Having dealt with the riot, Chen Ke took a deep breath and walked quickly to Fu Songcheng’s side.
“Mr. Fu,”
“Let’s continue. The peripheral disturbances have been quelled, the blocking net is in place, and the repatriation work ahead will proceed in an orderly manner.”
Fu Songcheng stood on the high platform, his gaze sweeping over the dense crowd below.
“Mm.”
The long, monumental repatriation project officially began.
A queue of tens of thousands—even with Yu Huaiting’s area-lock skill speeding things up—was still an enormous undertaking.
And the number of Blue Star players far exceeded those gathered in the central plaza. In every corner of the vast rest area, countless compatriots were scattered, struggling in confusion and fear.
They had to be contacted one by one, sent back batch by batch.
Every day, Chen Ke and his team repeated the tedious process of screening, comforting, and teleporting; every day, Bai Mu and Yu Huaiting silently and ceaselessly used their skills to connect thousands of people to Blue Star.
A month later.
When the last batch of ordinary players vanished, sent back to Blue Star.
The vast central plaza was so empty it made one’s heart panic. All around was a deathly silence. The once-noisy, weeping, killing purgatory now held only wreckage and ash covering the ground.
Chen Ke, Fu Songcheng, Yu Huaiting, Si Yi, Bai Mu, Lu Xiao, and the dozens of workers Chen Ke had gathered stood quietly at the center of the plaza.
They were the last ones left.
“It’s finally… over.”
Lu Xiao leaned against a pillar, looking around, and suddenly felt a weight lift from her heart.
She tilted her head up, looking at the torn artificial virtual sky overhead, her eyes red. “We can go home.”
She still remembered the first instance she’d entered: Silent Library.
Such a distant story. Back then she’d been weak and incompetent, able only to watch a few people snatch away her books; but back then, she’d also been clean and pure, like a blank sheet of paper.
Now, stained mottled by scheming and blood, could she still return to a normal life?
She looked at Fu Songcheng. Fu Songcheng noticed her gaze and gave her the kindest smile.
This time, not to snatch her items.
A few suppressed sobs rose from the crowd, then low laughter—laughter carrying the ecstasy of surviving a disaster, and also deep grief.
Chen Ke scrubbed his face hard, wiping away both the moisture at the corners of his eyes and the blood and grime on his face.
He turned to Bai Mu, the corner of his mouth tugging into a relieved smile. “Bai Mu, prepare to open our own channel. Everyone—we’re going home.”
Bai Mu’s complexion was very poor—a month of work made her feel like she’d been swept through happiness and turned back into a beast of burden—but her eyes right now sparkled with an unusually bright light.
She exchanged a glance with Yu Huaiting and was about to activate her skill, opening the channel to Blue Star—the direction of the home they’d longed for day and night.
Just as Bai Mu was about to retreat—
“Wait.”
A cold, powerful hand suddenly pressed dead onto Si Yi’s shoulder.
Fu Songcheng’s voice wasn’t loud, but in this moment it exploded by everyone’s ears like a thunderclap. Their hearts, which had just relaxed, were instantly lifted by those two words.
Bai Mu turned back and met Fu Songcheng’s eyes.
Fu Songcheng’s expression was extremely grave, facing Si Yi.
“Have you checked the instance’s local data?”
Si Yi froze, his brain turning somewhat sluggishly under extreme exhaustion. “Local data? Engineer Fu, what are you talking about? The core server was blown up by you half a month ago. Without the main server’s power and commands, shouldn’t the local cache clear automatically?”
“If it were a Blue Star conventional system, yes, it would clear.”
“But if it really all cleared, what do you think this rest area has been relying on to maintain normal operation for the past month? What do you think our skills and items are running on?”
Si Yi’s pupils contracted sharply, his face instantly turning deathly pale.
“I blew up the main server and cut off Source Star’s real-time control and interference with the instance.”
Fu Songcheng’s voice echoed across the empty plaza. “But to prevent network fluctuations, this game system’s architecture must contain a local backup data pool.”
Si Yi immediately caught on. Having followed Fu Songcheng’s team so long, he knew better than anyone what this meant.
His voice began to tremble. “If Source Star repairs the game connection, they wouldn’t need to rebuild the server at all—they’d just need to connect to this local node, and they could use these cached player data profiles to re-locate every one of us?”
“Hard to say, but Source Star’s technology far exceeds our understanding. This is a probability we can’t gamble on.”
Fu Songcheng looked at him, eyes like torches, nodding slightly, his tone carrying unquestionable resolve. “Delete it. Erase all the data completely, just in case.”
Hearing this, Chen Ke felt a chill shoot straight from the soles of his feet to the top of his head, breaking out in a cold sweat instantly.
If this data still existed, then all the desperate effort of the past month to send back a hundred and fifty million survivors would have been for nothing.
“It really has to be deleted! Delete it all!”
Chen Ke immediately expressed his stance.
Si Yi wasted no words. He immediately closed his eyes, his hands tapping frantically in the void, examining nested code that the others couldn’t see but only he could.
Moments later, his body began trembling violently, bean-sized sweat beads rolling down his forehead, his face already deathly pale without a trace of blood.
“Engineer Fu, you’re right…”
Si Yi opened his eyes. “The instance’s backup data node is still operating. It’s been recording everything in a dormant state.”
“Can it be deleted?”
Lu Xiao rushed forward anxiously, both hands gripping Si Yi’s arm.
“It should be possible…”
Si Yi’s brows twisted into a knot, his eyes fixed dead on that patch of data in the air only he could see, searching for the data address amid endless nested code. “Give me a little time…”
The entire plaza fell into a deathly silence.
Only Si Yi’s heavy breathing echoed in the air. Everyone held their breath, hearts pounding like war drums.
“Found it!”
Minutes later, Si Yi let out an ecstatic cry. “I found the root directory address!”
Leave a Reply