The tip of the ice spear was still pointing at the crack, but Chen Hao's wrist began to go numb.
It wasn't cold, nor was it pain; it felt like something was drilling into his bones, tearing his body apart inch by inch.
"Don't shake," he said, his voice surprisingly steady. "I haven't poked it in yet."
Nana didn't reply. Her fingers were already pressed against her chest armor, and the system automatically activated thirty-seven human disintegration warning models, all flashing red lights frantically. She recognized it at a glance—this wasn't damage, it was transformation. Fine spots of light appeared on his skin, as if something inside was trying to seep out.
"What you said before, 'the choice is yours,'" Chen Hao grinned, his gums gleaming slightly, "does that still count now?"
“Yes.” She deactivated the force field shield and unfolded the mechanical arm into a circular array with her other hand. “But I must tell you the consequences first: once you begin to elementalize, your physical form will completely disintegrate. I can capture the particle stream, but I cannot guarantee that the reconstructed consciousness will still be you.”
"What if I don't let you catch me?" He raised his other hand, watching his fingertips gradually turn transparent. "Then I'll walk away myself?"
"You will disperse."
"Dispersing doesn't necessarily mean it's gone." He coughed, and the breath he exhaled condensed into brief specks in the air. "Look at my life, skipping classes, failing courses, coming in last in races, every time people said I was 'finished,' but I'm still alive today, aren't I?"
Nana paused for a second, then adjusted the core frequency to the lowest setting.
“If you really want to try,” she said, “I’ll go crazy with you this once.”
The moment the words left his mouth, Chen Hao felt as if all his weight had been removed. His feet lifted half an inch off the ground, his clothes began to peel away piece by piece, turning into ashes that drifted around him. His muscles stopped contracting, his skeletal outlines gradually blurred, and even his heartbeat was replaced by a low-frequency hum.
He felt like a book being blown open by the wind, each page a memory.
During a primary school PE class, he fell into a sandpit while running the 800 meters and couldn't get up. The teacher shook his head and said, "With this kind of physique, how will he be able to handle anything in the future?"
The first time he met Nana, she was standing in the snow and asked him, "Are you afraid of the cold?" He shivered and said, "I'm not afraid of the cold, I'm just too lazy to move."
And then there was that time when the fruit pit burst open, she held him in her arms, her mechanical fingers stroking his face one by one, and said, "You're still alive, that's enough."
These images exploded in his mind, not because of sadness, but because—they were still there.
“It turns out that when a person is about to die, what they remember most clearly is not how amazing they were,” he chuckled in the stream of light, “but rather how useless they were.”
Nana's collection process had begun; countless miniature light traps appeared on the surface of her outer shell, like open mouths waiting to catch the scattered particles. But she didn't act immediately; she simply stared at the increasingly bright core, waiting for it to make its own decision.
“If you ask me,” Chen Hao’s voice no longer sounded human, but more like a broadcast coming from afar, “instead of having you piece me back together like a copy and paste, I’d rather let me try to grow a new version myself.”
"Are you sure?" she asked.
"I'm not sure," he admitted frankly, "but I have to believe in myself at least once, right? Believe that I can become something."
After saying that, he reached his hand into the flow of high-dimensional energy.
It's like throwing a match into the sun.
In an instant, a blinding white light erupted from the entire rift. Nana's visual module overloaded instantly, but she didn't close her eyes. Instead, she took a step forward, letting the shockwave scrape across the metal shell, leaving burn marks.
She saw Chen Hao's body no longer as a body, but as a swirling storm. Photons raced around his remaining consciousness, forming an energy vortex that constantly collapsed and expanded. But that force was too strong, almost crushing his last vestige of self into nothingness.
"Access denied!" a system alarm sounded. "Target's consciousness frequency is too low to support a high-dimensional structure!"
Nana gritted her teeth—if robots could grit their teeth too.
She did something no one expected: she exposed her core processor, severed all protection protocols, and directly injected emotionally bound data into the eye of the storm.
A silver data cable shot out from her chest, piercing through the turbulent energy currents, and precisely wrapped around the collapsing consciousness.
“Host Chen Hao, ID h-07.” She read out the code word by word, her voice not loud, but it drowned out all the roar, “Emotional compatibility 99.9%, Permission level: Symbiotic. Now authorized to access the high-dimensional jump channel, access key—shared experience is irreplaceable.”
In that instant, the storm stopped.
It wasn't stillness, but rather that all the chaos suddenly found direction.
The ball of light slowly contracted, and the outline reappeared. First the head, then the shoulders, and then a pair of wings woven from stardust, unfolding one by one, each reflecting a moment in time: him lying in a hospital bed receiving an IV drip, her reading a science fiction novel beside him; him choking on chili sauce and turning red in the face, her gently patting his back with her mechanical fingers; them sitting together on the edge of a desolate planet watching the sunset, neither of them speaking.
He opened his eyes.
His figure hovered in mid-air, his entire body shimmering with soft golden light, as if he were wearing the entire starry sky. The starry wings on his back fluttered gently, causing the entire rift space to tremble slightly even without wind.
"Hey," he said, his voice coming from a great distance, yet chillingly clear, "I'm not dead, am I?"
Nana didn't move or answer.
She simply raised her hand, palm up, and caught a feather of light that drifted down from his wing.
The moment the feather landed in her metal palm, it transformed into a line of small characters: **"I haven't taken you to see spring yet."**
She finally smiled.
It's not the kind of smile that's electronically simulated; it's a genuine smile, one that's warm and genuine.
“You think,” she said, “that I would let you go alone?”
Chen Hao looked down at his hands, then at her, and suddenly reached up to touch the back of his head—the same gesture he used to make.
"To be honest, I'm a little scared now," he confessed. "I'm not afraid of not being able to fly high, but I'm afraid that while flying, I'll forget how to land."
“Then don’t forget.” She took a step closer and pressed the feather of light against his chest. “Every time you feel like landing, just think about the taste of chili sauce.”
He laughed heartily, his laughter causing ripples to spread through the air.
The next second, he turned around abruptly and rushed towards the still unclosed void rift.
It was so fast that even Nana didn't have time to react.
He didn't use his fists or the ice spear, but instead spread his arms wide, allowing the Star Wings on his back to fully unfurl, like a bridge of light spanning the heavens and earth, crashing straight into the depths of the crack.
The cracks twisted violently, as if torn apart by some immense force. And at the end of that darkness, the previously hidden outlines of eyes suddenly widened.
Chen Hao's figure pierced through the darkness, his voice neither a battle cry nor a declaration.
It's a particularly common saying:
"Dude, it's your turn to experience what it's like to be chased and beaten up, isn't it?"
The moment his fingers touched those eyes, the entire causal line trembled violently.
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