At this moment, inside the Death Party instance.
Because of the version update, the players besieging Yu Huaiting gradually came to their senses. The two sides were deadlocked, and the scene became momentarily awkward.
The sky of the entire instance suddenly let out an extremely piercing buzz.
Everyone felt a violent flash of white before their eyes, as if a flashbang had detonated in their minds. When their vision refocused, everyone discovered in shock that the original [Version Update Progress: 99/100] had suddenly stuttered.
Then the new version’s update progress vanished completely.
“What’s going on?!”
“The update failed?!”
A wave of incredulous panic erupted from the Source Star players’ camp.
The next second, a cold, mechanical, emotionless system female voice burst into everyone’s minds:
[Warning: Core server connection lost detected.]
[Major system failure.]
[The game is about to enter offline status.]
[All surviving players in instances will be forcibly logged out within 30 seconds, entering the rest area.]
[The seven-day forced instance entry countdown is frozen indefinitely.]
[System shop and points exchange system locked.]
[Other rest area life functions remain operational.]
[30… 29… 28…]
A deathly silence.
The entire battlefield—whether Blue Star players or Source Star players—all stood frozen, dazedly listening to the system update.
“Fu Songcheng?”
Chen Ke stood at the high point, collapsing to his knees as if all strength had drained from him. Bai Mu silently propped him up.
Yu Huaiting stood amid mountains of corpses and seas of blood, letting the wind carrying the smell of gunpowder blow across his blood-soaked cheeks. His heart pounded madly in his chest, an indescribable ecstasy and sourness welling up at the same time.
Fu Songcheng had succeeded.
Single-handedly overturned Source Star’s servers.
And at this moment on Source Star, inside the Source Star building, was already an apocalyptic scene.
“Director! Get out quickly! The load-bearing pillars are damaged—the building has collapse risk!”
The bodyguards shielded Shen Ning desperately, dragging her toward the emergency exit.
Shen Ning looked at the wreckage everywhere, listening to the piercing alarms, and her usual elegant composure finally collapsed.
“Fu Songcheng! You madman!”
“Hurry and go, President Shen!”
Though Source Star’s technology was advanced, this building was built on Blue Star after all—the physical explosion from the server destruction was still lethal.
Down the emergency escape slide in the safety corridor, Shen Ning fled in a fluster, surrounded by the crowd.
Fu Songcheng didn’t pursue. He had to get back into the game.
Having caused such a huge disaster, he didn’t think staying on Source Star would let him escape unscathed.
He braced on the wall, staggering but moving extremely fast through the smoke-filled corridors. The building’s interior was already in chaos—no one paid attention to a “wounded man” in an engineer’s uniform.
“Physical login pod… physical login pod…”
Fu Songcheng frantically recalled the floor information he’d stolen earlier.
In this building, there were Source Star’s game login devices—capable of transmitting a player’s physical body directly into the game, the same physical login equipment as Quan Heng’s.
“Found it!”
He rammed open a glass door marked VIP Test Zone. Inside the room were over a dozen high-end devices resembling hibernation pods.
Fu Songcheng slapped the stolen high-level employee card on the card reader.
Beep—Authority confirmed. Beginning device calibration.
The pod door opened. Fu Songcheng lay down without hesitation. As the pod closed, he felt his body rapidly sinking.
The ceiling panel above, knocked loose by the building’s tremors, fell and smashed onto his login pod. Fu Songcheng couldn’t move for the moment and could only watch as it was about to hit him.
The next second, a thick smell of blood rushed into Fu Songcheng’s nostrils.
The scene before him shifted.
He’d returned to the game ahead of schedule!
Blue Star players were helping each other up, their faces bearing the ecstasy and bewilderment of surviving a disaster. Fu Songcheng paid no attention to anything around him—he followed the sense of the Bitter Couple identity curse toward a certain person, running in his direction.
What a coincidence—the instant they sensed each other, both were moving toward each other.
Their eyes met.
The surrounding clamor, the system countdown, the shattering of space—in this moment, all seemed to lose their sound.
Yu Huaiting didn’t even bother to grab the sword in his hand—he staggered forward two steps.
Fu Songcheng’s breath caught abruptly, the pain in his chest thoroughly drowned by a fiercer emotion.
He strode forward on his long legs, running desperately toward Yu Huaiting.
Two people covered in blood and wounds crashed hard into each other’s arms in the middle of the devastated battlefield.
Hiss—
The instant they embraced, both their bodies trembled violently at the same time.
[System Warning: ‘Bitter Couple’ identity interaction detected. Punishment mechanism activated!]
[Negative effect triggered: Burning.]
The two felt as if they were hugging a furnace that kept scorching them.
But neither let go—they savored it willingly.
Fu Songcheng clutched Yu Huaiting’s waist, burying his face in his blood-stained neck, feeling the longing of their long separation melting in the heat.
Pain in this moment seemed to become the most potent stimulant, constantly reminding them: they were still alive, they had finally, truly touched each other.
“I missed you so much.”
Yu Huaiting’s voice was hoarse. He wrapped his arms hard around Fu Songcheng, kneading him into his embrace, into his flesh and blood.
The burning agony even gave him the illusion that he and Fu Songcheng would melt together, never to part.
“I know.”
“I’m back.”
And so the two stood, under the gaze of countless eyes, holding each other dead, as if trying to knead each other into their own flesh and blood.
“Cough cough…”
An extremely ill-timed, somewhat helpless cough sounded beside them.
Chen Ke’s face was full of “can’t bear to watch”: “I say, you two big shots, mind the public decency? Though we’re very grateful you saved humanity, isn’t flaunting your love a bit much at a time like this?”
Only then did Fu Songcheng slowly release Yu Huaiting, though he still gripped his hand tightly.
He turned his head, looking at the pairs of eyes around him full of awe, curiosity, and gossip, the base of his ears slightly red.
“Endure it.”
Yu Huaiting shot back without any courtesy.
Chen Ke was choked into rolling his eyes.
By now, the system countdown had thoroughly reached zero.
[Instance forced logout procedure complete.]
The shop was closed, all entertainment facilities stopped operating, and only the system panels representing each player’s person still glowed with faint light.
“Fu the God, what on earth happened?”
Lu Xiao came over, looked around, her face full of confusion. “The server blew up—okay, we don’t have to enter instances anymore, but how do we get back to Blue Star? The exit option is grayed out!”
Hearing this, the surrounding players reacted one after another.
“Right! The exit option is locked!”
“Are we still trapped in the rest area?”
“What’s this supposed to be? House arrest in a different place?”
Panic began to spread again.
“I blew up the server storing everyone’s identity IDs.”
Fu Songcheng’s voice wasn’t loud, but in the silent plaza it clearly reached every ear. “Source Star has now lost control over Blue Star players. They can no longer force us into any instance games, and can no longer erase us through the system.”
Chen Ke walked over at this point and patted Bai Mu’s shoulder. “Can your skill still be used?”
Bai Mu tried. She vanished on the spot and reappeared shortly after.
“Yes.”
With this verification, Chen Ke explained before everyone that they could use the same method of kidnapping Source Star people to send the living back to Blue Star.
“We can’t teleport tens of thousands of people at once.”
Fu Songcheng nodded, his gaze sweeping over everyone present. “So we need to send people back bit by bit, batch by batch. The wounded and non-combatants first, then ordinary players.”
“Then what about those who fought us?”
Lu Xiao pointed at some of Dawn’s players.
Chen Ke’s eyes turned cold in an instant. “Let them fend for themselves.”
Loyalty was needed, but blind loyalty wasn’t.
Those who hunted them down without distinguishing right from wrong were either stupid or bad—there was no obligation to save them.
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