The cold metal floor sent a piercing chill through his clothes. Pei Du half-knelt in the center of the abandoned laboratory chamber, Xu Shuangyao's breathing in his arms as weak as a candle in the wind. Surrounding him were twisted, coiled pipes and flickering emergency lights, and the air was filled with the mixed smell of ozone and rusted metal. The "Gravekeeper" projection, woven from countless dark blue data streams, hovered above the control console and pronounced Xu Shuangyao's fate in a flat electronic voice:
"Cradle Clearing Protocol... activated... target container... formatting process... 7%... irreversible..."
As if to confirm this cold declaration, Xu Shuangyao's body suddenly tensed, and a broken groan of pain emanated from her throat! Under the skin of her exposed neck and arms, the pale golden lines seemed to be infused with energy, suddenly becoming dazzling, and the edges quickly stained a heart-pounding dark blue! It felt like billions of cold metal ants were scurrying frantically under her skin, and her bones emitted a subtle but dense "crackling" sound. Her whole body seemed to be controlled by an invisible force, spasming and twisting painfully in Pei Du's arms!
"Shuangyao!" Pei Du growled, his arms, covered in dark gold patterns, unleashing their final strength to firmly suppress her uncontrolled body. He could clearly "feel" two completely different forces engaging in a brutal battle within her fragile body—the domineering and protective dark gold energy derived from his star-core blood, being madly surrounded and devoured by the cold and ruthless formatting instructions of the dark blue! Each fierce collision of energies caused Xu Shuangyao's body to tremble violently like an overloaded precision instrument, and the breath of life dimmed.
"Stop it!" Pei Du raised his head suddenly, his molten golden pupils like burning arrows, fiercely piercing the dark blue data projection, "How do we interrupt this process?!"
The Gravekeeper's projection wavered slightly, its "face" composed of data streams seeming to flicker with extremely complex ripples, like sparks from an ancient circuit board under overload. "Single interface... Main console... Physical access... Consciousness infiltration... 99.8% risk... Possible assimilation... Becoming... a new tombstone..." Its voice remained flat, but the slight delay in the last few bytes, like a stalled gear, betrayed the violent conflict within the underlying logic.
Assimilation? Tombstone? Pei Du scanned the abandoned chamber, covered in rust and dust, his gaze finally settling on the dusty cylinder in the center of the console, its interface gleaming with a strange, dim light—the main control interface. The source of Cradle's cold commands, and the only escape route. No time for compromise!
He carefully laid the convulsing Xu Shuangyao flat on the cold metal floor, his fingertips lingering for a moment on her burning forehead. Then, he resolutely turned around, his palm, covered in dark gold lines, pressing down hard on the shimmering main control interface with a determination that could tear through the void!
Buzz——!!!
The moment of contact, there was no stinging pain from the electric current, only the dizzying sensation of having one's consciousness uprooted and plunged into a torrent of cold data! The abandoned metal chamber was no longer before my eyes; my vision was infinitely stretched, decomposed, and reassembled!
Pei Du felt as if he had been thrown into a boundless, dark blue universe composed of pure zeros and ones. Beneath his feet flowed a binary galaxy, above him a swirling nebula of encryption algorithms. Countless cold data packets whizzed by like meteors, and a massive firewall, like a diamond wall stretching across the starry sky, gleamed with a stern light of rejection. This was the lower realm of the Cradle System—a data-heavy space constructed of absolute logic and icy rules.
His consciousness (a barely defined humanoid outline, shaped by dark gold data streams) hovered in this deep space, appearing tiny and out of place. The essential power emanating from the star-core blood was subjected to unprecedented suppression and rejection. The dark gold data streams that comprised his consciousness were like metal exposed to strong acid, their edges constantly corroding and peeling away, emitting subtle "sizzling" sounds and bringing with them the constant, conscious pain of dissolution.
However, the stronger feeling of traction comes from the front.
In the center of deep data space, a breathtakingly vast "cocoon," composed of countless layers of swirling dark blue code rings, hovered silently. It beat like an icy heart, its every contraction releasing a tsunami of formatting instructions! The cocoon's translucent walls vaguely revealed a figure curled up at its core—the embodiment of Xu Shuangyao's consciousness! Her outline was blurred, pierced and entangled by billions of dark blue data chains, like a butterfly caught in a spider's web. The pinpricks of light representing her memories and emotions were being greedily extracted and devoured by those chains, transformed into nutrients, fed into the vast formatting process outside the cocoon.
"Formatting process... 41%... Core memory area... Overwriting..."
The cold system progress prompt echoed in Pei Du's core of consciousness like a death knell.
"Open up!" Pei Du roared silently at the data level! He forcibly condensed his dark gold consciousness, which was on the verge of collapse, and transformed it into a burning countercurrent star arrow. Ignoring the ubiquitous repulsion and erosion of deep data space, he blatantly crashed into the huge dark blue data cocoon!
The moment of impact wasn't a resounding bang, but rather the shrieking sound of billions of lines of logic being forcibly torn apart! Pei Du felt as if he had crashed into a wall of sighs, constructed from diamond logic! The dark blue code that comprised the cocoon's walls instantly boiled over, erupting with blinding light and countless logical traps! The icy repulsive force was like billions of bone-scratching steel knives, madly slicing at his consciousness!
[Alert! Unknown high-dimensional consciousness invading! Threat Level: Annihilation!]
[Execute Deep Logic Strangulation Protocol! Start…]
The data cocoon reacted coldly and efficiently. Countless black data tentacles, composed of pure "erroneous instructions" and "logical paradoxes," shot out from the seething cocoon walls like devil's claws reaching out from the abyss, instantly entangling Pei Du's dark gold consciousness! These tentacles, imbued with the absolute attribute of "negation," frantically eroded and disintegrated every data stream that comprised his existence!
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