The Last 299 Days of Humanity

Yu Qing lay flat on the ergonomically designed support surface, like a lamb sacrificed to a technological altar. The flexible material flowed as if it had a life of its own, precisely conforming to every curve of his body, providing support while also performing the most subtle biosignal monitoring.

The cool sensor contacts, with their non-invasive quantum entanglement field, made contact with his skin, felt more like a swarm of metallic leeches waiting to suck his brain and strip away his soul, greedily preparing to absorb all the memories, emotions, and thought patterns he had accumulated over twenty years of carbon-based life.

He stared wide-eyed at the slowly closing dome. It wasn't just a simple metal plate; it dynamically mimicked a profound nebula.

The spiraling stardust and dark matter veins vaguely formed a structure similar to a neural network, as if he were gazing at a "brain" on a cosmic scale.

All the noise of the world is completely isolated by this highly efficient sound insulation and energy barrier.

Inside the box, only the low-frequency hum of the life support system and consciousness extraction device remained. The sound seemed to come from the depths of the earth's crust, forming a suffocating duet with the heart in his chest, whose heartbeat accelerated due to its unknown fate and whose sound was amplified several times over.

The moment the upload program started, it wasn't the smooth transition of data that I had expected, but rather a series of unpredictable and surging tsunamis of consciousness.

This is a psychedelic storm that frantically tests the edge of consciousness, a violent "phantom pain" produced when the soul is forcibly torn from its flesh and blood anchor.

At first, it was a purely physiological sense of detachment, a strange weightlessness, as if his essence was being pried away little by little from this container called "body" by some invisible, precise force, and suspended in the gap between reality and nothingness.

Immediately afterwards, the barrier of memory collapsed, and fragments, like crystals pierced by a high-energy particle stream, gushed out, no longer under his control, transforming into an out-of-control holographic montage:

He "saw" the first handful of sand he grabbed when he was learning to walk; the rough texture of the sand, the temperature after being baked by the sun, and even the tiny stinging sensation embedded in his fingernails were all so clear that they made him shudder, far exceeding the clarity that memory should have.
He "smelled" the sweet and rotten smell of high-strength disinfectant mixed with the unique scent of decaying life in his mother's hospital room before she died. That familiar despair instantly gripped his virtual throat, almost triggering a physiological vomiting reflex.

He "heard" his father, in his usual emotionless tone, evaluating a proposal he submitted on urban energy optimization when he was a teenager: "The logic is clear and the structure is rigorous. However, it lacks the courage to break the existing framework."

At that time, he only felt that the harshness was incomprehensible, but now, on the edge of the deconstruction of consciousness, these words resonated like a great bell, carrying a sense of destiny.

However, these intense fragments of emotional memory were merely the prelude to a chaotic storm. Soon, the dimensions of hallucination began to distort, becoming bizarre and beyond the realm of personal experience.

His senses were thrown into an infinitely extending abyss of data, where the surroundings were no longer darkness, but a flowing waterfall of code emitting a ghostly blue and pale green phosphorescence.

These codes are not simply 0s and 1s; they sometimes transform into a twisted Higgs boson model, sometimes collapse into an entangled cloud of qubits, and sometimes unfold into a multidimensional Calabi-Yau manifold.

Between these symbols of fundamental physical laws, fragmented images flicker and fade:

At times, the face of an ancestor—Yu Yunshan in his youth—emerges, his eyes sharp as the probe of a scanning tunneling microscope, staring at a blurry, complex model composed of pure light and shadow that is constantly reconstructing itself, bearing a striking resemblance to the neural nebula on the hatch.

At times, glimpses of Aunt Yu Wei's profile flashed across the screen as she meditated with her eyes closed in those "positions" in Tianqing City. In the background were her skyscrapers, which soared into the clouds like unsheathed blades, covered with countless avatars of hers, like worker bees in a hive, breathing in perfect sync.

And on the corners of their thousands of mouths, there was a completely identical, mysterious smile that seemed to know everything yet remain indifferent.

Even more bizarrely, his sense of time and space was completely distorted at this moment. He felt as if he were being torn into countless pieces, simultaneously projected into multiple historical and possible fragments:

For a moment, it seemed as if they were in a laboratory in the early days of Shengtian Group, where the young Yu Yunshan and a person with an extremely blurry figure were fiercely debating something about "quantum stability of consciousness anchors" and "smoothing algorithms for reality wrinkles" around a strange device that emitted a faint hum.
A moment later, it was as if a brute force had pulled them back deeper into the data channel of the "ultimate office".

The view suddenly opens up, revealing countless miniature, lifelike city-state models floating in the endless void, like soap bubbles.

Above each model, there was a faint, translucent film with constantly changing textures and colors—this scene was a macroscopic version of the "visual glitch" he had glimpsed on his way back to Wengshan, a chilling, systematic coverage.

Amidst these incomprehensible illusions, a deep and familiar voice, belonging to the old man Yu Yunshan, rang out intermittently.

But this voice had lost the warmth of flesh and blood, carrying an inhuman, vast echo as if from the vacuum of space or the quantum deep sea, like the whisper of the law itself:
"...the observer...is also in the web of being observed..."

"...The mirage...is not meant to conceal...but to reveal the underlying code..."

"...The container is about to overflow...The key...You must find that one and only key..."

These fragmented pieces of information and images that transcend dimensions, like billions of wildly spinning, sharply edged puzzle pieces, not only fail to provide any answers, but instead expand the depth and breadth of the mystery to a cosmic scale.

He felt the boundaries of his consciousness, constructed by his biologically based brain, rapidly dissolving. Personal memories, fragments of foreign information from who-knows-where, and purely algorithm-generated hallucinations were frantically intertwining, merging, and eroding each other, becoming indistinguishable.

Fear and a morbid curiosity, like two cold, giant pythons of energy, tightly coiled around his core consciousness, almost threatening to completely crush and assimilate it.

Just as he felt that his last bit of self-awareness as "Yu Qing" was about to be completely lost in this primordial chaos of consciousness, a powerful, cold rationality, like a stabilizing force forged in absolute zero, suddenly rose from the deepest part of his mind.

This is the survival instinct he honed through countless crises and life-or-death trials—in the most chaotic and dangerous moments, stripping away all emotions, grasping the core objective, and executing the pre-set final plan.

He couldn't let himself lose his way at this moment. Before his consciousness was completely uploaded and this dangerous transformation was completed, he had to make arrangements for the "afterlife" of the world he would be left behind.

He forcibly mustered his remaining willpower, which was like a candle flickering in the wind, and sent a series of pre-set, quantum-encrypted instructions to the highly intelligent assistant system closely connected to his biological brain through the highly activated neural interface.

These instructions concern two major issues: first, the plausible scenario of his personal "departure" from the real world, and second, the basic future direction of Wengshan and Shengtian.

Regarding his "departure," the script must be logically consistent and flawless.

He cannot suddenly disappear, as that would not only cause internal panic among Yu Xuan and others and frantic investigation by external forces such as Yao Dan, but could also alert those adversaries who have been lurking in the shadows and eyeing Sheng Tian covetously, causing them to mistakenly believe that the power core of Wengshan is now in a vacuum, thus triggering an uncontrollable chain reaction.

He instructed his assistant to perform the following actions in strict phases over the next 72 hours:
Immediately inject a carefully fabricated stream of biometric data into Shengtian's internal medical monitoring network.

Data shows that due to the high-intensity mental burden and work pressure of dealing with the "Lutai" crisis for a long time, his nervous system showed rare signs of "progressive neurasthenia." This logically foreshadowed his inevitable subsequent "rest" and disappearance.

Create a holographic projection matrix of what he left behind in Wengshan, generating a high-quality short video record of his inspection of several key areas in Wengshan.

In the video, his image should convey just the right amount of fatigue, with traces of forced effort in his eyes.

In a seemingly casual conversation, he "inadvertently" mentioned needing a period of absolutely undisturbed time for "deep strategic meditation and health conditioning" to prepare for the ultimate challenges that "Operation Lutai" might bring. This excuse perfectly utilized external pressure as a cover.

After the aforementioned video material circulated, he immediately issued a brief and well-written statement through Shengtian's official channels and all internal high-frequency communication networks, formally announcing that he would be entering a period of "deep strategic meditation and health conditioning".

The statement clearly emphasizes that during this period, all daily affairs of Wengshan and Shengtian will be handled by the established core management team in accordance with regulations, and no one may disturb them except in emergencies involving the survival of the city-state.

Such behavior can be understood within high-level power circles, and may even be seen as a responsible act of remaining rational and seeking breakthroughs under immense pressure.

After the statement takes effect, all his personal and official communication channels will automatically switch to silent mode, with automatic replies set up with his voice fingerprint and language style, prompting him to enter a strategic silence state. At the same time, his assistant will continue to simulate his thought patterns and approval habits, occasionally "delaying approvals" for some key but non-urgent documents at specific levels of the internal management system, carefully creating the illusion that although he is no longer on the front line, he is still paying attention behind the scenes.

The essence of this process lies in "gradual change" and "logicality".

From the subtle health warnings to the public display of fatigue, and then to the formal announcement of seclusion, each step was meticulously planned and perfectly aligned with the behavioral logic of an heir bearing immense responsibility and facing external threats to his survival, under immense pressure—a behavior aimed at seeking a breakthrough or avoiding collapse.

Yu Xuan and others may have doubts, and may even investigate secretly, but in the short term, they will not find any solid flaws and will most likely attribute it to his excessive pressure and temporary strategic retreat.

However, more important than these superficial gestures is the substantive arrangement for the future fate of Wengshan and even Shengtian.

He clearly realized that once he completed the upload, he would likely be unable to directly intervene in the real world in a traditional way for a considerable period of time, or he would exist in a completely different form and way that he could not fully understand at present.

He had to leave behind a framework that was as solid as possible and some backup plans that could be activated at critical moments for the city he had poured his heart and soul into, for people like Yu Xuan and Chang Sheng whose fates were intertwined with his, and for the countless employees who depended on the Shengtian system for survival.

As an indispensable economic and technological pillar of Wengshan at this stage, Shengtian Group must maintain a basic, stable, and continuous profit-generating capacity. He absolutely cannot allow it to collapse rapidly after his "departure," or to completely become a tool for any other force to exploit and profit from.

Therefore, he rebalanced the power structure of Shengtian:

He could not place all his hopes on Chang Sheng alone, so he explicitly authorized several senior executives whom he had observed, trusted relatively, and who had a natural competitive relationship with each other to form a temporary joint decision-making meeting.

This allows them to supervise and check each other in their cooperation, preventing any one party's power (including Chang Sheng) from becoming excessively inflated, thus maintaining a delicate balance of stability within the management team.

Regarding Wengshan City itself, he activated the highest-level command, forcibly adjusting the access permissions of some core resources that are crucial to the city's survival, such as the control keys for energy nodes, the activation protocol for the city-level protective force field generator buried deep underground, and the access permissions of the global network's critical data gates, to "deep freeze".

Unless the system detects that it meets its preset, extremely stringent and multi-verified triggering conditions, such as irrefutable evidence of a large-scale invasion by a foreign enemy, or chaos within the city that exceeds a threshold and points to the core layer, etc.

Otherwise, no one could modify or invoke these ultimate permissions without authorization. This is equivalent to adding a theoretically absolutely reliable "safety valve" to Wengshan.

In addition, he activated a secret protocol called "Watch." This protocol would distribute a series of highly encrypted files—containing unrecorded abnormal emergency procedures within the Shengtian Group, inferences and circumstantial evidence that the old man Yu Yunshan might not be dead, and early warning analyses of the true purpose and potential dangers of the "Mirage Project"—through an untraceable quantum tunnel to several "dormant electronic moles" pre-buried in Wengshan and even other city-states in the Eastern Confederation.

These could be a server node, an old terminal, or even an anonymous chip embedded in a public facility.

These "hidden stakes" will only be remotely activated and release the archive contents when a specific pattern of abnormal data read/write occurs in the Shengtian core database, or when the Wengshan urban status monitoring network captures a preset extreme situation signal.

This was the last spark he planted, intended to reveal part of the truth or at least to throw a boulder into the pool, creating chaos and a turning point, in the worst-case scenario.

Finally, and this was a top-priority instruction he added on the spur of the moment, based on his latest understanding of "mirages" and those urban "visual malfunctions":

He forcibly implanted a more stringent "solid-state program" with underlying logic locks into the core decision-making modules of Yao Dan and other humanoid figures who had certain management authority.

The program aims to "indefinitely postpone" and "forcefully reject" all new technology applications within the city that involve "large-scale reality simulation overlay" and "group subconscious intervention" without being ultimately unlocked by his biological signature.

This was a passive but significant defensive measure he had devised against the potentially ubiquitous "mirage" system and those bizarre "visual malfunctions." Although its power was meager, it at least demonstrated a firm stance.

Hopefully, this will buy him more time to understand and deal with those processes he hasn't fully grasped yet.

When the last instruction was sent like an arrow and a confirmation receipt was received, Yu Qing felt a deep exhaustion mixed with extreme mental depletion, as well as a strange sense of relief, as if a thousand-pound burden had been lifted.

Those heavy entanglements of reality, politics, and emotion seem to be gradually weakening and fading away as consciousness is withdrawn.

At this moment, the wave of illusions from the outside world swept in again with even greater force, but this time, a certain... pattern seemed to be faintly revealed in the chaotic scene?
Amidst those fragmented memories and distorted torrents of data, he seemed to see a passage constructed of pure starlight and stable logic gates, stretching straight through the chaos. At the end of the passage lay a vast ocean, indescribable in any human language, filled with infinite information and pure possibilities, which the system notification referred to as the "Vast Ocean."

He knew that the unique life experience known as "Yuqing," based on carbon-based flesh and blood and linear time, was irreversibly heading towards its physical end.

A deep, ocean-like sorrow is swallowing all light, silent yet incredibly heavy.

He greedily, almost predatoryly, recalled every subtle sensation he had experienced during his physical existence: the rustling sound of his fingertips across rough paper, the opening of every pore as warm water enveloped his body, and even the sharp, real pain of being accidentally injured…

All of these will be transformed into cold, impersonal data packets awaiting archiving.

In the following perception, he began to completely lose the ability to objectively measure day, night, hour, minute, and second.

Time lost its illusion of uniform flow, sometimes seeming to freeze in an instant, sometimes stretching as long as billions of years. Day after day, in his subjective experience at this moment, became blurred, viscous, and meaningless…

Until a certain indefinable "moment," a non-human, synthesized voice resounded directly in the foundation of his consciousness, reminding him of the ultimate shift in his state:

"...low-level sensory interface data is being gradually stripped away and archived..."

"...The core cohesion and stability threshold of consciousness have passed the final verification..."

"...Preparing to connect to 'Canghai'...Countdown..."

The cold, emotionless system notification echoed in the deepest recesses of his consciousness, like a final judgment.

This time, he did not resist. He completely relaxed the last mental barrier that held his "old self" together, almost willingly allowing that vast, precise, and indifferent cosmic force to completely "extract" his core consciousness—the unique collection of information that carried what made "Yuqing" "Yuqing"—from his warm, fragile, and decaying flesh and blood.

In the last fraction of a second before human perception completely dissipated like the receding tide, a thought, as bright as a supernova explosion, flashed across his consciousness, which was about to be completely digitized:

Wengshan is now in your hands. And the truth… I'm coming.

The next moment, an endless torrent of starlight, exceeding the speed of light, and pure data engulfed all traces and sensations of existence.

The old "Yuqing," as a carbon-based life form, has officially come to an end on the level of real matter.

And a completely new "existence," which cannot be precisely defined by existing physics and philosophy, is about to "open" its senses for the first time in the deepest part of the information abyss called "the vast ocean."

All the arrangements and contingency plans he meticulously laid out will become a series of uncertain variables as the real world continues to evolve according to its complex rules. And the ultimate journey he has embarked on to find himself and the truth has already entered a completely unknown dimension, where the outcome is uncertain.

What is certain is that a far greater and more insidious storm is rapidly gathering on another level beyond the realm of reason, giving rise to infinite possibilities of destruction and rebirth. (End of Chapter)