Courtyard House: My Long and Hard Body Makes Me Play with All the Women in the Courtyard

At that moment, the world was once again thrown into violent tremor.

The next second, the palace doors slammed shut!

The crowd was left standing there, stunned and speechless in the wind.

"...She was there?!"

Su Ting stood frozen in place.

Behind her, a tear welled up in the eyes of the young girl, Shen Zhixue, and her lips moved slightly, as if she wanted to say something—

"You've finally arrived... I've been waiting for you for so long."

—Her voice sounded so real for the first time.

This was the first time I had ever experienced such pain.

Su Ting turned around abruptly, "Zhixue?!"

A glimmer of light appeared in the girl's eyes, like a shattered mirror being pieced back together bit by bit. Her lips moved slightly, but she didn't say another word. She just quietly looked at him, her gaze seeming to pierce through time and memory, falling directly into the softest part of his heart.

But in the next instant, the light and shadow around her body began to tremble erratically, as if she might be pulled back into nothingness at any moment.

"She's disappearing!" Ji Yan immediately became alert.

"Don't let her leave again!" Lin Su shouted, rushing over.

"Halt!" The gray-robed man suddenly waved his hand, and a barrier blocked everyone's path.

"No one can disturb the Dream Bridge resonance," he said calmly. "Once it's interrupted, this dream restart will completely fail. None of you can save her."

Everyone froze.

"Then why can you speak?" Xiao You asked angrily.

The gray-robed man looked at her, half his face hidden in the darkness, his expression inscrutable. "I am a remnant of this system. My purpose in existence is to maintain the operation of the 'boundary'... until the last flame is extinguished."

As soon as he finished speaking, the entire sky suddenly lit up!

The enormous clock gears above the palace began to turn again, their rumbling as steady as a heartbeat yet carrying an undeniable power.

"Time has started to reverse!" An Ran exclaimed. "We're going back to a point in the past!"

"What? But haven't we already entered the core of the dream? This..." Lin Su frowned as he looked at the flowing memories around him. They were rapidly churning, merging, and recombining, like a story curtain that had been pieced together in a disordered order and rewritten.

“This means… the real past has not yet arrived,” Ji Yan said slowly.

Her gaze swept over Su Ting, who was standing motionless not far away, and her heart suddenly clenched.

He was still looking at Shen Zhixue.

Shen Zhixue's figure grew fainter and fainter, but the smile on her lips remained.

A smile that was almost desperate yet incredibly gentle.

And as she finally dissolved into dust and vanished into the air, a soft voice rose from the wind:

[Su Ting, don't be afraid to see the truth...]

I will always remember you.

Everyone was stunned.

The gray-robed man, who had been silent for a long time, suddenly turned around and looked at us: "Are you ready? We will land on that rainy night five years ago."

“You mean—” Ji Yan’s eyes widened.

“That’s right.” He nodded calmly. “The last night the SHASI experimental base operated. The scene that no one dared to face.”

Su Ting finally looked away, his eyes regaining their clarity.

"Let's go," he said.

"Take me there. I want to see every single detail clearly."

As they stepped across the star-studded bridge and entered the palace gates, the scene before them spun violently.

—The next second, a torrential downpour began.

They stood before a massive building, brightly lit yet deathly silent.

A gold plaque hangs above the heavily guarded entrance: SHASI Research Institute Central District.

Lightning ripped through the long night, illuminating the mottled bloodstains in front of the door.

Rainwater flowed down the bluestone floor, and the air was filled with a metallic smell.

Chapter 1041 The Core Area at the Time of the Incident

Screams could be faintly heard coming from inside the laboratory in the distance.

No, to be more precise, it was a mixture of the child's innocent cries and the alarms from the medical equipment.

"This is... the core area where the incident occurred." Lin Su took a breath.

Xiaoyou bit her lip and murmured, "I've been here before, but it's all so blurry, I can barely remember..."

“You shouldn’t have come here,” Chu Mo suddenly said.

All eyes turned to her at the same time.

Chu Mo's gaze was cold and stern as he gripped a small instrument tightly in his hand. "This space will automatically sense emotions. If we lose control of our emotions or trigger specific memories here, it will immediately trigger a defense program—the system will activate a forced expulsion mechanism."

She paused, "Or to put it more strongly... it's trapped us all in this past."

"Understood," Su Ting said in a deep voice. "Then we must confirm the target location as soon as possible. Can you pinpoint the key areas?"

“We have a clue.” Chu Mo opened the device screen. “Based on the trajectory of memory resonance, we should go to layer B3… The bioenergy there is the strongest, and it may be the core location where the data was sealed back then.”

The group exchanged glances.

Then I walked towards the entrance of the research institute.

The moment the door was pushed open, what greeted me was not the cold, high-tech feeling I had imagined, but a pungent smell of medicine and an incredibly tense atmosphere.

"Hurry up, this way." Lin Su pointed to a long corridor ahead. "I remember this is the main passage connecting the various areas on the map."

There were hardly any people in sight along the way, except for the occasional sound of hurried footsteps and heavy breathing behind me.

But no one turned back, nor dared to.

—Everyone is afraid to touch that memory.

At the corner, a ceiling light, flickering on and off, cast a shadow.

"Wait." Ji Yan suddenly stopped everyone and whispered, "There are people ahead."

She lowered her body slightly, peeking half her head out from the wall. The dim light shone on a desk at the end of the corridor ahead, where a slender figure was looking down, flipping through documents, her pen flying across the paper.

That was... a girl wearing a researcher's uniform.

The girl's face was almost completely hidden in shadow, with only her slightly pale hands and bloodshot eyes visible. She would occasionally look up to glance around, as if wary of anyone approaching.

"Strange, how come there are ordinary people in this place?" Xiaoyou asked softly.

“She’s not an ordinary person,” the gray-robed man said in a low voice. “This is a simulated afterimage created by the system—a fragment of her consciousness. Once you get close to the core of her past emotions, she will disappear.”

Chu Mo frowned as he looked at the flickering ripples on the screen, his voice tinged with hesitation: "But what if she's a key information provider? Perhaps we can try to guide her to leave something behind."

Lin Su nodded in agreement: "I'll give it a try."

Before anyone could stop him, he carefully walked around the broken wires and shards of glass on the ground, slowly making his way towards the table. He had only taken a few steps when the girl suddenly looked up!

Lin Su froze.

The two stared at each other from less than ten meters apart, the air seeming to freeze. Fear and hesitation were evident in the girl's eyes, and her lips trembled slightly.

"Do you remember... that test subject?" she suddenly asked.

The sound was very soft, like a feather drifting in the wind.

Chapter 1042 Don't Open That Door

Lin Su paused for a moment, then cautiously asked, "Which experimental subject are you referring to?"

The girl's gaze swept over his shoulder, then across the direction of the crowd. Her eyes flickered, as if she had remembered something terrible. She abruptly stood up, the papers in her hand scattering all over the floor.

Immediately afterwards, her body began to twist violently, swaying like ripples in water.

"It's too late!" the gray-robed man shouted. "The system has already started reacting! She'll disappear before the defense program is triggered!"

The girl's voice was clearer than before: "She's hidden in the ice cell... Don't open that door... or you'll see with your own eyes... your world collapses."

The next moment, her figure vanished completely.

The entire corridor was plunged into darkness again.

Only the sound of raindrops falling from the ceiling was exceptionally clear.

For a long time, no one spoke.

"She said 'she'... does she mean Zhixue?" An Ran said in a low voice.

“It could also be… other test subjects.” Chu Mo gripped the instrument tightly. “In any case, our target is clearer now—Level B3. The ice chamber there may still contain secret data that we didn’t have time to disclose back then.”