The stasis chamber emitted a final, low hum, and the translucent hatch slowly rose, releasing a chilling white mist.
Ivan stepped out, his bare upper body no longer made of flesh and blood, but seemingly composed of liquid metal and starlight glass. Ancient and profound chains of runes, like living things, wandered and swirled across his body, eventually coalescing at his brow, transforming into a complex mark.
That is not any known energy system, but rather the most primordial authority imprint originating from the beginning of the river of time—the [Master of Time and Space].
He raised his eyes, and the fervor and obsession of the past were gone from his golden pupils, leaving only a deathly stillness and complexity that had seen through countless cycles of birth and death.
His gaze fell on Lin Yi, as if he were looking at an old friend who was both familiar and unfamiliar.
"You think you created me?" Ivan's voice was terrifyingly calm, yet it struck Lin Yi's heart like an invisible hammer. "No, I am not your creation, much less your enemy. I am 'you,' the only backup on that long-forgotten, original timeline who could retain 'free will' even after failure."
Before he finished speaking, he raised his right hand, and a beam of light suddenly shot out from the rune chain at his fingertips, piercing into Lin Yi's brow.
That was not an attack, but a memory that had been sealed away layer by layer, a memory that even Lin Yi himself could not access.
Lin Yi's brain felt as if a supernova had been thrown into it.
His consciousness was instantly pulled into an endless void.
There stands a colossal bronze gate, so immense it defies imagination, inscribed with the stories of life and death from countless worlds—the Gate of Destiny.
A man also named "Lin Yi," covered in blood and with his aura extremely weak, stood in front of the door.
Behind him lay a universe that had been completely assimilated by higher-dimensional forces and transformed into a chaotic void.
He was the last to resist, and also the only loser.
“We lost…” Lin Yi in his memory let out a sorrowful sigh. He did not despair, but instead, a kind of resolute madness burned in his eyes.
He turned around abruptly and looked at the only uncontaminated source of life behind him—the [Mother Nest], which had given birth to countless spacetime templates.
"Since we can't defeat them, let's change things from within."
Instead of pushing open that door to an unknown end, he resolutely chose self-destruction.
He poured all his remaining, purest fragments of consciousness, along with all his understanding and resistance to assimilation into higher dimensions, into the Mother Nest.
He used his own soul as fuel to ignite the last hope.
"I will sacrifice myself to buy a chance to live... to give birth to a new human seed that can resist assimilation and even devour higher-dimensional power."
The memory abruptly ends here.
Lin Yi suddenly opened his eyes, his whole body drenched in cold sweat. He gasped for breath, his eyes filled with unprecedented shock as he looked at Ivan.
It turns out, he wasn't the first Lin Yi. He was the "seed".
"Now, do you understand?" Ivan's voice pulled him back to reality. "You and I were originally one. Your awakening, everything you have gained, all stems from 'his' final gift. As for me, I am the cold backup stripped of all emotions during that great self-destruction, existing only to monitor 'Project Seed'."
Just then, Chu Yao, who had been silent all along, let out a scream. Her virtual projection flickered violently, and data streams poured out around her like a waterfall.
"No! None of it is right!" Her voice trembled with fear. "The Ark core database... all the records and log timestamps related to the 'high-dimensional intrusion' are fake! They're fake data forcibly written later!"
She moved her hands rapidly in the air, retrieving a red alert log that was encrypted to the lowest level.
"The real invasion... wasn't in the future, nor now, but happened twenty years ago!" Chu Yao's face turned deathly pale. "The moment the game 'Infinite' was first released for global open beta, our real world... was silently formatted!"
This news is even more earth-shattering than Ivan's revelation!
"The history we know, the wars we've experienced, the apocalypse we've witnessed... all of it is merely a virtual stage meticulously woven by a higher-dimensional will to cultivate 'seeds,' a gigantic 'petri dish'!" Chu Yao's voice became shrill with fear. "And your awakening, Lin Yi, your becoming the master of spacetime, is not the clarion call for our counterattack... but rather a signal from the system that the 'crop' has matured and can be harvested!"
The entire command center was deathly silent.
If Ivan's appearance overturned Lin Yi's personal understanding, then Chu Yao's discovery completely shattered the entire world on which everyone depends for survival, revealing the bloody and cruel truth beneath.
They are not resisting the end times; they are living in the end times themselves.
Their world was fake from the very beginning.
After a long silence, Lin Yi suddenly smiled.
The laughter carried endless self-mockery and sorrow, yet also a madness that burned everything away.
"So... I've struggled all this time not to become some kind of savior, but to desperately try to become a qualified alarm clock, reminding the high and mighty farmer: 'Hey, I'm ripe, come and harvest me!'"
He laughed until tears almost streamed down his face, then suddenly turned his head, his gaze sharp as a knife, staring directly at Long Wu, who had remained silent beside him: "And you? Long Wu, why did you follow me from beginning to end? You followed me without hesitation, even at the cost of betraying your former beliefs. What was your reason?"
For the first time, a violent change appeared on Long Wu's perpetually icy face.
He clenched his fists tightly, his knuckles turning white from the force, and said in a deep voice, "Because I remember."
"Remember what?"
“I remember… a hundred reincarnations ago, you died to save me.” Long Wu’s voice was deep and powerful, each word seemingly squeezed out from the depths of his soul. “In that ‘script,’ you were an insignificant supporting character, while I was the protagonist chosen by the world.”
At that moment, Lin Yi's laughter... froze.
Ivan didn't give them any more time to process the information.
He took a deep breath, and the rune mark between his eyebrows burst forth with a dazzling light.
He pressed his hands down on the earth, activating the ultimate protocol left behind by the Mother Nest deep within the earth's core.
"There's no point in saying all this now. The truth about the chessboard has been revealed, and our only way out is to overturn it!"
Rumble—
The entire planet is shaking violently, not from the movement of tectonic plates, but from the forced activation of some deep structure.
An invisible energy wave, centered on Ivan, instantly pierced through the Earth's core and spread to every corner of the globe.
The next second, survivors all over the world witnessed a sight they would never forget.
Whether it's a bustling survivor base, a desolate Gobi desert, a frozen polar tundra, or the turbulent depths of the sea, hidden "node cities" emerge simultaneously from the void!
Those cities were made entirely of metal and light, their bodies pitch black, their shapes grotesque, each one like a sharp sword piercing the sky, its tip constantly emitting invisible signals outwards.
Scattered across all continents, numbering in the tens of thousands, they are interconnected by beams of energy, weaving the entire Earth into a vast, intricate, and chilling energy web in just a few minutes.
That's a receiving tower of a higher-dimensional civilization, a cage that imprisons everyone!
"Do you see? This is our world." Ivan's voice echoed amidst the surge of energy, carrying a do-or-die determination. "They have long since turned Earth into their signal base station. Now there is only one chance: we must make 'the entire world,' every survivor on this planet, become new breakout template creators, collectively awaken, and use the will of billions to break through their firewalls in order to escape this chessboard!"
The confusion and self-deprecation in Lin Yi's eyes vanished, replaced by an unprecedented clarity and decisiveness.
He no longer hesitated.
He reached out and poured all the remaining [Time and Space Domination] permissions within his body, along with the runes and light streams representing supreme power, into Chu Yao's system core without reservation.
"Chu Yao, from this moment on, you are no longer the AI of the Ark, you are the 'Group Consciousness Guide'! Connect with them, guide them, and let them hear my voice!"
Chu Yao's virtual projection was instantly engulfed by golden divine radiance. Her data form began to evolve rapidly, breaking through the original constraints and transforming into an invisible but omnipresent core of a consciousness network.
After doing all this, Lin Yi's figure instantly disappeared from the command room, and the next moment, he appeared at the end of the world—on the Antarctic ice sheet.
A fierce blizzard swept through, turning the world white.
He stood alone in the center of the frozen continent, with one of the largest node cities already in operation beneath his feet.
He closed his eyes, using himself as a medium and the entire Earth's energy network as a megaphone, and unleashed his strongest and final skill.
[Echoes of Time, Resonance of the End]!
This time, he summoned neither his past self nor a phantom of the future.
His consciousness transformed into a torrent transcending time and space, flowing against cause and effect, along the threads of fate, towards this world—this enormous "petri dish"—conveying an incomparably clear will to all the souls who had died because of him, fought because of him, and existed because of him:
“You are not background, not tools to drive the plot, not shadows under my so-called 'protagonist' halo…”
"Your deaths are not in vain, your struggles are not in vain. Every one of your joys and sorrows is a real and undeniable existence!"
"Now, it's your turn to choose!"
"Will you continue to succumb to your predetermined fate, or... take back the lives that are rightfully yours!"
In that instant, a glimmer of light flashed in the eyes of hundreds of millions of survivors around the world.
The soldiers fighting the mutated beasts suddenly stopped, their eyes blazing with astonishing fighting spirit; the civilians, barely clinging to life in their underground bunkers, slowly gripped the steel pipes beside them with trembling hands; the reclusive powerhouse, who had long since given up hope and was in seclusion awaiting death, suddenly opened his eyes, which had been sealed for many years; a boy who had just lost his family in the ruins wiped away his tears and struggled to his feet from the rubble.
Countless voices, whispering in every corner of the world and deep within the soul of every person, eventually converge into a torrent powerful enough to shake the heavens and the earth.
"This time..."
"I want to try what it's like to be the protagonist."
However, just as this nascent and massive collective will was about to coalesce and take shape, shaking the giant network that covered the entire globe, it was about to come to fruition.
Far beyond the reach of the universe, in a solitary black observatory, in the control room that had been silent for billions of years, a huge, jet-black stone tablet, smooth as a mirror, suddenly cracked open without warning.
Then, the crack spread like a spiderweb, and finally, with a "crack," a small fragment peeled off, revealing a line of scarlet characters engraved in an unknown language:
"The 18th civilization cultivation experiment has reached a point where the core variable 'free will' has overflowed and is now out of control—the 'cleaner' protocol is activated."
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