Chapter 57: The Shattered Quarantine and the Ghost in the Fleet
The "Zero-Day Breach" was not a clean explosion; it was a conceptual tear in the fabric of the galactic quarantine. As Zhou Fan launched himself toward the Auditor's fleet, the world behind him seemed to stretch and distort, becoming a distant, glowing marble trapped in a blue honeycomb. He was no longer just a man; he had become a [Packet of Sentient Data], moving at speeds that defied conventional physics.
Beside him, Ling Er was encased in a protective shroud of the "Random Seed." To the Auditor's sensors, she appeared as "White Noise"—an unpredictable variable that the galactic systems couldn't lock onto.
"Zhou Fan! The silver ships are repositioning!" Ling Er's voice echoed through their private neural link. "They're not using lasers... they're using [De-fragmentation Beams]!"
The silver, brain-shaped vessels of the Auditor's fleet began to pulse in unison. Broad waves of translucent energy swept through the vacuum. Anything these waves touched—space dust, stray satellites, or drifting debris—was instantly organized, categorized, and shrunk into tiny, glowing cubes. The Auditor wasn't trying to destroy Zhou Fan; he was trying to [Archive] him.
"Organized death is still death," Zhou Fan muttered.
"[Command: Polymorphic Code Injection]!"
As the De-fragmentation beam hit him, Zhou Fan didn't resist. Instead, he changed his "File Extension" a thousand times per microsecond. One moment he was a 'Sound File', the next a 'Physical Constant', then a 'Memory Fragment'. The beam, programmed to organize specific data types, began to "stutter." The silver ships groaned as their internal processors overheated, trying to categorize a target that refused to stay in one form.
The Infiltration: Boarding the "Cerebrum-Class"
Zhou Fan saw his opening. He steered his trajectory toward the Auditor's flagship—the largest silver brain in the center. He didn't crash into the hull. He [Phased] through it by matching the vibrational frequency of the ship's defensive shields.
Inside, the environment was hauntingly silent. There were no corridors or doors. The interior was a fluid, mercury-like substance that responded to thought. This was a [Liquid-Computing Environment].
"Warning," a smooth, melodic voice resonated through the liquid. "Unregistered Logic Pattern detected in the Primary Lobe. Initiating [Internal Quarantine]."
Suddenly, the mercury-like floor rose up, forming humanoid shapes—thousands of them. These were [Logic Sentinels], soldiers made of pure, liquid processing power. They didn't carry swords; their hands were blades of [Absolute Truth], designed to cut through any "Lie" or "Corruption."
"Ling Er, stay behind me!" Zhou Fan commanded. He opened the Missing Ledger, which now glowed with a dark, rebellious ink. "They represent the 'Established Order'. We represent the 'Exception to the Rule'!"
Zhou Fan engaged the Sentinels. His movements were a blur of [Macro-Optimization]. Every strike he landed wasn't just physical; he was injecting "Corrupted Equations" into the Sentinels' liquid bodies. When he punched a Sentinel, it didn't just break—it [Crashed]. The liquid soldier would freeze, its body turning into a jumble of nonsensical symbols before dissolving back into the floor.
But the Auditor was not impressed. The being of Solidified Time appeared at the end of the hall, his staff glowing with a terrifying heat.
"You play with code like a child playing with sand," The Auditor said, his voice echoing with the weight of a billion years. "I am the one who oversaw the birth of this galaxy's first star. I have archived civilizations far greater than yours. Do you really think a 'Lead Developer' from a backwater sector can breach the [Galactic Core]?"
The Auditor raised his staff, and the liquid floor suddenly turned into a [Memory Trap].
The Trap of Endless Iterations
Zhou Fan and Ling Er found themselves suddenly standing back on the hill where the story began. Then, in a flash, they were back in the Great Shrine. Then, in the dark laboratory of the Designers. The Auditor was forcing them through a [Rapid-Cycle Iteration], making them relive every failure, every death, and every reset they had ever experienced, but at a thousand times the speed.
"Your mind is a sequence," the Auditor's voice boomed from the sky. "And every sequence has an end. I will find your [Termination Point]."
Ling Er screamed as she saw her own death a million times in a second. Her "Random Seed" began to flicker. The pressure of reliving all those tragedies was causing her consciousness to fracture.
"Zhou Fan... I can't... the noise... it's too much..."
Zhou Fan felt the same pressure. His silver hair was turning white as the Auditor "Aged" his data. But then, he remembered the blank pages of the Ledger.
"The sequence only ends if the logic is closed!" Zhou Fan roared, his eyes bleeding violet sparks. "But I am the Missing Account! I am the data that was never meant to be recorded!"
He grabbed Ling Er's hand and forced his own consciousness into a [Divide by Zero] state. He intentionally created a logical paradox within his own mind. The "Memory Trap" couldn't handle the paradox. The Auditor's ship began to shake violently as the Liquid-Computing environment started to "Boil" with errors.
"Impossible!" The Auditor's calm facade finally cracked. "A biological entity cannot sustain a Null-Paradox!"
"I'm not just a biological entity," Zhou Fan said, his voice now a terrifying mix of human grit and machine precision. "I am the Infinite Loop you forgot to close."
With a final surge of power, Zhou Fan shattered the Memory Trap. The silver flagship exploded from the inside out, not with fire, but with a massive burst of [Raw Information].
Into the Void-Sea
As the flagship disintegrated, Zhou Fan and Ling Er were propelled out into the [Void-Sea]—the vast, dark space between star systems. They were no longer near their home planet. They had been launched into the "Deep Web" of the galaxy.
Ahead of them, millions of light-years away, lay a massive, glowing cluster of stars that looked like a giant, golden circuit board.
"The Galactic Hub," Zhou Fan whispered, holding the unconscious Ling Er.
The Auditor's voice echoed one last time through the debris: "You have escaped the quarantine... but now you are in the [Unprotected Space]. There are things in the Hub that make the 'Designers' look like children's toys. Welcome to the Real War, Developer."
Zhou Fan looked at the Ledger. A new page was no longer blank. It had a single line written in gold:
[OBJECTIVE: REACH THE SOURCE CODE OF THE UNIVERSE. STATUS: IN PROGRESS.]