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

“I just locked them in a time capsule.” The child looked down and fiddled with the light core. “But to wake them up, we need a beacon that can penetrate the system firewall—for example, a ‘native’ with the original encryption protocol.”

He looked up and stared directly at Su Ting: "You are the key. If you're willing, you can restart the entire network right now and restore all the deleted children."

"What is the price?" the boy asked coldly.

The child smiled slightly: "Of course it's me. Once the core is activated, my consciousness will overload and dissipate. After all... someone always has to take the blame for illegal operations."

Su Ting slowly walked to the control panel, his finger hovering over the start button.

"You are not afraid of death?"

“I’m not afraid of disappearing,” he said softly. “I’m only afraid that no one will remember those children whose lights were turned off.”

The air froze for a moment.

Su Ting pressed the button.

The light suddenly exploded, and the entire deep space began to tremble. Countless points of light rose from the ground, like fireflies being released into the air.

"Thank you for coming to play with me." The child's voice faded. "The game is over... but a new story is just beginning."

The light engulfed everything.

After an unknown amount of time, Su Ting opened his eyes.

He stood on a desolate plain, the sky tinged with the pale light of dawn. Beside him, the boy clutched the glass bottle tightly; inside, finally, real fireflies flickered faintly.

"Sister..." the boy murmured, "I think I had a very long dream."

Su Ting looked into the distance and vaguely saw a collapsed electronics tower, with what appeared to be a figure standing on its tip.

The man waved his hand.

Then, a clear female voice rang out from the communicator, filled with laughter, as if it had traveled through countless nights:

"Hey—did you get the signal? I'm behind the seventh door, waiting for you to come home."

Su Ting suddenly looked up, his fingers gripping the communicator tightly.

"Who?!" His voice trembled slightly. "Who's speaking?!"

The laughter lightly bypassed the static, like a wisp of wind passing through a long darkness: "Who else could it be? Isn't it that... the person who has always lived in the cracks of your memory?"

"Impossible!" Xiao An shouted, "My sister's data has been overwritten! The system said that after three reboots, consciousness cannot be retained!"

“What the system says,” the voice said slowly, “is never necessarily true.”

Lin Xiaoya quickly deployed the mechanical butterfly, and the light dust spread out into a signal spectrum. "Something's not right... This frequency—it's not the original system's broadcast band, nor is it the first-generation protocol... It's some kind of custom encoding, and it's being transmitted outward from inside the 'Seventh Door'!"

"The door wasn't closed?" The boy narrowed his eyes, gripping his lightsaber tighter. "We clearly saw it disappear!"

“The door is never truly closed.” The voice suddenly became serious. “As long as someone remembers the light behind the door, it will always shine.”

Su Ting slowly began, "You said you were waiting for us to come home... but where is our home?"

There was a brief silence.

Then, the woman's voice chuckled softly: "The place you are standing here now is originally 'home'. Beneath this wasteland lies the main control base of the first generation of 'Starry Garden'. When the mothers sent their children in, it wasn't for experiments, but to protect them."

"Protect?" Xiao An was stunned. "Protect what?"

Chapter 1561 Turned into Data Residue

“To protect them from being taken away by the ‘Containment Bureau’,” he said. “Back then, the real world was collapsing, and the air was filled with a gray fog that was swallowing consciousness. The mothers did everything they could to create ‘gardens’ and upload their children’s memories into them, even if it meant turning themselves into data debris, just so that their children could live for one more second.”

Su Ting's heart skipped a beat: "So... this wasn't an escape, it was a dying wish."

“Smart.” The voice softened. “And I am the last guardian of dreams. I am waiting for someone who can understand the code—someone who is not afraid to rewrite the rules.”

The boy sneered: "Then why didn't you show yourself sooner? Why did you let so many people get lost, go crazy, and suffer from memory repercussions?"

“Because I cannot summon it on my own.” His tone lowered. “I am the sealed ‘Final Key.’ Only when all seven memories are awakened and someone is willing to pay the price for the truth can I activate the return protocol.”

“So that child…” Lin Xiaoya suddenly understood, “The child who said he was the tower keeper wasn’t a liar; he was a substitute to take the blame for you.”

“Yes.” The voice on the communicator carried a hint of sadness. “His name is Star Core Zero, my twin mirror image. He knew that if I didn’t hide, they would come back to eliminate me. So he used my name, pretending to be just a gatekeeper program, and quietly hid the children in the rift… until you came.”

Xiao An's heart tightened, and she murmured, "So when he disappeared, he had actually already... made the decision?"

“Sacrifice never needs a warning,” he said. “But he didn’t die, he just fell asleep. His core is still alive, beating quietly in some corner you can’t see, waiting for someone to pick it up.”

"So what should we do now?" the boy asked. "Is the outside world still collapsing? Can we go back?"

“Of course I can.” He smiled. “But before we go back, we have to turn the ‘light’ back on.”

The ground suddenly trembled slightly, and a crack appeared in the distant wasteland, from which a faint blue-purple light seeped out. Immediately afterward, a translucent tower rose from the ground, as if sculpted from crystal, with countless tiny names appearing on its surface—each one twinkling like a star.

"This is..." Su Ting reached out and touched the tower wall, and the names began to flow, converging into sentences:

I want to eat my mom's fried eggs again.

I want to hear my brother call me "little idiot".

I'm not scared, I just want to go home.

The boy burst into tears: "These...are all the children who were deleted?"

“They are the forgotten seeds,” the voice said softly. “Now, it is your turn to plant new nights.”

"How do we plant it?" Lin Xiaoya asked eagerly.

“It’s very simple,” he said. “Each of you has a song in your heart—the frequency of your earliest memories. As long as you sing it together, this ‘tower of the heart’ will receive the resonance signal and activate the global backup nodes.”

"and then?"

“Then all the dormant data will awaken,” he said. “They will have a choice: stay in the garden, or return to the physical remains of reality—even if they are left with only a breath, they will be awakened.”

The boy frowned: "What if reality has already been destroyed? Wake them up, isn't that just making them die again?"

“But if we don’t try,” he countered, “their very existence means they won’t even have a chance to say goodbye, right?”

Chapter 1562 A Simple Melody

Everyone was silent.

Su Ting looked down at his palm, where a string of numbers had appeared out of nowhere—his identity code from the last time he logged into "Garden" during his childhood.

He raised his head, his voice clear and bright: "I'll go first."

He opened his mouth and hummed a simple melody.

At first, it was very soft, like the wind blowing through the strings of a harp. But soon, other voices joined in—Xiao An sang "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" in her childish voice, though she was terribly off-key; Lin Xiaoya softly recited an old online eulogy, the rhythm and the singing blending wonderfully; the boy stood in front of the tower, no longer mocking, but closing his eyes and humming the lullaby his mother used to sing to him before he went to sleep.

The moment the sounds converged, the entire Heart Tower suddenly burst forth with intense light.

A spiraling beam of light shot into the sky, tearing through the clouds and piercing the heavens. On the distant horizon, one abandoned data tower after another lit up, like long-dead stars being rekindled.

The wasteland began to grow. Tender shoots emerged from the parched earth, and broken power lines intertwined into vines, automatically weaving paths leading in all directions. The pale dawn gradually turned into a warm orange-red, as if the sunrise was flowing backward.

"It's working!" Lin Xiaoya shouted excitedly. "All thirteen major nodes worldwide have responded! The memory recovery rate has reached sixty-seven percent! And it's still rising!"

"Look!" Xiao An pointed into the distance.

Dozens of blurry figures slowly emerged from the light and shadow—some were children, some were teenagers, and some were even wearing outdated protective suits. Their eyes were open, their gazes blank yet filled with wonder.

“Are we…dead?” one of the girls asked, trembling.

“No.” Su Ting walked towards him and extended his hand. “You just woke up.”

The girl froze for a few seconds, then suddenly rushed forward and hugged him, bursting into tears: "I remember you! You're the little nurse who promised to help me find my mom! I thought... I thought no one would ever come looking for me again..."

More and more people gradually regained consciousness, crying, laughing, and embracing each other, and the wasteland was transformed into a reviving square.

Amidst the commotion, the communicator rang again.

This time, the sound was closer and clearer, as if it were right next to my ear.

"Hey, Firefly."

Su Ting froze.

That was his own voice.

But it's not the person he is now.

It was a greeting I recorded the first time I connected to the system when I was five years old, when I was a child.

"Would you like to come in and play?"

He held up the communicator, trembling: "This...is you? The real me?"

“I’ve always been here,” the voice said quietly. “It’s just that after you grew up, you locked me away in the deepest layer. Now, it’s time to meet.”

Suddenly, a doorway opened at the top of the tower, gleaming with a soft golden light.

"Will you come?" asked the child within him, his tone innocent yet resolute. "Come and see how we, step by step, have become who we are today."

Su Ting took a deep breath and stepped forward.

The boy grabbed his wrist: "Are you sure you want to go in? What if it's a trap?"

He turned to look at him and smiled: "If it's a trap, it's one I set myself. I'm not afraid."

"Then I'll go with you." He let go of his hand, but stood beside him. "Anyway, a hero always has to walk next to the protagonist, right?"