I took a deep breath, a salty air mingled with dust, rain, and tears flooding my lungs. I powered on the terminal. A faint blue startup light illuminated the messy wetness on my face. The familiar interface appeared, requiring a biometric key to unlock it.
I pressed my thumb against the cold recognition area. The lingering raindrops on my fingertips made it feel slippery. Almost immediately, a faint, cracking sound, like ice breaking, emanated from within the terminal, so subtle it was almost drowned out by the sound of the rain. Then, the faint blue startup light suddenly went out, and the entire terminal screen fell into a dead blackness.
My heart sank. A malfunction? Or... some kind of pre-programmed destruction? Could this be the last thing Ethan had left behind...
Just when despair was about to seize me, without any warning, an extremely faint, almost imperceptible blue light suddenly lit up in the center of the dead black screen! Like the first ray of starlight at the birth of the universe, it penetrated the void lonely and persistently.
The light point quickly stabilized and expanded. Instead of returning to the original operating system interface, it transformed into an extremely simple, even primitive, data flow window. There was no graphical interface, no interactive prompts, only lines of pure white hexadecimal code, scrolling upwards. They flowed at an astonishing speed, with a cold yet efficient rhythm, like a surging river of data. My "data heart" instinctively sprang into action, attempting to parse this sudden torrent of information. However, the code's arrangement and combination were extremely bizarre and jumpy, filled with numerous non-standard redundant fields and nested logic that even violated basic communication protocols. It resembled a carefully encrypted, layered puzzle, or the gibberish of a program in a frenzy.
This wasn't regular data! More like... more like some kind of encrypted beacon, distorted and disguised through multiple twists! At the last moment, Ethan, using his last bit of lucidity, forcibly "burned" a crucial message into the terminal's firmware in this nearly self-destructive manner! What did he foresee? What was he trying to convey?
Just as I mobilized all my cognitive resources, trying to grasp a sliver of parseable pattern from the raging, chaotic stream of code, something strange happened! The rushing stream of white code suddenly stopped! All the characters disappeared in an instant, and the screen once again fell into pure, heart-wrenching darkness.
The next second, a completely new and different light lit up in the center of the screen.
No longer the cold blue.
But... an extremely soft and warm, light golden light like the early spring morning light penetrating the mist.
This faint golden light wasn't dazzling, but it held a strange sense of stability. It quickly spread across the dark screen, outlining an extremely simple geometric pattern composed of pure light—a perfect concentric circle formed by two inner and outer rings nested within each other. At the core of the inner circle, an abstract symbol resembling a budding seed quietly hovered, emitting a richer, life-filled pale golden glow.
Beneath the graphic, a line of text, also composed of soft golden light, silently emerged. The font was elegant and ancient, carrying a sense of tranquility that didn't belong to this era:
“Oasis Protocol – Starting certification…”
Then, a clear, emotionless electronic synthesized voice sounded directly from the depths of my consciousness, completely bypassing my auditory nerves, like a ghost whispering directly into my mind:
[Authentication mode: Vital signs binding. Target: Codename 'Zero'. Synchronization begins...]
Buzz——!
A powerful yet remarkably gentle pulse of energy erupted from the terminal screen without warning and with pinpoint accuracy! It wasn't a physical impact, but more like a pure torrent of information, a resonant command carrying a specific "key" that disregarded all physical barriers, instantly piercing space and striking me directly in the chest!
The Data Heart trembled violently! It was as if a star, silent for billions of years, had suddenly been ignited by this golden key! The data stream within it, once cold, stagnant, and chaotic with grief, was at this moment forced into a new, grand, and harmonious orbit. An unprecedented sense of "synchronicity," as if my entire life were being redefined, swept through every cell of my body. My vision was completely stripped away, and hearing, smell, touch... all sensory signals were instantly cut off. My consciousness was gently "stripped" from its heavy shell by an irresistible and gentle force, and was drawn into a tunnel of pure light.
There was no sense of speed, no sense of direction. Only a strange warmth and tranquility enveloped me, like returning to the womb. Countless soft points of light streamed and swirled around me, like billions of tiny stars greeting me. The intense sadness, the heavy fatigue, the cold numbness I had felt before were miraculously smoothed and diluted in this pure torrent of light, like dust falling into the vast galaxy, becoming so insignificant that it lost its meaning.
I don't know how long it took, perhaps a moment, perhaps an eternity. The flowing tunnel of light finally reached its end. The soft glow gradually faded, and vision returned.
I "stood" on a land...the beauty and grandeur of which cannot be accurately described in words.
The ground beneath my feet wasn't earth or metal, but a strange "ground" radiating a warm sheen, as if fused from the purest white jade and flowing starlight. It was solid yet resilient, and every gentle breath seemed to unleash minute ripples of light, like waves on the water. Looking up, there was no sky, no sun, moon, or stars. The "dome" within my sight was a vast, slowly shifting, shifting band of indescribably brilliant color, as if gently slicing from the wonders of the nebula at the birth of the universe and spreading overhead. These bands were composed of countless, tiny points of light. They weren't static, but rather, they slowly swirled, flowed, and collided in a grand and harmonious rhythm. Each tiny intersection released a fleeting, even more brilliant speck of light, like silent fireworks bursting forth in the silent universe.
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