The crimson aurora over Antarctica resembles a giant scar that stretches across the sky, yet it has not healed for a long time.
The "soft reboot" has been completed in reality.
The city, once silent in darkness, has lit up with thousands of lights again, as if waking from a nightmare.
However, those who awoke discovered that their memories had gaps that could not be bridged.
Pedestrians on the street will suddenly stop, their faces showing blank fear. They clearly remember being crushed under a collapsing building, and they also clearly remember that they are alive and well at this moment.
I've lived once, and died countless times.
This cognitive dissonance, like an invisible plague, is spreading among survivors worldwide.
On the ruins of the Antarctic ice sheet, Chu Yao stared solemnly at the holographic screen in front of her. The data stream on it refreshed like a waterfall, one of which was dyed a dazzling scarlet red.
"Lin Yi, the intensity of your spacetime fluctuations decreased by 67 percent the instant the restart was completed." Her voice trembled slightly. "I just conducted a simulation test. Your current limit for [Time Freeze] is only three seconds, and the activation of [Space Folding] also had a delay of 0.12 seconds. In a true god-level battle, this is enough to be fatal."
She turned her head and looked at the man sitting on the edge of the broken ice cliff.
Lin Yi did not turn around. His gaze was fixed on the distant horizon, where a sun, reborn after the catastrophe, was struggling to tear through the clouds and cast its golden rays upon this ravaged land.
His aura had indeed weakened considerably; it was no longer as powerful as before, where mere presence was enough to subtly distort the surrounding spacetime.
“You surrendered your ‘uniqueness’,” Chu Yao said, enunciating each word clearly, uttering the most terrifying guess. “In order to bring those erased timelines back to life, in order for every ‘possible us’ to exist, you relinquished your absolute authority as the ‘final template.’ The price was that your divinity was significantly weakened.”
Lin Yi exhaled softly, and the white mist dissipated in the cold air.
“That’s not within my authority, Chu Yao. True victory is never about destroying all the clones, but about acknowledging that every ‘possible self’ has the right to choose their own fate.” His voice was calm, yet it carried an undeniable resolve. “I’m simply giving them back the right to choose.”
“We have no time to celebrate.” Lin Yi stood up, brushing the ice shards off his clothes, his eyes sharp as knives. “The reality reboot has caused a temporary disruption of the rules, and the interference of higher-dimensional wills has been weakened to a minimum. I must take advantage of this window of opportunity to find their intervention channels, and then… completely sever them!”
However, before he could finish speaking, a piercing alarm suddenly blared from the mobile base not far away!
"It's Ivan!" Chu Yao's expression changed, and she immediately rushed towards the base.
Lin Yi followed closely behind, taking a step forward and appearing beside the Stasis Box.
Inside the specially designed stasis chamber, Ivan's body was trembling and convulsing violently, as if he were enduring some unimaginable pain.
Beneath his skin, dark golden runes moved like living creatures, sometimes appearing and sometimes disappearing, exuding an ancient and ominous aura.
His lips moved unconsciously, and broken syllables escaped intermittently: "The container... must... be restarted... The template... needs... Anchors..."
"He's being overwritten!" Chu Yao quickly pulled up the monitoring data, her expression growing increasingly grim. "His consciousness is being formatted by an unknown high-dimensional code! I tried to clear it with the 'Shadow Devourer' virus, but... it failed!"
"Shadow Devourer" is a virus she developed specifically for Lin Yi's divine characteristics. It is designed to devour and analyze high-dimensional information streams and should theoretically be invincible.
“The source of this intrusion code did not originate from your recent actions, Lin Yi.” Chu Yao’s voice was hoarse. “Its protocol level is too high, so ancient… it’s as if it was born with this world. The firewall logs show that its root instruction is—'A return lock was set at the beginning of creation'.”
Return Lock!
Lin Yi's pupils suddenly contracted.
These three words mean that Ivan's crisis is not an invasion by an external enemy, but a pre-set "recycling" mechanism from the bottom of the world!
Just then, a steady and powerful voice rang out.
“Let me do it.” Long Wu strode forward, his rugged face filled with determination. “Let me enter his world of consciousness. Just like I cut off my own inner demons back then, whatever it is, I’ll drag it out!”
"No!" Lin Yi refused decisively, his tone more stern than ever before. "This time is different! That's not a demon in your heart; it's a projection of the will of the entire high-dimensional system, a manifestation of the world's rules! Once you go in, your will, your memories, everything about you will be instantly assimilated and become a part of it!"
Faced with Lin Yi's warning, Long Wu smiled, his smile open and fearless.
“Boss, have you forgotten? I’m not the main character.” He patted his chest, making a dull thud. “I don’t have your complex spacetime causality, nor have I been marked as a ‘template’ by a higher-dimensional will. I am who I am, a pure warrior. It wants to assimilate me? Not so easy. I’m not afraid of death, nor am I afraid of becoming someone else. As long as I can bring him back, it’s all worth it.”
As he spoke, he opened his palm, and a core crystal the size of a fist, seemingly formed from lava and crystal, floated up.
That was the source of his true dragon bloodline—the Dragon Heart Crystal.
For this operation, he actually planned to burn his own bloodline core!
He closed his eyes, preparing to forcefully tear open Ivan's mental barrier with his purest "non-template" will.
Fiery energy surged from the crystal, transforming into golden, dragon-shaped streams of energy that coiled around his arm.
Just as Long Wu's soul was about to leave his body, a hand gently pressed down on his shoulder.
Lin Yi had arrived beside him without him noticing. He lightly traced a line in the air with his fingertip, and a barely perceptible spatial rift appeared. A drop of golden blood containing the laws of time and space seeped from his fingertip and dripped precisely onto the blazing dragon heart crystal.
“You are not the protagonist, but you are my guardian.” Lin Yi’s voice was deep and powerful. “This bond, this will to protect, is also part of breaking through the template.”
"Buzz—!"
The moment the golden blood merged into the Dragon Heart Crystal, it was like a drop of water falling into boiling oil, instantly triggering a violent qualitative change!
The originally violent dragon-shaped airflow instantly became gentle and profound, and visible ripples of spacetime appeared on the crystallized surface!
Long Wu suddenly opened his eyes!
At that moment, his pupils were no longer the black of a human, but transformed into two blazing golden dragon flames!
Through those eyes, he no longer saw a cold base, but countless intersecting and ever-flowing timelines!
Lin Yi's drop of divine blood, through the "bond" between him and Lin Yi, granted him the ability to briefly glimpse a corner of the river of time!
Countless bizarre and fantastical images flashed before his eyes, and finally, he firmly locked onto an incredibly dark timeline that had been almost forgotten at the very bottom of the river of time.
“I saw it…” Long Wu’s voice became hoarse and hollow, as if it came from the distant past, “I saw… Ivan’s first reincarnation.”
He was instantly swept up in a torrent of consciousness.
It was a dark and damp underground laboratory, filled with a pungent smell of disinfectant mixed with the stench of blood.
A thin, blond boy who looked only seven or eight years old was being held down on a cold operating table by several people in white lab coats.
boy's
On his chest, a gruesome bloody hole had been cut open, and a writhing "nest core," seemingly composed of flesh and nerves, was being slowly implanted into his body.
Long Wu's heart clenched, and he was about to roar when he saw a figure that froze his soul.
A person stood in the shadow of the operating table.
The man didn't make a move; he just watched quietly, but his gaze was colder than that of the researchers who were executing him.
It was he who tacitly approved of all of this happening.
It was he who personally pushed young Ivan into the abyss of becoming a "host".
That person had a face exactly like Lin Yi's.
No, not the current Lin Yi.
His eyes looked more weathered and weary, as if they bore witness to the birth and death of countless worlds.
That's... Lin Yi from the distant future!
A sudden realization cleaved through Long Wu's mind like lightning!
Ivan was not an experiment, nor was he some unfortunate vessel!
In a timeline that has already failed, Lin Yi from the future personally chose this "backup plan" in order to preserve a spark of hope to fight against the will of higher dimensions!
The core of the mother nest within him was not a tool for enslavement, but rather a coordinate that Lin Yi had reserved for himself to be reborn in another body after all other possibilities had been cut off!
Ivan is not a vessel, he is an anchor, the last insurance policy that Lin Yi personally laid for himself!
This truth is enough to overturn everything!
Long Wu's consciousness trembled violently; he had to go back!
We must immediately bring this truth, which could change the course of the battle, back to Lin Yi!
However, just as his will was about to break free from this fragment of memory, Ivan, whom he had been spying on and who was convulsing in pain in the stasis box, stopped trembling without warning.
The storm in the space of consciousness has subsided.
In the real world, within the cold base, Long Wu's soul has not yet fully returned.
Inside the stasis chamber, Ivan slowly, very slowly, opened his eyes.
In those azure eyes, all the pain, confusion, and struggle had vanished, replaced by an inhuman, cold indifference that looked down upon all living beings.
A strange, inhuman smile slowly crept onto the corners of his mouth.
"Thank you,"
A voice so calm it was chilling resounded directly in everyone's hearts; it wasn't a sound produced by the vocal cords, but a pure transmission of consciousness.
"I've retrieved the 'startup key' for you."
The moment the words fell, the dark gold runes on the transparent outer wall of the Stasis Box, which had previously only been moving under Ivan's skin, suddenly shone brightly!
They seemed to break free from invisible constraints, transforming into tangible ancient chains that emerged from the void, emitting a piercing "clattering" sound, and binding and locking the entire stasis box layer by layer.
A terrifying pressure, powerful enough to freeze the soul, descended upon Ivan with a deafening roar.
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