After crossing the long wooden plank bridge, you will reach Narcissus Plain. The night sky was deserted. Jiang Zhou stopped when he turned back.
A girl put her hands behind her back with a warm smile on her face. She leaned out toward Jiang Zhou and shouted as if calling from a distance:
"Finally I found you, I've been waiting for you for a long time!"
Her tone sounded like a coquettish accusation, and the biting cold wind passed through her body and hit Jiang Zhou's face coldly.
Jiang Zhou ignored her familiar words.
"Hey, hey, where are we going next? Are we going back?"
Seeing that Jiang Zhou was silent, the girl continued.
Jiang Zhou lowered his head and opened the parchment tablet that Charon had given him before. On the moth-eaten light screen display, information about the Narcissus Plain began to scroll down.
There are records about the Narcissus Plain, which first appeared fifty years ago. It was the brief period of peace between the Second and Third Cyber Wars, and something happened that year that is destined to go down in history - the chief technology executive from Minerva Information Technology completed the brainstorming process. The "Luter Protocol" of the computer interface has once again upgraded the Styx firewall.
To put it simply, this protocol implants the apoptotic program into the brain-computer interface, which greatly reduces the possibility of malicious programs in the abyss dark web rising to the base reality through the abyss wanderer.
Jiang Zhou could imagine what kind of uproar the promotion of this agreement would cause in the Abyss Wanderer group - he remembered that when Qianxia Ying talked about the apoptosis program, she commented on its inventor as " Cruel bitch”.
The Narcissus Plain appeared in this context - according to the statement left by Charon's "horse", the emergence of this place is suspected to be related to a group of abyss wanderers who were dissatisfied with the emergence of the apoptosis program.
As for Hecate, she directly told herself that those people called themselves "fire thieves".
The fire thief, combined with mythological allusions, the first thing Jiang Zhou could think of was the Titan Prometheus who brought fire to mankind.
If the various black technologies of the Abyss Dark Web are regarded as fire, then Jiang Zhou can guess a rough idea of this organizational philosophy based on the name alone.
"Stop looking, let's go home together."
The girl came up, stood behind Jiang Zhou, looked at the parchment tablet in his hand and said angrily.
Jiang Zhou glanced at the girl and still didn't reply to her words.
Because he knew that it was not talking to him.
In fact, this lively and lovely girl is just a remaining ghost.
Looking back, through the other person's translucent body, Jiang Zhou saw that the dock where he had landed had disappeared. The ferry, the River Styx, Charon and Hecate were gone, replaced by a lonely wasteland.
The girl probably thought that Jiang Zhou was looking at her, so she smiled and repeated her previous words:
"Let's go home together."
Her expression was endearing when she said this, but Jiang Zhou ignored the girl's shadow and turned around to continue moving forward.
"Let's go home together... go home... go home... let's go home..."
That girl, after Jiang Zhou turned around and left and was abandoned at the same place, she fell into a lag as if the disk was stuck, and fell into an endless loop.
The reverberation of the substitute...
As Jiang Zhou walked, he read the information left by Charon—or, more precisely, Charon's past "horse".
Because of the special nature of Narcissus Plain, there are no malicious programs wandering here. There are just many abyss wanderers whose consciousness is either forced or voluntarily trapped in the dark web - those beings called wanderers.
They lost their way back to the basic reality through the deep-diving interface. Although the physical body maintained physiological levels through the life-support device of the deep-diving instrument, the stand-in program was forever wandering in the abyss dark web.
As for the original abyss wanderers who were unwilling to update the "apoptosis program" and hid here, if the substitute program was destroyed, it would not lead to physical death, but would rebuild their substitutes in the Narcissus Plain.
After the "Luter Agreement", being able to rebuild one's own avatar is something that can only be achieved by upgrading to Depth 7 and touching the limits of human intelligence. And these wanderers can do this no matter what the adjustment depth is, and it is not without cost - without the deep dive sub-chamber to continuously and synchronously scan the real body state, every time the avatar is rebuilt, the construction error will accumulate.
And when the errors accumulate to a certain extent, the changed avatar will reversely affect the consciousness, so that the final result is... the memory of the mandala is biased, causing the avatar program to deny access.
This was the case with the girl Jiang Zhou saw before - she had experienced countless deaths and reorganizations, but was never able to synchronize her physical body with the base reality. This caused her consciousness to eventually dissipate in this place, leaving only A reverberating program that keeps repeating past behavior.
This is why Jiang Zhou has been too lazy to reply to her.
For him, the biggest revelation he encountered when he encountered this substitute was that the Narcissus Plain was not a peaceful place.
Someone killed the girl many, many times, until her memory of the mandala code was transformed and she became a ghost wandering the plains.
This place has its own cruelties and dangers, and because Jiang Zhou's brain-computer interface has an apoptosis program installed, he cannot die even once.
Therefore, he must remain extremely vigilant.
Even if there are no malicious programs wandering around, the place is still full of dangers.
"Hey, hey, where are we going next?"
With that in mind, the girl's voice came from behind Jiang Zhou again.
The remnant of the previous substitute followed him like a ghost, like a swaying pale ghost.
Does this thing still follow people?
Jiang Zhou still didn't reply, but tried to speed up his speed, trying to get rid of the other party.
With the physical fitness brought about by Icarus Depth 2, he only needs to put in a little effort to continue running faster than a cheetah on flat ground.
However, after running like this for a few minutes, Jiang Zhou found to his dismay that he couldn't get rid of the opponent with his speed - the opponent was also an adjuster and had improved his speed.
"Wait for me, what are you doing so quickly?"
Seeing Jiang Zhou stop, the girl retracted the spiral wings spread behind her shoulder blades and said so.
All right……
Jiang Zhou thought.
At least I had someone to accompany me all the way to relieve my boredom.
…………
The base structure of Narcissus Plain looks like a vast and desolate plain. No matter which direction Jiang Zhou went, all he could see in the end was the same scenery.
When I wanted to come here when it was built, the parameters entered by the developers when generating the map were very exaggerated. In other words, the developers of Narcissus Plain really hope that this place can accommodate as many people as possible.
But fortunately, Jiangzhou has a hacker vision - not through the graphical interface, but through the complexity of the code to observe everything around him. For many things with similar appearance modeling, the actual data volume may differ by several orders of magnitude.
This allowed him to roughly find the direction without being like a headless fly looking for a needle in a haystack in this endless plain.
The core ability of Hecate's blessing, the ability to open paths, cannot be used in Narcissus Plains.
But fortunately, the information Charon left for Jiang Zhou contained a detailed description of the code characteristics of the "horse". This allowed him to avoid too many detours when searching for the opponent's position.
After wandering for about half a day, I found the clues left by the other party, and used this to find the possible path of the other party.
"Are we looking for the way home? We have come so far, are we almost home?"
Jiang Zhou couldn't help but sigh when he heard the ghost's chattering voice coming from behind him again.
In the information Charon gave him, there was no detailed description of the action logic of these substitutes whose consciousness had dissipated. But he never expected that this thing would follow him all the way.
It feels like taking an NPC to complete a task.
Jiang Zhou thought helplessly.
And at this time, after he took a step, it was like an oasis suddenly discovered in the desert. A very modern city suddenly rose up in this wilderness.
Is this the gathering point for the wanderers?
Jiang Zhou stopped and immediately concealed his appearance through the Anonymous program. He saw people outside the city, armed as guards, guarding the door, but no one dared to act rashly.
He planned to observe for a while before talking.
However……
"I'm really home."
The ghost who followed him along the way looked at the modern city with excitement and kept clapping his hands and saying this.
Her movements attracted the attention of the guards.
(End of chapter)
