72: Chapter 72 A Call from Earth

For the City of Liver Emperor, night was merely a unit of measurement, not a signal to rest.

This war beast, hovering above the Old Demon Domain, had a core furnace whose every pulse converted massive amounts of spirit stones and demon crystals into pure energy, which was then transported through countless crisscrossing rune pipes to every corner of the city.

Energy drove the assembly lines of the arms factories, catalyzed the medicinal liquids in the alchemy rooms, and maintained the thick, tangible defensive barrier that shrouded the entire city.

The high concentration of escaping energy intertwined with the players' immense spiritual power, making the air in the entire city thick, as if one could inhale scorching streams of information with every breath.

This place was the nest of the fourth calamity, the base camp where the Filial Sons and Virtuous Grandchildren prepared for their expedition, and the singularity where the world's energy was most concentrated and its laws most active.

Inside the council chamber, the latest battle report regarding the "Cultural Blitzkrieg" was being presented to All Realms Connector by Gossip Reporter Little Trumpet via a remote communication projection.

"...Reporting, Director, the second phase of the 'Thunderbolt Project' has been successfully completed. Currently, the 'Ten Secrets of the Sacred Land' series of stories has become popular simultaneously in Wangxian City and seventeen surrounding market towns. Topics such as 'Yaoguang Peak Usury' and 'Dark History of the Discipline Hall' have become fodder for gossip among low-level cultivators after drinking. Our 'Cultural Influence' rating has risen by 7.3 percent over the last twelve hours. Aside from symbolically arresting a few 'storytellers' we intentionally threw out there, the Sacred Land authorities have taken no substantive counter-measures. Their attitude... is extremely ambiguous."

All Realms Connector listened quietly, tapping its fingers on the tabletop. On the map, the red dots representing "public opinion occupation" were spreading at a visible speed, eroding the sacred green of the Central Sacred Land.

Everything was under control.

However, against the backdrop of this grand narrative, some deeper, stranger noises were quietly sprouting within the "underlying code" of the city.

City core area, energy conversion hub.

The space here was occupied by huge, slowly rotating crystal clusters, with liquid golden or purple brilliance flowing inside each crystal.

The air was filled with a "humming" sound that seemed to make the soul resonate.

This was the "heart" of the entire city, with an energy intensity sufficient to instantly evaporate the spiritual body of a Qi Refining stage cultivator.

Liver Emperor V87 was leading his engineering team to conduct the final stress test on the energy output node about to be connected to the "Gate of the World."

"Rune array A-7, increase energy load to 120 percent! Observe its spiritual power dissipation curve!" Liver Emperor V87 issued orders meticulously. In his eyes, there were only data and models; he was as rigorous as a precision instrument.

And in this forbidden scientific research area where noise was strictly prohibited, one figure seemed out of place.

I Love Exploiting Loopholes was sneaking behind a backup energy diversion port. On his player interface, there were no engineering blueprints, but rather a dazzling series of system logs refreshing at high speed.

He was not participating in the stress test; instead, he was taking advantage of this rare, extreme energy environment to do what he did best—looking for bugs.

"...Strange, the system's underlying spiritual power interaction protocol actually exhibits periodic, very slight redundant overflows under this high pressure..." He muttered, his eyes gleaming like a shark that had caught the scent of blood.

To others, this was a "problem" that needed fixing; to him, it was a broad road leading to "hidden quests" and "system backdoors."

He skillfully called up the "data probe" mini-program he had written and carefully probed the source of that redundant overflow, trying to capture its underlying logic.

Just then—"Zzzzt!" An extremely faint but sharp static noise, sharp enough to pierce the eardrum, exploded in his mind without warning.

Immediately after, the system log interface before his eyes, those countless lines of scrolling green code, suddenly flickered!

An indescribable black-and-white image, filled with static and distorted lines, flashed across his vision like lightning!

The feeling... was like an old television, that momentary signal interruption when switching between two channels.

I Love Exploiting Loopholes was struck as if by lightning and froze abruptly.

"What the f*ck?" He was stunned for half a second, his first reaction being wild joy.

A new bug! Definitely a world-class bug never seen before!

However, when he tried to recall the feeling of that moment, an inexplicable chill, originating from the depths of his soul, quietly crept up his spine.

That was not a common code error or missing texture in the game. It was a feeling of... "not belonging here."

It was as if you were running in a seamless program, but were suddenly forcibly "bumped" by "something" from another dimension with completely different rules.

"Big Boss V87!" I Love Exploiting Loopholes scrambled out from the corner, his face a mix of excitement and a hint of panic he hadn't even noticed himself. "There's... there's a problem! A big problem!"

Liver Emperor V87 frowned, clearly dissatisfied with this unpredictable guy interrupting the test. "What's the situation? Did your probe short-circuit the diversion port?"

"No! It's... it's the system! The system has been 'f*cked' by someone!" I Love Exploiting Loopholes gestured incoherently. "Just now, at the very moment the energy output reached its peak, I... I received a... garbage signal!"

"Garbage signal?" Liver Emperor V87's expression became serious.

In the heart of this city, any abnormal signal could be fatal.

He immediately stopped the test and walked personally to I Love Exploiting Loopholes' terminal.

"Reproduce it." He said concisely.

"Okay!" I Love Exploiting Loopholes immediately perked up. He operated skillfully, guiding a weak stream of energy to flow toward that node again.

"Right now!" He shouted.

Liver Emperor V87 opened his eyes wide, pushing his perception to the limit.

"Hum—" This time, he clearly "saw" it.

The moment the torrent of energy flowed over the node, an "impurity," so weak it could almost be ignored, seeped in from the void and mixed into the normal system data stream.

It was like a drop of ink dripped into the rushing Yangtze River, instantly diluted and scattered, but its existence was undeniable.

Liver Emperor V87's expression became incredibly grave for the first time.

As the chief engineer, he knew better than anyone what this meant.

This was not an internal bug, but an intrusion from the "outside."

But... what is the "outside"?

For them, who were in the game world, where were the boundaries of the world?

Could it be that the Central Sacred Land or the Demon Lord had developed a means to attack their "system" directly?

"Capture it!" Liver Emperor V87 immediately ordered. "Set up the 'Sumeru Array,' build an information barrier. I want to fish this drop of 'ink' out!"

The engineering team immediately took action.

Several hours later, after consuming massive resources and under the personal direction of Liver Emperor V87, they finally succeeded in capturing an extremely short "abnormal signal" during the next energy peak.

The signal was projected onto a huge light screen.

It was a piece of garbled code with no logic, impossible to interpret.

Flickering symbols, broken lines, intermittent high-frequency noise... It looked like background radiation left over from the Big Bang, chaotic and empty.

All the engineers present frowned. They tried every known decryption algorithm, but whether it was the array language of the cultivation world or any programming language from their memories, none could parse even a fraction of it.

"That doesn't make sense..." a tech geek muttered to himself. "This thing... it doesn't carry any effective 'information entropy'; it's pure noise. But... its structure vaguely reveals a kind of... a kind of sense of order."

Just when everyone was at a loss, I Love Exploiting Loopholes, who had been staring fixedly at the light screen, suddenly trembled slightly.

He pointed at a blurry figure in the garbled code that flashed by, composed of countless noise points, and asked in a dry voice: "That... do you guys think... that thing... looks a bit like an... 'equal sign'?"

Everyone looked over upon hearing this. Reminded by him, that blurry figure, amidst the chaotic background, seemed to truly present two parallel short lines.

An "equal sign." A mathematical symbol that was meaningless in the cultivation world but was the most basic thing in their cognition.

Immediately after, another player also discovered something.

"And that too! The audio spectrum of that high-frequency noise! Look at its peaks! 0... 1... 1... 0... 0... 1... This... is this binary?!"

The air instantly went deathly silent.

If an "equal sign" was just a coincidence, then the appearance of a string of suspected "binary" code completely overturned the nature of the event.

These things did not belong to this Xianxia world. They belonged to another place. The place they called "home."

...

Top floor of the council chamber.

In All Realms Connector's office, the atmosphere was so oppressive it felt as if it had solidified.

On the light screen, the captured garbled signal carrying the "equal sign" and "binary" was playing on a loop.

The playful smile on Keyboard Warrior Governing the Nation's face had long since disappeared, replaced by a scholarly fervor and gravity.

"The source... can it be located?" All Realms Connector's voice was low and calm.

"No." Liver Emperor V87 shook his head, a hint of frustration on his face. "It... it doesn't come from any coordinate in this world. It's as if... it appeared directly in our system channel, or more accurately, directly in each of our 'player templates.' Its source points to a... absolute void."

Pointing to a void. Or rather, pointing to the "outside" of this world.

"Is it a trap?" All Realms Connector looked at Keyboard Warrior Governing the Nation. "Fairy Yunshang... or some deeper old monster from the Central Sacred Land, deliberately using things we can understand to lure us?"

"It's possible." Keyboard Warrior Governing the Nation mused. "But what's the cost? Simulating a signal that crosses world rules, the difficulty and consumption are probably no less than recreating a Demon Lord. What are they after? Just to make us nervous?"

He paused and proposed a hypothesis that made everyone present skip a beat.

"Or... is there a possibility..." he said slowly, "that this wasn't sent to us by someone else? But rather... sent by 'ourselves' to 'ourselves'?"

This sounded like a tongue twister, but All Realms Connector understood the meaning instantly.

Players, or Earthlings, were summoned by the "Old Ancestor." This process was one-way.

But what if... on the Earth side, someone discovered this phenomenon of "missing persons" and tried to trace it back along that invisible "line"?

This call from "Earth" might not be a greeting. But rather... a rescue signal.

Just as the office fell into silence, inside the unobserved ancestral hall space belonging to the Old Ancestor Lu Bei, that illusory spiritual body suddenly opened its eyes.

Just a moment ago, he felt a trace of extremely weak "noise" in the incense connection between himself and all the "Heavenly Chosen Filial Grandson," interfered with by an external force.

The source of that noise was not a creature of this world. It came from... that line of karma connecting the two worlds that he had long since severed.

In Lu Bei's eyes, for the first time, a trace of true astonishment and... unease appeared.

"The plan remains unchanged." After a long while, All Realms Connector finally spoke, breaking the silence.

Its voice returned to its usual calmness and decisiveness.

"The expedition to the Central Sacred Land is our established strategy. This... 'signal' is a variable, but it cannot become an obstacle."

It looked at Liver Emperor V87 and I Love Exploiting Loopholes: "This matter is classified as top secret. The two of you will take the lead in establishing the 'Watcher Project,' specifically responsible for monitoring and deciphering this signal. I don't care what method you use; I want to know what it is, what it wants to do, and where it comes from."

It paused, its gaze sweeping over everyone present, and said word by word: "Before we figure all this out, the city under our feet is both the flagship of the expedition and... the only ark for us to confront all the unknowns of the two worlds."

Outside the office, the "City of Liver Emperor" was still roaring.

Countless players were still fanatically striving to "get a golden coffin for the Old Ancestor" and "expedition to the Central Sacred Land to open a new map."

They did not know that right above their heads, a storm sufficient to shake the foundations of their existence had already quietly gathered.

And in the very core of the city, inside a newly renovated secret room completely isolated from the outside world, I Love Exploiting Loopholes was setting up more precise monitoring arrays with several top technical players.

Their task was no longer hunting, fighting monsters, or doing quests. Instead, it was waiting.

Waiting for that call... from outside the world, which might never come again, or might ring out again at any moment.