Qin Xuezhong felt like she had just woken from a dream.
It felt like being in her mother's womb—floating in warm water, gently swaying, with indistinct sounds occasionally reaching her ears.
Safe, cozy.
She didn't have to think about anything, nor worry about anything.
She wanted to float like this forever.
Even though she had no memories from before her birth, at this moment, she seemed to inherently know that this was the feeling of being in her mother's womb.
Outside, many things were happening, reduced to vague vibrations passing through her body, then vanishing without a trace.
It seemed unrelated to her.
As for why she was here, that question never even surfaced.
After an unknown amount of time, she suddenly felt the previously gentle warmth around her fade into nothingness.
The once soft current seemed to have stilled, leaving a deathly silence.
It was as if she had been suddenly trapped in an underwater tomb.
Dazed, Qin Xuezhong took a long time to realize she could move.
In the chaos, she fumbled for a long time before finally finding an exit.
The exit was tiny, barely the width of her fingertip.
In a daze, she gathered her strength and somehow squeezed through the opening.
As soon as she emerged, she shivered.
So cold!
All around were countless tiny specks of light, in a pitch-black space.
After floating for a short while in this space of light, she finally saw a window.
The view outside was dirty; it looked like a waste processing room.
She saw a brain encased in a container being placed into a shredder.
The next second, sharp drill bits and saws brutally shattered the container, turning the brain into a bloody mess.
Everything went dark before her eyes, and all thought ceased.
---
When she woke up again, Qin Xuezhong was floating in warm water for a long time, gradually awakening to a strong fear inside her.
She wasn't in her mother's womb; she… was that brain!
A wave of anxiety brought back all her memories.
She wasn't that brain!
She had just connected to Ouyang Zhao's brain underground in a psychiatric hospital!
How did it turn out like this?
No consciousness space, no light spheres, no exits—she was thrown straight into a role-play?
Whatever this was, it gave Qin Xuezhong a clear purpose—to keep the brain she was portraying alive.
The warm water she had felt earlier was likely the nutrient solution in an organ cultivation chamber.
The exit she sensed was actually a data interface inside the chamber.
That space composed of light points was probably the internal network of some facility.
And the window with the image was most likely the camera in the waste processing room.
Just as she figured this out, she quickly extended her consciousness and found the camera again.
Before she could see the specific image, just seeing the waste processing room made her heart sink.
This meant that her most recent camera was this one.
So, she was already inside the waste processing room!
Indeed, this time the image appeared a bit earlier than before— the cultivation chamber containing the brain was just placed on the shredder.
She immediately exited the camera view and found the shredder's data interface.
But just as she connected, the shredder ruthlessly started up again.
She was back to square one.
After dying countless times in vain, she gradually found the trick—always think of painful things.
As long as she thought of painful memories, she wouldn't linger too long in the initial sense of safety.
So, she repeatedly reinforced her feelings of working overtime before her crossing—every night spent to dawn, the endless back-and-forth with clients and superiors, and the countless nightmares during project periods.
In fact, compared to the terrifying cases in the cyber world, those past experiences seemed trivial.
However, here, she had the ability to resolve those issues, making them less scary.
In her old world, she was just an ordinary person constantly pressured by life and work, where even seemingly insignificant matters could drive someone to collapse.
Soon, when the pressure became great enough, she woke up at the beginning of the scene.
Through the countless cameras around her, she saw that this was a small room.
It was filled with sensors to monitor air quality, light, and temperature, ensuring the environment remained absolutely stable.
In the center of the room floated Ouyang Zhao's brain in a cultivation chamber.
Surrounding it were countless industrial-grade data cables leading into the ceiling.
For the first time, she felt a complete sense of helplessness.
—It was just a brain, surrounded only by sensors and cameras, and she couldn't connect to the mainframe or other devices through those data cables.
Perhaps because she was about to be transferred, the connections had already been severed in advance.
Want to escape?
Without hands, feet, eyes, or ears, how could she escape?
At that moment, the room's door opened, and two automatic unloading robots slid in.
In the loading bay behind them was another nearly identical cultivation chamber. It looked like it was going to replace the brain she was portraying.
Wait.
She had previously thought that someone had taken Ouyang Zhao's brain away. But it turned out it was being replaced, and they were going to destroy her?!
The developer of the mainframe, who sacrificed himself to stabilize the world, was being tossed into a shredder like this?!
The first idea that came to her was to hack one of the robots and make her escape.
However, she was just a brain.
And these two robots had no wireless signal receiving capabilities; they operated solely on preset programs.
This was similar to what she had seen when she visited the mainframe core shaft—most devices were well-isolated to prevent network security vulnerabilities.
Before long, her vision went dark— the robots had removed her from the device platform, cutting off her direct connection to the camera.
With few options, she died once more.
After numerous attempts, she found a simple yet crude method.
—The camera on the ceiling was not very well concealed; there were a bunch of data cables stuffed behind the ceiling. By swinging the camera back and forth beyond its limits, she managed to damage the camera's base, causing it to fall.
Next came the moment of testing her luck.
Because the position where the robots stopped had no camera, she had to make the camera fall precisely near the interface behind the robot at the right moment to establish a data connection.
At the same time, each time before getting rid of the camera, she had to black out all the sensors and other cameras to avoid detection.
This process led to dozens of deaths.
It was fortunate that she had good luck.
The difficulty of this was a bit like throwing a coin from several stories up into a small cup on the ground… it wasn't completely devoid of skill, but it was mostly reliant on luck.
As she numbly failed again and again, suddenly, the fallen camera lodged perfectly against the emergency switch behind the robot.
Qin Xuezhong instantly hacked in.
The robot immediately halted.
Then, she manipulated the robot to carefully secure the data cables to prevent disconnection.
For the next while, everything went much smoother—she first set the program to take down Ouyang Zhao's brain, then immediately reconnected it to the robot, instead of routing through the camera's cables.
Next, following the robot's original program, she entered the waste processing room.
At this point, Qin Xuezhong finally let out a breath. Yet, she also became more anxious.
Because having come this far, if she had to die again, she might have to throw dozens or even hundreds of cameras again, which was simply the most torturous game in the world.
She knew this was some location within the mainframe core shaft, and even if she wanted to exit through the waste processing room, she would have to pass through very stringent scans.
Unless there was some unrecorded secret way in and out…
Thinking of the word "secret," Little Qin felt a tremor in her brain waves.
—This was a memory from ten years ago. Ten years ago… didn't Yu Zhezhong say that he was diagnosed with a brain disease and was coerced into the Puppet Plan?
Then… would the Yu Zhezhong of that time also be here now?
The Puppet Plan itself was a dark secret, and Yu Zhezhong had a complete set of command codes allowing free entry and exit in the capital area.
Conveniently, she knew where Yu Zhezhong was and was familiar with his brain.
Qin Xuezhong decided to act.
She pulled up the nearby map, located the passage that this robot had access to, and roughly planned a route to Yu Zhezhong's rest area.
To conceal the organ cultivation chamber, she began to follow the route.
—But she didn't expect to encounter so many enemies on her way out.
Almost every corner, every duty room, and every important entrance was filled with fully armed soldiers.
---
It was somewhat abnormal.
Little Qin eavesdropped on a few patrol teams' conversations.
"Is there an intruder?"
"No, I heard it's an internal disturbance in the mainframe database. They're currently troubleshooting, so it might be down for a little while."
"Damn, a shutdown is a big deal..."
"No kidding, the consortium is probably going to lose a lot of money..."
Qin Xuezhong roughly guessed what was going on.
Because the core of the mainframe was being replaced, it was a significant event. To cover up this replacement process, the mainframe fabricated a pretense of a database disturbance.
This led to heightened security everywhere.
Getting past them seemed nearly impossible.
After several failed attempts, Little Qin was truly exasperated.
Mainly because each time she died, she had to return to the starting room, endlessly tossing cameras.
Eventually, out of impatience, she secretly dealt with a few people, stole some weapons, outfitted the robots in steel armor, and charged in directly.
Of course, this was just an outlet for her frustration.
To escape in such a heavily guarded environment was nearly impossible.
After venting, she returned to square one and earnestly sought a stealthy approach.
She hacked into the mainframe's edge network, dug up dirt on the staff for blackmail, even considered modifying robots to traverse the ventilation ducts, or hiding the brain in the cafeteria's soup pot to try to slip by…
After dying thousands of times, she finally settled on the most direct but tedious method—finding blind spots in the patrols and moving little by little.
If outsiders saw this scene, they would definitely think that the robot controlled by Qin Xuezhong was a real ghost.
This movement was almost muscle memory after countless deaths.
—Whenever a patrol member turned around, she could take advantage of those few seconds to black out the cameras and move to the next gap.
It was like an invisible ghost striding through the dense patrols.
When she finally walked through the security zone and opened the door to Yu Zhezhong's room, there was nothing inside, only a white light.
She was stunned for a moment, then realized that this meant she had cleared the level?
At that moment, Little Qin had only one thought:
If this memory was a recreation of Ouyang Zhao's escape process from years ago, it was simply… incredible.
Qin Xuezhong had her own consciousness in the void, could easily hack into devices, had learned stealth, and knew of Yu Zhezhong's existence; after restarting over a thousand times, she had finally reached this point.
Ouyang Zhao back then… his memories and emotions were fragmented, and any mistake could mean complete death.
And she had somehow… brought this brain, which was originally destined for destruction, out directly?
One successful attempt?
How did she do it?
Just as Qin Xuezhong was pondering this, a woman's voice rang out, answering her question:
"What else could be done? When pushed to the edge, one must carve out a path."
The voice was gentle yet carried a ruthless decisiveness.
—For the first time, Qin Xuezhong heard Ouyang Zhao's voice, a figure who had been officially recorded as dead for decades and had quietly escaped from the mainframe for ten years.