"No! Sir... no..."
Qin Zhilu sneered, "Don't force me to look at your screen."
"Uh..." An Yu pinched his slightly sweaty palms, glanced at An who was looking at him inexplicably, covered the phone and whispered: "I'm sorry, but please allow me to continue to raise it. It's still here." …It’s quite likeable… Please.”
"Really?" Qin Zhilu's tone was light and hard to guess, "What's the difference between it and me?"
An Yu said truthfully: "It is gentler and less dangerous. The animation design of the two-headed body makes people relax, and it also..."
"Destroy it."
"But -" An Yu's heartbeat stopped. Ling Qiu had never taught him how to adapt to this situation. He quickly said based on instinct: "But it's just a piece of code. It's not powerful and can't bring me anything." A sense of security can only relieve boredom."
He paused and then said: "I will use it to simulate a conversation with you so as not to say anything that offends you, sir."
After a few seconds of silence in the earphones, An Yu was already planning to say goodbye to the little octopus man.
He was even guessing how the commander's AI would react when it heard that it would be destroyed.
There will be silence for about two seconds, and then he calmly says: "You made a smart decision and did a good job. Goodbye, An Yu."
"Okay." Qin Zhilu turned over the page, "What does it look like?"
"Well……"
"octopus?"
An Yu was silent, and Qin Zhilu chuckled, "It's up to you. There's still one minute to land, and Yan's chosen point is on the east side of Area 34, very close to the hospital. I have carefully browsed the battle reports of all the amnesiac soldiers, and the location of the hospital has appeared. The ratio is very high, that must be where the abnormal population gathers in District 34.”
"Understood." An Yu calmed down, "Let's go to the hospital as soon as possible."
"Being remote does not mean not participating in the mission. Although I will not continue to speak, I will always keep the public channel online. You can speak at any time." Qin Zhilu said businesslikely, and the topic suddenly changed, "The battle report will be written for you. Just focus on your mission.”
An Yu was stunned, "Really?"
"Writing for you is much more convenient than revising what you wrote after I come back." Qin Zhilu approved him cleanly and said, "I wish you good luck."
As soon as he finished speaking, the restraining feeling of the seat belt suddenly became stronger. A few seconds later, the plane landed in the open space in front of an abandoned factory in District 34.
The moment An Yu and his group stepped out of the cabin, it was as if they had stepped into a basin of hot soup.
The extremely humid and warm air enveloped every inch of the skin, and the pores all over the body were wide open, making it difficult to breathe.
A gust of wind blew by, and it was so hot that An Yu's temples instantly began to throb.
Ning tightened An's hood and whispered to himself, "With this climate... no wonder there are regular plagues."
The terminal shows that it is now 5:38 in the evening, and the sunset in Area 34 will arrive in 26 minutes.
Before sunset, there were many people on the street in District 34. They were all nearby workers who came out to have dinner. They were wearing old and colorful linen shirts and were sweating profusely.
The whole street is filled with small restaurants, with tables set up outside and old fans blowing hot air.
Occasionally, a few dilapidated and swaying buses pass by, and the on-board electronic screen displays the real-time physical environment: the temperature is 44 degrees Celsius and the humidity is 87%.
An Yu and his group were walking on the road, their attire was out of place, not to mention there were several mechanical balls lingering around their bodies.
But they only received a few indifferent glances occasionally and did not attract much attention.
Lu Ming walked beside An Yu and whispered: "People here seem to be very numb."
"Yeah." An Yu's eyes passed over the cramped and tall buildings on both sides. The outer walls were gray and yellow, revealing the cement bricks and tiles inside. The messy cables were hanging and entangled between the buildings, and they were mixed with the clothes drying pole on the balcony. . There were people on some balconies, girls wearing floral vests and shorts looking down from high places. Those immature eyes were also numb and did not stop at anything.
The appearance of the residents resembles that of the slums in Area 53, but the material conditions are obviously better.
An Yu then roughly scanned the rice bowls held by the workers. What they ate were soup rice or noodle soup. Half a bowl of staple food was poured with a spoonful of rice water, various mixed vegetables were chopped and thrown in, and the pig skin was rubbed with oil. , there will be a few pieces of broken eggs floating in the more sophisticated bowls.
If it were Area 53, it would be impossible for ordinary workers to afford these meals every meal. It would have to be those people who have regular businesses or small businesses in the outer cities.
An Yu concluded: "District 34 is not considered poor."
As soon as he finished speaking, everyone around him turned towards him and stopped talking.
"Really." An Yu added: "To be precise, half of the workers have eggs in their bowls. They are so rich."
"You have redefined the definition of extremely rich." Yan retracted his gaze, "But I understand that the people of Baicheng with such material conditions will not live in such numbness. According to the data, the pillar industry of District 34 is not industry. Workers are just a group with a lower standard of living in this city. There are several good cultural industry companies here, and there is also a sizable hospital. People from nearby Baicheng often come here for medical treatment."
An Yu nodded, "Yes, that's what I mean."
There is something wrong with this state of collective apathy.
His eyes suddenly caught the little boy sitting on the ground at the door of the corridor in front. He was holding his feet. There was a large bleeding scratch on his ankle. The wound was not treated in time and was already somewhat inflamed.
Tears welled up in his eyes, he hugged his ankles and blew repeatedly, then sucked it in with his mouth, and then spit it out.
An Yu walked over and asked, "How long has it been?"
The little boy raised his head, and the hot wind fascinated his sight. He looked at An Yu for a long time before saying, "It's been fourteen days."
"Don't you feel something is wrong?"
"I must have been infected with some insect poison when I fell. There were too many unknown bugs." The little boy wiped the corner of his mouth with his dirty sleeve. "Every time the wound was almost healed, it would fester again." If it’s cracked, there must be something dirty that hasn’t come out yet.”
As he spoke, he picked up his feet again and was about to suck them again, but An Yu reached out to hold his shoulders and said, "Stop sucking."
He took out Billy's ointment, applied a little on the wound, and then stared at the wound without blinking.
The hot wind blowing across his face seemed to create ripples in his golden eyes. After a moment, the little boy lowered his head in surprise. The pain was quickly dissipating from his ankle. He watched the wound heal rapidly, but at the moment when the skin was almost aligned and healed, he suddenly paused for a moment.
An Yu frowned, and the tense pupils in his eyes slowly dilated.
After a few seconds, the wound opened again.
Big tears fell from the boy's drooping eyes, and he sobbed twice, "Sure enough, it won't get better."
An Yu said no more, turned and left.
The other four people were watching all this not far away. Yan said thoughtfully: "You can use the acceleration of time so easily..."
The other three people were stunned and didn't say anything for a long time. After a long while, Ning said: "An would like to ask, why did you not succeed in the end? Are you not yet proficient in using this ability?"
"It's not that we didn't succeed, it's that we didn't fight with that thing." An Yu whispered. The climate in Area 53 was cold. He couldn't stand the hot wind. He also put his hood over his head and looked at the time on the terminal. The voice said: "At the moment when the wound was about to heal, there was a force that wanted to reset his time. That was the real cause of his repeated wound opening."
He paused and then said, "Shangfeng won't let us alert the enemy. If I intervene forcefully, that thing will find out."
In the earphones, Qin Zhilu said: "Well done."
"Thank you, sir." An Yu looked at the little octopus man on the terminal who had finished eating and started working out, holding a dozen dumbbells with a dozen tentacles, and whispered: "Sir, I discovered a strange phenomenon."
"What?"
“The city doesn’t seem to have time.”
Along the way, he passed more than 40 small restaurants. Through the wide open doors of each restaurant, he could see the layout inside the restaurant at a glance.
There is no clock on the bare wall, but there are traces of the clock's existence. The only two clocks with electronic clocks had black screens. The electronic display of the bus I just passed by only showed the bus schedule and environmental data, but not the time. The most important thing is that there is an obvious watch mark on the little boy's dark arm, but it is also bare there.
An Yu took a deep breath of hot air and exhaled it slowly.
"The mechanical clock has disappeared, and electronic time has disappeared from all screens." He said: "Although I was always sleeping in the past, the first thing I did every time I woke up was to look at the calendar and time. It's hard to imagine. , how do people live in a city that has lost the tools to measure time.”
Chapter 63 Time Console·63
The east side of District 34 is an industrial-intensive area, and there are many people in the same situation as the little boy. Injuries sustained by workers at work never heal, and they return to the injured state every time time is reset. This does not endanger their lives, but they just relive the pain endlessly.
The minor injuries and illnesses were fine, but the most pitiful thing was a man who lost half of his hand due to a machine failure. When An Yu and his group passed by, he was sitting on the street playing with a knife with dull eyes.
Qin Zhilu said on the team's public channel: "I just checked with Shangfeng and found that the people in the communication center of District 34 have also lost the concept of time. It's just that they didn't realize it at all and only reacted after being reminded. Shangfeng was in the communication The time information was appended, and when they received it, the line of text disappeared, and the electronic time that should have been displayed when surfing the Internet daily was also wiped clean. Now the main city can only communicate the time orally."
"There are still people who are completely unaware of the disappearance of time." An Yu glanced at the few people on the street who were staring at their wounds. A silent tragedy was unfolding in the city. He said softly: "It seems that everyone The degree of impact varies.”
Qin Zhilu continued: "This super abnormal body cannot create a complete space-time disorder zone and cannot block communications. It should use different degrees of time plunder on different people to prevent the abnormality from being detected."
He transferred to the private channel with An Yu, "Have you also undergone a full-sequence gene induction test, and have you not lost your sense of time?"
An Yu looked away from the grocery store on the street - inside the open door, the store owner was crying, but as far as he could see, there were no obvious injuries on his body.
"No, I just feel a lot of pain, and I have been trying to stop my heart from bursting out of my body." An Yu said calmly, "Sir, have you experienced this?"
Qin Zhilu said "Yes", "Yes."
He flipped the pages and spoke in a calm tone, as if he was talking about someone else's affairs, "Do you remember what I told you that when I was 16, I was briefly blind for four hours after a gene injection?"
An Yu stopped at the door of the grocery store, "Remember, it's the second to last door."
"What door?"
An Yu quickly said: "It's nothing..."
Fortunately, Qin Zhilu did not go into details and continued: "I also lost the perception of time during those four hours. I thought it was at least a few days or even months. Time is not an objective thing. Losing the perception of time will cause pain to people. It comes from inner demons. Maybe it’s because you have absolute mental stability that you won’t be affected.”
An Yu stepped into the grocery store.
The shop owner is a middle-aged man. His mother died in the last wave of plague, but because the time vehicle disappeared, he can no longer tell the exact number of days his mother died.
He lowered his head and looked at his nails filled with black mud. "I can't control it. Every time I think the sadness is going to subside, it comes back again. I went to the hospital to see a psychiatrist..." He trembled and put his nails in his mouth. Chew, "You say I'm not sick. It's the same thing for normal people who lose their loved ones."
A trace of pity appeared in Ning's eyes, and he whispered to An Yu: "It seems that not only the trauma visible to the naked eye, but also the pain in the heart cannot escape its insight."
Qin Zhilu introduced in the team channel: "He is one of the first people to have mental abnormalities. According to the data, the abnormal person first appeared three months ago."
Lu Ming, who had been silent all this time, suddenly asked: "Didn't anything happy happen during this period?"
"My son was born." The man thought for a long time before saying, "I seem to be happy. This is something I have been looking forward to for many years. I just forgot how I felt at that time."
An Yu thought of the soldiers who had lost their memory, "Is it because they can't remember it well, or are they unable to perceive that memory at all?"
The man's eyes were a little dazed, and he stayed there for a long time before saying: "It's hard to say, I feel like my life is like a rope that has been cut in a mess. Some of the rope's knots disappeared out of thin air, and some of them kept repeating themselves."
Walking out of the grocery store, Yan said, "Time is just a man-made concept. It's hard to imagine how to tamper with it."
An Yu answered him naturally, "Time has its own unique way of compilation."
After he finished speaking, he was suddenly stunned. After a while, he remembered that this sentence was said by the commander in the orphanage. At that time, he blindfolded him and taught him to block interference and focus on perception.
Walking to the back door of the hospital, a noisy discussion suddenly sounded in the earphones, followed by a booming sound and the channel fell into dead silence.
Yan immediately asked: "What, something happened in the main city?"
An Yu touched his ear and said, "Sir? Are you okay?"
"I'm fine. Everything is normal in the main city." Qin Zhilu's footsteps sounded again in the earphones, and the soles of his shoes hit the ground regularly, which was reassuring. As he walked, he explained: "Sorry, I forgot to mute the sound just now. I was just passing by the Minaret Video Hall."
