Weird Game: I brought an old version bug

Jiang Chen's pupils suddenly contracted.

My heart skipped a beat, and a chill ran down my spine to my head.

Shiyu's shadow, cast on the gray ground, did not move with her movements.

The dark silhouette lay still in place, slowly raising its head to face Jiang Chen.

It turned towards Jiang Chen, revealing a faceless mouth with an extremely eerie smile.

The pungent smell of ozone in the air instantly became ten times stronger, causing a painful ache in people's lungs.

[Hidden Hint: Article 0 of the old version agreement has been triggered]

[The cleanup process starts from within.]

Jiang Chen did not panic.

His mind became incredibly calm under extreme pressure.

He quickly constructed a logical model of this mirror cleaner in his mind, looking for flaws.

Since the main consciousness was erased in the subconscious space just now, this shadow is a backup.

The old version of the cleanup program was like a virus; as long as there was a single line of code left, it could replicate infinitely.

He activated "Reconnaissance," and his pale golden vision instantly locked onto the shadow on the ground.

Under extreme vision, the shadow's attribute panel was filled with wildly jumping crimson gibberish.

The name bar above his head displayed the distorted words: "[Mirror Cleaner - Fragment]".

Shi Yu was in a state of extreme exhaustion at this moment. She was leaning against Jiang Chen and was completely unaware of the danger.

Jiang Chen cannot retreat; if he does, the shadow will directly devour Shi Yu's living core.

He slowly pulled out the "decompilation core"—but the core was exhausted and completely ineffective.

He could only regard it as an ordinary metal dagger.

The shadow seemed to sense the threat; it no longer remained in a two-dimensional plane and began to bulge upwards.

Black slime peeled off the ground, churning and expanding violently like boiling asphalt.

In just a few seconds, it transformed into a three-meter-tall faceless humanoid monster.

The monster had no eyes, but Jiang Chen could clearly feel that it was staring intently at him.

The monster moved.

Its body instantly elongated, transforming into dozens of sharp black tentacles.

The tentacles, accompanied by a piercing whooshing sound, rushed straight towards Jiang Chen's limbs and bones like venomous snakes emerging from their holes.

Jiang Chen pushed off with his feet and activated "Coordinate Alteration", leaving a trail of afterimages in the same spot.

The tentacle slammed down on the spot where he had just been standing, instantly corroding a deep pit into the gray ground.

Jiang Chen twisted his body in mid-air, and the reverse-engineered long blade drew an arc in the air.

The blade precisely cut into the core of a tentacle, yet it encountered no resistance as if it had struck air.

The garbled text rapidly reassembled in mid-air, and the severed tentacles were restored to their original state in the blink of an eye.

After landing, Jiang Chen rolled repeatedly, narrowly avoiding the subsequent fatal attack.

He was panting heavily, his back was soaked with cold sweat, and his stamina was rapidly declining.

Physical attacks and conventional data manipulation are completely ineffective against this monster in its pure shadow form.

It has no physical form and is immune to most damage, which is the most troublesome aspect of the cleanup process.

While dodging, Jiang Chen kept his eyes fixed on the spot where the monster's feet met the ground.

He keenly noticed a glimmer of light at the edge of the shadow where the base of the tentacle touched the ground.

A thought flashed through Jiang Chen's mind, and the sentence in Zhong Yuan's diary echoed in his mind once again.

"The crack is the way out." As a projection of the data tower, the shadow is inevitably subject to the underlying protocol.

That golden halo is the logical anchor point left in the real world by the old version of the protocol.

Once this anchor point is severed, the shadow will lose its source of power and revert to a harmless two-dimensional shape.

He took a deep breath, forced himself to calm down, and began to calculate the monster's attack frequency.

After each tentacle lash, there is a 0.5-second period of stiffness, which is his chance.

Jiang Chen deliberately slowed down his dodging speed, creating a fatal opening to lure the monster into a full-force attack.

Just as the black spear was less than ten centimeters from Jiang Chen's brow, he moved.

He activated "Damage Rewind," forcibly pulling himself back to his peak state three seconds prior.

A burst of pale golden light flashed, and Jiang Chen's body twisted and folded at an incredible angle.

He slid along the edge of the black spear, his reverse-engineered blade rising from below, defying the flow of the spear.

The blade did not strike the monster's body, but instead precisely cut into the golden halo.

"Snap!"

A crisp sound of shattering glass echoed across the open plain.

The golden halo was split in two by the blade, and a blinding stream of white data gushed out from the broken point.

The cracks spread rapidly across the monster's entire body like a spider web, and the black slime began to evaporate.

It struggled to reconnect to the ground, but having lost its anchor, it could only dissipate helplessly.

In just a few seconds, the three-meter-tall monster turned into dust that scattered in the cold air.

Jiang Chen knelt on one knee, panting heavily, his hand holding the knife still trembling slightly.

This attack exhausted his remaining mental energy, and his health dropped below the 15% threshold.

He forced himself to stand up, turned to look at Shiyu, and found that she was still unconscious.

Jiang Chen walked over and gently patted her shoulder, trying to wake her from her exhausted state.

Shi Yu's long eyelashes trembled slightly as she slowly opened her eyes, her gaze still somewhat unfocused.

She looked at the black scorch marks all around her, then at Jiang Chen, who was panting heavily, her face full of confusion:

"Did I... just fall asleep again? What are these things on the floor?"

She rubbed her temples, her voice weak, clearly having no memory of the shadow attack.

Jiang Chen didn't explain in detail, only saying that he encountered a data cleanup program.

He reached out and helped Shiyu up. The two supported each other as they walked toward the huge black tower.

As they drew closer, the tower's oppressive atmosphere intensified, like a lurking ancient beast.

The moment the two stepped into the shadows of the tower, the bronze gate emitted a muffled rumble.

Cold, white mist billowed from the crack in the door, carrying an old and decaying aura of data.

The giant gate slowly opened to both sides, revealing a deep and dark passageway inside.

The walls on both sides of the passage are inlaid with countless dim red crystals, emitting a faint light.

A deep, mechanical roar echoed in the air, like the beating of a giant heart.

Jiang Chen gripped the long blade used for decryption and cautiously stepped into the tower.

Shi Yu followed closely behind him, her eyes growing brighter and brighter, as if she had sensed some kind of calling.

The two walked about 500 meters into the passage, and suddenly their view opened up.

They arrived at a huge circular hall, whose dome was so high that it seemed to have no end.

The hall is filled with thousands of neatly arranged transparent glass columns that stretch to the horizon.

Each glass column was filled with a pale blue nutrient solution, and a human-shaped figure was suspended in the liquid.

Jiang Chen took a closer look and immediately gasped – these were all sleeping players!

Their heads were covered with a dense array of data cables, and their faces were serene, as if they were having a sweet dream.

"This is the final destination for all obsolete data after the old version is overwritten."

Shiyu looked at the glass pillars, and tears streamed down her face without warning. She seemed to have remembered something.

"The system didn't delete them; instead, it turned them into biological batteries to keep the new version running."

Her voice echoed in the empty hall, filled with endless sorrow and anger.

Jiang Chen patted her shoulder, signaling her to continue forward and search for her memory backup.

Shi Yu wiped away her tears, her eyes becoming incredibly determined. Guided by her intuition, she walked deeper into the hall.

She stopped in front of a glass pillar in the seventh row, her body stiff as a stone.

Floating inside the glass pillar was a girl who looked exactly like Shiyu.

But she was wearing the old version of the black uniform, with a "Core Administrator" badge pinned to her chest.

Her eyes were closed, her face was as pale as paper, and her body was covered with data cables thicker than those of the others.

Shiyu reached out her hand, trembling, and placed it on the cold glass surface, a faint resonance coming from her fingertips.

"That was me... or rather, that was my original personality that was stripped away by the system."

Shi Yu murmured to herself, her eyes filled with complex emotions, a mixture of fear and relief.

Just then, the indicator light on the glass pillar suddenly turned from blue to red and emitted a piercing alarm sound.

The red crystals throughout the hall suddenly erupted with dazzling blood-red light, illuminating the space as if it were a purgatory.

The deep, mechanical roar suddenly rose in pitch, turning into a deafening, piercing buzzing sound.

The nutrient solution inside the glass column began to boil violently, producing a large number of bubbles that blurred the view.

Jiang Chen immediately pulled Shi Yu behind him, held the reverse-engineered long blade horizontally in front of his chest, and looked around warily.

My mental energy has been pushed to its limit, and the Scouting skill has 134 seconds left on cooldown—I can't use it again for a while.

However, the expected monster did not appear, and the hall remained deathly silent.

But Jiang Chen sensed that the surrounding spatial coordinates were undergoing a terrifying distortion.

Shiyu suddenly clutched her chest, collapsed to her knees in anguish, and her eyes turned dark gold once more.

But this time, it wasn't possession; rather, her core was resonating with the glass pillar.

"Jiang Chen...run...they...they're waking up..."

Shi Yu managed to squeeze out a few words.

Jiang Chen looked up abruptly and was horrified to discover that inside the thousands of glass pillars in the hall...

All the sleeping players slowly opened their eyes at the same time.

Thousands upon thousands of emotionless, dark gold eyes.

They stared intently at them in the red light.

[Hidden Hint: Article 0 of the old version agreement has been triggered]

[The cleanup process starts from within.]