Bright Sword: Conquer the monk at the beginning and take down Zhou Weiguo

He slowly stepped onto the central platform and inserted the chip into the starter.

There was no startup sound, no light effect, only a brief moment of "silence".

That kind of silence makes people feel that time has stopped.

And the next second——

The entire cabin seemed to come alive. Blue light pulsed rapidly, and layers of data began to project into the air, like sparks from jumping neurons, darting past him, each pulse carrying a precise command. A metallic voice module automatically rose, emitting a mechanical yet rhythmic female voice:

[Recognition successful: Core synaesthesia node access completed. System reconstruction started.]

He closed his eyes, letting all the signals flow through him. The tiny receivers within his body began picking up the forced transmissions, and his consciousness instantly connected to the system. Countless images flashed through his mind—broken wires, unfinished connections, fragments of a motherboard riddled with errors, and unfinished data loops.

The route secret he had been desperately searching for all these years was for this step.

"I need it to tell me everything."

He shouted in his heart, not a request, but an order.

The platform began to spin, and a massive projection unfolded in the air. It was a complete structural diagram, no longer a fragmented puzzle, but a physical structure with a beginning and an end, a cause and effect. All external branch lines, all blocked secondary passages, and all nodes hidden under secondary modules were highlighted.

He finally saw the "side passage" clearly.

It wasn't a new line, but rather a derivation of an older one. Everyone assumed it was an abandoned test line, but in reality, it concealed a relay system that had long been operational but never been made public.

"Ridiculous... We've been running the entire device with a blind spot." He chuckled, but his smile was a mixture of fatigue and anger.

He called up the system control panel and tried to access the secondary channel, but a permission verification blocked him.

Not general permissions, but "artificial keys".

That was a man-made blockade. The early builders were afraid that the main control would be cracked, so they set up a unique unlocking method, and this method was exactly the "starting recording" of him and Xiaohu that could not be reproduced back then.

He fell silent for a moment, his finger hovering over the command panel for a long time.

"Brother, can you take me to listen to that recording when you come back?"

That childish, trembling voice echoed endlessly in his mind, as if all the emotions of that night had frozen in that moment. His throat tightened, and he suddenly realized something - Xiaohu had never been waiting for him to lead the way, but waiting for him to listen.

He quickly retrieved the remaining historical storage files in the cabin. At the bottom, he found the folder named:

【Route_N-Fragment】

The moment I opened it, I heard a noise in my ears.

"Zi-hiss-drip-"

Then, there was a voice.

Extremely vague and extremely short-lived.

"Path... Start..."

He shook his hands, quickly capturing the sound wave shape and importing it into the permissions interface. After two seconds of silence, the system suddenly emitted a bright blue light.

[Verification passed. Secondary channel is opening.]

He slumped back to the console, his eyes fixed on the slowly lighting projection. The secondary circuits connected bit by bit to the main control, each node connecting to a forgotten piece of history returning to its proper place.

And he knew that Xiaohu's voice had become an indispensable part of the entire system.

At that moment, he didn't say anything, just sat quietly.

But when node 32 suddenly flashed red, his heart suddenly tightened.

The light wasn't as steady as before, but fluctuated violently, even beginning to affect the energy flow in the main control room. A faint sensation of heat wafted through the air, as if something was rapidly heating up. Then, a pungent, burning smell permeated the air, seeping from beneath the platform, a scent of something unusually burning.

He quickly looked down at the energy console, and a string of disturbing data appeared before his eyes:

Energy feedback is abnormal. Voltage backflow is occurring between nodes 32 and 37.

Qin Cang's heart instantly rose.

"System, start the isolation procedure!" he ordered in a low voice.

However, only a line of cold characters appeared on the panel:

【Command rejected: Partial control lost.】

His brow furrowed sharply, a hint of disbelief in his eyes. The main control system had experienced a permissions crash after he'd accessed the secondary circuit. This could only happen if it had been tampered with or had its structure contaminated. He wanted to disconnect immediately, but as his finger pressed the disconnect button on the terminal, the entire platform trembled violently, and a searing current flowed upward from the input terminal, striking his palm.

Qin Cang groaned and staggered back a step. The skin on his palms turned red from the electric current and trembled slightly.

This is no ordinary line anomaly.

He endured the pain and called up the system architecture diagram again. The synesthesia nodes that had been running stably before suddenly began to flicker one by one, as if the nerves were in convulsion and were being torn from the inside by some force.

He instantly realized that the problem lay deeper.

"Someone has tampered with the core of the secondary passage."

This wasn't the natural aging of time, nor was it a system breakdown, but rather some carefully laid trap. The moment he successfully accessed the system, a deeply buried data module awakened, like a cancer lurking deep within the nervous system, releasing its toxins during the reboot.

His face became extremely ugly.

He knew exactly what all this meant: not only did he have to face the risk of system collapse, but he also had to fight against an unknown enemy that had already been embedded in it.

He gritted his teeth and forced himself to calm down.

“Find the source of the pollution first.”

He turned back to the console and switched to the dark layer monitoring interface. In that gloomy virtual space, he finally saw something unusual—a black line that wasn't part of the system's original design. It snaked around the main control core like a snake, wrapping around the base of the synaesthesia bus and continuously releasing tiny disturbance waves.

"This is not electricity." He murmured softly.

"It's data toxin."

Only the oldest generation of information erosion programs use this method. They do not rely on signal strength, but instead simulate microscopic errors to create a "self-doubt" process within the system - making the system think that something has gone wrong, thereby automatically shutting down some permissions and giving up core judgment.

"How cruel..." A sneer flashed across Qin Cang's face, but his eyes were as cold as a knife.

He took a deep breath and took out the spare data separator from his arms. This was an ancient device he had left behind many years ago. It needed to be scrapped after one use, but if used properly, it could cut off the infection path in an instant, buying him a very short purification time.

"Only once." He reminded himself.