178: Chapter 177 A Defense That Makes Attackers Cry

Seven seconds after The Unfinished Court activated, Zhou Zhe realized—this thing wasn't a shield at all.

At least, not entirely.

In the holographic projection, that ruined garden did not appear directly in the starry sky to confront the conceptual giant web. It was like a drop of ink on rice paper; first, it bloomed into a pale golden ripple within the rule field on the outskirts of the Cradle, and then the ripples began to grow.

Phantom pavilions and towers grew, winding corridors grew, withered trees and trees full of wooden plaques grew. The entire The Unfinished Court had no physical form, appearing as if an emotional filter had been overlaid via holographic projection onto the outer boundary of the Cradle. Viewed from the inside, the starry sky remained clear; but from the images returned by external monitors, the Cradle was now enveloped by a translucent, constantly shifting phantom of an Eastern garden.

The moment the giant web woven by the Dream-Devouring Shadow touched the edge of the garden, something strange happened.

The nodes of the giant web did not explode or annihilate; instead, they began to... play videos.

The first node lit up, displaying an image: a three-headed cartoon robot crouching in a corner, with a speech bubble above its head reading, 'I'm so lonely.' The image was as rough as a child's doodle, accompanied by out-of-tune music box music.

The second node lit up: a field of dandelions, each one letting out a sobbing 'woo-woo' sound as it was scattered by the wind, the flying fluff spelling out 'Why is life so short?' in the air.

The third node: a steaming bowl of noodles. When the chopsticks picked up the noodles, they suddenly started singing: 'Where has all the time gone? I grew old before I could really feel my youth...' Out of tune, severely out of tune.

Zhao Yan stood before the defense command console, watching these images, silent for a full five seconds.

'Is this the Shield of Regret?' He turned to Zhou Zhe. 'It turned the conceptual attack of the Dream-Devouring Shadow... into low-quality sentimental short videos?'

Zhou Zhe was also stunned. The parameters on his operation interface were perfectly normal, with the resonance level of The Unfinished Court maintaining a steady 30%, but the output effect was completely different from the simulation tests. The simulation tests had shown solemn scenes of civilization's epic history, not this kind of stuff that made people laugh and cry at the same time.

'Wait.' β-2 spoke up suddenly, her projection analyzing the data stream at high speed. 'This isn't an erroneous conversion. This is targeted deconstruction. Look at the energy readings—'

She brought up a set of waveforms. Every node of the giant web was releasing high-intensity 'existence falsification' conceptual waves, but when these conceptual waves passed through the garden phantom, the waveforms were forcibly twisted and degraded, turning from precise mathematical proofs into... emotional ramblings.

'The essence of the Dream-Devouring Shadow's attack is using rationality to falsify the value of your existence,' β-2 explained quickly. 'And the response strategy of The Unfinished Court is: it acknowledges the logic of the falsification, but presents this falsification in an overly sentimental, even somewhat ridiculous way—just like stacking ten thousand plastic dolls to form the words 'meaning of life'. When a serious proposition of destruction is deconstructed into a farce, the lethality of the proposition itself is dissolved.'

As if to verify her words, the giant web in the starry sky began to shake violently. The images playing in the nodes became increasingly outrageous:

One node was looping a tragic segment from a classic play, but all the characters had been replaced by rubber ducks, with a dialect-version dubbing.

Another node was displaying a 'Chronicle of Civilizational Regrets,' with the tenth item being 'A certain ancient civilization failed to carve the last line of an epic on a stone tablet.'

Yet another node turned directly into a collection of popular love poems: 'If I were cosine, you would be my sine; together we could cover the entire domain—pity the domain is bounded, while regret is infinite.'

'It's angry.' Lin Shen said suddenly. He stared at the monitoring screen, which showed the conceptual radiation intensity of the Dream-Devouring Shadow spiking irregularly. 'Not aggressive anger, but... embarrassment and rage after being teased.'

Sure enough, the giant web suddenly contracted, and all the nodes merged into a huge, rotating black vortex. From deep within the vortex came a whisper ten times clearer than before, and this time everyone could 'understand' it:

'Stop... this... blasphemy...'

'Death... should be solemn...'

'Order returning to chaos... should be a grand terminal narrative...'

'Not... rubber ducks...'

The last three words were pronounced through gritted teeth.

Zhou Zhe almost laughed out loud and quickly covered his mouth. Chu Yunshen's shoulders shook, and he turned his head to pretend to cough. Even the corners of Zhao Yan's mouth twitched.

'It seems our 'non-standard' approach is indeed quite creative.' Lin Shen said. 'β-2, record this interaction. At the hearing, this will be the empirical evidence of our 'civilizational resilience'—even a conceptual predator can be driven to incoherence by us.'

'Recorded.' β-2 said, pausing. 'However, I personally think that using rubber duck dramas to counter a cosmic-level entity might leave the Arbitration Tribunal with an impression of being 'insufficiently serious'.'

'Then it depends on how we present it.' Chu Yunshen breathed steadily, his eyes regaining their professional look. 'We can define it like this: this is a 'civilizational psychological defense mechanism that uses deconstructionism to dissolve ultimate propositions.' Sounds very academic.'

Countdown: 5 hours 48 minutes.

Just as everyone breathed a sigh of relief, a new anomaly occurred.

The black vortex suddenly stopped rotating, and fine cracks appeared on its surface. What poured out from the cracks was no longer whispers, but a sharp, screeching sound like glass rubbing against glass.

The monitoring alarm blared frantically:

[Warning: Alien conceptual encoding intrusion detected!]

[Type: Forced empathy reversal!]

[Effect: Converts the target civilization's emotional defense into a self-attacking weapon!]

'It's learning from us!' Zhou Zhe exclaimed.

On the operating interface, the garden phantom of The Unfinished Court began to twist. The pale gold of the pavilions and towers turned into a morbid dark red, and the poems on the wooden plaques were tampered with:

'This feeling might become a memory' turned into 'This feeling was ridiculous to begin with.'

'Life between heaven and earth, suddenly like a traveler on a long journey' turned into 'Life between heaven and earth, was a mistake from the start.'

Black, thorn-like branches grew on the withered trees, and hanging on the branches were no longer wooden plaques, but small, playing screens—all of them segments of setbacks and predicaments from human history, accompanied by mechanical canned laughter.

The Unfinished Court was being reverse-contaminated, turning from a 'Shield of Regret' into a 'Blade of Self-Mockery.'

Zhou Zhe's fingers slid rapidly across the operation interface, trying to recalibrate the resonance frequency, but the system feedback was cold:

[divine remains seed in deep hibernation, core emotional source unavailable.]

[Current defense architecture running on seed preset templates, cannot be dynamically adjusted.]

[Suggestion: Shut down the system immediately, or the reverse contamination will permeate into the Cradle's internal emotional network.]

Shut down? Then the conceptual giant web outside would drive straight in.

Don't shut down? The internal self-attack would first disintegrate the defenders at a psychological level.

A dilemma.

'Engineer Zhou, how much longer can you hold on?' Zhao Yan asked, his hand already pressed on the launch button of the physical defense system.

'Three minutes and seventeen seconds. Reverse contamination progress... 42%.' Zhou Zhe's forehead was sweating. 'If it exceeds 60%, the contamination will be irreversible, and The Unfinished Court will permanently become a negative emotion diffuser.'

'β-2, any suggestions?'

'I am analyzing the Dream-Devouring Shadow's reversal encoding pattern.' β-2's projection flickered at an increased frequency, showing high-load computation. 'It is essentially imitating the operating logic of The Unfinished Court, but injecting malice. If we can inject a stronger... hmm, 'positive interference'?'

'What do you mean by 'positive interference'?' Chu Yunshen frowned.

'It's an expression method that lacks aggressiveness but has excessive permeability. For example—' β-2 suddenly pulled up a data packet. 'I just found this in the Cradle's public database, a common pattern in human cultural exchange archives: a collection of overly straightforward emotional expressions.'

Zhao Yan: '…Why are you bringing this up now?'

'Because the essence of this type of expression is to convey emotion in an unadorned, even slightly abrupt way. This 'abruptness' itself is intrusive—it will force the receiving system to allocate extra resources for parsing.' β-2 said. 'If we use higher-intensity expressions of this kind and inject them into the contaminated The Unfinished Court in reverse, it might cause system overload, just like injecting more chaotic but harmless instructions into a program that is already disordered.'

Zhou Zhe listened, dumbfounded: 'Is there... any theoretical basis for this?'

'Based on information overload defense theory.' β-2 said. 'When someone attacks you with a passion you cannot understand, the best counterattack is to make them confused first with an even more nonsensical approach. I believe the same applies to conceptual systems.'

Lin Shen stared at the reverse contamination progress on the monitoring screen, which had already climbed to 51%.

'Do it.' He said.

β-2's efficiency was astonishing. Three seconds later, a 'passionate expression' data packet, enhanced by conceptual encoding, was ready. The content was selected from common human emotional exchange patterns, processed to be harmless, including but not limited to:

'You look especially spirited today!'

'I just read a particularly interesting book, would you like to hear me talk about it?'

'I think we could become very good friends!'

And so on, five hundred in total.

'Inject.' Lin Shen ordered.

The data packet shot like a warm-toned stream of light into the darkening garden phantom.

What happened at that moment was later recorded in the Cradle's 'Anomaly Event Records,' numbered [Special Record-09: Passionate Expression Interference Conceptual Predator Event].

The garden phantom froze at first.

Then the dark red began to fade, replaced by an indescribable... pink-orange.

The black thorns on the withered trees began to play heartwarming daily scenes, and the canned laughter turned into cheerful background music. One node suddenly started looping 'I hope you have a good mood today,' accompanied by soothing piano music.

Another node popped up a huge, flashing dialog box: 'Your performance just now was really great!'

The most brilliant part was the center of the vortex, where a line of large, jumping characters appeared:

'I really appreciate your unique way of thinking, let's communicate more!'

It was followed by a string of symbols indicating friendliness.

It really started looping.

The screeching sound of the Dream-Devouring Shadow stopped abruptly.

It didn't stop attacking; it was as if it had been choked by something.

Monitoring data showed that the conceptual radiation intensity plummeted off a cliff, the reverse contamination progress dropped from 51% to 3%, and then completely to zero.

The giant web began to disintegrate. The nodes extinguished one by one, like a screen being forcibly turned off.

Finally, the vortex, while playing the 47th 'You are truly an interesting existence,' disappeared with a 'pop.'

Only a faint warm residue remained in the starry sky, along with a whisper so weak it was almost inaudible, full of resentment:

'...Low-level... vulgar...'

'But... effective...'

'We... temporarily retreat...'

'But will... find a way to crack... this vulgar method...'

Then, it was completely quiet.

The spatial folds disappeared, and the conceptual fluctuations returned to zero.

Inside and outside the defense layer, there was dead silence.

After a full ten seconds, Zhao Yan spoke: 'So... we won?'

'Won with overly passionate expressions.' Zhou Zhe looked at The Unfinished Court on the operation interface, which had returned to its normal pale gold, his expression complex. 'I think if the divine remains seed knew, it might choose to continue sleeping.'

β-2's projection made a 'shrugging' gesture—she had recently learned it from Zhao Yan. 'Effective is effective. And according to emotional monitoring, 87% of the human members within the defense layer just now experienced an 'absurd sense of excitement,' and morale increased by 23%. This is more practical than a solemn epic defense.'

Chu Yunshen was already recording: 'Hearing case supplement: 'Creative Interference Defense' displayed by civilization under extreme pressure can be used as empirical evidence of psychological resilience.'

Countdown: 5 hours 12 minutes.

The crisis was temporarily averted, but no one relaxed. The Dream-Devouring Shadow's words, 'will find a way to crack this vulgar method,' were like a thorn stuck in their consciousness.

Lin Shen brought up the technology tree system. The tree-shaped icon for the kindling protocol had jumped from 3% to 5% in its unlock progress.

A line of small text appeared beside it:

[Non-standard protocol application detected: 'Emotional Overload Interference'. Compliant with the 'Flexibility' guideline in the sowers legacy.]

[Reward: Unlock 'Civilizational Trait Enhancement' interface (Preview).]

He opened the preview and saw three directions for enhancement:

[Resilience of Compassion] - Increases the civilization's recovery speed after trauma

[Humorous Deconstruction] - Increases the civilization's resistance to mental attacks

[Abundance of Regret] - Increases the civilization's ability to extract wisdom from failure

Each direction required consuming 'Civilizational Resonance Points,' which were sourced from the collective emotional experience of all members—that 'Passionate Expression Counterattack' just now had actually accumulated 153 points.

'Don't rush to choose yet.' Lin Shen closed the interface. 'Wait until the hearing results are out.'

Just then, the medical sector sent an emergency communication.

It was Great Strength. He had woken up, and the brain scan results showed an anomaly: in the language area of his cerebral cortex, a tiny neural imprint that did not belong to a human was detected. The imprint was slowly releasing information.

The information content consisted of two alternating lines of text:

First line: 'Daddy, I'm in pain.'

Second line: 'Sower Protocol, awakening progress 19%.'

Zhao Yan stood up immediately: 'I'll go take a look.'

'Take β-2 with you for real-time analysis.' Lin Shen said. 'Also, notify Zhou Zhe—the situation with Great Strength's daughter might be related to the divine remains seed.'

'You mean...'

'The Pruning Faction is using that girl's body as some kind of 'protocol carrier'.' Lin Shen's voice was very cold. 'And the resonance source required by the carrier might be the divine remains, or... us, who are of the same origin as the divine remains.'