There was no roar of explosion, no tearing pain.
There was only a soul-freezing, absolute...dead silence.
Pei Du felt as if he'd been plunged into the solidified core of a star. The dark gold lines covering his body, the emblem of power emanating from the star's core blood, were now forced to their limit, flickering violently like a candle in the wind, each dimming as if extinguished completely. He tried to muster even a fraction of his strength, to activate the crude "Thorn Kingship" he had just grasped, but his commands fell on deaf ears. The dark blue field of logical suppression, like billions of tons of invisible ice, froze every muscle fiber in his body, locked the torrent of energy coursing through his body, and even the speed of his thoughts was dragged down, like wading through sticky cosmic dust.
Time lost its meaning. Space solidified into a vast, cold block of amber. And he was the insect fluttering its wings in vain at the amber's center. Only the slender, cold body in his arms, the faint, almost imperceptible heartbeat through the thin fabric, like a thin gossamer anchor, pinned him to the precipice of existence.
Xu Shuangyao. Her name was like a scorching brand, burning in the core of Pei Du's consciousness, which had been suppressed to the point of near stagnation. Her pale little face was pressed against his chest, and in the dead light of the dark blue realm, it appeared almost transparently fragile. Fine beads of sweat condensed on her smooth forehead, and a few strands of black hair stuck to her cheeks. Under her tightly closed eyelids, her eyeballs seemed to be moving very slowly and painfully, as if she was addicted to a cold nightmare from which she could not wake up. Under the skin of her heart, subtle energy veins of light gold and dark green intertwined. In the absolute "silence" of the field of logical suppression, its conflict seemed to have been forcibly paused, but it was more like two destructive energies compressed to the extreme, waiting for the shackles to be loosened, and then an even more violent backlash would erupt.
"Move... Ah!" Pei Du roared from the depths of his soul, his molten-gold pupils bloodshot from the intense struggle, like golden glass about to shatter. He could clearly "see" the vast rift ahead, leading to the underground labyrinth and representing the only way out. Under the relentless pressure of the dark blue beam, the spatial structure at the entrance, like a painting being erased by an invisible eraser, became blurred and distorted, and ominous ripples appeared at the edges. The passage to darkness and possibility was being smoothed out and sealed off bit by bit by the cradle's cold will before his eyes!
Never before had the poisonous vines of despair entwined themselves around his heart as frantically as they did now, attempting to strangle it to death. Cradle Commander's cold precision, like the most delicate animal trap, pinned him to this tiny, hopeless spot. Above him, the Null Sector's devastating artillery fire wove a web of deathly light. Behind him, the Mother Tree's frantic counterattack, its terrifying roots lashing out like a giant, world-destroying python, tearing apart space. Beneath him, the only avenue of escape was disappearing. Even moving a finger was a luxury!
At the moment when his consciousness was about to be completely swallowed by absolute silence and despair—
Buzz!
An extremely faint, yet unusually clear throbbing, like a stone thrown into a stagnant pond, suddenly created ripples from the depths of the dim dark golden lines in Pei Du's left palm!
It wasn't power! It wasn't the will of the Throne of Thorns or the Mother Tree! It was a cold, precise, inhumanly logical stream of data!
The feeling was strange yet eerily familiar, like suddenly touching a cold, finely threaded metal wire in absolute darkness.
boom--!
Pei Du's brain felt as if struck by a silent thunderclap! Countless shattered images, cold mechanical sounds, warnings of logical conflicts, and the "Clearance Protocol" directive that would ultimately push him into the abyss of annihilation... like a decompressed database, it instantly exploded within his suppressed consciousness!
It's... the remnants of the cradle's program!
It was the fragments of the Cradle's underlying instructions that had been eroded and imprinted deep within his True Spirit's mark during his earlier soul-to-soul fusion, when he had forcefully penetrated the depths of Xu Shuangyao's consciousness and fought against those icy chains of logic. Like a stubborn virus, these fragments had been lurking beneath the high-level barriers of his star-core blood. Now, in the absolute "order" of this logically repressed realm, under the immense stimulation of this desperate situation, like dormant seeds being activated, they suddenly...awoke!
The cold, massive, chaotic data fragments, like a bursting glacier, instantly broke through the dam of Pei Du's core consciousness!
[…Spatial coordinates locked…G-7 Abyssal Core Area…]
[…Target individual Pei Du…Energy signature…End Star Core…Source Blood Mark…Threat Level: Annihilation…]
[…Logical Suppression Field…Model: Entropy Silence-III…Operation Principle: Forced Dimensionality Reduction…Energy Level Threshold…]
[…Space Crack…Structural Stability Parameters…Critical Collapse Point: 87.3%…Estimated Time to Complete Seal: 3.47 Standard Seconds…]
[…Null Sector formation fire coverage map…Avoidance path calculation…Failure rate: 99.999%…]
[… Prediction of the attack trajectory of the mother tree aggregate roots… Impact point… Coincidence rate: 98.8%…]
Countless cold data streams, parameters, probabilities, and instruction fragments, like billions of frozen ants, frantically crawled and reorganized within Pei Du's suppressed mind! They ignored Pei Du's will, analyzing their surroundings, analyzing the deadly threat, and calculating the despairing probability of survival! This was not help, but a cold, cruel "gift" from the enemy, a cruelty that forced you to see every step before pushing you into the abyss!
"Ugh!" Pei Du let out a silent howl from the depths of his soul! This cold, logical invasion from within his consciousness was more painful than external physical suppression! It was like an ice pick, fiercely chiseling at the part of his "human" emotions and will, attempting to assimilate him into a cold machine that knew only calculation and execution! His molten-gold pupils contracted violently, and the golden light flickered under the impact of the cold logical data flow, like a candle in the wind.
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