The game is only half finished, and the entire internet is begging for an update!

Chapter 206: Marking the Boat to Find the Sword, Picking Flowers in the Morning and Evening?

The gunfire behind them grew increasingly intense, and the sound of the heavy elevator descending, accompanied by the scraping of metal, drew ever closer.

The escape continues.

The two of them crawled directly into the sewer; outside, it was a cold, rainy night with torrential downpours.

The torrential rain pounded hard on the cold prison ground, while distant searchlight beams, like sharp swords, swept wildly between the mud and barbed wire.

The professor coughed violently, and the young man's crawling speed slowed slightly.

He figured it out.

"I see."

As the professor crawled, he looked down at his prison uniform, and his tone gradually calmed down.

"I spent half my life studying complex systems, and in the end, I ended up in prison because of my research. Many people say this is a step backward, that I brought science back from the future to disaster."

"But I've always felt that they're looking too closely."

The young man turned and glanced at him.

The professor, panting, continued haltingly, "The development of things is inherently tortuous. It's never a straight upward line; it's more like a constantly rising spiral."

"When you reach the other side of the spiral, you'll see a familiar place. You'll feel like you've come back again, like you've made the same mistakes again, and even like everything is going backwards."

He paused for a moment and then chuckled.

"But as long as the spiral continues upward, those recurring mistakes are not meaningless."

"Because only when you see it again will you know exactly where you went wrong last time."

The professor paused, looking at the young man's expressionless face.

"What's wrong?"

The young man shook his head: "It's nothing."

He had heard this phrase many times before, sometimes in prison, sometimes in a car.

The professor, however, continued.

"Many people like to say, 'Take it easy, the world is so big, what's your pain?'"

I don't like what you're saying.

He raised his head.

"The macrocosm is never about diluting suffering."

"We go to understand a bigger world, not to tell someone that your suffering is insignificant."

"On the contrary."

"The macro perspective is to prevent a certain kind of suffering from eventually becoming your entire world."

The young man didn't say anything. He just needed to climb a little further; the exit was just ahead… This professor talks a lot…

It's fortunate that he's a scientist; if he were an ordinary person, how could he accept it so quickly?

soon……

The professor saw the faint light in the distance of the passage, and a look of disbelief finally appeared in his eyes.

"so……"

"Are we going to succeed this time?"

In that instant, lightning flashed and thunder roared.

The outlet of the sewage pipe is just ahead.

"Exit reached! Drill!"

The young man suddenly shoved the old man forward!

However, just as the old man's body was halfway out of the pipe...

"Buzz..."

A deep buzzing sound suddenly exploded directly above their heads!

It's a drone! The professor's face turned deathly pale instantly.

Did I fail again...?

"Tick-tock".

Rainwater dripped slowly from the edge of the sewage pipe.

The red light of the drone in the video got closer and closer. The next second, a blinding white light suddenly engulfed the entire screen. The professor's astonished face, the young man's outstretched hand, and the pursuers closing in from afar all disappeared in an instant.

Immediately afterwards, the time on the screen began to jump wildly.

2026.

2031.

2044.

2052.

Finally, the numbers abruptly stopped.

【Parallel World·2056】

When the camera lit up again, the torrential rain had stopped, and there were no more gunshots.

There was only one quiet, almost oppressive, laboratory.

Beyond the enormous floor-to-ceiling windows lies a city shrouded in a dim, yellowish sky. High-rise buildings still stand in the distance, but most have their lights off. Several transport drones fly slowly along fixed routes. Further away, the area that should belong to the city is completely severed by a massive, gray-black barrier.

The laboratory interior, however, maintains an astonishing level of precision and temperature.

A transparent screen floated in mid-air, displaying a massive amount of data. Dozens of city maps, relationship diagrams, and densely packed timelines were simultaneously displayed on the walls. In the very center stood a silver-white device that occupied almost half of the experimental hall.

And that young man from before is now standing in front of the device.

There was no blood, and there was no rainwater on his body.

In the laboratory, a middle-aged man wearing glasses was rapidly flipping through documents, talking incessantly.

"The target has been identified."

"Gu Changchuan, 2026 Linjiang City First Major Prison, No. 0714. Former core member of Xinghai Joint Scientific Research Institute, sentenced to life imprisonment for serious technological crimes."

The young man glanced at the photo on the screen.

The middle-aged man continued, "Most of his research data from back then was destroyed. What we can confirm now is that the complex system model he studied has a high correlation with the several major catastrophes that occurred in 2056."

The young man frowned upon hearing this.

"Just correlation?"

"Is it not cause and effect?"

"no."

"So you want me to break him out of prison?"

The middle-aged man paused for a moment.

The researchers nearby all looked away in unison.

The young man pointed at Professor Gu on the screen, then at himself: "Have you considered the possibility that he might be a criminal?"

"I've considered it."

"Then why should I save him?"

The middle-aged man was silent for two seconds, then pushed a prison layout diagram in front of him.

"Because we had no other choice."

The laboratory fell silent for a moment.

The middle-aged man looked out at the dimly lit city through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

"We don't know how long the global food system can last."

"The three ecological zones in the Southern Hemisphere are completely out of control, the coastline is changing every month, and the energy network has already suffered an irreversible collapse."

"If we continue to extrapolate based on the current model..."

He didn't continue speaking.

Because the answer has already appeared on the screen.

[Civilization Maintenance Probability: 1%]

The young man stared at the number, speechless for a long time.

The middle-aged man then looked at him again.

So, go ahead.

"Back to 2026."

"Rescue Professor Gu."

"If this world is destined to be destroyed, then his research is very likely the part that we have missed."

The young man listened, speechless.

"Very likely?"

"You can't even be sure?"

"cannot."

"If they are rescued, can they change our world?"

This time, no one answered.

The researchers in the lab exchanged glances.

Finally, it was the female researcher with gray hair in the corner who slowly spoke.

"I have no idea."

"Nobody knows."

She spoke very calmly.

"We have far too little understanding of timelines right now. Saving someone today might give the world a new technology thirty years from now, or it might cause someone else who should have existed to disappear completely."

"It's even possible that nothing has changed at all."

"But we have no way out."

"The theory has reached its limit, the laws of physics are falling apart, you can only keep hitting your head against a brick wall!"

The young man leaned against the table and glanced at the floor plan of Lin'an Prison.

"So you're just telling me to go back and gamble?"

"right."

"What are we betting on?"

"Betting on a better future."

The young man's lips twitched.

"Are all researchers this unrigorous these days?"

"There's no way around it; nothing is absolutely precise in the face of time!"

"..."

The young people had nothing to say.

The female researcher suddenly smiled.

"Who knows if your return to those places will ultimately lead to a clinging to outdated methods, or a futile attempt to rediscover the past?"

"When you return to the same place, see the same people, and witness the same events, you may only be futilely searching for answers that no longer exist."

"But it's also possible that, on the second, third, or even the hundredth time you see it, you'll finally realize what you missed the first time..."

"That's all we can hope for..."

The young man looked up at her.

The female researcher walked to the transparent water glass next to her and casually caught a drop of water that had fallen from the circulation pipe.

"The Earth's water cycle has been going on for 4.6 billion years."

"The drop of water you catch now may have once been an ocean, or a cloud, or it may have fallen in a forest hundreds of millions of years ago, or it may become a snowfall someday in the future."

"We don't know which drop will change anything."

"But for us now, every small change is a source of hope."

The laboratory fell silent again.

The young man looked at the drop of water, then glanced at the city outside the window that was slowly dying out, and the playful look on his face finally faded.

"Alright."

"So be it, let's try to find the sword by marking the boat!"

He turned around and walked towards the suspended platform in the center of the alloy ring.

"Energy loop network connection completed."

"Gravity compensation valve is open."

「目标时间节点锁定：公元2026年，11月14日，凌晨03点14分。」

A blinding pale white halo erupted from the edge of the huge ring, and the next second...

A burst of white light erupted, and the young man's figure vanished completely.

The view turned to pure white.

After a brief silence, lines of game information began to slowly appear.

[Chaoxi Games: A Large-Scale New Virtual Game]

If the future is destined for destruction, then let's go back to the past.