared to the Lyrians, who is stronger?"