Riyue Dian’s sanity screamed in denial of everything before him, but the viscous, enveloping sensation in his limbs and the absurd colors forced into his visual nerves cruelly declared that this was no dream.
“Buzz—!” The space itself emitted a low-frequency, grating vibration.
Immediately afterward, everything around him—the writhing black base and the crazily entwined colored light filaments—began to reorganize violently.
The “ground” beneath his feet surged upward, tossing him toward a “sky” haphazardly woven from purple and orange-red threads; meanwhile, the space above his head collapsed into a deep green, constantly swirling vortex.
His sense of direction failed completely; up, down, left, and right became meaningless.
“Ugh!”
He flailed his arms in vain, trying to grab onto something, but only caught a handful of a greasy black substance that quickly flowed through his fingers.
The reorganization was completed within seconds. He found himself half-submerged in a “wall” composed of congealed blue and yellow stripes that resembled blood vessels, which were still faintly pulsating.
‘I have to get out of here!’ A powerful survival instinct overwhelmed his fear.
He struggled desperately, trying to pull his legs out of the viscous black substance that ensnared him.
However, the substance acted like living tar, wrapping around him even tighter and beginning to slowly swallow his lower limbs.
It was cold.
It was not a physical low temperature, but a chill that pierced through his consciousness and stripped away his life force.
Just as he was about to fall into despair, a patch of frantically flickering magenta light filaments not far away suddenly began to condense and deform.
They outlined a rough human silhouette, but the outline was extremely distorted, like a reflection in a funhouse mirror.
Following that, countless tiny, sharp mirror shards precipitated from the light filaments and covered the surface of the silhouette, forming a flickering shadow entity composed of innumerable broken versions of “Riyue Dian.”
The mirrored entity turned toward him silently. In an instant, Riyue Dian saw himself—thousands upon thousands of himself.
Every image was distorted beyond recognition.
Some were terrified, their features displaced; some were grinning menacingly, full of malice; others were vacant and hollow, like dolls…
These distorted images were not merely reflected; they seemed to be amplifying and performing the most hidden fears, anxieties, and self-doubts deep within his heart—
The meaning of Green Dam’s existence, the confusion regarding technical ethics, and the questioning of the value of his own creations…
All the negative emotions suppressed by his rationality were now being dug out by these broken shards and presented in the ugliest possible way, frantically attacking his cognition.
“No… no… that’s not…”
He was incoherent. His stomach churned, and a wave of intense nausea and vertigo hit him.
The mirrored entity “walked” toward him slowly and with a limp. Wherever it passed, the colors of the space became even more frantic and disordered.
It reached out an arm made of a thousand broken shards, grabbing for him.
Extreme terror granted Riyue Dian his final burst of strength. He let out a roar that didn’t sound human and violently wrenched one leg out of the black viscous material, producing a grating, tearing sound.
He scrambled and “fell” backward, but in this space, falling merely meant crashing into another area of shifting colored blocks—this time a grey-white porous structure that resembled rotten cheese.
He didn’t dare look back. He “swam,” “crawled,” and “struggled” with all his might, taking advantage of the brief topographical changes caused by each spatial reorganization to move clumsily and frantically.
The mirrored entity followed at a leisurely pace. The friction of the broken shards produced a hair-raising clicking sound. Those distorted images constantly flickered in his peripheral vision, providing continuous mental contamination.
He noticed the surrounding colors beginning to produce “tastes”—
A sharp, metallic sourness flooded his throat, followed by a cloying, sickly sweet stench like rotting fruit.
Synesthesia had begun; his senses were becoming completely disordered.
Just as he felt his brain was about to be completely melted by this endless madness, he discovered something strikingly different from this bizarre and gaudy alien realm.
It was a forest-green laptop. It appeared beside him without warning, as if it had always been there.
It was completely unaffected by the alien realm; its ordinary, monotonous appearance seemed increasingly unique in this moment.
‘Hope…’
For some unknown reason, Riyue Dian suddenly had a premonition: if he could just turn this laptop on, he would be saved.
Riyue Dian’s fingers trembled as he pressed the power button of the forest-green laptop almost uncontrollably.
*Vrrr—!*
A familiar startup sound belonging to a normal electronic product rang out. In this bizarre realm filled with disordered humming and color-shrieking, it seemed so out of place, yet it sounded like heavenly music.
The screen lit up. It was no longer filled with those crazily distorted blocks of color, but a familiar operating system startup interface.
The blue progress bar moved forward steadily, and every pixel radiated a comforting sense of normalcy.
This small, regular, glowing rectangle seemed to have become the only anchor of order in this chaotic and insane universe.
“Green Dam… start…”
Riyue Dian hoarsely shouted the startup command he had set, acting almost entirely on instinct.
He didn’t know why he was doing it, nor did he know if it would be useful.
It was simply a desperate intuition, a final reliance on something familiar.
**[Command received. Starting—]**
A cold, flat electronic voice came from the laptop’s speakers, clearly penetrating the chaotic noise of the environment.
In the next second, a sudden change occurred.
The light on the laptop screen exploded. It was no longer confined to the screen but projected outward rapidly, instantly enveloping an area of several meters around Riyue Dian.
Within this illuminated zone, the frantically writhing black viscous base that sought to swallow him quickly faded, becoming like the crude black lines of a child’s sketch.
Although it still twitched, it lost its biological vitality and sticky texture, appearing more like ruined marks on paper that had been haphazardly rubbed out with an eraser.
The colored filaments that entwined and sliced through space had their blinding, logic-defying colors quickly “filtered,” turning into bright but gentle pastel colors—
Pink, sky blue, soft yellow…
They remained interwoven, but they no longer caused visual pain; instead, they looked like the imaginative yet disorganized scribbles of a preschooler.
Even the shadow entity composed of countless broken shards that mirrored his internal fears underwent a dramatic transformation the moment the light swept over it.
The shards remained broken, but their edges became rounded. They no longer reflected those extreme, hideous faces, but rather disproportionate, simple line drawings with expressions that were either exaggeratedly surprised ((○´･д･)ﾉ)…
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