Chapter 123 Thousand Eyes
The appearance of the person before me gradually became similar to his previous youthfulness, but in the subtle details he showed a different kind of calmness and indifference.
Six years have passed, his eyebrows have become more mature, and the tips of his eyebrows are always unconsciously pressed down. In his calmness, there is a sorrow and depression that cannot be dissipated like a thick fog. His eyelashes tremble and droop, and his thin lips are lightly pursed into a straight line.
When they met again after a long separation, Huo Qianyun subconsciously thought that Li Ziyue was still the new dungeon player who had to hide behind her, or the obedient junior who was used to waiting for her arrangements.
Huo Qianyun looked down and saw his bony hand holding her wrist. A sense of security spread to her heart as their skin touched. She raised her eyes again and saw his smooth neck and a few strands of thick, inky hair above it.
At some point, Li Ziyue had taken on the position she once held in the team.
The fragile butterfly that everyone used to say "would never amount to anything" and "was useless without the golden finger" is now able to flap its own wings.
Huo Qianyun raised the corners of her mouth to smile, but tears were welling up in her eyes. Her eyelashes moved up and down slowly, and her lower lip was lightly bitten by her teeth. She swallowed the pain in her throat.
No stone is naturally round.
She was very happy and very sad.
All the machines were blindly worshipping the huge monster that was about to devour them like crazy. Countless simulated human heads were hanging on it, and scarlet, broken crystal balls were rolling down one after another, sinking into a mixture of energy liquid and simulated human blood.
The speed of the crawler conveyor was increasing, the number of broken mechanical bodies piled up around them was increasing, and everyone's backs were forced downwards.
Could it be that the scene before my eyes was not real, but another layer of simulation?
Zhang Xingzhi just shook his head in silence.
Li Ziyue's eyes narrowed slightly.
Further away, cracks appeared in the ceiling of the underground space, and light shone through from above, making the area as bright as the morning light.
The crack opened wider and wider, as if someone from above wanted to explore in.
Generally speaking, the main and side quests of a dungeon follow the same logical theory. If Zhang Xingzhi had not used the image of a "monk" to break the dungeon simulation, they would have fallen into a cycle of constantly doing exercises and taking breaks from get out of class to avoid being affected by school violence. The cracked ceiling before them might be the way out.
The priority now is to survive as long as possible.
An inexplicable commotion began to be heard in the distance, and then countless slender arms like flying dragons in the sky appeared like mad clouds invading the sun, quickly covering the artificial ceiling of this underground area.
The Buddha's hand suddenly moved downward, snatched up the machines that were still kneeling in worship, and threw them into the darkness around him, eating like a child with a gluttonous disease.
"No……"
Some machines were startled by the Buddha's actions and suddenly woke up from their brainwashed stupor. Several of them, with only the upper body left, couldn't help but crawl backwards, as if trying to break away from the tracks.
The machine is afraid: "I don't want to be eaten... I... become its energy source... I..."
"I'm pitiful... I... save..." It grabbed the hem of Li Ziyue's shirt, its hollow machine eyes flashing with fear, "Please save me..."
A circle of Buddha's arms has been wrapped around its waist, and countless tiny tentacles have grown from the arms, which shut down its energy source with great precision.
Its wailing ceased abruptly—
The hand holding Li Ziyue suddenly lost its strength and fell to the ground. Then, it was quickly lifted into the air due to the pull of the Buddha statue's arm and disappeared into the terrifying darkness in the distance.
The whole process takes no more than two seconds.
Li Ziyue didn't know whether he heard the robot's call for help, nor did he know that his hands were cold and his heart was pounding at this moment.
Cold sweat wet the hair on his forehead. When he came to his senses, he found that he had been looking at Huo Qianyun for a long time.
Li Ziyue closed his eyes and forced himself to suppress his surging emotions.
This is just a small episode.
He gasped internally.
Almost all the machines that attempted to escape were caught by the Buddha statue. Countless hands were still stretched out, and it seemed to choose randomly. Objects caught by it could not escape at all.
If they run away, they will die. There is a huge gap in power between them and the Buddha statue, so they must not confront it head-on.
what to do.
As far as the copy is concerned, there can be no unsolvable problems. The source of the player's confusion is that he has not mastered the information needed to completely solve the problem. With the scimitar on his palm, Li Ziyue looked at the machines that were constantly kneeling around him, frowning and thinking.
The key to solving the dilemma in the "doing the questions" task is the ringing sound, not really complying with the task requirements. Similarly, if they just pay homage and do nothing else, death is inevitable.
There are usually two possibilities when you have no idea what to do when you encounter a difficult problem. One is that the known information is incomplete, and the other is that you don’t have a thorough understanding of the question. For now, Li Ziyue is more inclined to the first possibility.
At this moment, a familiar yet unfamiliar voice suddenly sounded in his mind.
"Restarted successfully, successfully connected to your neural network," the AI assistant said calmly, "Dear host, I detected that you are experiencing extreme emotional fluctuations. Do you need help?"
Li Ziyue was stunned.
Huo Qianyun beside him patted his shoulder and said, "Did the AI in your brain restart successfully? Its functions are limited when it is not connected to the Internet, but it will not be affected by the mutation. Feel free to use it."
Li Ziyue narrowed his eyes into a line, raised his head slightly and looked into the distance.
[Super farsightedness has been enabled for you]
When he saw the details of the Buddha statue clearly, Li Ziyue's breathing stopped for half a second.
He murmured, "...It's all eyes. It really is 'Thousand-armed Guanyin'."
The body of the Buddha statue is made up of countless broken simulated mechanical heads, but there is an "eye" with an image printed on it in the middle of the hand. It has thousands of hands, and densely packed "eyes" surround it.
[Sorry, my ability is limited and I can't further expand your horizons]
Li Ziyue took a breath and issued a second order: "Help me count the number of machines kneeling here that are shaped like eyes or can perform photography functions, and compare the probability of them being selected by the Buddha statue with other machines."
Zhang Xingzhi was thoughtful: "According to legend, the Thousand-armed Thousand-eyed Bodhisattva was Miaoshan, the third daughter of King Miaozhuang of Xinglin. King Miaozhuang once suffered from a strange disease and needed his own daughter's hands and eyes as medicine. The third daughter wanted to sacrifice her own hands and eyes to cure her father, but King Miaozhuang refused because he had a good conscience. After he recovered from his illness, he named his third daughter the Thousand-armed Thousand-eyed Bodhisattva and built a temple for her and made a golden statue for her." [Note 1]
"You're guessing from this that Buddha statues don't have 'eyes'?"
Li Ziyue nodded: "Luckily I guessed it right. None of the machines with camera functions or eye-like shapes were chosen by the hand. ''Now..."
Before he could finish his words, a mechanical shield shaped like an eyeball appeared on his head.
Sun Yuancheng was like an unscrupulous capitalist. While he was modifying the structure of the machine with a screwdriver, he was cruelly exploiting the small robots around him to help him compress the metal.
"Wait for me half a minute." He stared intently at the small machine that was still shaking in his palm and unfastened a small lock on it. The energy liquid in the machine's body inevitably dyed one of his eyebrows. He was rarely so serious and rarely so taciturn.
Unlike most people, Sun Yuancheng had been subjected to persecution that almost crushed his bones because of his extraordinary talent. Over time, he came to loathe and even hate his own abilities. Rather than becoming the focus of the crowd, he would rather lie on the ground and be a corpse hated by everyone.
In order to protect himself, he constantly shackled himself with the shackles of "weakness" and "incompetence", but now, these shackles are being broken by him bit by bit.
Li Ziyue's eyebrows softened for a moment.
The closer we get to the Buddha statue, the faster the tracks rotate, and the more frightening the scene becomes.
Those "eyes" were clearly electronic screens, showing countless terrified human faces.
Li Ziyue found several familiar faces inside.
That is the audience image in the live broadcast room.
Some of the "eyes" were being attacked frantically by alienated robots. Every time the machine spikes penetrated deeper into the image that flashed on the screen, inexplicable blood-red would overflow along the border, like real human blood.
They treat images with extremely cruel psychological oppression. Most of the time, the spikes are hung above the screen. When the audience is about to have a mental breakdown or thinks that the robots are dead and let them go, the robots will smash the spikes down fiercely.
There were no screams, everything was a silent, blood-red pantomime.
After completely draining the audience's mental collapse, they dug out the "eyes" of the completely black screen, then smashed their own heads to separate their heads from their bodies, and then embedded the simulated heads that were flashing red light into the bloody holes in the live broadcast screen.
Except for humans with innate antisocial personalities, most people will be morally constrained and condemned when doing evil to others. Machines are completely ruthless. They do not understand sympathy and will not experience sympathy. They will only rely on the data fed back after emotional analysis to conclude that they have won a great victory in torturing humans.
A natural executioner.
Li Ziyue felt that everything was crazy, the copy was crazy, the live broadcast room was crazy, the machines were crazy, and people were going crazy too.
He could only keep comforting himself that those were not real audiences but just fake images. However, he caught a glimpse of something abnormal in the image out of the corner of his eye.
The audience member was wearing the uniform of a high school. He had met Li Ziyue once when he was summarizing the live broadcast footage in the player lobby. Since they were both students, Li Ziyue had an impression of him.
He had lost too much weight, and his upper body was in a disheveled state, as if he had just rolled through the gates of hell. A machine with strange red eyes was constantly attacking the screen he was on, but he was looking at Li Ziyue with eyes filled with hot tears.
The high school student's lips trembled slightly.
——[Save me...Aren’t you amazing...Save me...I still have a future...]
The next moment, there was a "puff" sound, blood-red liquid splashed, and the electronic screen went completely black.
Again.
Li Ziyue looked at the hand he stretched out.
It froze in mid-air, trembling slightly.
Once again, he watched with his own eyes the person who asked him for help disappear before him.
There seemed to be audience members talking around.
"...High school student?! I've watched his live broadcast! He's amazing! We are saved!"
"Really!"
Those people became excited.
"Everyone please beg this man to save us!"
"Host! This is also a dungeon experience, right? If it is a dungeon, please save us. Isn't this what you are best at?"
"I gave you a lot of points before! Hurry up and rescue me!"
"Please, please... We have been tortured for too long... There are people at home waiting for me to wake up..."
All the hopes for help weighed heavily on his shoulders. Li Ziyue could hardly stand and his vision became increasingly blurred.
Save? Save...
The faster the tracks ran, the more the mad machine hit him. Li Ziyue staggered back a few steps. The suffocating palpitations made him almost unable to stand up again.
The person's body kept shaking in front of the camera. He knew that the audience's image could not make any sound, but everyone's mouth opened and closed. The layers of shaking swallowed him and made his head buzz.
It's so noisy around.
The scolding and cries for help lingered only in his mind.
His breathing could no longer keep up with his body's needs, and the AI forced him into a brief period of darkness.
He was blind, but the noisy sounds disappeared, and the darkness made him calmer than the bright daylight.
The tracks were gradually rising and moving towards the mouth of the Buddha statue. Even if they could avoid being selected by the arms, they would be swallowed by the Buddha statue sooner or later if they did not move.
“Bang!”
Everyone looked at Li Ziyue in shock as he suddenly slapped them in the face.
He slapped himself awake and forced himself to adjust to the best state. His hair, wet with cold sweat, was gathered back. Li Ziyue narrowed his long peach blossom eyes and said, "The mouth of the Buddha statue is close to the ceiling. It is estimated that we will reach the highest point in 26 seconds. We can jump to the head of the Buddha statue with the help of the mechanical pedal on the left."
The AI in his brain automatically simulated his idea and concluded that the survival rate was not high.
26 seconds, enough time for him to come up with ten more plans and choose the one with the highest chance of success.
Fortunately, he is not alone this time.
Just after 10 seconds, there was a loud noise from above, and at the same time, a flash of light came like a summer rainstorm, instantly illuminating most of the dim underground space.
"Connected!" Huo Qianyun's eyes lit up, "Some data has not been fully transmitted, but the ally is here!"
The ceiling was completely broken, and countless players jumped down from above. The leader held a spear that shone with silver light in his hand, and the tip of the spear stabbed into the center of the Buddha's head neatly. His expression was frighteningly gloomy. With a slight movement of his wrist, half of the Buddha's face was chopped off by his seemingly easy move.
Before Li Ziyue recovered from the bright light, he felt himself falling into a warm embrace. The person had a familiar fragrance on his body, which instantly dispelled the pain he had just felt.
Zhang Lian's hands were shaking, his voice was shaking too, but he just kept calling him brother.
Li Ziyue responded one by one and patted his back to comfort him, but he felt that he was gradually losing his strength.
When his tense nerves finally relaxed, he realized that he had been exhausted for a long time.
"Zhang Lian." He called softly.
"Um."
Li Ziyue just sighed: "...You came to save me, didn't you?"
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