📖 Previous Chapter / 上一章： Echoes from the Grave: Booting the Black Book

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The abandoned underground parking garage reeked of a pungent mix of stale engine oil, black mold, and the sharp scent of fried electronic components.

The heavy roll-up door slammed shut behind us, cutting off the frenzied optical-cable tentacles outside. However, that suffocating, oppressive feeling of being locked onto by some massive, invisible network didn't disappear.

Thump. Thump.

In the dead silence of the dark, the sound was unnervingly clear. It wasn't my heartbeat. It was the black book, Hell's Eye, which was now glued to my chest. With every vibration, a freezing stream of data shot through my capillaries and flooded my entire body.

"Thud!"
A heavy sound of someone collapsing echoed beside me. Old Chen had fallen hard onto the grease-stained concrete floor.

"Old Chen!" I fumbled in the dark to help him up. The moment my hand touched his right leg, I jerked it back like I had been burned. It was astonishingly hot, like touching the casing of an overclocked server on the verge of melting down.

By the faint backlight of my phone screen, I drew in a sharp breath of cold air. Old Chen's leg wasn't bleeding. The flesh that had been struck by the blue electrical arcs was actually "silicifying" at a visible rate! His blood vessels were turning into translucent, eerie blue tubes, and his muscle fibers were rapidly crystallizing into a bizarre substance resembling an integrated circuit board.

It was some kind of hardware-level virus capable of directly infecting carbon-based lifeforms!

"Don't touch me..." Old Chen gritted his teeth, his entire body convulsing. His bronze sword had fallen to the side. "My Yang energy can't suppress this damn thing... It's overwriting my neural signals..."

Right at that moment, an extremely faint red dot lit up deep within the garage.

It wasn't the dull ember of my grandpa's cheap cigarette. It was the beam of a high-frequency infrared targeting laser. The red dot rested perfectly precisely between my eyebrows.

"If I were you, I wouldn't use that piece-of-trash phone riddled with backdoor vulnerabilities for a flashlight. You two stick out like giant lightbulbs in the dark."

A crisp female voice, heavily laced with a metallic synthesizer effect, echoed from behind an abandoned load-bearing pillar.

Immediately after, a petite silhouette stepped out. It was a girl in her early twenties, wearing an incredibly thick, worn-out motorcycle jacket that was clearly lined with lead plates. Over her left eye, she wore a tactical visor resembling a VR headset, which was currently cascading with an icy blue data waterfall. But what made my scalp tingle the most was what she held in her hands—a heavy-duty electromagnetic nail gun. Except, the entire barrel was densely covered with Taoist demon-suppressing runes drawn in dark red cinnabar!

"Who are you?" I instinctively shielded the black book on my chest.

"The person saving your lives. Call me Lu Yan." The girl didn't waste words. She walked over and glanced down at Old Chen's crystallizing leg. "The 'Silicon Necrosis' Trojan from the Abyss Motherboard? He has exactly three minutes before he becomes a semiconductor zombie driven by the server. Drag him in here, fast!"

Lu Yan turned and kicked open a heavy iron door hidden behind a pile of scrapped car frames.

Left with no choice, I hauled the semi-conscious Old Chen up and staggered inside. The moment the door slammed shut, the suffocating magnetic oppression in the air vanished completely.

It was a makeshift Faraday cage, brutally welded together using heavy copper mesh and scrapped car shells. Outside electromagnetic waves and those bizarre "network signals" were entirely blocked.

Lu Yan tossed her nail gun onto a workbench. From her toolbox, she grabbed a blood-stained, industrial-grade soldering iron, followed by a bottle of high-concentration alcohol soaking black rune paper, which she poured directly onto Old Chen's wound.

"Hold him down!" Lu Yan ordered coldly. "A physical format is going to hurt a bit."

Before I could process her words, she pressed the glowing-red soldering iron directly against Old Chen's silicified wound!

"GAAAAH!" Old Chen let out an agonizing, lung-tearing scream. There was no smell of burning flesh; instead, a pungent black smoke of fried circuits and blue electric sparks erupted from the wound. As Lu Yan violently burned away the spreading transistors, she rapidly chanted a spell I had never heard before—she was reciting low-level hexadecimal code using ancient Chinese pronunciation!

A dozen seconds later, the blue light completely died out. Old Chen passed out from the sheer pain, but the crystallization on his leg had finally stopped, replaced by the flow of normal, red blood.

I slumped onto the floor, panting heavily, feeling like I had just crawled back from the gates of hell.

"You know the occult, and you know hacking?" I looked at the mysterious girl wiping down her soldering iron. "Who the hell are you? That thing outside... that was my grandpa, but it's impossible."

Lu Yan didn't answer my question. Her left eye, hidden behind the tactical visor, was locked dead onto my chest.

"Did you think your grandpa was standing at that door trying to steal that ratty book from you?" Lu Yan's voice suddenly trembled. She pulled a data cable with a black diagnostic probe from her belt and slowly walked toward me.

"Wasn't he?" I frowned, that freezing data stream still surging through my veins.

"Of course not." Lu Yan violently ripped open my torn shirt and stabbed the black probe into the skin right next to Hell's Eye.

The screen on her wrist-mounted micro-terminal instantly lit up, displaying a horrifying, blood-red progress bar: [Subconscious Overwrite: 1.05%... 1.06%...]

"Your grandpa wasn't trying to steal the book..." Lu Yan looked up, her normal right eye filled with absolute terror as she stared at me. "He was trying to sever the connection! He was trying to stop you from 'booting up'!"

I froze, slowly lowering my gaze to my own chest.

Under the dim light of the Faraday cage, I finally saw it clearly. The skin pressed against the black book had somehow become translucent. Beneath my flesh, my normal blue veins had entirely transformed into tiny, pulsing optical fibers glowing with a sickly red light. At a visible speed, they were spreading like a spiderweb straight toward my heart.

Thump. Thump.

A soul-shattering realization hit me like a freight train—my actual heart had stopped beating a long time ago. What was maintaining my blood flow and data cycle right now was this black book, which was rapidly merging with my body, acting as my new mechanical heart.

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Disclaimer: This is an original bilingual fiction series by the author. A significant amount of manual effort went into the scene descriptions and visual aesthetics. Plagiarism or re-writing in any form is strictly prohibited.