Chapter 121 The World Transforms into a Instance

The underground area that was originally filled with mechanical garbage has become much emptier recently. The twitching mechanical limb in Sun Yuancheng's hand is the eighth humanoid arm he has cleaned up today.

The energy stored in the severed limb was exhausted, the red light at the fingertips disappeared, and it turned into a lifeless corpse again.

Sun Yuancheng dismantled the usable parts and threw them into the container piled up behind the house. He was unusually silent, and his feminine and pretty face showed a cold and indifferent expression.

Then, a drop of cold liquid with a smell of rust fell on the side of his face.

It was like a leading soldier who was calling on thousands of troops to attack, raising the flag and shouting to the army behind to follow. Droplets hit people's faces and bodies one after another. After just a few breaths, Sun Yuancheng seemed to be immersed in a thick blood-red fog, and his whole body was filled with a strange moisture.

Sun Yuancheng wiped away the liquid with his fingers, and when he looked in front of his eyes again, there was, as expected, another splash of bright red.

He looked up and saw streams of scarlet liquid overflowing from the seemingly endless "underground ceiling". The liquid dripped and turned into a blood rain in this small area.

The cleaning device started automatically, isolating all the blood-red outside the house. He was in the center of protection, like a blood-red chick born in an eggshell that had not yet fully formed.

The blood raining down in the underground area was enough to show that the situation above was dire.

I'm afraid that the human casualties were severe, and the blood flowed like a river, so that the blood seeped in here through the cracks in the broken foundation above.

As the security system of this virtual world, Huo Qianyun must be feeling bad now.

As time went by, Huo Qianyun had more scars on her body and her mental state became worse. Several times when Sun Yuancheng came back, he saw her vomiting blood in the bathroom.

Simulated humans are beings that combine the advantages of humans and machines. Some of the weaknesses of humans, such as pain, illness and other negative effects, have long been avoided by science, but Huo Qianyun insisted on retaining the characteristics of a living being in herself, so now that the main system is damaged, her branch is suffering like a seriously injured human.

Huo Qianyun fell into a bathtub filled with warm water, with simulated blood flowing out of her mouth, nose, and eyes. Except for her skull, there was no human skin on the rest of her body. It was all covered in mechanical armor, like a drowning steel fish.

Sun Yuancheng lowered his eyes, drained the water in the bathtub with ease, then turned on the shower head to rinse the blood off Huo Qianyun's body.

She coughed violently twice, choking out the dark blue energy solution in her throat. She closed her eyes slightly and the amplitude of her movements visibly shrank. Sun Yuancheng then pinched her chin and poured a bottle of brand new concentrated energy solution into her mouth.

It was unknown how long this went on before Huo Qianyun returned to normal.

She climbed out of the bathtub with difficulty, looked at Sun Yuancheng, who was dressed in red and blue, and smiled a little embarrassedly: "... Sorry to bother you."

"It's okay." Sun Yuancheng's eyes were still on the back of her neck. He seemed to be hesitating, and after a while he changed the subject, "How is it going up there?"

Huo Qianyun was washing the blood off her hair in front of the mirror on the sink. "Most of the alienated machines have been scrapped for the second time. The situation is temporarily stable, but about one-fifth of the human players are still dead."

"The results predicted by all parties are not good. There may be several waves of large-scale attacks in the future," she said with an irritated "tsk" sound. "You should know what happened in the "Advanced Pseudo-Human Dungeon" six years ago, right?"

Sun Yuancheng nodded at the figure in the mirror.

"There's a fake of mine among the intruders. She's making the whole thing extra tricky. The main system is about to cut off contact with me," Huo Qianyun propped her hands on both sides of the sink, watching the water droplets on her forehead drip down the curve of her face to the center of the sink, "I don't know what's going on up there after that."

Sun Yuancheng raised his eyebrows but did not show much surprise.

He always looked at Huo Qianyun with a strange look.

Huo Qianyun looked back at him, raised one hand and pressed the back of her neck.

"Do you have something to tell me?"

Sun Yuancheng didn't answer.

"Your micro-expressions and movements are easily interpreted by us, so it is difficult for humans to lie to machines." She tied up her long hair with a rubber band and turned her body slightly to reveal the mark on the back of her neck. "Are you curious why there is a 'turbulent duck' icon behind me?"

Sun Yuancheng was silent for a while, then lifted up the hem of his shirt, revealing a small section of his well-defined abdominal muscles.

And at the bottom of his waist, a crow mark remained there quietly.

“I’ve seen crows and gray wolves, but never a duck.”

"If Zhang Lian and Zhang Feiye belong to the Gray Wolf faction that pursues human mutation, and Crow belongs to the Infinite Stream player," he narrowed his eyes slightly, "then which camp do you belong to?"

"Which faction do I belong to?" Huo Qianyun chuckled. "My 'colleague' has been with you day and night for a long time. You might as well ask 'it' which faction it belongs to."

System?

In fact, Sun Yuancheng is more concerned about why these camps are divided. Are three camps all there are? Or...

Huo Qianyun squeezed the foam produced by the hand sanitizer into the shape of a little duck: "Pay attention to the question, dear junior, I said 'colleague', the player system in your mind is my child."

…

Li Ziyue has been in a strange coma for several days. He seemed to have walked into a white forest with no exit. Everywhere he looked were tall trees with pure white branches and leaves, and birds and insects chirping, but no other living creatures.

The fog in the forest was very thick, so thick that it seemed like water could be squeezed out of it, but people did not feel the dampness or coldness.

Several times, Li Ziyue felt that something was staring at him in the fog.

The thing was indeed there. It was about the size of a child, milky white in color, and almost perfectly blended into the white forest and mist. Li Ziyue had to look very carefully to catch a glimpse of its shadow.

Whenever it made a wave to Li Ziyue, a series of dense and overlapping shouts would rise and fall around Li Ziyue.

"Hello."

"Li Ziyue."

“I’m watching you.”

The tone of its voice changed the deeper we went into the forest.

First there was incomprehensible mumbling, followed by a howl like crying, and then it quietly turned into shy joy, and the happy tone dropped and sank into pretentious indifference.

It's like condensing all the emotions of a child from birth to growing up and then showing them one by one.

Huo Qianyun gave Li Ziyue a full body check-up, and all indicators were normal. She had no other solution for the time being. The situation above was even worse, and she couldn't take Li Ziyue out easily. She could only let Li Ziyue fall asleep first.

Li Ziyue, a model worker who used to enter the dungeon at midnight and stand in the classroom for morning reading at 6:30 in the morning, walked around in the white forest for a few circles before getting up, rubbing his head.

The confusion and loss of not being able to find a way out in the dream faded away as the brain automatically forgot after waking up. He vaguely remembered a piece of white, but did not remember its cry in the dream.

It was just a very long, strange dream.

Probably because he had slept for too long with Zhang Lian, Li Ziyue also began to sit on the bed in a daze.

The curtains were still drawn tightly, but this underground area was already pitch black, and even with the curtains drawn on both sides, no sunlight could be seen.

Li Ziyue yawned and walked towards the bathroom, rubbing the back of his neck unconsciously with his fingertips. There was an inexplicable itchy feeling there, as if it was burning.

Sun Yuancheng and the senior student seemed to be not in the room. Li Ziyue simply washed up, but finally couldn't help it. He turned his head to the side and used the mirror to see what was wrong with the back of his neck.

When he saw the place clearly, he suddenly froze in place, and the sleepyhead who had been circling around him instantly crawled away.

There is a black crow sign there.

“Bang!”

Someone knocked twice outside the bathroom door, and then Huo Qianyun's voice was heard.

"Yueyue, are you in there? Is it convenient for you to come out? I have something to tell you."

Li Ziyue was sitting at the dining table, mechanically drinking warm millet porridge mouthful after mouthful.

"It's completely chaotic outside," Huo Qianyun said with an unpleasant expression. "Almost all systems are crashing. What's worse is that someone has taken advantage of the player system and sent misleading messages to the players. A large number of players are about to be teleported to this virtual world."

"It's easy to get in, but hard to get out. Most of the exits are blocked. Once these players come in, they can only wait to be beaten to death by the crazy machines."

Li Ziyue stopped moving: "...The players here basically live in peace with the machines. There are very few cases of humans abusing machines, even if it is to compete for territory...Machines have always had a place in this world. Why do they have such great malice towards humans? Do they have to kill them all?"

"The root cause of everything is that the player system was maliciously hacked and tampered with," Huo Qianyun sighed. "In addition to recording points for players, building forums, and publishing dungeon tasks, the player system also collects players' emotional information. The negative parts of these emotions were extracted and implanted into the machine."

Emotions again.

The same is true for previous learning systems. These AIs seem to attach particular importance to human emotions. Why? To better simulate humans?

wrong.

If the answer is just this, then the known conditions cannot be exhausted, and there must be other reasons.

Li Ziyue remained silent.

The senior student couldn't help sighing: "It's hard to imagine what the world will be like in the future. Everyone should be prepared for pessimism."

"The current decision is," she took a deep breath, "the higher-ups have decided to send as many of you as possible out and back to your own world. After that, I will activate the world's self-destruct command."

Sun Yuancheng was startled. Li Ziyue had already spoken: "What will you do if you destroy yourself?"

"I've already become a pile of data," the senior shrugged and said nonchalantly, "As long as the data is still there, I can be resurrected infinitely. Don't worry, I have a cloud backup."

She put down her bowl and chopsticks.

"Let's go, don't delay any longer, I'll take you out of the underground area first."

However, the scene after the door opened was not the normal darkness of the underground.

They seemed to have stepped into Doraemon's door, and on the other side of the connected houses was a seemingly normal classroom.

Li Ziyue's pupils shrank slightly——

Bright sunlight shone through the back window. The slender branches of the trees next to the classroom passed through the window bars, and the mottled leaf shadows were left on the yellowed pages of books and the broken desks.

All the students in light blue school uniforms turned their heads in unison. Their dark pupils, without any spirit in them, caught sight of the figures of Li Ziyue and the other two.

All the movements, all the faces were the same, even the twisted necks were eerily similar.

There was no one on the podium, but the chalk was still suspended in the air. Then it rubbed against the blackboard, making a rustling sound like millions of tiny insects crawling quietly, and pure white powder floated in the air.

Then, Li Ziyue heard the strange yet familiar prompt tone in his mind.

[Congratulations to the player for triggering the main quest "Endless Learning"]

[Task Difficulty: ? (0.5mm signing pen, 2B pencil, eraser, compass, triangle ruler, transparent pencil case)]

[Task requirements: Solve the problem]

An unusually short task with no rewards, no difficulty, and very few hints.

If Li Ziyue didn't remember, the area he was in was not a copy but a virtual world. Copy mission instructions could not appear in a virtual world, and the player's system had been in dormant mode for a long time.

Huo Qianyun was rarely shocked.

"...How could this happen?" She was stunned. "The player system is under my jurisdiction, but I have already shut it down by force."

"The worst situation has happened..." She pressed her fingers against her frowning brows. "This world is turning into a replica. We have to get out quickly. If it completely turns into a replica and the player system is out of control... the machines will kill people even more recklessly."