304: Chapter 304 Three Meters

Lu Yan's voice came through the wired telephone, mixed with the continuous dull grinding sound of metal from the direction of the exterior wall.

"Boss, one-third of the east alloy layer has been eaten through."

"The consumption rate of the precast wall is twice the calculated rate."

"Forty minutes."

He paused for a second.

"It will hit the main body in forty minutes."

Lin Yuan put down the receiver.

Most of the defense line markings on the whiteboard had already been erased by Su Xiaonuan.

The sound of the steel seal fell one after another at the dispatch console, each sound marking an area as "abandoned".

B2 sent over a handwritten note from Tang Qiqi.

[All twelve patterns of the zero coffin lit up to maximum simultaneously. The black marks stopped moving. The coordinate box trembled. The weight dropped from 1.7 to 0.3 kilograms within thirty seconds. It was emptying itself.]

Almost at the same time, Liu Qing read out the reports from the observers in Shanghai and Zhe City from the other end of the wired telephone—the ground around the twelve silent well collapsed, and black gas columns spewed from the wellheads.

"The light directly disappeared when passing through the gas column."

Liu Qing's voice was very calm.

"It's not an occlusion. That section of the light path no longer exists."

Lin Yuan pressed the two sets of information side by side on the desktop.

Twelve black gas columns pierced through the clouds.

The mechanical telescope of the exterior wall observation deck turned toward the sky.

The observer tightened the eyepiece, and his hand stopped on the recording board.

Directly above Jiangcheng, the twelve gas columns converged into a black disk.

With a diameter of about two hundred meters.

There was no color inside the disk.

No light.

No darkness.

It looked like a chunk carved out of the field of vision.

The sound of physical barriers shattering came from the direction of B2.

Tang Qiqi's last photo was run up by a messenger—at the original position of the zero coffin, even a layer of the ground was missing.

The disk began to expand.

Where it passed, the air no longer existed.

The clouds no longer existed.

The roofs of distant buildings were erased from the picture, without any process of collapse or debris falling.

Yu Qingyi reported via wired telephone from B1: "The entire building in the seventh zone of the outer ring—that position in the picture has turned into a blank."

All the Zero Entities stopped in their steps at the same time.

The black ash on their gray-black bodies began to peel off, floating toward the sky and merging into the disk.

They were not an attacking force.

They were fuel.

The Void Domain expanded outward by thirty meters per minute.

The observer continuously read numbers with a mechanical rangefinder, his voice getting faster and faster.

"Seven hundred forty... Seven hundred ten..."

Tank drove titan no. 1 across the gate line last.

He glanced back—the precast wall behind him began to disappear from the top, and in less than two seconds, the entire wall no longer existed.

The gate slammed down.

Three layers of alloy.

Six physical locks.

The paper tape spat out the last line of words.

[Distance from the Void Domain to the main exterior wall: four hundred twenty meters. Contact with the main structure in fourteen minutes.]

Wang Xue walked up to the master control console.

Without anyone's permission.

She slapped a handwritten paper onto the desktop.

"Between the eighth round and the twelfth round, I have seen this."

A crude circle was drawn on the paper.

"The Red Moon, Superpower, zombies, crystal core—all originated from the same genetic modification broadcast."

"The experiment initiated by the high-level officials of various countries fifty years ago went out of control. That thing is a built-in recycling program."

Her throat rolled.

"When the mutation exceeds the threshold, the program starts and erases all non-primitive products. After the twelfth round in my past life, I died. No one has survived the completion of recycling."

The wired telephone rang.

Beijing independent line.

Adam's voice was not steady for the first time.

"My Superpower is gone. SSS-level Devouring—it was taken away."

Lin Yuan held the receiver without moving.

"Ark Zero failed. The gene sample library needs Superpower to maintain freezing, and all degraded at the moment of zeroing."

"What can you do now?"

"I can't do anything," Adam said. "I'm just like you. An ordinary person."

Lin Yuan put down the receiver.

No one spoke in front of the master control console.

Distance from the Void Domain to the exterior wall: three hundred ten meters.

The next second.

A faint blue light flashed across Lin Yuan's field of vision.

It was not a complete interface.

Like an old screen with extremely weak signal, the handwriting kept flickering.

[Host binding is about to be lifted.]

[The essence of the contract is not a product of the System.]

[Underlying connection: genetic resonance.]

[The true meaning of 100% favorability—not System-locked loyalty, but permanent resonance at the genetic level. This connection is not on the recycling list.]

Three seconds later, the blue interface disappeared line by line.

Attribute bar.

Favorability bar.

Superpower bar.

Deleted line by line.

The last character went out.

Something at the back of the head disconnected.

Dizziness lasted less than a second.

The System disappeared permanently.

Lin Yuan lowered his head.

On his palm, a very faint grayish-white water pattern was still flowing.

Not a Superpower.

It was something the body remembered.

Genetic resonance.

It did not rely on any external programs.

The End could not delete it.

The Void Domain touched the exterior wall.

The outermost alloy began to disappear from the top.

Soundless.

The sensor spat out the last set of data before being erased, and the paper tape terminal stopped running.

Qin Yumo stood in front of the B1 isolation room door.

Twin blades were held in her hands, without the blessing of Superpower, just ordinary alloy.

The corners of the ceiling at the end of the corridor began to turn blank.

"It has come in."

Lin Yuan turned and walked toward the isolation room.

Jiang Xiaowan lay on the observation bed.

The incubator was right on the right-hand side.

The baby girl closed her eyes, the white mist on the breathing mask rising and falling together.

The upper left corner of the ceiling turned blank.

The blankness spread.

Five meters.

Four meters.

Three and a half meters—

The baby girl opened her eyes.

She opened her mouth and let out a not-so-loud cry.

The Void Domain stopped.

Three meters away from the incubator.

The edge of the blankness hit like an invisible wall.

It tried to push forward.

The three-meter boundary remained motionless.

Tang Qiqi squatted on the ground, pulling a wind-up tape measure from the outer wall of the incubator to the edge of the blankness.

"Three meters."

"The error is within centimeters."

The baby girl cried once, and the blankness struck once.

During the pause in the crying, the blankness remained motionless.

Lin Yuan looked at that gap.

The System's last four lines of words floated up.

[Genetic structure: natural closed loop.]

[Rating: unable to establish.]

She was not a product of the Red Moon.

Nor a mutant of the Superpower Era.

She was human life nurtured by natural closed-loop genes.

The recycling program could not find any markers on her.

It did not have the permission to delete her.

Lu Yan reported via wired telephone: The advancement of the Void Domain inside the Tiangong main body slowed down overall.

It was not stopped, but the speed plummeted.

Su Xiaonuan sealed all of Tang Qiqi's mechanical photos, measurement data, and time records into an independent archive.

The steel seal stamped the top-secret chapter.

Lin Yuan stood beside the incubator.

His daughter closed her eyes again.

The crying stopped.

The white mist resumed a steady rhythm.

He reached out, his fingertips touching the glass wall.

Three meters away, the blankness was still there.

In the sky, the Void Domain still covered most of Jiangcheng.

The End did not disappear.

But it was stuck.

By a child less than twenty-four hours old.

Lin Yuan withdrew his hand.

"Su Xiaonuan."

"Here."

"Record this distance."

"Three meters."

"This is the only number we are sure of."

Su Xiaonuan wrote the number on the cover of the archive.

The tip of the pen finally landed on the distance column.

Three meters.

She closed the archive.