63: Chapter 62 Crossing the Boundary

V's signal, "The fish has taken the bait," was like a stone cast into still water, sending clear ripples through the encrypted channel.

Almost the moment the signal arrived, Lin Yi's calm reply reached her, like the sturdiest of backings: "Received. Jackie is in position, and I'm monitoring the activity in your program's background in real-time. I've entered Cyberspace. Everything is normal, don't worry."

Before his voice had completely faded, Jackie's signature boisterous voice cut in, carrying a reassuring ruggedness: "Exactly, chica, don't chicken out! Channel that ruthlessness you use when you slice people up with your Monowire! Your husband and I are ready to rush in and fish you out at any moment, so go do your thing!"

The words "your husband" felt like an electric shock, making V's ears burn despite the tense atmosphere.

She retorted in her mind, shamed and angry: "Whose husband?! We're not even close to that point yet, stop talking nonsense!" But this little bit of banter strangely dispelled the last trace of gloom in her heart.

After all, she had the most reliable group of partners standing behind her.

At this moment, Jackie was like a dormant beast, hiding on the fifth floor of an abandoned building behind the chapel.

His massive frame and thick arms were holding that long "Nekomata" tech sniper rifle with a precision that belied his size.

The cold touch of the rifle body came through his gloves, and the crosshairs shimmered in his dim field of vision, firmly locked onto several key exits of the distant Batty Hotel.

Within arm's reach, the high-firepower ajax assault rifle leaned against the wall; along the pre-planned extraction route, his beloved DB-2 Satara shotgun was also in position.

All routes and emergency plans had been rehearsed countless times in his mind, which appeared careless but was actually meticulous and reliable.

Meanwhile, at the temporary stronghold in the West Wind Apartments, Lin Yi did not use the terminal in the room.

Who knew which terminal in Pacifica hadn't been backdoored by the Voodoo Boys; he wouldn't touch those uncertain devices.

He hacked directly into Cyberspace via "Bai Ze," his consciousness diving into the deep sea of data like an invisible submarine, his digital avatar taking shape in this space.

At this moment, he focused all his attention on the hidden program background connected to V, with log streams rushing through his consciousness like a waterfall, every byte of change under his surveillance.

He was waiting for that critical trigger signal, ready to unsheathe like a sharp sword and strike straight at the target at any moment.

Inside the Data Fortress, V's "performance" entered a critical moment.

The look of struggle and unwillingness on her face slowly faded, eventually turning into a resigned, somewhat reckless helplessness: "Fine, fine, looks like I can't escape this 'escort' service. Alright, for the sake of my pay, I'll play along with you lot!"

She took the professional deep-dive equipment handed to her by a Voodoo Boys netrunner nearby.

The cold synthetic material clung to her skin, and various biological sensors automatically attached to key nodes on her torso.

Subsequently, she stepped into the cooling vat that had been prepared, its interior rippling with ice cubes and transparent coolant.

The cold liquid rose slowly, covering her legs, waist, and abdomen, until it reached her chest—a feeling of suffocating restraint faintly emerged, but she forced herself to relax, adapting to this necessary "protective" measure before the deep dive.

Brigitte watched as V cooperatively stepped into the vat, a flash of satisfaction in her eyes.

She turned to the netrunner next to her, who was nervously operating the Relic interface, her tone urgent and unquestionable: "Is the data engram extraction complete? Upload it to her!"

"Uploading... Data stream stable... Engram encoding confirmed—confirmed as Johnny Silverhand! Upload complete!" The netrunner's voice trembled slightly, whether from being in close contact with a legend or the impending insane operation, it was hard to tell.

"Very good." Brigitte took a deep breath, as if to calm the excitement within her.

She and several other core netrunners quickly walked to their respective deep-dive interfaces, like believers walking to their prayer spots, connected the cables, and lay down into their respective cooling vats.

"Relax, Miss V, and fully experience this... sacred moment." Brigitte said this last line, then immediately initiated the deep-dive protocol.

V felt a powerful suction coming from the interface.

Her vision, hearing, and even her entire consciousness were violently dragged away from the anchor point of the real world.

After a brief, weightless vertigo, she found herself seemingly floating on a highway made of countless iridescent data.

The scenery around her was not made of real objects, but of geometric shapes and torrents of color composed of pure information, constantly flowing and changing.

Immediately after, a fragment of memory that didn't belong to her, carrying intense emotional color, exploded in her consciousness like a forcibly inserted film—deafening rock music, the choking smell of strange smoke, the towering shadow of Arasaka Tower, and the profile of a man, unruly, filled with endless anger and determination.

Johnny Silverhand.

"Is this chip... really Johnny Silverhand's soul?" V, having experienced that memory, subconsciously asked in the deep-dive public channel, her voice filled with incredulous shock.

This personal experience was far more impactful than any recorded data.

"To be precise, that is the digital engram he left behind in the world, a highly authentic consciousness copy." Brigitte's voice rang out in the data stream, calm to the point of cruelty, carrying the detachment of a researcher examining a specimen. "It seems the data reception is complete. Now, there's no time for sentiment; we need to go deeper."

Before V could digest this shock, Brigitte and the other netrunners in the Data Fortress jointly pushed their computing power.

V only felt everything before her eyes being crazily accelerated, stretched, and twisted once again.

Those brilliant data light spots were stretched into endless long lines, colors mixed into a chaos, and finally, all the scenery retreated rapidly to the sides, as if space itself was being forcibly torn apart.

Then, it appeared.

A "wall."

A giant wall that could not be measured by any real-world scale.

It extended upward, as if reaching the dome of heaven; it spread downward, seemingly rooted in the abyss of a data hell; looking left and right, there was no end in sight.

Its main body was an impenetrable, deep ink-black, but its surface was constantly flowing and rolling with dark red ripples like congealed blood.

It didn't look like it was built of bricks and stone, but rather like a living, unimaginably huge net—a net woven from pure malice, crazy whispers, and unknown terror.

Most heart-stopping of all, on that seemingly solid wall surface, a huge, struggling, twisted shape would occasionally bulge out suddenly, as if countless behemoths on the other side of the wall were frantically crashing against it, attempting to break through. After reaching its limit, the bulge would suddenly retract, letting the wall surface return to that suffocating, rhythmic "flatness."

V's consciousness froze.

A fear stemming from biological instinct seized her.

This is... the Blackwall? The boundary separating known civilization from the out-of-control hell of the Old Net?

"Now," Brigitte's voice trembled slightly with excitement, carrying a martyr-like fanaticism, "you need to pass through this wall. The Johnny Silverhand engram you are carrying is the best sacrifice we have prepared—and also the bait most capable of attracting the 'god,' of attracting 'Alt Cunningham' to appear!"

"What? No! You fucking didn't say anything about having to go through this damn thing!" V screamed in terror, trying to struggle. But under the joint control of several top netrunners, her unprepared consciousness was bound like it was in invisible shackles, completely unable to resist.

"You don't have a choice!" Brigitte shouted sharply.

The next moment, an irresistible, immense force acted upon V's consciousness, violently pushing her forward.

Her vision was completely swallowed by that rolling black and red color, as if she had been thrown into an endless vortex, and nothing remained in her ears but countless crazy, chaotic, malicious roars and whispers—

She had passed through the Blackwall.

Almost at the same millisecond that V's positioning signal crossed the eerie physical boundary of the Blackwall, Lin Yi, who had been waiting silently in another area of Cyberspace, heard a clear alert from the program logs in his consciousness.

[Warning: Target unit biological signal fluctuating violently!]

[Warning: High-intensity Blackwall boundary interaction signal detected!]

[Positioning signal triggered! Coordinates locked! Tracking program running at full power!]

"Jackie!" Lin Yi's mental command was like an unsheathed blade, instantly transmitted to the real world via the encrypted link. "V has crossed the wall! I'm going to support her! Twenty minutes—if you don't hear further news from me after twenty minutes, execute the assault as planned!"

At the same time the message was sent, Lin Yi's solid and elegant digital avatar, constructed by "Bai Ze," was no longer hidden.

He transformed into a pure white stream of light tearing through the data space, following the coordinates of the extremely unstable temporary channel forcibly opened by V that the tracking program had fed back, shooting toward the direction of the Blackwall, toward the location where V was, with a speed that exceeded conventional computing power.