The time left for Ren Zhong is only half an hour.

It seems ample, but in fact, it's not.

He must contact Sun Ai as quickly as possible, and have Sun Ai complete the work of forced shutdown and format program writing.

But before all this happens, there's a prerequisite—he must awaken Sun Ai's personality.

Ren Zhong tried diligently to observe his surroundings, attempting to capture some information he could recognize.

After a moment, in a haze, he finally "saw" some flickering light shadows in the void.

Sometimes these light shadows were green, sometimes red.

The two kinds of light shadows appeared suddenly and then extinguished instantly.

The position of each appearance was also inconsistent, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes left, sometimes right.

This indicated that fierce confrontations and struggles were happening in the communication module of the computing power where his consciousness resided.

From an intuitive perspective, the two colors of light shadows gave him different feelings.

Red was more chaotic, filled with a violent aura, as if wanting to tear apart everything it touched.

Green was stable and peaceful, giving a sense of orderliness.

After brief consideration, Ren Zhong decided to try approaching the red light shadow.

He was taking a gamble.

Of course, even if he gambled wrong, it wouldn't be a big problem.

Anyway, the current "net" couldn't send out information, it couldn't do anything.

Even if exposed, well, it would just be a death.

However, Ren Zhong found it extremely difficult to capture the red shadow. Even though he had lost track of time, he still felt that the speed of light shadow changes was too fast, impossible to ponder or touch, let alone exchange information with it.

At the same time, Hua Yuelan and Chen Qiao, standing outside the light wall, also began to act.

Hua Yuelan opened an instrument resembling a searchlight and aimed it at the back of Ren Zhong's neck, then pressed the launch button.

A cable slowly floated out from the hole in the front end of the instrument, crossing the barrier of the light wall and attaching to the back of Ren Zhong's neck.

Then, the top of the cable began to probe out superconducting wires made of biomass material as thin as capillaries, piercing into the back of Ren Zhong's neck and continuing to extend inward, weaving into a web and wrapping around his spinal nerves.

On this side, after seeing the connection success prompt on the instrument, Chen Qiao pressed the start button.

In the next moment, a large amount of biological microelectric signal released by simulated neurons during information transmission entered Ren Zhong's spinal nerves through the superconducting wire and directly acted on the depths of Ren Zhong's brain.

These signals "deceived" Ren Zhong's body perception, causing his brain to start frantically secreting dopamine, further elevating his mental excitement level.

Under this stimulation, Ren Zhong's consciousness in the data ocean suddenly inflated and began to be controllable by thoughts.

The concept of such behavior is equivalent to Ren Zhong having completed consciousness upload, temporarily storing his consciousness in the "hard drive", with the program having self-awareness, capable of autonomously choosing partitions in the hard drive to occupy.

Finally, a red light shadow briefly appeared by his "side", and before it disappeared, Ren Zhong quickly spread his information over it.

In the next instant, his physical perception suddenly changed.

In front of him was no longer nothingness, but a huge lattice instead.

Ren Zhong immediately recognized the lattice as the physical structure of the "net".

At this moment, the lattice was still lush green, with occasional blocks of yellow, red, and black appearing.

Suddenly, a smudge of strange red appeared in the corner.

Then the red began to spread in all directions.

The green part suddenly brightened, with streams of data flowing towards the red area.

The red was frequently on the verge of being engulfed by the data flow, seemingly just a step away from being swallowed, but it always managed to escape danger at the last minute, finding gaps in the huge data flow, bursting out, and spreading even faster until finally rivaling the green and each occupying half of the territory.

Yet, just as the red occupied area was about to reach 50%, the intensity of the green's resistance suddenly increased, with a sudden increase in the magnitude of counterattacks against the red blocks.

Thus, the two parties engaged in a tug-of-war around the 50% boundary, vying for dominance, evenly matched.

Ren Zhong immediately understood the significance of these block changes.

It was precisely the process of confrontation between Sun Ai incarnated as a virus and the "net" itself over the past twenty years.

The reason why Sun Ai's progress was smooth in the early stages, but encountered difficulties near 50%, should be because the creator of the "net" set up a underlying protection system to prevent the "net" from being completely destroyed.

For the past twenty years, the "net" hadn't actually been damaged, it was just busy entangling with Sun Ai and had no time for anything else.

Back when they entered the "net," Sun Ai had said she would try to self-destruct to perish together.

Now it seems she couldn't achieve that.

If no external interference occurs, she must continue entangling with the "net" in this space until the end of time, until the "net's" energy is exhausted, simultaneously falling into slumber.

Or, the "net" could be dragged back to the headquarters of the Mechanical Empire. Then, top-notch programmers would intervene to assist the "net" in destroying Sun Ai from the outside, or they could physically intervene, dismantling the "net" and clearing all the useless data inside.

For the Mechanical Empire, the truly useful data is the cosmic hash value, not the "net" program itself.

They had acquired it long ago.

Looking at the changing light shadows, Ren Zhong thought, this data should be the "memories" of Sun Ai.

Back in Starfire Town, he had once been pulled into Sun Ai's memory in a dream and sat in her simulated "chief seat," experiencing the leader's philosophy of the Nameless City.

In the end, Ren Zhong's philosophy prevailed over the other's.

After all this time, unexpectedly, in a different setting and in a different way, Ren Zhong found himself in Sun Ai's memory again.

Having had the experience once before, Ren Zhong immediately thought of a way to break the deadlock.

First, he constructed a clear command in his mind.

Outside, Hua Yuelan recognized it and began recording a program capable of deep hypnosis of the human brain, as taught by Sun Miao long ago.

New biological microelectric signals entered Ren Zhong's brain through the superconducting wire again, pulling him into a "dream within a dream".

The vision shifted, and Ren Zhong appeared in a scene he found somewhat familiar.

It was still the Nameless City.

Last time he was here, Sun Ai had shown him the spacious streets, beautiful houses, bustling traffic and people, creating an extraordinarily lively street.

But this time, Ren Zhong only saw collapsed houses, ruins everywhere, damaged corpses.

The streets were desolate and empty, devoid of people, with only the skeletons on the ground proving there had once been living people here.

Ren Zhong wandered along the streets, moving quickly and effortlessly.

Finally, he reached the city's center.

There was a no longer towering house, which was the council hall of the Nameless City.

Over a hundred years ago, a group of talented people from the wilderness with shared ideals gathered here, trying to carve out a path of survival for all the wilderness people, and almost succeeded.

But now, the hall had long since been shattered, littering the ground with desolate ruins.

In front of the pile of rubble, Ren Zhong saw a small figure.

It was a little girl dressed in her favorite pink dress from when she was alive.

She stood like a statue.

The hem of her dress fluttered gently in the wind.

Ren Zhong approached and tried calling out, "Sun Ai?"

The girl, with her back to him, didn't respond.

Ren Zhong moved around to her front and saw that once mischievous little face was rigid and expressionless, like a robot.

She was unaware of Ren Zhong's arrival, her eyes unfocused.

Red light gleamed in her pupils.

These microchanges of red light were highly synchronized with the changes in the blocks outside.

In some sense, this meant Sun Ai's "program" had been relying on the obsession with the Nameless City to contend with the unimaginable enemy, the "net," for twenty years.

Although Sun Ai was no longer a human now, a smile appeared on Ren Zhong's face.

He stood still, arms open wide.

His dreamland began to spread from his feet, gradually enveloping Sun Ai.

Outside, Hua Yuelan and Chen Qiao simultaneously activated the final step, reading the memories of Sun Miao and Tang Shuying from the Crystal Core of the young Legion Beast.

Ren Zhong only had one-ten-thousandth of a second left.

But he believed Sun Ai could "see" Sun Miao and Tang Shuying's entire lives in that one-ten-thousandth of a second.

Although Ren Zhong had never read the two's life memories, he believed they must have left countless heartfelt words for Sun Ai.

Especially after Sun Ai's sacrifice, until the two's life journey ended, the indelible longing that remained in each of their hearts.

This is an emotion that can never be simulated by a program.