Chapter 147-I Clean Up Garbage in a Wasteland World

Chapter 147 Kill the VIP (II)

Zhu Ning entered the underground passage.

The opening above had sealed completely. There was no going back. Ancient stone steps extended downward, one after another.

Liu Niannian had produced a flashlight, and her clothes seemed to glow.

Zhu Ning asked: "Is your outfit made of some special material?"

Liu Niannian: "Yes, but it's built into my Consciousness Body."

Zhu Ning: "..."

A true pay-to-win player. She remembered asking Big Orange before entering whether they could bring anything in, and Big Orange had said it was impossible.

Zhu Ning's own clothes existed only because her Consciousness Body self-identified with them. Other than sparing her from running around naked, they served no function whatsoever.

They walked for over ten minutes until the gunfire above was no longer audible. Deep underground, there was a door.

A faint light seeped from its edges. Before opening it, Liu Niannian pressed a button on her outfit. Her clothes and appearance both changed.

Her previously glowing suit became an utterly ordinary T-shirt and jeans. Her beautiful face turned plain—the kind that would vanish into a crowd without a second glance.

Zhu Ning asked: "What are you doing?"

Liu Niannian: "He's probably seen my face. I don't want him to recognize me."

Bao Ruiming moved in elite circles. He had definitely seen Liu Niannian before.

Liu Niannian pulled open the door. Blinding white light flooded in. Zhu Ning instinctively squinted.

When she opened her eyes again, she found herself standing on a beach—completely different from the earlier landing assault. This was a soft, golden stretch of sand.

Tourists milled about. A little boy stood nearby, apparently cut by a shell hidden in the sand. A woman in a red dress came running to check his wound.

Two meters away, someone was sunbathing while a companion rubbed sunscreen on her back.

Seabirds called in the distance. Leaves rustled in the breeze. For a virtual world, it was astonishingly real.

There was nothing high-tech about it. If anything, it felt a bit dated—like a quaint, old-fashioned seaside town straight from Zhu Ning's own world.

The three of them seemed to have materialized on the beach out of thin air. When Zhu Ning turned around, the door had already vanished.

Facing contaminated land, the wealthy had uploaded their consciousness to the Cloud.

She'd imagined the Consciousness Cloud would be all gold and splendor—rich people living in palaces.

She'd even pictured these wealthy elites living together in the Cloud, sharing the pinnacle of power.

Instead, it was a privately customized world, built for one person alone.

The real ocean no longer existed, yet Bao Ruiming had conjured an entire world inside his own mind.

It wasn't just Zhu Ning—the unsophisticated country bumpkin—who was stunned. Even Xu Meng and Liu Niannian were taken aback.

Once they stepped through the door, Big Orange's voice disappeared. She couldn't break through the firewall with them. They were on their own now.

Zhu Ning asked: "So this is the Consciousness Cloud?"

Liu Niannian collected herself. She was well-versed in her family's business. "Each client has different preferences, and we provide customized service. I've seen plenty who built palaces inside their own heads. But a town this ordinary? That's a first. This place must mean something special to him."

Everything felt novel to Zhu Ning. "So every consciousness is stored separately? No visiting each other or anything?"

An industry insider would find this question childish, but Liu Niannian answered with great patience: "Independently stored. If something goes wrong with one Consciousness Body, we can cut it off from the server side. It won't contaminate other clients."

Zhu Ning had many questions. The second one followed immediately: "Question—could a Contamination Zone form in here?"

Liu Niannian: "Absolutely. Human consciousness can collapse and become a Contaminant. His Consciousness Body has already been purified, and yes, he could create a Contamination Zone within the Cloud. But I've never seen one or been inside one, so I don't know what it would look like. If contamination occurs, we have crisis response protocols on our end—we just kill it directly."

Liu Niannian continued: "Online contamination is handled by Prometheus. He casts his network, filters out the contamination, and protects our communications from damage."

That was how Dead Posts came about, too.

Zhu Ning looked at the bustling crowds around them. A child ran right past her. She asked: "Are these people alive?"

Liu Niannian: "Most of them are virtual. Think of them as NPCs."

Zhu Ning asked: "Won't we be discovered?"

Liu Niannian: "Not by them. For the sake of realism, every NPC has their own personality and consciousness. They believe they're real people. In their eyes, we're probably just tourists."

Realism?

Rich people really were strange—uploading their consciousness and still craving authenticity.

But when she thought about it, in the real world, weren't ordinary people basically NPCs to the privileged class?

As a member of the Lu family, Liu Niannian knew many rules of the Consciousness Cloud. "But be careful of the Inspection Squad."

Inspection Squad?

Liu Niannian nodded. "Every Consciousness Body is different, but they all have an Inspection Squad—essentially a security system. Don't do anything that defies common sense, or you'll draw attention."

Remembering how Zhu Ning had blown things up at the hotpot restaurant last time, Liu Niannian knew her style and added a warning: "If you go too far, the Eradication Protocol might activate."

Zhu Ning: "What does the Eradication Protocol look like?"

Liu Niannian: "I'm not sure about this particular Cloud. Each scenario reacts differently. Generally speaking, it's a rapid-kill mode."

For example—a meteor strike, a sudden disaster. It would destroy the world in a way that was perfectly "logical," then rebuild from scratch.

Basically a hard reset.

Zhu Ning mulled it over. Wasn't this just another kind of Contamination Zone?

Do logical things. Don't let the Contaminants discover you.

Once they did, a Contamination Zone would enter hunting mode. The Consciousness Cloud would enter eradication mode.

Similar logic—so this was right up Zhu Ning's alley.

Xu Meng asked: "Then where is he?"

Liu Niannian shook her head: "I don't know. He could be anywhere."

Bao Ruiming might be sunbathing on the beach right now, lounging under a parasol. He might be strolling down a street. He might be at home.

Since a Consciousness Body could be altered, Bao Ruiming might no longer look like the man Zhu Ning had seen. He could be a little boy, or a middle-school student still in uniform.

It all depended on which version of himself this freak preferred.

Zhu Ning calmed her mind and thought. She'd been playing therapist to Contaminants all this time, and now it felt like she could dust off those old skills.

Zhu Ning asked: "So a Consciousness Body is essentially the manifestation of someone's inner world?"

Liu Niannian said carefully: "For a Consciousness Body at his level, yes. And Bao Ruiming has the authority to modify the program."

"How to put it..." Liu Niannian thought for a moment. "We've walked into his custom-built dream theme park."

In a sense, the Consciousness Cloud was a kind of dream-crafting space.

It was looking more and more like a Contamination Zone. Follow a certain logic, find the source of contamination. Bao Ruiming was the source.

The town was vast, warm, and peaceful on the surface, with no clues in sight.

A needle in a haystack.

Xu Meng gazed at the distant waves. "He really seems to love the ocean."

Zhu Ning had visited his office before. Bao Ruiming's office was built above an aquarium—sharks swimming beneath his desk. He'd looked like a lord of the sea.

This place definitely meant something to him.

Xu Meng: "Let's look for clues."

Liu Niannian: "Split up?"

Zhu Ning: "Let's stay together. Something about this place feels off."

It might look normal, but considering this was the inside of Bao Ruiming's twisted mind, normal was the biggest abnormality of all.

Since Liu Niannian had changed her appearance, the three of them didn't stand out in the crowd. Zhu Ning walked and observed.

Before entering Contamination Zones, Zhu Ning usually reviewed Dead Posts to get a sense of what had happened inside. But this was a Consciousness Body—she had no leads whatsoever.

The areas they could explore boiled down to a few major sections: the beach, the ocean, and the houses in the distance.

The ocean looked dangerous. Zhu Ning had once seen a movie where the protagonist touched the edge of the sea and found it was actually a wall.

Was the sea's edge here a data wall too?

Since they couldn't confirm whether something lurked beneath the ocean's surface, they abandoned that option.

The island wasn't large. They circled the entire beach without finding anything remarkable. By the time they finished, sunset had come and night was falling.

Liu Niannian: "It's so peaceful here."

All they'd seen during their walk were townsfolk. Someone was even selling flowers along the street.

Zhu Ning: "I feel the same. I could honestly retire here."

No wonder the rich loved living in the Consciousness Cloud. They really could achieve inner peace.

Past the beach, wind turbines stood in the distance. A clean road stretched outward, flanked by houses with a distinctly coastal style—a picturesque sight at first glance.

In Zhu Ning's era, this island would have been an Instagram-worthy tourist hotspot.

A thought struck Zhu Ning: if the world weren't contaminated, the three of them might actually have gone on a seaside vacation together. But Contaminants had spread across everything. Every ocean was consumed. Only twenty percent of the land remained.

They could only "enjoy" the seaside inside a madman's brain.

All three of them stopped in their tracks. Ahead stood a church. Compared to the rest of the tranquil island, the pointed steeple looked distinctly out of place.

Given Bao Ruiming's thoroughly abnormal behavior, anything with religious overtones was worth investigating.

Xu Meng: "Let's take a look."

Around Xu Meng, Zhu Ning had instinctively slipped into the role of second-in-command, and she followed immediately.

Up close, the church turned out to be very old—at least two hundred years. The stained glass was chipped and dusty, and weeds had overgrown the grounds, as though no one maintained it.

Yet a dim glow emanated from within.

Liu Niannian: "Something doesn't seem right."

The Consciousness Cloud was generally built for a client's pleasure. Liu Niannian figured old men's imaginations tended to be boring—for an old man, having countless beautiful wives or mountains of cash in the Cloud would be normal.

Some even created an idyllic paradise to play farming simulators in.

What was the point of putting a creepy, decrepit church here?

The church walls weren't smooth. They were covered in tiny bumps. From a distance, it was hard to tell what they were.

Zhu Ning: "There's something on the walls."

Liu Niannian was curious about everything too. She leaned in for a closer look—then froze and immediately turned away.

She didn't say she was scared, but her complexion had gone noticeably pale.

Zhu Ning took one look and instantly understood Liu Niannian's reaction.

For a disorienting moment, she thought she was seeing countless eyes, pressed tightly against one another, squeezing and jostling, a dark mass staring back at her.

Zhu Ning reached out and touched the wall. She wasn't wearing a Protective Suit. Normally she relied on glove sensors to relay tactile feedback; this time, she touched it directly.

Rock-hard. Like a mass of teeth.

Barnacles—one of the most revolting creatures in the ocean, often parasitizing other organisms like whales, sea turtles, and even the hulls of ships.

They were the parasites of the deep, slowly devouring their hosts' lives.

If Zhu Ning hadn't met Jiang Ping, she might not have thought much of it. Now it was hard not to read into it—both were parasitic organisms.

These barnacles were alive. Only living ones could cling this firmly to the building.

It was bizarre. Barnacles were typically found on coastal rocks. This far from the ocean, baking under the sun all day without water—how were they surviving?

Was this entire building constructed from densely packed barnacles? Beyond the outer walls, what about the interior? Were the tables, chairs, and furniture all made of countless barnacles too?

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Author's Note:

If you don't know what barnacles are, you can look them up—but I'd recommend against it~

The movie mentioned is The Truman Show.

If you've forgotten who Jiang Ping is, refer back to the Desolate Village arc—the garrisoned soldier who was parasitized by the worms.

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