As Tang Ren squatted on the ruins of the beacon tower and ate some roasted noodles, the moonlight in the Gobi Desert was being torn in half by some force. The moonlight in the west was rusty green like bronze, while the moonlight in the east was cold blue like the LED screen. Although Su Chen's eyes were wrapped in gauze, the remaining neural interface in his retina allowed him to "see" a more bizarre picture - the entire Yadan landform was undergoing topological changes.
"Your compass... is singing." Su Chen suddenly grabbed Tang Ren's wrist. The electronic compass destroyed by the quantum sandstorm was now broadcasting longitude and latitude in the tune of Dunhuang music. Tang Ren shook his hand away and cursed: "Damn it! This thing was still playing "The Most Dazzling National Style" yesterday!"
Qin Feng drew a Riemann surface on the sand with a repair pen, and suddenly looked up: "The source of the sound... is thirty meters underground." He kicked away the floating sand, revealing a manhole cover pattern made of Han Dynasty pottery fragments. Tang Ren took out a ram's horn hammer he bought at the night market and smashed it hard, revealing a titanium alloy hatch in the splash of sparks - the surface was etched with the same star map as the mercury coffin unearthed from the Qin Mausoleum.
"Open the gate of heaven in Qian position!" Tang Ren inserted the Five Emperors' coins into the grooves according to the star positions. The moment the cabin door slid open, three people covered their noses at the same time. The preservative spices mixed with liquid nitrogen mist from two thousand years ago surged out, and the humming sound of mechanical operation came from deep in the stairs, which resonated perfectly with the sound of the prayer wheels in the Dunhuang Caves.
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When the flashlight beam pierced the darkness, Su Chen's neural interface suddenly overloaded. He "saw" countless glowing threads seeping out from the wall, connecting to the bronze tree in the center of the underground palace - each leaf was a quantum crystal, and the branches were wrapped with metabolic imitation blood vessels.
"This is...alive!" Qin Feng scanned the mural with an ultraviolet lamp. The "Zhang Yichao Leading the Army on a March" from the early Tang Dynasty was slowly moving, the pupils of the warhorse in the painting contracted and expanded, and the curved sword of the Hu general was oozing real blood. Tang Ren tapped the wall lightly with a sheep's horn hammer, and it actually made a dull sound like muscle tissue.
Su Chen fumbled and touched a bronze branch, and was suddenly pulled into a torrent of data. He saw evidence that the Q organization existed during the An-Shi Rebellion - the painter used luminous gecko blood to mix pigments and sealed the brain waves of the soldiers in the formation into flying patterns. Even more terrifying is that the fragments of Qin's mother's consciousness when she was young are trapped in a bronze leaf, entangled with Wu Daozi's neural map.
"Quickly cut off the power!" Qin Feng found that the mural was absorbing their physical electricity. Tang Ren, however, picked up a hammer and smashed it at the bronze tree root: "Cut off your mother! I'll uproot you!" The splashing imitation blood was highly corrosive and instantly burned through his jeans. In the chaos, Su Chen was guided by the shadow of his mother in the data stream and pressed the electronic compass into the interface groove of the tree trunk.
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The bronze tree suddenly burst into green radiation, and the mural objects broke free from the wall. The skirt of the Huxuan woman turned into a data storm, dragging the three into the West Market of Chang'an in the eighth century AD. Tang Ren's modern clothes automatically replaced the Persian brocade robe, and the repair pen in Qin Feng's hand turned into a bamboo abacus.
"Would you like some quantum pancakes, sir?" The pancakes handed over by the vendor had a CRIMASTER challenge code on them. Although Su Chen couldn't see, he could clearly sense that the entire virtual Chang'an was a sophisticated brainwave cage - the subconscious of every passerby was a battery to maintain the system.
Suddenly, the tiles on Suzaku Street began to turn over. The boundary between reality and illusion collapsed, and Qin Feng saw himself existing in five different time and space at the same time: a soldier wielding a sword on the Anshi battlefield, a hacker cracking the code of a London cathedral, a restorer whose tower top collapsed, a merchant in Chang'an at this moment, and an unconscious body in the desert of reality.
"Found the source of anti-entropy!" Mother's voice pierced through the data fog. Tang Ren suddenly opened his clothes, revealing the scar from the burn at Dunhuang Night Market - the shape of the scar was exactly the same as the bronze leaf. He put the scar on the virtual waffle oven, and the high temperature triggered the pain feedback of the neural interface, and the entire Suzaku Street suddenly collapsed into pixels.
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When the three fell into the mercury river at the bottom of the underground palace, Qin Feng understood the true meaning of the star map - the floating mercury beads formed a three-dimensional model of Orion, and each mercury bead encapsulated the memory of a historical figure.
"Put this on!" Tang Ren threw over a pair of low-quality swimming goggles he bought at the night market. Su Chen saw a shocking scene through the lens: the bubbles in the mercury liquid were all miniature culture tanks, and Qin Shihuang's brain was conducting quantum communication with Tesla's neurosynapses.
Qin Feng was suddenly swept by the mercury flow to the center of the vortex. There was a bronze coffin suspended there, and the familiar Cantonese opera singing was seeping out of the gaps in the coffin lid. When he pried the coffin with a repair pen, he found that what was stored inside was not a corpse, but a biological computer spanning thousands of years - the core processor was actually a still beating human heart, and the blood vessels were connected to the gold foil of the flying fairy in Dunhuang.
"A Xiang, wait for me!" Tang Ren screamed from behind. His left foot was solidified by the mercury liquid, and his skin was turning into mural paint. Su Chen followed the sound and threw out the electronic compass. The moment the disk cracked, it released an antimatter pulse wave, evaporating the mercury sea to create a huge cavity.
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In the darkest hour before dawn, the three of them huddled together in the remains of the beacon tower, warming themselves by the fire. Tang Ren's left foot was still translucent like the material of the mural, Qin Feng held the biological crystal taken out of the bronze coffin, and Su Chen used a branch to write a Braille sign on the sand.
"This thing is imitating the rhythm of a heartbeat..." Qin Feng put the crystal close to his ear. His mother's voice mixed with electronic noise permeated: "...art is a lie of entropy reduction..." Suddenly, the image of the Deer King in Cave 257 of Mogao Grottoes appeared on the surface of the crystal, and Sinuo's origami spider was spinning in the eye sockets of the Nine-Colored Deer.
Tang Ren poked Jing Yuan with a burnt lamb skewer: "I don't care about elk or camel, I..." His words were interrupted by the rising sun behind the sand dunes. The edge of the red wheel was unusually neat, as if it was cut and pasted into a real CG picture. Su Chen suddenly pulled the gauze, and data flashed in his empty eye sockets: "They are using Dunhuang as a brush to redraw the entire time and space."
Qin Feng stood up and saw his shadow split into twelve different costumes from different dynasties. The oldest shadow was wearing a Qin Dynasty Taoist robe and was using a compass to calculate the star positions; the newest shadow was filled with quantum fluorescence and holding the latest version of CRIMASTER terminal.
"It's time to end it." He threw the bio-chip into the rising sun. The chip vaporized in the strong light into a bronze mist, which turned into a rainstorm of data streams. Tang Ren limped and held up a broken umbrella. The advertisement on the umbrella was the new slogan of the Q organization: "Countdown to the start of Art Revolution 2.0".
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In the community clinic, Tang Ren's left foot gradually regained its flesh color after being soaked in a Chinese medicine barrel. Su Chen's eye nerves were implanted with biochips made of Dunhuang mural pigments, and he is now "seeing" the world in a new way - Fei Tian's clothes are WiFi signals, and the silhouettes of camels are data packet flows.
"You broke the meat router!" Tang Ren poked at the seam of Su Chen's temple. Qin Feng suddenly pushed the door open, the VR glasses in his hand were still playing the encrypted video: Saotome Suzu was reorganizing in the Tokyo underground laboratory, and the "Lo Shen Fu Tu" behind her was swallowing the entire Ginza into the two-dimensional space.
Su Chen's mural vision suddenly caught something unusual - a miniature camera was embedded at the location of the Zusanli acupoint in the meridian map on the clinic wall. He threw out an acupuncture needle to smash the camera, and the flying parts actually spelled out a new CRIMASTER puzzle: the coordinates of the Miluo River encrypted with the handwriting of "Lanting Preface".
"It's never going to end, is it?" Tang Ren kicked over the medicine bucket, and the brown medicine juice on the ground converged into a map of the Yellow River system. Qin Feng used a repair pen to connect the tributaries, and suddenly stopped: "This is not a geographical map... It's, it's a neural network simulation map!"
The lights in the clinic suddenly flickered, projecting a holographic message from Sinuo on the wall: "Dunhuang is just a palette, the real canvas is at the bottom of the Miluo River." Her origami dragon boat crossed the light and shadow, with the side of the boat engraved with double ciphertexts of the Warring States silk book and blockchain.
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Three months later, Tang Ren's barbecue stall added a "Cyber Camel Meat" sign. Qin Feng used a laser pen to write the Qin seal in the smoke, while Su Chen monitored the brain wave frequency of each diner through the mural visual.
"The latest news!" Kiko's projection emerged from the oven, "Q organization uses "Chu Ci" to train AI, at the bottom of Dongting Lake..."
Tang Ren used a charred lamb leg bone to break up the projection: "Dongting Lake chopped pepper fish head! Let's go tomorrow!" His prosthesis suddenly sounded an alarm - inside the wooden prosthesis, a bronze leaf was heating up, and the tree patterns revealed a new astrological code.
Su Chen "looked" at the night sky. The Milky Way in Dunhuang had been rewritten into a Mobius ring. A strange light spot flashed across a man-made satellite. It was a warning sent by his mother with her last consciousness: the ultimate equation to solve all the puzzles of time and space is hidden in the bamboo slips from the Warring States Period at the bottom of the Miluo River.
Amid the hustle and bustle of the night market, Qin Feng threw the repair pen into the bonfire. In the dancing flames, the Cantonese opera from twelve years ago and the quantum noise resonated a new melody - this art war that spanned thousands of years was finally coming to a true finale.