On the icy plains, every second felt like an eternity.
Half of Long Wu's body had already transformed into a translucent crystal shimmering with an ominous luster. Dark red [Burning Shadow Flame] rose from his crystallized feet, but it was no longer scorching hot. Instead, it exuded a deathly stillness that could burn away reality.
Every inch he moved in the center of the formation, a burning black mark was left on the ice beneath his feet, as if he were using his life trajectory to inscribe his final epitaph on this pure white earth.
He was like a statue about to burn out, using his remaining, crumbling consciousness to firmly hold onto that invisible energy field, suppressing the erosion from higher dimensions.
Data streamed down Chu Yao's face like a waterfall. Her voice trembled slightly from extreme calmness, each word seemingly squeezed out from between her teeth: "Warning, the soul structure of target 'Long Wu' is being irreversibly assimilated by a 'rule-level being,' with an assimilation rate of 47.8%. According to the model's calculations, in twelve hours, his individual consciousness will completely dissipate, transforming into a pure, self-conscious energy symbol."
She raised her head and looked at the back of that once carefree, now steely-willed figure, her voice so low it was almost swallowed by the wind and snow: "Was it worth it?"
Long Wu's body stiffened for a moment, as if even the simple action of turning his head had become extremely difficult.
He didn't turn around, but squeezed out a metallic laugh from his crystallized throat. There was no pain in that laugh, only a relieved warmth: "What do you think?"
He paused for a moment, as if recalling something extremely distant yet incredibly precious.
"I'm... the first person to call you 'sister'."
These simple words struck Chu Yao's heart like an invisible hammer.
The data stream in her eyes instantly became chaotic, and for the first time, an uncontrollable grief appeared on her face, which had always maintained absolute rationality.
Amid this tragic standoff, another disruptive transformation is silently unfolding.
Lin Yi's will was like a giant net covering the entire globe, gently yet firmly wrapping Ivan's humanity, which was on the verge of collapse and about to be corrupted by the will of the Mother Nest.
Under his guidance, the consciousness of billions of awakened beings was no longer scattered starlight, but was woven into a magnificent and indescribable "temple of the mind".
There are no physical entities here, only pure thoughts, memories, and emotions; it is the ultimate barrier of the human spiritual world.
Ivan's figure became transparent in the center of the temple. The human struggle and pain on his face gradually subsided, replaced by an unprecedented peace and understanding.
In the final moment before fully merging into this temple of consciousness, his voice no longer traveled through the air, but resounded simultaneously in the minds of every awakened individual involved in its construction.
"Remember... when everyone is a protagonist, the story no longer needs an ending."
The moment the words fell, across the globe, from heavily guarded underground fortresses to war-torn city ruins, from deep-sea laboratories to mountain outposts, a total of 100,000 of the highest-ranking Awakened Ones opened their eyes simultaneously, as if receiving the same sacred command.
The same golden light shimmered deep within their pupils.
Without orders or commands, they spontaneously sat cross-legged, formed hand seals, and began to construct miniature resonant force fields, using themselves as nodes.
In an instant, 100,000 brilliant stars on Earth's psionic network were simultaneously lit up. They echoed each other and shone brightly, enveloping the entire planet in a network of light composed of pure will. The scene was as if the stars in the sky had been rekindled in a world shrouded in darkness.
However, Chu Yao's expression grew increasingly solemn.
Her senses swept across the entire battlefield, past the area suppressed by the Burning Shadow Flame, and a chilling truth emerged.
“The Scavenger… was not destroyed.” She murmured to herself, her voice tinged with despair. “Its ‘arrival’ itself was delayed. We… we used the collective consciousness of the global awakened to forcibly push its timeline back by forty-eight hours.”
The discovery made her feel dizzy.
What is the cost?
She immediately connected with the consciousness of the nearest awakened being, and the answer became clear in an instant.
The awakened one's memory is becoming blurred, not forgotten, but rather... diluted.
Details about his childhood, the faces of his family, and everything he loved are slowly fading, as if shrouded in a thin mist.
“We’re trading our ‘presence’ for time…” Chu Yao’s voice trembled. “Every moment of awakening, every resonance, is consuming the very essence of what makes us ‘human.’ Lin Yi, if this continues, even if we win in forty-eight hours, will we still be ourselves?”
"No."
Lin Yi's firm voice rang out behind her, resolute and decisive.
He had arrived beside her without her noticing, his gaze passing over her and landing on the burning crystal statue on the high platform—Long Wu.
“We are not consuming, Chu Yao, we are reshaping.” His eyes were as deep as the starry sea, reflecting the hundred thousand illuminated points of consciousness. “When ‘my’ memories, ‘my’ emotions, ‘my’ cognition begin to merge into a grander ‘we,’ individual memories will no longer be the sole burden defining existence; they will become the power of the entire race. We are abandoning our insignificant, isolated selves to embrace an unprecedented, unified concept of ‘humanity.’”
Before he finished speaking, Lin Yi took a step forward, his figure as fast as lightning, and instantly ascended the high platform at the core of the formation that Long Wu had protected with his life.
He stood beside Long Wu, one hand gently resting on Long Wu's completely crystallized shoulder, where the temperature was as cold as absolute zero.
"Long Wu, hold on to the present," Lin Yi said in a low voice, as if giving a final message to a comrade-in-arms, a brother. "Next, it is up to us... to create the future."
He closed his eyes, using himself as the core medium and amplifier, and activated his ultimate ability, which he had never shown to anyone before—[Echoes of the Masses].
This time, it's not about simply manipulating time, nor is it about going back in time.
Instead, at this very moment, all awakened beings worldwide connected to the consciousness network begin to "recall the future" simultaneously!
An indescribable torrent of information instantly blurred the boundaries between reality and illusion.
On the ruins of Tokyo, a young swordsman awakened to the world sees himself wielding a lightsaber, leading survivors to slay giant monsters on a strange red planet.
In a secret base deep in the Amazon rainforest, a plant manipulator sees himself transforming a withered planet back into a lush, green world, eventually exhausting himself and becoming the World Tree.
In the underground city-state of the Sahara Desert, a boy who manipulates sand sees himself building a magnificent city that spans the entire galaxy, and ultimately passing away peacefully atop the city's highest spire.
Death in battle, rebirth, sacrifice, leading a race, exploring the stars, establishing a new civilization... billions of possibilities, billions of future fragments belonging to the "protagonist," intertwine, collide, and merge in everyone's minds, forming a web of possibilities covering all timelines.
"Now! Chu Yao!" Lin Yi's voice boomed like thunder in Chu Yao's mind.
Chu Yao snapped back to her senses, the last trace of sadness in her eyes replaced by absolute rationality.
Her hands danced in the air so fast that afterimages appeared, weaving, integrating, and refining these endless streams of data, these "memories" of the future, with a logic beyond human imagination, ultimately constructing a completely new set of underlying rules and protocols that could directly interfere with reality.
"The protocol is complete!" Chu Yao announced loudly, her voice filled with the excitement of making history. "Based on your core principles, I have named it—'The Charter of Humanity, First Edition'!"
At that very moment, the inverted tower that pierced the heavens and the earth at the heart of the Antarctic continent suddenly trembled violently.
Thousands upon thousands of deep cracks appeared on the tower, from which crimson light, filled with violence and fear, burst forth, as if an ancient beast, imprisoned, was awakening.
Ivan's voice, now part of the collective will, echoed once more from the depths of the earth, tinged with mockery: "It is afraid...it feels it. We are no longer code in its database, we...are writing our own source code!"
"Activate 'Charter Overriding'!" Lin Yi's command resounded throughout the global consciousness network. "Inject our will into the remnants of the Ark Core network! Override its rules with our rules!"
"Command received!" Chu Yao's eyes shone brightly. She pushed her hands forward, and the newly born "Charter of Humanity" was immediately transformed into an incomprehensible quantum command stream. Through a super array formed by 100,000 awakened nodes around the world, it was broadcast in the opposite direction towards the root of the Antarctic tower collapse, like a digital tsunami sweeping the globe!
This is the ultimate showdown between civilizations, a life-or-death struggle between rules!
Just as the command stream carrying the entire future of humanity was about to be fully injected, a giant hand made entirely of light and twisted metal suddenly emerged from the thousands of cracks in the collapsed tower!
That hand disregarded space and distance, tearing through the veil of reality, and with an unparalleled momentum, traversed thousands of miles to grab Lin Yi on the high platform!
That was a fatal blow that transcended all physical laws!
At the critical moment, below the high platform, hundreds of the closest Awakened Ones, without the slightest hesitation and even with fearless smiles on their faces, voluntarily leaped into the formation protected by Long Wu's [Burning Shadow Flame].
"For 'us'!"
They shouted in unison, using their own consciousness, which was about to be assimilated by "us," as the final fuse, detonating all the energy in their lives, transforming it into hundreds of miniature time bubbles.
These bursts of time continuously exploded in the space in front of the giant hand, each causing a distortion of time and space for a fraction of a second.
Hundreds of tiny distortions combined to form a visible spacetime fault.
The giant hand of light and metal was violently pushed by the fault line, causing its attack trajectory to be fatally deflected. It grazed Lin Yi's body and crashed into a parallel dimension next to it, disappearing without a trace.
Lin Yi seized this fleeting opportunity, focusing all his attention on his fingertips, and carved the final paragraph of the "Charter of Humanity," which was also the most core outline, onto the ground beneath his feet.
His will penetrated the ice, rocks, and mantle, leaving a deep imprint on the core crystalline layer deep within the Earth that sustains the entire planet's existence.
"The right to be the protagonist belongs to every life that chooses to move forward."
The moment the last character was engraved, the world seemed to stand still.
The next second, the tower in Antarctica, a symbol of despair and end, did not explode with a deafening roar, but instead began to collapse and disintegrate silently from bottom to top.
The metal and runes that made up the tower broke into billions of shimmering fragments. Instead of falling, they floated upwards as if they had lost their gravity, gathering into a vast, boundless, suspended metal forest above Antarctica, strange and magnificent.
Before the cheers of victory could even begin, everyone was stunned by the miraculous scene unfolding before their eyes.
Just then, someone raised their head.
The thick, dark clouds that blanketed the globe looked as if an invisible hand had torn a huge gash in them.
The sunlight did not arrive as expected. After the crack appeared, what was revealed to everyone was a deep, quiet, yet utterly unfamiliar starry sky.
Countless stars twinkled on the dark velvet, forming magnificent yet unfamiliar constellation maps. None of the points of light, the shapes and colors of the nebulae, had ever been recorded in the history of human astronomy.
That's not the star map Earth should have.
Immediately afterwards, a gentle breeze brushed against Lin Yi's cheek, carrying with it a faint, strange scent that did not belong to any element on Earth.
He felt an extremely slight, almost imperceptible floating sensation on the ground beneath his feet, as if the weight of the entire planet had shifted in an indescribable way at that moment.
Before the heat of battle had even dissipated, a chill, even more vast and unknown, emanating from the depths of the universe, quietly descended.
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