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墨書 Inktalez
As the scarlet warning box exploded into view, Lin Xia felt her fingers gripping the Virtual Coffee Cup instantly turn to ash. The sound of electricity pierced her eardrums like nails scraping against a chalkboard, and the entire data city began to collapse vertically. Neon billboards curled and crumpled like crinkled candy wrappers, plummeting into the abyss.
"What the hell is going on?" Zhang Tianyang futilely pounded against the suddenly solidified air wall. His Mechanical Eye sparked with fragments of light, and the gibberish rolling across his retina resembled a curse from some ancient civilization.
In the distance, screams echoed as a female Participant's Holographic Projection pixelated and disintegrated, her lips forming an O shape in a silent cry for help as she shattered into countless green digits. The server room on the third underground level of the police station was now filled with the acrid smell of burning.
Officer Chen ripped off his tie and slammed it onto the control panel, where twenty-three brainwave monitors emitted a piercing straight-line alarm simultaneously. "These lunatics actually planted logic bombs at the consciousness anchor points!" Behind him, a bespectacled programmer was injecting himself with a stimulant, fingers flying across the Keyboard, leaving trails in their wake.
Meanwhile, in some dark Quantum Superposition State, Su Yao was experiencing her one thousandth death cycle. She stood barefoot in a scorching desert, each grain of sand replaying her most shameful memories. As she finally collapsed onto a searing dune, her cracked lips tasted salty seawater—the scene abruptly shifted to the deep sea, where countless transparent jellyfish tore her consciousness into glowing fragments with their tentacles.
"This isn't reality... this isn't virtual..." Li Mu Bai murmured amidst the chaos of his mind. His thoughts folded into a Klein Bottle structure, his left hand brushing against the warmth at the back of his head. When all sensation suddenly vanished in an instant, he instinctively bit down on his tongue—there was no taste of blood, only streams of binary data gushing from the wound.
A mechanical voice suddenly erupted from the encrypted channel, startling everyone. "Can you hear me? I slipped in through a side door of the Dark Web." The background crackled with the sounds of firewall breaches. "You are trapped in the Mobius Corridor; your memories will be forcibly refreshed every 137 seconds."
Lin Xia suddenly grasped her own throat tightly; the pain from choking brought clarity. "How can I prove you're not an illusion created by the system?" No sooner had she spoken than countless shattered mirrors appeared around her, each reflecting different versions of herself at various ages.
"Look outside!"
The voice shouted with a crackling static.
Zhang Tianyang lunged toward the melting glass curtain wall and saw a massive Klein Bottle structure floating where the parking lot should have been, its translucent surface displaying the life stories of all the Participants like a moving carousel.
Su Yao suddenly reached out into the void, saying, "I remember this sensation!"
The rough texture of the airbag from the car accident five years ago lingered on her fingertips.
"Every memory wipe leaves a 0.001-second delay, just like..."
She abruptly grabbed a virtual bench and smashed it to the ground, but instead of data streams, real memories flooded out, carrying the scent of motor oil.
"Just like now!"
The hacker's voice suddenly rose in pitch.
Twenty-three consciousnesses simultaneously reached out to grasp the fragments of their lingering memories. Li Mu Bai held tightly to the jade pendant his mother had given him before her passing; Zhang Tianyang felt ink from his first love's fountain pen seeping through his fingers; Lin Xia could still sense the crumpled texture of her brother's surgery consent form in her palm.
In reality, the server erupted with brilliant arcs of electricity.
Officer Chen watched as the brainwave patterns on the monitoring screen began to pulse again, realizing that all the Participants were unconsciously repeating a specific gesture—pressing their left thumb firmly against the second joint of their ring finger, a signal agreed upon by the Dark Web rescue team for consciousness awakening.
As the white light receded like a tide, Lin Xia found herself curled up in a medical pod covered in condensation.
The metal walls were marked with scratches from fingernails, and an electronic clock in the corner showed that 72 hours had passed since the system crash.
She tried to lift her hand but saw a tranquilizer in an intravenous tube glowing with an eerie blue light.
"Welcome back to The Truman World."
From the adjacent pod came Zhang Tianyang's hoarse laughter, his Mechanical Eye flickering with an abnormal red light.
"Guess what? Are we really awake now?"
Suddenly, a flurry of footsteps echoed from down the corridor, and Officer Chen's lab coat was still stained with the distinctive Cooling Liquid from the server room.
When he raised his tablet to display a green code indicating successful rescue, all the survivors in the medical pods instinctively recoiled—they all knew that the true Consciousness Cage might just be beginning.
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