Chapter 157-I Clean Up Garbage in a Wasteland World
Chapter 157 Kill the VIP (XII)
The Huo Family estate.
Alarms blared wildly. Huo Wenxi's personal security detail was engaged in combat with the intruders outside. The Demon Hunter squad dispatched by the Sanitation Center had yet to arrive.
As a precaution, the entire exterior of the residence was sheathed in a layer of metallic defensive armor.
But it was useless. Someone had already punched a hole through the back door, and something had gotten inside.
The main breaker had been pulled. Someone had breached their security defense system. The entire Huo estate plunged into darkness, and the guest room where Huo Wenxi was located went into lockdown.
Zhuang Lin held a gun, eyes fixed on the sealed bathroom door. He stood in front of Huo Wenxi, sensing that someone had entered the living room.
Gunfire erupted outside. The sounds of crossfire made the silence inside the living room all the more conspicuous.
Zhuang Lin was Huo Wenxi's last line of defense. If Zhuang Lin died, Huo Wenxi was as good as dead.
Zhuang Lin couldn't comprehend Huo Wenxi's actions. They were coming for Zhu Ning—why hadn't she been evacuated in time? Without Zhu Ning's evacuation, Huo Wenxi herself was at risk. Huo Wenxi might end up buried alongside Zhu Ning.
Bang!
A tremendous crash came from the doorway. Someone had opened the guest room door and was now frantically trying to bash it down.
After stubbing out her cigarette, Huo Wenxi hadn't lit another. She seemed oblivious to the outside world, unaware that her own life was in danger.
She simply watched Zhu Ning.
Huo Wenxi's gaze was intensely focused, as though studying a work of art.
Zhu Ning lay quietly at the bottom of the bathtub, wearing an oversized eye mask. Ice cubes floated around her body. The Chip slot at the back of her neck had gone dark—meaning that even if Huo Wenxi wanted to pull Zhu Ning out, she couldn't.
But Huo Wenxi had no such intention. She believed Zhu Ning would win.
Zhu Ning could bring back the intelligence she wanted. Huo Wenxi's judgment had never been wrong.
...
Why did Huo Wenxi trust her so much?
Zhu Ning couldn't understand it at all. Her abdomen and back throbbed with waves of pain.
She'd originally wanted to stall by asking Bao Ruiming a few more questions, but he wasn't buying it. He answered only a handful before refusing to elaborate further, then killed her cleanly and decisively.
Zhu Ning felt the long claw tear open her chest. The sharp pincers sliced easily through the surface flesh, and beneath lay her beating heart.
Bao Ruiming met almost no resistance. The blood-soaked claw came down, piercing through her heart with a wet squelch, pinning her straight through to the floor beneath.
Zhu Ning's eyes went wide. It was her first time experiencing having her heart impaled—quite the rare experience, since normal people only got to try it once.
Strangely, Zhu Ning felt no pain. It was nothing like the agony she'd imagined. The earlier wounds to her abdomen and back had amplified her suffering, but not this time. It was as if Bao Ruiming hadn't opened her heart at all.
Zhu Ning lowered her lashes. A long claw was plainly lodged in her chest. Bao Ruiming, apparently wanting to make sure she was thoroughly dead, even twisted it twice.
Zhu Ning gazed up at the Church overhead. The original Church had been solemn and imposing—entering a temple or church instinctively inspired reverence—but here, data streams were twitching.
Like a scene built inside a game.
She felt no pain, not even a stray thought. A person only got one chance at the moment of death, and she'd assumed she would see her life flash before her eyes.
She'd hoped to see Zhu Yao in that montage. She hadn't dreamed of Ms. Zhu in a long time and was terrified of forgetting her face.
But she saw nothing. Even the life-flashing montage refused to play for her. It was far stranger than she'd expected—all she could see was a Church constructed from data.
Why did Huo Wenxi trust her?
And up until now—why hadn't Danger Sense triggered?
Squelch—
Bao Ruiming withdrew the claw. It was drenched in blood. Killing Zhu Ning was the last item on his list. He'd fulfilled his duty to the letter, leaving no loose ends.
A pity his Idol was destroyed. He couldn't even gaze upon it one last time in prayer.
Praise the great One.
In nine days, the Divine Descent would come. When it did, all of District 103 would be consumed by contamination. It would be a spectacular sight.
Bao Ruiming couldn't see, but his spirit was one with his god.
The Meteor outside had paused. All Bao Ruiming had to do now was wait for Creation Technology to terminate his brain. His death was certain.
He'd assumed he would feel at peace—after all, at his age, he'd long since made peace with mortality. But he didn't. It turned out that even at his age, people were still afraid to die.
Humans would always fear the unknown. Bao Ruiming didn't know what death was like, and so he felt a reverent dread.
A Meteor hung suspended outside. Its fiery glow bathed the entire world in red. This was the apocalypse.
Bao Ruiming walked toward the main door. Before dying, he wanted to choose a scene for himself. He wanted to walk to the sea.
Even though the server had shut down and the beach had been stripped of its disguise, reduced to strings of code.
After leaving Floating Sand Island, he'd never seen the ocean again. Now he'd constructed a world for himself, and he wanted to die in the sea.
He thought he could hear the waves.
Soft sand. Warm seawater rising to embrace him. The briny scent of the ocean.
That was his sea.
Thud—
Bao Ruiming's mid-stride foot froze. He heard a sound behind him. His pupils contracted, and a surge of terror gripped him.
He turned stiffly, craning his neck around. Zhu Ning's corpse was gone.
Zhu Ning had gotten to her feet at some point.
There was a gaping hole in her stomach. The area over her heart was ruptured. Her back was in tatters. Blood trickled steadily down her cheeks.
Blue light flickered at the wound sites, the edges segmented into rectangular data strips—like a patch of mosaic.
Wasn't she dead?
Destroying a person's heart or brain in the Consciousness Cloud was supposed to kill them.
Wait—Bao Ruiming had made an error.
Zhu Ning hung her head, staring at the void where her heart should be. A bizarre perspective—she could see all the way through to the back of her own body.
She seemed dazed, not yet adjusted to her shattered shell. She murmured to herself, "Danger Sense didn't trigger."
Danger Sense was definitely functional. During the beach landing battle, Zhu Ning had used it to survive two extra times.
They'd breached the Firewall. To the Consciousness Cloud, Zhu Ning was like a virus—at that point, she could easily have been killed by the Firewall. A bullet through her skull or heart would have ended her.
Yet even after Bao Ruiming had skewered her heart, her Danger Sense never reacted.
Her hands looked as though they were composed of countless data fragments. Zhu Ning stared at the strange Data Blocks on her body. "Why didn't Danger Sense trigger?"
She seemed to be asking Bao Ruiming—like a student humbly consulting an old professor in a university lecture hall.
Zhu Ning hadn't done a thing. She hadn't revealed any killing intent. She was simply looking at her own hands.
Bao Ruiming actually took a step back. He'd remained calm even after realizing his mistake—until he heard about Danger Sense.
Bao Ruiming stood rigid, his brain strung taut. He still hadn't processed it.
Danger Sense?
Zhu Ning possessed Danger Sense?
When Ability Users entered the Consciousness Cloud, their abilities were stripped away, because the Cloud was just a string of data—abilities couldn't be carried into the brain.
How could Zhu Ning use an ability?
No—was what she was using even truly an ability?
Who on earth was she?
"Oh," Zhu Ning said. "The server's been shut down."
[Related services have been halted. Maintenance in progress.]
These words flashed across the Consciousness Cloud. Liu Niannian had shut down all of Bao Ruiming's services. The reason Zhu Ning had been able to be injured before was that the server had been operational.
Before leaving, Liu Niannian had told Zhu Ning to protect her heart and head, because being pierced by the security system would truly kill her.
Liu Niannian had essentially turned off the antivirus software. Bao Ruiming had made an error—he'd lost his home-field advantage, yet out of habit, he'd still used his claws to kill.
Now Zhu Ning and Bao Ruiming were trapped together inside an offline Cloud.
Bao Ruiming's claws were a component coded in at the time. Him using them to kill her was merely two data streams colliding.
Zhu Ning could still feel pain—her abdomen and back still ached—but there was no pain in her chest.
It suddenly clicked. None of her various talents had worked because there was no metal here, no liquid either.
A simple truth. She'd been aware of it from the moment she'd entered, only realizing it now.
There was nothing here. This was the Consciousness Cloud—a void. She and Bao Ruiming were nothing but lines of code, made of data.
The Consciousness Cloud converted human consciousness into code. But Zhu Ning herself was code. She didn't even have a brain or heart in the traditional sense.
She was the fusion of technology and Contaminant. All this time, she'd been developing the Contaminant side. The technology side had never been explored.
Data. This was a world of data.
In theory, she could encode her own body. She could become her own god.
For Zhu Ning, the Consciousness Cloud with its server shut down was a solipsistic world—everything moved at her will.
"Your server has crashed," Zhu Ning said. "Mine doesn't seem to have."
This wasn't a Contamination Zone. This was the Consciousness Cloud.
Bao Ruiming's power had come from Creation Technology. Zhu Ning's came from the System.
Zhu Ning raised her eyes. A drop of blood clung to her lashes. Her pupils had turned ice-blue, data streams churning wildly within them.
Bao Ruiming had always been supremely composed. This time, a chill ran down his spine—not because Zhu Ning had risen from the dead, not because he couldn't kill her, but because of what he saw in her eyes.
He seemed to understand the look she was giving him. It was like staring at a machine.
Impossible.
Danger Sense. Human-body digitization. Those combined were far too familiar.
The most improbable answer surged into Bao Ruiming's mind—was Zhu Ning an Alpha Series Experiment subject?
Eighty years ago, humanity erected the High Wall and ushered in the era of the great Genetic Screening. The first generation of First-Class Citizens had dedicated themselves to saving all of humanity, determined to lead the species toward a brighter future.
To combat contamination, everyone was trying to save the world in their own field. Ideologies varied wildly.
A branch of Eternal Pharma had launched the Alpha Series Experiment—fusing Contaminants with code, using precise technology to control chaotic, disordered Contaminants, thereby achieving perfect equilibrium.
The experiment subjects' underlying logic was to purify the entire world.
The Alpha Series Experiment ran diametrically opposed to Bao Ruiming's faith—two completely divergent paths.
Bao Ruiming had never believed the experiment could succeed. It sounded fantastical—Contaminants were undefeatable, yet humanity dared try to harness them with technology.
It was as absurd as humans using a computer to attack a god.
And why would Contaminants help humanity purify the world? To use an imperfect analogy—would humans help ants kill other humans? The project was fundamentally flawed from the start.
Hadn't the Alpha Series Experiment failed?
When it first emerged, Bao Ruiming had followed it closely. But unsurprisingly, the experiment was eventually declared a failure. Their exploration had hit a bottleneck—years of effort with no breakthrough, immense resources squandered—and the laboratory was officially shut down.
The lead researcher had disappeared.
The Alpha Series was a joke.
Bao Ruiming had verified multiple times—all experiment subjects from that era had been destroyed and scrapped.
If a successful subject existed, why wouldn't Eternal Pharma have made it public?
Bao Ruiming's voice trembled. "You're an experiment subject?"
Zhu Ning let out a casual "huh." "You know me?"
In that instant, Bao Ruiming felt as though he'd plunged into an icy abyss. The Alpha Series Experiment had actually succeeded.
Zhu Ning hadn't attacked him, yet those words cut deeper than the most vicious assault in the world.
This was a strike aimed directly at the level of faith. Zhu Ning had shattered his Idol—first in the physical sense. Now she was going to shatter Bao Ruiming psychologically.
Bao Ruiming didn't fear death. He'd always felt that dying was fine—the apocalypse was imminent, and he knew his god would descend.
As long as he was certain of that, Bao Ruiming could face death with equanimity.
But if the Alpha Series had a successful product, it was like planting an unstable molecule—a bomb that could go off anytime, anywhere.
Did anyone else know?
Bao Ruiming had learned of it first. Zhu Ning was extremely dangerous—likely still in her nascent stage, not even clear on her own abilities. A fully matured experiment subject would have killed him the instant she entered the Cloud.
Yet here Zhu Ning was, still trying to learn how to use her powers.
Bao Ruiming had identified his organization's enemy. Mobilizing everything to hunt down Zhu Ning before she could grow was the optimal choice.
Bao Ruiming knew all of this but couldn't relay it to anyone.
He wanted to issue one final order—if he died, those who came after must kill Zhu Ning at any cost.
The current Zhu Ning couldn't withstand an organization's full assault. Now was the best window.
Bao Ruiming was a consummate hunter, still scheming even at this juncture. Given the chance, he would absolutely pass on the intelligence.
But there was no chance.
Because Creation Technology's server had been shut down. Bao Ruiming couldn't contact anyone.
He'd uploaded his consciousness in the first place to escape capture. Now Creation Technology had locked him in permanently.
What tormented Bao Ruiming most wasn't his impending death—it was the possibility that the once-certain Divine Descent might fail because of Zhu Ning.
The thought drove him to the brink of madness.
Bao Ruiming was changing. His aged face turned profoundly sinister in an instant. Black lines writhed along his back, and something was struggling to burst free from his body.
Bao Ruiming had rarely killed with his own hands. He was the strategist. He had already killed Zhu Ning once.
He had one last chance. He would prove the absurdity of the Alpha Series. He hadn't lost.
Zhu Ning watched the black lines multiply. Bao Ruiming's body was swelling. Something was trying to extend from beneath his suit trousers—different from the claws on his back—two crab-like legs.
Bao Ruiming's consciousness was on the verge of collapse. A Contamination Zone was forming here.
Ding—
[You have activated the Side Quest: Illusory Floating Sand Island. Objective: Kill Bao Ruiming.]
Author's Note:
I wanted to finish this in one go but my body wouldn't allow it. This arc is almost over!
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