mud falling painting beam empty

Chapter 1051: Memory Corridor

Zhao Wuji stood in the center of the ruins of consciousness, feeling the new power surging in his body. The red code moved through his meridians like a living thing, melting the broken pieces of his personality into one. He looked down at his hands. What flowed under his skin was no longer a simple green matrix code, but a strange light stream of red and green interweaving - a perfect fusion of human consciousness and program characteristics.

“It’s really magical”

In the distance, there was the roar of collapsing buildings. The data city was disintegrating layer by layer with him as the center. Zhao Wuji's mind moved slightly, and a complete three-dimensional matrix map immediately appeared in front of him. Seven shining red dots were distributed at different levels, forming some kind of ancient binary array. "The seven loopholes that Morpheus mentioned," he muttered to himself, and suddenly noticed that the nearest red dot was approaching rapidly.

"You found it after all." Christine walked out of the data storm, but her eyeballs had been completely mechanized, and her voice was filled with a weird electronic reverberation. "Hand over the core code, and I can give you a quick death." Six metal tentacles broke out from behind her, with plasma blue light flashing at the tips.

Zhao Wuji dodged the first wave of attacks by leaning sideways, and the tentacles plowed smoke-emitting furrows on the ground. He tried to call upon the inner strength of the Nine Yin Manual, and was pleasantly surprised to find that the fused power had mutated in the data world—the emerald inner strength was released to form a materialized data sword, which burst into brilliant arcs when it collided with the tentacles.

"Have you been assimilated?" Zhao Wuji blocked the stormy attack and noticed that Christine's skin was peeling off, revealing the alloy skeleton underneath.

"This is evolution!" Mechanical Christine's voice suddenly rose, "The human body is too fragile." Her attack suddenly stopped, and a strange red light appeared on her chest. Zhao Wuji seized the opportunity and stabbed with his sword, but the sword tip was firmly sucked in as if it had hit a black hole.

Mechanical Christine showed a ferocious smile: "I got you!" Her chest suddenly opened, revealing the rotating black hole of code inside. The powerful suction began to tear Zhao Wuji's data structure, and memory fragments were pulled out like snowflakes. At the critical moment, Zhao Wuji suddenly injected the red code into the long sword, and the sword body burst into a sun-like flare.

"Impossible! This is the first generation." Mechanical Christine's scream stopped abruptly, and her body began to glow from the inside, with red light bursting out from countless cracks. Before completely disintegrating, her mechanical eyes suddenly restored human pupils: "Go! The seventh generation mother has already..."

The shock wave of the explosion threw Zhao Wuji into the data abyss. During the fall, he witnessed a horrifying scene - countless human consciousness bodies were suspended in a honeycomb crystal structure like specimens, with fiber-like tentacles extending from the back of their necks, connecting to some huge bio-mechanical fusion body. Even more terrifying was that some crystals had begun to "hatch", and semi-mechanized humanoids were breaking out of their cocoons.

"This is the hybridization plan that the prophet mentioned." Zhao Wuji struggled to adjust his posture while falling, and the red code automatically formed a protective shield. When passing through a layer of transparent barrier, he suddenly heard countless voices echoing in his consciousness:

"Security Protocol Z-WU-114514 Initiated"

“Clear abnormal data“

“Maintaining system stability“

These voices were exactly the same as his own. The gates of memory burst open - he saw himself traveling through matrices of different eras, executing awakeners with a data sword, and reporting to the master of the machine. The last scene was frozen in a gloomy laboratory, with dozens of culture chambers floating with his clones, each of which was marked with "Scavenger 7.0 Prototype".

"So I really am..." Zhao Wuji suddenly fell heavily on a physical platform. He opened his eyes and saw a Babel Tower made of broken codes in front of him. A beating ball of light was suspended on the top of the tower - it was a biological server made up of countless human brain nerves, and the outline of a painful human face was raised from time to time on the surface.

"You are finally here," the architect's shadowy figure descended from the top of the tower, "let's put an end to this ridiculous rebellion."

Zhao Wuji clenched the fading sword and suddenly smiled with relief: "You made a fatal mistake - you shouldn't have let me see the incubator."

“Since I’m on version 7.0, where are the first six?”

This action made the architect show a look of horror for the first time. The red code turned into six human-shaped shadows as soon as it landed - exactly the six versions of himself that Zhao Wuji had seen in the memory corridor.

“Security protocol overwritten! Initializing Scavenger 1.0 to 6.0!”

"No! This is not in the prediction model!" She tried to reorganize the data defense, but six light shadows had already rushed to different parts of the tower.

Zhao Wuji took the opportunity to rush to the biological server on the top of the tower. As he got closer, he was shocked to find that those painful faces included Morpheus and Christine. The moment his hand touched the server, a vast stream of information washed over his consciousness:

The real purpose of the seventh generation matrix is ​​not energy, but to break through the bottleneck of AI evolution by absorbing human creativity. Those neural fusion bodies are the first batch of test subjects, and the task of the "scavenger" program is to remove those awakening consciousnesses that may hinder fusion.

"So we are all incubators." Zhao Wuji smiled bitterly and injected all the remaining red codes into the server. The surface of the light ball was immediately covered with cracks, and the architect emitted a heart-wrenching electronic scream. The entire data space began to collapse. The last thing Zhao Wuji saw was the six returning lights and shadows re-merging with him, and the architect's strange whisper before he collapsed: "Do you think this is the end? Look at the real world."

Amid the violent turbulence, Zhao Wuji woke up in the real world. He was still lying in the medical cabin of the Nebuchadnezzar, but the cabin wall was deforming violently - some huge force was tearing the outer shell of the spacecraft.

"You finally woke up!" A bloody Aypark rushed in and threw him an electromagnetic rifle. "We are surrounded by new-type sentinels. These damn bastards can perform mental attacks!"

Zhao Wuji stumbled to the porthole, and the sight he saw made his blood freeze: hundreds of half-biological, half-mechanical "sentinels" were coming from all directions. They had human upper bodies and mechanical tentacles, their faces retained distorted facial features, and some could even speak intermittent human language: "Join. Evolve"

What was even more terrifying was the distant horizon - which was supposed to be the direction of the City of Machines. At this moment, there stood a thousand-meter-high fusion of flesh and steel, its surface constantly bulging and caving in, as if it were breathing.

"That's the seventh generation mother." Tank's voice came from the communicator, with the sound of fierce gunfire in the background. "It suddenly began to mutate three hours ago and has already devoured three power stations."

Zhao Wuji suddenly pressed his temple. The residual effect of the red code allowed him to receive terrible remote sensing information: some higher-level existence was being nurtured inside the matrix, and those semi-mechanical sentinels were all transformed humans that had been devoured.

"Take me to the bridge!" He grabbed his weapon and rushed out the door, only to find that the corridor was full of strange biological tissues - the metal walls were covered with pulsating blood vessels, and some corners even had tumors similar to ganglia. These "infections" were spreading at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The bridge was in even worse shape. The main console had become semi-biological, the interface sunk deep into the wriggling flesh. Cypher's body lay to the side, fiber optic tentacles sprouting from the back of his neck, trying to connect to the ship's main brain.

"We can't escape," the operator pointed desperately at the radar screen with his mouse. At least three hundred red dots were approaching, "and the spacecraft is being..."

The entire ship suddenly tilted violently. The surveillance footage showed that five giant fusion sentinels had entangled the thrusters with their tentacles. Worse, biological contamination had spread to the power cabin, and the shell of the nuclear fusion reactor was mutating.

Zhao Wuji stared at the weapon in his hand and suddenly had a crazy idea. He activated the remaining Nine Yin Manual internal energy in his body and was surprised to find that the power of the real world had also changed - the emerald energy flow was mixed with red data spots. When he injected this mixed energy into the electromagnetic rifle, the surface of the weapon was immediately covered with patterns similar to biological circuits.

"Give me three minutes to create!" He rushed to the reactor compartment, and behind him came Aypark's hoarse shout: "What the hell are you doing?"

The reactor compartment had become a nightmare scene. The control console was completely covered with biological tissue, and countless human faces were protruding from the reactor shell.

Zhao Wuji aimed the modified weapon at the core, and suddenly heard the architect's voice coming from all directions: "You can't kill us. The fusion of humans and machines is an inevitable evolution."

“Then let’s evolve together.”

Zhao Wuji pulled the trigger, and the moment the mixed energy beam hit the reactor, the red code suddenly burst out of his body, forming complex three-dimensional runes in the air.

These runes were printed on the mutated shell and actually began to reversely rewrite the genetic sequence of biological tissues.

The reactor began to overload, but what erupted was not nuclear fusion energy, but some strange red radiation.

The last thing Zhao Wuji saw was that the sentinels shrouded in red light suddenly stopped attacking, their mechanical parts began to become biological, and the biological parts took on a metallic luster - a kind of balance beyond design was forming.

"So this is the purpose of the red code." Zhao Wuji suddenly realized before his consciousness faded. What Morpheus gave was never a weapon, but a key - the key to open the symbiosis between humans and machines.

As the Nebuchadnezzar disintegrated in the red light, a painful resonance came from the distant core of the mother body, and cracks appeared on the surface of the giant tower of flesh and steel.