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Chapter 1050: Imperial Scavenger

Cookie crumbs fell from Zhao Wuji's fingers. He stared at the face in the photo that looked exactly like his own, his throat tightened: "You said I'm a.program?"

The prophet's laughter was as harsh as a rusty door hinge: "Everyone is a program, dear. The only difference is that some programs can dream." Her skinny fingers suddenly clasped Zhao Wuji's wrist, her nails digging into the skin, "Let's see your source code."

Severe pain exploded along the nerves. Zhao Wuji's eyes flashed with countless memory fragments - the sparks of wooden swords colliding in the dojo in the 21st century, the children huddled in the shelter after the nuclear war, and the green data stream floating in the dark void. The most suffocating was a laboratory scene: dozens of his clones were immersed in glass cabins, and mechanical arms were implanting chips into their necks.

"Aha!" The prophet suddenly let go, and Zhao Wuji stumbled and knocked over the cookie rack. "Very interesting, you are both a loophole and a patch."

Apak pointed his gun at the old man and asked, "What did you do to him?"

"Just helping him recall the factory settings." The prophet licked his fingers covered with cookie crumbs and suddenly read out in a mechanical, tablet voice: "Security protocol Z-WU-114514, clear abnormal data and maintain system stability."

This sentence turned a key in Zhao Wuji's mind. He held his head in pain, feeling a cold data stream rewriting his memory. In a daze, he saw the prophet take out a metal box from the oven, and inside it lay a silver pill.

"A gift from the Master of the Machine." She stuffed the pill into Zhao Wuji's mouth. "Go meet your creator."

The moment the silver pill dissolved, Zhao Wuji's consciousness was thrown into a torrent of data. When he opened his eyes again, he was standing on top of a pyramid made of circuit boards. The stars in the night sky were all flashing codes, and the sea of ​​clouds flowing under his feet were actually billions of data links.

“Welcome home, Scavenger.”

The sound came from the black cube floating in front. As the cube unfolded, a human-shaped light and shadow was revealed at the core - a female silhouette made of flowing galaxies, her long hair was a beating optical fiber, and the hem of her robe was scattered with broken firewall data.

"I am the architect of the seventh generation matrix. You can call me an architect." The voice of light and shadow is like the overlap of countless electronic synthesized sounds. "You are supposed to be an anti-virus program to remove the virus of human consciousness, but you have infected human nature."

Zhao Wuji found that his hands were being digitized, and green codes were flowing under his skin: "Are those memories implanted?"

"Memory is nothing but a data packet." The architect waved his hand to call up the holographic projection, showing Zhao Wuji's "work record" in the matrix of the past generations - he had killed the awakened with a long sword materialized by data, and had corroded the network nodes of the resistance with a logic virus. The projection finally froze on an amazing scene: the young Morpheus was pressed on the edge of the data abyss by "Zhao Wuji", and the latter's eyes flashed with cold blue light.

"This is your true mission." The architect's voice was full of electric temptation. "Return to the system and you will gain the highest authority. Continue to resist." She suddenly showed the real-time monitoring of the Nebuchadnezzar. Apak and others were being besieged by mechanical squids. "They will all die."

Zhao Wuji looked at his arm that was gradually becoming transparent, and suddenly laughed: "If I am an antivirus program, why do I still have the right to delete?" He suddenly thrust his hand into his chest and pulled out a glowing red code, "What Morpheus gave me is not an ordinary data chip - this is a loophole in your core firewall!"

The moment the red code touched the air, the entire data space began to collapse. The architect's light and shadow distorted and screamed, and cracks crawled all over the surface of the black cube. Zhao Wuji took the opportunity to jump into the nearest data stream, and his consciousness quickly shuttled through the underlying structure of the matrix.

He landed in a city made of broken memories. The high-rise buildings here are stacked fragments of childhood, and the streets are filled with fragments of first love conversations. In the distance, six "Zhao Wuji" of different ages are fighting - the young version holding a data sword is chasing the office worker version in a suit, and the bloody ancient warrior version is fighting the future warrior version.

"The civil war of personality partitions." A "Zhao Wuji" in a white coat suddenly appeared beside him, with a name tag reading "Dr. Zhao" on his chest. "Each matrix iteration will produce a new personality, but the core memory is always blocked."

His words were pierced by the data sword. The young version drew out the weapon dripping with code and sneered: "The one who talks the most will always die first."

Zhao Wuji suddenly realized that this was the bottom layer of his consciousness. He rushed to the center of the battle and caught the data knife chopped by the ancient warrior version with his bare hands. At the moment of contact, the memories of the two began to blend - it turned out that the martial arts memory was not implanted, but came from the residual consciousness of a martial artist in the third-generation matrix.

"Listen!" Zhao Wuji raised the red code above his head, "This is the matrix's death switch! We need it."

Six different weapons pierced his body at the same time. Zhao Wuji laughed in the pain and let the red code flow into his body through the wound. A powerful data storm erupted with him as the center, forcibly merging all personalities.

When the storm subsided, Zhao Wuji, standing in the ruins, opened his eyes, with red and green code flames dancing in his pupils. He waved his hand and Morpheus' electromagnetic rifle materialized, with the gun body wrapped in the internal force of the Nine Yin Manual.

"Now, let's go blow up that damn power plant."