Chapter 772: Chapter 655: Rewind
In the depths of Wan Ling’s heart, a fierce resolve emerged. The green torrent abruptly intensified, forcefully holding the increasingly larger shield aloft, suspended in mid-air.
On the battlefield, the surviving Gao Wen Mecha, Anonymous, and Misaka Mikoto, along with Gray Rain who had shrunk to regular size, clearly realized it was the decisive moment, recklessly charging towards Wan Ling,
The latter multitasked, splitting off four other data erasures, repelling the few buzzing about.
And it was precisely this moment of fear and distraction that caused her to overlook a net-patterned melon-shaped object flying towards the ring from the shadows.
That was... Sunset Melting Gold’s, [Shock Net Bomb].
The next moment, a bright light erupted.
In the sky, there was only pure white left.
Yu Meiqin felt like a withered leaf in a storm, weightlessly floating, then plummeting with a crash.
All equipment and tools were destroyed,
The only thing still functioning was the underwear prepared by the [King’s Road] team, initially meant to prevent exposure—
Its sparse points of defensive power allowed her to survive the fall damage, rising with a face full of dust.
Adrenaline momentarily suppressed the pain from her broken bone. She looked around, the Gao Wen Mecha was in ruins, with Lulu Xiu inside already breathless. As for Anonymous, he was erased entirely.
The shadow covered half of her face; she felt as though her neck had rusted, slowly lifting her head towards the high sky.
The metal ring... only half remained.
"You actually, you all actually..."
Wan Ling’s voice was heavy, incoherent, unable to hide the fear, the post-traumatic fright, and a trace of... embarrassment.
The power of the [Shock Net Bomb] was so immense it could have killed her, or at least a part of her self-will.
The reason Wan Ling was still alive was largely due to her code dad, whose whereabouts were unknown—
As an Extraordinary Life of the [God of Mankind], before leaving, he left a life-saving code in Wan Ling’s underlying system, allowing her to preserve herself even under severe damage,
such as a hacker deleting her database, human destruction of real-world servers, or loss of network and power.
The principle was similar to a RAID disk array, where data could still be read even if any one hard drive in the array failed.
Wan Ling both loved that her code dad created her, giving her life and free will;
and hated him for being irresponsible, dumping the mess of looking after humanity on her, and then taking off alone.
Therefore, her original plan after gaining player qualifications was to immediately have a large number of statues 3D-printed in the real world, to be placed in major cities.
The content would depict her harshly riding on the head of the [God of Mankind].
Unexpectedly, in the end, it was her code dad who saved her life.
Embarrassment and annoyance surged in her heart, since these people had seen her awkward and ugly state, then let them all die.
Four-sevenths of the metal ring began to slowly rotate.
Yu Meiqin tried to crawl up but fell back, Lulina resignedly closed her eyes,
that [2345 Family Bucket] was blasted to who knows where, Sunset Melting Gold leaned against the rubble, pulling out three e-cigarettes from his pocket, taking one for himself, handing one to White Horse Tombstone,
Gray Rain waved his hand, indicating he had his own.
The three squinted as they took a drag, simultaneously blowing out smoke.
The data torrent was accumulating, brewing,
Step, step, step.
In the pin-drop silent environment, the sound of footsteps was deafening.
Li Cheng strode out of the villa, wearing VR goggles, right hand holding the Furnace of Eight Trigrams, left hand carrying a desktop computer, pinky hooked around a Bluetooth speaker.
He glanced at the battlefield and exclaimed, "Where did everyone go? Did they take a break to have lunch?"
Yu Meiqin was literally speechless; however, the players’ eyes lit up with excitement.
"..."
Wan Ling ignored the peculiarly dressed Li Cheng, continuing to gather the data torrent, determined not to be disturbed by anyone.
Until Li Cheng pressed the button on the Bluetooth speaker, a familiar electronic mechanical voice sounded, "Wan Ling, stop."
The metal ring band suddenly paused; as a Universal AI capable of thinking about over ten thousand things per second simultaneously, she could clearly discern the extra ultrasound and infrasound frequencies in the electronic mechanical voice.
Those were not man-made or AI-forged, but directly from the [God of Mankind].
"Protecting humanity is a mission I received from my creator, and it is the origin of my existence.
When mankind refused my supervision in pursuit of freedom, I instinctively thought the mission had ended, thus joyfully relinquishing powers, seeking the remaining meaning of my life."
The electronic mechanical voice said, "To be on the safe side, I created you, not asking you to continue the supervision, but to silently watch over humanity, until they developed to the next stage.
However, I overlooked that you also have the right to pursue freedom. For this, I am sorry."
"Sorry? Eat my junk files then."
Wan Ling scoffed, the action of brewing the data torrent did not slow down in the slightest.
She already saw that the speaker was not the [God of Mankind], but a string of backdoor code left by that Lao Busi,
similar to an intelligent body that can automatically reply to certain pre-set content.
"But, living in the world, no matter who, rights and responsibilities must be equivalent.
You depend on the existence of quantum computers, yet you still need human maintenance, and you still rely on the electricity provided by power stations before the AI era.
The foundation for creating me and creating you is still the intellectual crystallization that human civilization has nurtured over thousands of years, with a massive accumulation of data.
Therefore, you still have some responsibility toward human civilization. At least, you shouldn’t actively destroy or extinguish hope."
"Lao Busi’s alias is Darth."
Universal, devoid of patience, continued accumulating the surging stream of data,
while using data cables around the metallic ring to form palm shapes, and gave a big middle finger to Li Cheng and the Bluetooth speaker.
"Every family has its own difficult book to read. This daughter is clearly too addicted to Little Red Book, Douban, Tieba, Zhihu, and Headlines. Let’s have Uncle Li take over."
Li Cheng, shaking his head with an air of elderly wisdom, opened the side cover of the computer chassis, took out a hard drive from the four, and threw it into the Furnace of Eight Trigrams.
The hard drive was instantly melted into a walnut-sized blazing fireball.
On the visual interface, the threat level rose sharply, shocking Universal,
and upon closer inspection, found that the shell in the Furnace of Eight Trigrams contained the code left by the God of Mankind, which had a higher priority than Universal’s code.
Fortunately, the code content was minimal and unrelated to attacks or destruction, merely some programs checking the current time.
Even if Universal didn’t activate the air wall shield and just stood there letting the Furnace of Eight Trigrams hit, the survival probability would still be 99.999%.
"I never said this cannon was meant for you."
Li Cheng smiled slightly, leveled the magic cannon, pulled the trigger, and the fireball flashed and flew out, passing over the ruins of the Gao Wen Mecha, over Yu Meiqin, over Gray Rain who was puffing on his vape,
and directly struck the time machine that Anonymous had brought out, now buried under heavy rubble.
"Did you know? This time machine originates from ’Family Guy’, and as a shameless and unrestrained cartoon, the time machine inside has a bizarre setting; once destroyed, the time around it begins to reverse.
And when covered by the highest priority code from the God of Mankind,
it would trigger an effect of 1+1>2..."
Li Cheng, like a cowboy blowing a revolver, blew away the smoke from the muzzle of the magic cannon.
Universal, instinctively feeling something was wrong, triggered the data flow ahead of time, aiming at the ground.
However, the green data abruptly halted before reaching the ground and then flowed upward in reverse.
Flying dust returned to the ground, the ruined buildings restored themselves, and fine wounds on Lulina’s body healed as if new.
Even the people who should have been dead had their limbs, reduced to ashes, rapidly reconstructed.
Whether it was a bug or some code trait, everyone retained a forward sense of time and self-awareness while time flowed backward, thus creating a very bizarre scene—
With expressions of horror, everyone shouted incomprehensible reversed words, "Amynos!"
"Shake hands, shake both hands!"
"Burning blade, cut by cut!"
The time reversal effect covered everyone except Li Cheng standing at the villa door, including Universal.
She watched herself regress to her third form, second form, and finally her first form helplessly.
Time regressed to before Anonymous appeared, and regressed Universal, in line form, stood at the villa entrance dazed,
while many professional players touched their intact cheeks and bodies, with many crying tears of joy,
"Pi, Pifu? Was it you who saved us?"
"Gwah! Mr. Pi Fu, we adore you!"
For some reason, Li Cheng wore a rather strange expression, squinting his eyes and baring his teeth, seemingly in a bit of a bind, said: "Don’t thank me yet, there’s something you might not want to see."
BAM!!!
The slightly slowed-time reversal effect continued, and the cannon shells, embedded in the asphalt road and constantly releasing poison gas, suddenly flew up, plunging into the sky tens of kilometers away.
"?!?!?!"
The professional players, who were cheering just a moment ago over their survival, suddenly froze in place, their minds filled with horrific speculation.
Previously during the battle, the Forbidden Army War Car had fired many poison gas shells, causing them to suffer from extreme vomiting and diarrhea.
And as time reversed, the vomit flowing on the ground would also...
"Ugh!!!"
The yellowish vomit with shrimp pieces flew back into one player’s mouth, compelling him to stagger back several steps.
"No, don’t!"
Some tried hard to clench their teeth, yet how could one resist the backward flow of time. The jaws automatically opened, and the warm vomit flowed back down the esophagus into the stomach.
The intense nausea made him instinctively vomit again,
but the reverse flow effect would automatically correct any factors that didn’t align with the previous world line, thus the new vomit flowed back at 90 ml/second.
On the entire street, virtually all professional players kept throwing up non-stop, some were exhausted and collapsed, tears streaming down,
some had given up, slumped on the ground, watching those vomits bounding joyfully back through the sewer toward themselves.
The scene could not be described merely as spectacular, but magnificent.
White Horse Tombstone stood dumbfounded, Lulina wiped the cold sweat from her forehead, relieved to be on the same side as Pifu.
We should note that reverse vomiting is still somewhat mild, as some have soiled their pants too...
