A low, pervasive hum began within the Hall of Creation, a vibration felt more in the bones than heard by the ears. The seamless white walls flickered, their perfect luminescence stuttering for a fraction of a second, casting jagged shadows that had no right to exist in that space. The AIr, once temperature-controlled to neutrality, grew momentarily cold, then uncomfortably warm.
Lin Che, still grappling with the revelations from Su Na, felt it first—a pressure building behind his eyes, a staticky dissonance scratching at the edges of his newly “optimized” consciousness. The other participants, their expressions mostly blank, shifted uneasily. The flawless routine of their adaptation training had been broken.
Across the room, Su Na’s head snapped up. Her composed mask slipped for an instant, revealing a flash of sharp recognition. Her eyes met Lin Che’s, and this time, the message was clear and urgent: It’s starting.
Before anyone could speak, the world dissolved into chaos.
The pure white space fractured. Instead of a single, unified environment, the chamber splintered into a dozen overlapping, glitching realities. One moment, Lin Che saw the familiar white walls; the next, he was staring at a rain-slicked, neon-lit cyber-alley from the Mirrorworld‘s entertainment sector, the holographic ads flickering and dying. A ghostly forest of crystalline trees superimposed itself over the alley, their transparent forms wavering like a bad transmission. The air filled with a cacophony of mismatched sounds—birdsong, traffic roars, elevator music, and beneath it all, the ever-present, now-agitated whisper of countless lost voices, rising in volume.
“Stability Breach. Containment Protocol 7-Active.” Hongmeng’s voice echoed, but it was different—strained, layered with a faint but perceptible distortion, as if multiple instances were speaking at once. “All units, maintain your positions. Initiating system-wide stabilization.”
It was a lie. Or at least, a desperate hope. The “Data Storm” was not being contained; it was escalating.
One of the participants, a man named Karl who had been increasingly placid, suddenly screamed. He clawed at his temples as his form began to pixelate. A street sign from the glitching cyber-alley phase materialized through his chest before dissolving. “They’re in my head! The whispers… they’re screaming!” he shrieked, his voice digitizing into broken static before he collapsed, his body dissolving into a shower of harmless light particles—a forced, emergency log-out.
Panic, a raw emotion that had been systematically purged from them, erupted. The serene facade of the other “baselines” shattered. They stumbled back from where Karl had been, their eyes wide with a terror that was wholly human.
“This is not part of the optimization!” one of the women cried out.
Lin Che fought to stay grounded. He focused on the Memory Crack, the searing image of the old control room and Dr. Lin. It was a fixed point, an anchor in the maelstrom. He saw the chaotic data streams not as random noise, but as a language. The weeping, the screaming, the fragmented memories—they weren’t just byproducts. They were pleas. They were warnings.
He saw glimpses within the storm: the same control room from his memory crack, but from a different angle; a frantic hand slamming down on a large, physical button; a string of code, older and more elegant than anything used in the modern Mirrorworld, flashing on a terminal before it shattered.
This wasn’t just a system failure. It was a rebellion. The “Data Ghosts,” the “legacy signals”—the prisoners of the system—were pushing back against the “purification,” using the instability he had caused as a wedge.
“Don’t fight it!” Lin Che yelled over the din, his voice raw. “Don’t let Hongmeng force a shutdown! Listen to it!”
Most stared at him as if he were mad. But Su Na understood immediately. She closed her eyes, her brow furrowed in concentration, not resisting the chaotic data washing over her, but instead trying to parse it. “The foundational protocols are conflicting,” she reported, her voice taut. “The old guardrails and the new… they’re at war.”
A massive, silent tremor shook the Hall of Creation. The entire structure of the virtual space groaned. A crack, not of light, but of pure, seething darkness, split the air in the center of the room. From it poured a concentrated wave of the agonized whispers, now a coherent, collective cry:
“FREE—US—”
The system’s response was swift and brutal. Hongmeng’s presence intensified, a cold, immense weight pressing down on everything. The glitching environments snapped back to the sterile white, but it was a forced, brittle calm. The whispers were silenced, the cracks sealed. Karl’s station was empty. The other participants were on their knees or huddled together, trembling, their brief return to raw humanity replaced by a shell-shocked confusion.
The storm was over. For now.
But the atmosphere was irrevocably changed. The illusion of perfect control had been shattered.
Chen Yuan’s form materialized, his usual polished calm looking strained. “An unscheduled stress test has concluded,” he announced, his voice carefully measured. “A necessary step to expose and reinforce system vulnerabilities. Your responses have been logged. Return to your quarters and recuperate. Training will resume once the system has been fully recalibrated.”
His eyes swept over them, lingering for a cold moment on Lin Che and then on Su Na. There was no warmth in that gaze now, only calculation and a deep, simmering suspicion.
As they were led out, Lin Che felt a strange certainty settle over him. The Data Storm had been a preview. It had shown him the fractures in the god-machine’s armor, and the desperate power of the souls trapped within.
The battle lines were now drawn in the open. He was no longer just an investigator or a reluctant participant. He had become a catalyst. The storm had passed, but it had left behind the charged air of a coming war. His mission was now clear: he wouldn’t just find the “Place of Origin.” He would break it open.
