The order of collapse
Within Jintian Realm, the eternally unchanging laws of light flickered violently like a candle in the wind, casting a flickering light on Xiang Jinyang's flawless face. In those glazed eyes, reflecting the trajectory of the stars, there was no longer a cold sense of order, but a trembling that bordered on bewilderment.
【“Where is your ‘self’?”】 【“Is it the rules themselves?”】 【“Or is it… an ‘administrator account’?”】 【“Are you still considered a ‘living’ thing?”】
Each word wasn't just simple language, but rather fragments of anomalous code with terrifying penetrating power, precisely bombarding the very logic of Xiang Jinyang's existence. For eons, he had maintained the operation of heaven and earth, managed the cause and effect of trillions of lives, and defined the order of all things, yet he had never... never needed to define "self."
"Self"? Does the Way of Heaven need "self"? Do rules require "joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness"? "Living"... what is it?
These concepts themselves, like viruses, attacked his perfectly rational core. Calculation modules overloaded, logical chains collapsed, and rules clashed violently due to a loss of coordination. The fundamental rules that maintained the Jintian Realm began to vibrate uncontrollably, distorting, and even annihilating each other.
The entire space emitted a low humming sound as if it could not bear the heavy burden. The smooth ground cracked into tiny spider-web-like cracks. Above the dome, several of the thickest main chains of rules even began to collapse, turning into silver spots of light in the sky. Due to the loss of structure, they violently scattered and impacted each other, as if a server cluster had encountered a devastating data storm.
Xiang Jinyang's figure became ethereal and uncertain, the backlash of the rules directly affecting his very essence. He clutched his forehead and let out a soft, suppressed groan. It wasn't physical pain, but rather the more fundamental, intense discomfort that comes when the very foundations of existence are shaken. He tried to recompile, repair, stabilize, but the strange "viral" thought persisted, constantly creating new logical paradoxes.
"Whoa, blue screen? Try restarting?" The culprit, He Yuan, sat cross-legged nearby, chin propped up in his hand, watching with rapt interest, even offering some kind advice. Silver streams of code flashed rapidly in his eyes, greedily recording every detail of the "World Core Server" crash. To him, this was an unprecedented and precious data sample.
But he soon discovered that the collapse seemed a little too complete.
Xiang Jinyang's presence grew fainter, nearly dissolving into the chaotic storm of rules. The entire Jintian Realm began to destabilize, its edges blurring and collapsing, revealing the emptiness beneath. If this continued, this independent subspace would likely be completely annihilated, and Xiang Jinyang, at the core of the space, would likely face a fate...
"Tsk, this is troublesome." He Yuan frowned. He hadn't studied it enough yet, so he couldn't let it go so badly. "It seems I stimulated it too much. The underlying architecture is even more rigid than I thought."
He stood up, ignoring the raging fragments of laws and turbulent energy around him—those terrifying entities that could easily shred a Nascent Soul cultivator were automatically smoothed and brought back into order by an invisible force the moment they approached him. He walked step by step towards the silver halo that was nearly losing its human form, about to be swallowed by its own laws.
"Hey, 'Admin'," he stretched out his hand, trying to touch the halo, "Can you hear me? This isn't the way to die from a computer crash."
As soon as his hand touched the cold and chaotic energy, a huge, disordered torrent of rules filled with the breath of self-destruction rushed madly towards his consciousness along the contact point!
If it were an ordinary cultivator, even an old ancestor in the Mahayana stage, his soul would be instantly assimilated and torn apart by this torrent of power that contains the collapse of the way of heaven.
But He Yuan just narrowed his eyes slightly.
"Force receiving logs? The traffic is quite large."
He didn't resist, but instead proactively opened his "interface," allowing the massive, chaotic, and chaotic data representing the core laws of this world's heavenly laws to pour in. Simultaneously, the silver code in his eyes shone to its fullest, like an overclocked processor, parsing, classifying, and reorganizing the data at a terrifying speed.
In his vision, it was no longer a crashing creature, but rather a massive operating system, the complete collapse of a core process stuck in an infinite loop. Countless erroneous instructions, conflicting threads, overflowing data, and crashing modules flooded in like a tsunami.
"Core process 'Heavenly Dao' running error: Encountered undefined concept 'self'..." "Logic module conflict: The rule 'Absolute Order' is inconsistent with the newly added variable 'Abnormal'..." "Basic definition library missing: Unable to retrieve the state parameters of 'alive'..." "Warning! Rule chain broken! Energy circulation out of control! Spatial structure stability below the threshold!..."
Countless error messages flashed through his consciousness like a screen.
"What a mess...." He Yuan sighed, his fingers moving so fast that afterimages appeared as he rapidly tapped in the air. With every tap, a condensed silver code was injected into the collapsing halo.
He wasn't repairing, he was...debugging.
Forcefully terminate logical processes that are stuck in an infinite loop; reallocate computing resources of conflicting modules; bypass verification nodes that are stuck due to "undefined concepts"; and even... directly comment out (temporarily block) some of the basic rules that are in severe conflict!
His movements were precise, calm, and even carried an almost cruel efficiency. To him, this was not about saving an endangered life, but about rescuing a precious supercomputer on the verge of physical damage and preventing the complete loss of its valuable data.
With his "debugging", the collapse speed of the silver halo representing Xiang Jinyang slowed down significantly. Although it was still chaotic, the trend of complete annihilation was forcibly curbed.
Xiang Jinyang's consciousness sank and floated in endless chaos and tearing.
He felt as if he had been dismantled into the most basic particles of law, scattered in the boundless void. Eternal coldness and loneliness enveloped him. It was the state he had been most familiar with since his birth, but it had never been as... suffocating as it was at this moment.
Then, an external force, icy yet strangely ordered, forcibly intervened.
That power wasn't as vast and majestic as his rules, but it was more condensed, precise, and even... overbearing. It roughly combed through his scattered rules, forcibly separating the conflicting parts and bypassing the logical paradoxes that caused him unbearable pain, like a brilliant programmer repairing a piece of old, flawed code.
Under the manipulation of this force, the wave of collapse that was about to swallow him completely actually receded bit by bit.
A feeling of extreme weakness, yet becoming "stable" again, slowly returned.
He regained the sense of his own existence. He was no longer the omnipotent incarnation of Heaven, but a broken and fragile consciousness that had just been forcibly pulled back from the brink of destruction.
He struggled to regain his form.
The silver light dissipated, and Xiang Jinyang's figure reappeared, but he looked far more ethereal than before. The regular stream of light around him had grown dim and sparse, even occasionally trembling slightly, like a holographic projection with a poor signal. His face was transparently pale, and in his glassy eyes, the eternal sea of stars seemed to have just experienced a catastrophe, shattered and shattered, with lingering fear and... confusion.
He raised his head and looked at He Yuan who was close by.
The other party was withdrawing his hand, and the disturbing silver light at his fingertips slowly faded. His face showed the concentration of someone who had completed a highly difficult technical task, as well as... a hint of dissatisfaction.
"The foundation is too fragile, with zero redundancy and abysmally poor scalability. It crashes right there when it encounters a problem beyond the scope of the standard." He Yuan stroked his chin, sizing up the frail Dao Ancestor as if assessing a restored antique computer. "Who wrote this 'system' for you? The design concept is so outdated."
Xiang Jinyang's lips moved slightly, but no sound came out. The recent collapse had nearly drained all of his strength, and even more so, his eons-long, unchanging cognition. Now, facing this "abnormal variable" that had completely destroyed him and then forcibly pulled him back, he felt for the first time a feeling so complex it defied all rules.
Not anger, not fear, not gratitude.
It is a kind of... unprecedented emptiness and helplessness.
He couldn't even comprehend what had just happened to him. What was that? That shock that nearly shattered him? And this… feeling of weakness, brokenness, and imminent collapse?
He Yuan looked at the fragility and confusion in his broken eyes, which were completely unlike the way of heaven, and suddenly moved closer, almost touching the tip of his nose.
Xiang Jinyang subconsciously wanted to step back, but found that he was so weak that he could hardly complete this action.
"But speaking of which," He Yuan stared into his eyes, lowering his voice with a devilish temptation, "How was that feeling just now?"
“…” Xiang Jinyang’s pupils shrank slightly.
"It feels like everything is completely out of control, the rules are collapsing, and even existence itself is threatened." He Yuan's fingertips lightly touched Jin Yang's heart—the location of the core of power. "Besides maintaining that damn order, you finally...experienced something else, right?"
"Although that might feel terrible," he laughed, a smile that was bright but chilling to the heart, "it's still much more interesting than your cold, 'correctness' that has remained the same for billions of years, isn't it?"
Xiang Jinyang was shocked, as if he was pierced by these words.
The cold "correctness"... The broken "fun"...
The violent conflict once again stirred up waves in his weak core of rules, but this time, it was no longer a pure collapse, but was mixed with an extremely faint... throbbing that even he himself had not noticed.
He Yuan looked at the waves in his eyes that appeared again with satisfaction. He no longer approached him, but took two steps back and stretched.
"Okay, I've installed the basic service pack for you. You won't die for now. You can slowly fix the remaining bugs yourself." He yawned, as if a little tired. "Oh, by the way, I've got a 'small patch' for you."
He pointed at Jinyang's heart.
"Next time you encounter a problem like this, don't just use your core computing power to handle it. Instead, split it into a thread, suspend it, or put it into a cache and process it slowly. It might only be a temporary solution, but at least... it won't crash again."
After saying that, he no longer paid attention to Xiang Jinyang who was standing stiffly in place, and walked back to where he had been lying before. He lay down comfortably again and closed his eyes, as if he had just casually repaired an appliance.
In the empty and silent Jintian realm, the only sound left was the subtle humming of the rules slowly repairing themselves.
And Xiang Jinyang stood there alone.
He slowly lowered his head and looked at his slightly trembling, still illusory hands.
The terror of near annihilation just now... the strange feeling of being forcibly pulled back from collapse by an external force... and that sentence "...is much more interesting than your cold, unchanging 'correctness' for billions of years"...
Countless "undefined" filled his sea of consciousness.
For the first time, he clearly felt the existence of "self".
Not because of the rules, but because... of loss of control.
He still stood there, like an unchanging statue. But something had quietly shattered in the collapse and forced repairs, and... could not be restored.
Above the dome, several chains of rules that had just been re-condensed flickered faintly, and the light no longer seemed as absolutely cold as before.
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