87: Chapter 87 Warning! Your Heavenly Tribulation has ceased responding.

The sky was no longer the sky. It had turned into a giant screen emitting a faint blue light of death.

The once-rolling clouds froze into jagged blocks, and birds hung suspended in mid-air, their wings held in mid-flap but no longer moving. The entire world seemed to have been hit with a pause button labeled 'Lag'.

On the ground, the hundred thousand Black Armored Army soldiers remained in the posture of filling out forms, their faces filled with terror. Butcher Xiao had just lifted his foot to flee, but while his foot went up, his body stayed in place, like a game character with 999ms of network latency performing a comical 'moonwalk'.

"This... this is..." Daoist Qingxu tried to speak, but his voice drifted in the air for several seconds before slowly reaching everyone's ears. "Audio... and... video... out... of... sync..."

Second floor of the Scripture Pavilion. Li Mo pushed up the glasses on his nose, looking at the heart-palpitating 'blue screen' above. There, rows of pale white garbled code were frantically scrolling:

[System ERROR: 0x0000001] [Illegal logic injection detected.] [Starting antivirus program...] [Target locked: Scripture Pavilion. Executing operation: Complete Deletion.]

Rumble— There was no thunder, only a grating 'sizzle' like a static-filled microphone. A pitch-black 'pillar of light,' composed of countless corrupted data streams, fell straight down from the heavens. It possessed no physical destructive power, but wherever it passed, space turned into a void of white—an absolute nothingness where even the textures had been erased.

"Is this the Heavenly Dao's formatting? Crude, so crude." Li Mo shook his head and opened the heavy black book in his hand—Programming: From Beginner to Deleting the Database and Fleeing.

"Since you want to play with code, I'll play with your underlying logic." He picked up an ordinary brush and tapped lightly in the Void Realm. [Development Tools: Launching.]

In an instant, the world in Li Mo's eyes changed. That world-destroying black pillar of light decomposed into lines of red code in his sight: function deleteTarget(obj) { destroy(obj.body); erase(obj.soul); return null; }

"Tsk tsk, typical procedural programming. With coupling this high, no wonder it crashes easily." Li Mo complained as his brush moved like a swimming dragon, directly inserting itself into the 'source code' of the pillar of light.

"First, we don't need deletion." He added two slashes in front of destroy(obj.body). // destroy(obj.body); Commented out.

Immediately after, he added two more slashes in front of erase(obj.soul). // erase(obj.soul); Commented out again.

In the sky, that menacing black pillar of light, capable of obliterating a Great Power at the Undergoing Tribulation stage, suddenly... stuck just as it was about to touch the roof of the Scripture Pavilion. It was still there, still looking terrifying, but it caused no harm. Because it had been 'commented out.' In the System's logic, although this line of code existed, it would not execute.

"Then, since you're here, you should leave something behind." A mischievous grin curled on Li Mo's lips as he wrote a new function beneath the pillar's code: if (attack_failed) { dropLoot(grade = "LEGENDARY", amount = 99999); playSound("victory.mp3"); }

Enter. Run.

The next moment, a scene that left the entire Cultivation World dumbfounded occurred. That frozen black pillar of light suddenly trembled violently, its original pitch-black color instantly turning into a festive... golden-red. Then, the once-despairing static sound vanished, replaced by the loud, cheerful, and highly piercing sound of a suona—'Good Luck Comes'.

"Good Luck Comes~ Wishing you good luck~" Amidst the deafening BGM, the golden-red pillar of light exploded. There was no explosion, no destruction. There were only Top-Grade Spirit Stones raining down from the sky like a torrential storm.

Pitter-patter! Countless Spirit Stones pelted the roof of the Scripture Pavilion, the vegetable garden, and the hard hats of the frozen Black Armored Army, making crisp and pleasant sounds.

"Ouch!" Butcher Xiao was hit in the forehead by a fist-sized Top-Grade Spirit Stone, but he didn't care about the pain; he was completely stunned. "Is... is this a Heavenly Tribulation? Since when does a Heavenly Tribulation throw money down?!"

The blue screen in the sky flickered a few times, seemingly caught in a massive logical loop. [Warning! Execution Error!] [Output result does not match expectations!] [Attempting rollback... Rollback failed...] [System overheating, forcing hibernation.]

As the final line of text flashed by, the jagged blocks in the sky began to recede rapidly, and that viscous feeling of 'lag' vanished. The blue sky and white clouds came back online, and the sunlight became soft once again.

Only the Top-Grade Spirit Stones covering the ground and the lingering notes of 'Good Luck Comes' in the air proved that what had just happened was not an illusion.

Second floor of the Scripture Pavilion. Li Mo closed the black book and rubbed his aching wrists. "Phew, the Heavenly Dao's firewall is quite thick; my hands are sore from all that editing."

He glanced at the System panel: [Achievement Unlocked: The Matrix (Cultivation Edition).] [You have successfully tampered with an attack from the Heavenly Dao. Due to the poor quality of the code (full of patches), the Heavenly Dao's core logic has experienced a slight crash. Estimated repair time: three months.] [New Permission Granted: Truth Vision (Allows viewing the source code of all things and making minor adjustments).]

"Three months?" Li Mo nodded in satisfaction. "That's enough. Just enough time for Ling'er to finish her summer homework."

At this moment, Daoist Qingxu and a group of Elders were frantically picking up Spirit Stones on the ground. "We're rich! We're rich!" "This isn't a Heavenly Tribulation; this is a blessing from the heavens!" "Thank you, Senior! Senior's magic is boundless; even the heavens were moved to shower us with money!"

Li Mo sighed helplessly as he watched the undignified high-ranking officials. He turned to look at the glass bottle in the corner of the bookshelf containing the 'Miniature Ghost King.' Inside the bottle, Wan Guku had been knocked unconscious by the earlier 'Good Luck Comes' and was now rolling his eyes and blowing bubbles.

"Crisis averted." Li Mo picked up his still-warm tea and toasted the air. "Even if the code is bad, as long as it runs, it's good code."

However, just then, a commotion broke out at the 'Administrative Approval' window. An old man in tattered Daoist robes, his face covered in dust, was excitedly pounding on the counter of Window 1. "I want to report this! I want to complain!" "I am the Pavilion Master of the Heavenly Secret Pavilion! The Heavenly Secret Rankings suddenly glitched out, dropping my rank from first to dead last! It even added a note calling me a 'noob'! This isn't fair!"

Li Mo nearly spat out his tea. Oh no. When he was editing the code earlier, he seemed to have accidentally used 'global variables'... Now, the data for the entire Cultivation World was likely a mess.

"Squeak." The Treasure-Seeking Rat thoughtfully handed him a rag. Li Mo wiped his mouth and looked out the window with an innocent expression. "This has nothing to do with me. These are just the growing pains of a 'System update'."

He casually picked up a piece of paper, wrote a new notice, and threw it out: [Compensation Announcement Regarding Recent Heavenly Dao Server Fluctuations] [Due to force majeure, the Cultivation World version has been updated to 2.0. This pavilion is not responsible for any data anomalies occurring during this period (such as Realm drops, gender swaps, spiritual pets turning into huskies, etc.).] [Compensation: One hard hat per person.]

Watching the crowd below fall into chaos once again, Li Mo smiled slightly and lay back in his rocking chair. "It seems the life of this Administrator is becoming more and more 'promising' by the day."