mud falling painting beam empty

Chapter 1065 Silver Firewall

Zhao Wuji regrouped in great pain.

His consciousness gushed out from the geocentric network like a drowning man washed ashore. His body recondensed in the lee of a snowy mountain in XZ, and every inch of his skin bore traces of being melted and cooled. When he opened his eyes, the first thing he saw was his translucent arm—what flowed under his skin was no longer blood, but a quantum fluid that shone with silver light.

"Lin Xiaoyu?" The voice turned into white mist in the thin air. No response.

He struggled to get up, his metal bones making a slight friction sound. Thirty meters away, a silver cocoon lay quietly in the snow, with cracks on the surface. Zhao Wuji stumbled over and tore open the cocoon with his mutant fingers.

Lin Xiaoyu curled up inside, but only her upper body was intact. Her lower body had become quantized, like an amorphous silver nebula, with a few blue arcs bursting out from time to time. Even more terrifying was her right eye: the original human pupil had now become an electromagnetic light spot symmetrical to the left eye, and when it rotated, Zhao Wuji could see the radio current spectrum emerging in the air.

"The signal is too strong." Her voice was mixed with electromagnetic noise. "There is an amplifier on the top of Mount Kailash that amplifies the signal from the center of the earth tenfold."

Zhao Wuji looked up at the snowy peak. To ordinary people, it was just a snow-covered mountain, but in his newly acquired quantum vision, the entire mountain was covered with a translucent hexagonal force field. A structure similar to the South Pole metal column was suspended on top of the force field, transmitting some kind of coded signal into space - not towards Centaurus A, but towards Vega.

"The seventh lock." Lin Xiaoyu's quantized part suddenly shrank and re-condensed into the shape of legs, but her skin had turned into the same metallic texture as Zhao Wuji's. "We have to destroy that transmitter. Otherwise it will wake up the other prisoners."

There was a sudden vibration in the snow. Zhao Wuji instinctively built a metal barrier, and the next second the snow where he was standing was blown away by bullets. Twelve figures in lama robes walked out from behind the rocks, but they were not holding prayer wheels, but modified pulse weapons. The old man in the lead took off his hood, revealing half of his mechanized face - his right eye was a quantum sensor that glowed red, resonating with the galaxy pattern on Zhao Wuji's chest.

"The key holder." The old man's voice was like a mechanical hum. "The guardian of the holy mountain has been waiting for a long time."

Zhao Wuji felt dizzy. The red light projected by the old man's mechanical eyes formed a holographic image in the air: in 1945, the Nazi expedition team discovered an underground city in Mount Kailash; in 1962, three people from the Chinese Academy of Sciences expedition team disappeared here; it was not until three years ago that the guardians dug a tunnel to the center of the mountain and discovered the Prometheus device that was repairing itself.

"You guys are helping it?" Zhao Wuji's fingers glowed slightly, ready to decompose the surrounding metal at any time.

"We are observing." The old man pointed to the top of the mountain. "The device is activated every seven years, and every time people like you are summoned." He opened his clothes, revealing a healed galactic scar on his chest. "But I failed. Key 1.0 cannot communicate with it and will only be swallowed."

Lin Xiaoyu suddenly grabbed Zhao Wuji's hand. Her electromagnetic vision saw the truth that the old man didn't say: the inside of the mountain was full of silver silk threads, entangled with hundreds of corpses like spider webs - all of them were former key holders, and their energy was drained to keep the amplifier running.

The metal under the snow suddenly rose up. Zhao Wuji took the initiative and reorganized the metal elements within a radius of 100 meters into a sharp spear array, but the old man just raised his left hand calmly. What popped out of his wrist bone was not a weapon, but a small piece of galaxy pattern exactly the same as the one on Zhao Wuji's chest - but the color had faded to gray.

"Don't you understand yet?" The old man's mechanical eyes flickered. "Key 2.0 is bidirectional. It allows you to receive signals, and it also allows you to..." The mountain suddenly shook violently. A silver light shot down from the peak and hit the pattern in the old man's hand. Zhao Wuji felt a burning pain in his chest, as if something was reading his memory through this connection: the Antarctic ice lake, the earth's core network, the last flame of Lei Yan

Lin Xiaoyu's scream woke him up. She rushed over and used electromagnetic pulses to cut off the silver light, but it was too late - the old man's body swelled like a balloon, and quantum outlines similar to those in the Antarctic lake emerged under his skin. When his mouth opened to a width that humans could not reach, what came out was no longer language, but a frequency that was exactly the same as the whisper of the center of the earth:

"Find the other keys. Before the signal is intercepted."

"Run!" Zhao Wuji pulled Lin Xiaoyu up.

The avalanche was chasing them. They stumbled towards the cave on the mountainside, and behind them was the muffled sound of the old man's body exploding. Just as the snow wave was about to swallow the two of them, the metal gate at the entrance of the cave suddenly opened and closed - inside the gate stood a young man in a tattered scientific research suit, holding an old-fashioned radiation meter that was flashing wildly.

"Welcome to the last observatory of mankind." The young man pushed the cracked goggles, and behind the lenses were a pair of pure human eyes without any mutation. "My name is Chen Xing, a descendant of the missing expedition team in 1987."

Deep in the cave, hundreds of antique computers formed a ring matrix. The waveform on the screen was synchronized with the transmitter signal on the top of Mount Kailash, but there was an additional filter program for manual intervention. Chen Xing pointed to the solar system map on the main screen, and seven red dots marked the seal locations.

“My grandfather discovered a secret.” He pulled up a fuzzy video recording: the black substance beneath the Antarctic ice becomes temporarily inert when it comes into contact with human blood. “The Promethean civilization used our genes as a firewall because the prisoners were unable to parse the irregular organic structure.”

Zhao Wuji looked at his quantized arm. Lin Xiaoyu suddenly understood something: "So after we mutated..."

"You are being assimilated." Chen Xing nodded seriously. "Key 2.0 is an advanced interface, but every time you use it, a part of your humanity will be devoured." He pointed to a new signal on the screen. "For example, now - the Super Management Bureau has located here."

Amid the roar of the avalanche, another vibration came from the mountain. Zhao Wuji sensed a familiar mechanical resonance—Leng Feng had actually left Antarctica alive, and with a larger force. The ice cones on the top of the cave began to fall, but Chen Xing showed a strange smile.

"Luckily I had a plan B." He pressed a red button on the console. "The Guardian of the Holy Mountain is not the only one stealing fire."

The entire Mount Kailash lit up at this moment. It was not silver light, but a golden red like magma. The metal network inside the mountain was overloaded by some force, temporarily blocking the signal transmission. The galaxy pattern on Zhao Wuji's chest suddenly turned and pointed to the new coordinates in the northeast:

Tunguska.

"Go find the next guardian." Chen Xing's voice was drowned out by the loud noise of the collapse. "Remember, the silver blood is the last firewall."

When the cave collapsed completely, Zhao Wuji and Lin Xiaoyu were pulled into the underground network by a force. In the last second of quantization, Zhao Wuji saw Chen Xing's body engulfed by golden light - it was not fire, but the human gene map bursting out of his body, temporarily blocking the erosion of the silver light like a shield.

Zhao Wuji recalled some childhood memories at this time, and also confirmed that this earth is not real, nor is it a parallel earth, but a reorganized script in the digital world: "Then let's play on, this Lin Xiaoyu should be Lin Yu's program..."