242: Chapter 243 "Order Wars" [Clone City]: The "Calamity" Unleashed Once Again

Passerby Man rubs the cold, smooth, pitch-black Unlucky Egg in his palm. Grey-black patterns symbolizing "Calamity" faintly surface on the shell, a sign that the calamity stored within the Unlucky Egg is about to erupt again.

As the Viscous Nutrient Solution spread across the Underground Garbage Dump continuously assimilates various trash to multiply, that sweet scent grows ever stronger. Lifting his feet to shake off the Viscous Nutrient Solution overflowing his ankles—in this pitch-black junkyard, tens of thousands of dormant Clones and various trash being assimilated into Viscous Nutrient Solution are piled into mountains that rise and fall with the Clones' breathing. In this space, only the sound of rhythmic breathing and the faint noise of drones spraying nutrient solution intertwine into a hair-raising background sound.

Just as Passerby Man lifted his foot to avoid a Clone with half a missing leg in front of him, an invisible wave suddenly erupted from the Unlucky Egg, sweeping towards a sealed room somewhere in Clone City above ground. The power of "Calamity" doesn't just make Passerby Man unlucky; it also causes everything associated with him to encounter calamity. And at this moment, the ones most deeply associated with Passerby Man are the tens of thousands of dormant Clones before him, and those directly related to these Clones are the Original Humans located at the top of the Clone Tower.

A simple data loss caused a nearly imperceptible defensive loophole to appear in the originally perfect network System of the entire Clone City. The Hacker, like a mouse smelling cheese, tapped his ten fingers on the Virtual Keyboard like butterflies, easily infiltrating the "Monitoring Chip System" in the Clones' brains and completely paralyzing it.

The paralysis of the "Monitoring Chip System" was like ten million threads controlling the Clones snapping simultaneously, or like countless heavy shackles being removed. Unlike the 1,900 Clones in Clone City on the surface who had Awakening of self-awareness and resolved the explosion crisis of their monitoring chips, the tens of thousands of Clones in the Underground Garbage Dump ended their long forced hibernation the moment the Monitoring Chip System was paralyzed. As pairs of eyes opened in the darkness of the Underground Garbage Dump, Passerby Man fell down due to the violent shaking of the "Trash Mountain." The beam of light emitted from his flashlight also successfully attracted pairs of questioning and bewildered eyes.

The next second, the rhythmic, faint breathing throughout the Underground Garbage Dump abruptly stopped.

Passerby Man's heart suddenly tightened. The flashlight's beam trembled violently as the Clones beneath his feet moved their limbs, illuminating a terrifying sight he would never forget in his lifetime.

Hundreds of thousands of dormant Clones, at the same moment, all opened their eyes and looked at him in unison.

There were no roars, no struggling; only dense, endless eyes opening simultaneously. Their hollow pupils were full of questions and confusion. The very moment their forced hibernation ended, the Clones instinctively revealed stylized smiles.

The Clones slightly turned their stiff necks and limbs. Some looked at the special pipes overhead, some looked at their fellow Clones piled around them, and some stared straight at Passerby Man, who was frozen in place, their smiles unchanging, as if waiting for his command.

The doubt in the Clones' eyes was doubt about still being alive after entering the Trash Decomposition Device, doubt about the tens of thousands of their kind pressing above and below them, and doubt about the Viscous Nutrient Solution slowly seeping into their skin.

The confusion in the Clones' eyes was confusion about not being dead despite supposedly reaching their lifespan limit, confusion about which job they should perform, and confusion about this never-before-seen Original Human before them.

Clones with missing limbs struggled to move their bodies; those with damaged organs labored to rise and fall their chests. Their bodies, soaked in the Viscous Nutrient Solution for a long time, were rapidly exiting the low-power forced hibernation state under the original "monitoring chip." As the top layer of Clones broke free from their stacked positions, they all began moving in the same direction in unison.

Passerby Man looked at the hand reached out by the Clone in front of him, politely said "thank you," and was pulled up by the other party.

Stepping in the Viscous Nutrient Solution and watching the endless walking Clones before him, Passerby Man's mouth twitched frantically. His hand holding the Unlucky Egg was trembling: "Such a classic conspiracy? ... No originality at all! ..."

Plagued by misfortune since childhood, after experiencing all sorts of unlucky events, Passerby Man was already able to roughly infer the events he might encounter and the various conspiracies that might exist behind them through various details.

What Passerby Man could be certain of now was that after the calamity accumulated by his A-rank Talent [Person of Calamity] was strengthened three consecutive times by the Unlucky Egg, it not only brought him to the core location of a conspiracy through a series of "accidental" unlucky events as usual but also allowed him to witness the Awakening of tens of thousands of dormant Clones underground. It was clear that the degree of this "Calamity" far exceeded the sum of previous ones, and Passerby Man could clearly feel that the "Calamity" was still continuing.