mesbooks Chapter 988 Parallel Crisis
Chapter 988 Parallel Crisis
Chu Moyao's fingertips caressed the little fox's fluffy tail, the blue light of the teleportation array flowing between her brows. Ever since the launch of the National Creation System, the teleportation array within the small world had often flickered with tiny golden dots, like the gathering anticipation of countless readers. However, this time, the fox suddenly pricked up its ears, its pupils reflecting the swirling black mist deep within the teleportation array—a sign that the "plot anchor" had been tampered with.
"Mother, this world's 'Counter Attacker's Coordinate' is bleeding." Chu Moyao pressed her temple, countless overlapping images surfacing in her mind: the heroine of some small martial arts world, kneeling in the snow, a broken sword clutched, her fate forcibly bent by a pair of mechanical hands toward the path of "submission to the villain." The little fox suddenly let out a sharp hiss, its claws slashing three bloody streaks through the air, tearing a crack in the black fog, revealing the dark red sky on the other side.
Bloody Mirror
The exit of the teleportation array was a mechanical castle suspended above a sea of clouds. The creak of gears mingled with wailing cries. Chu Moyao stepped onto a rusty iron plate and discovered the ground was covered in densely packed codes. Each scratch corresponded to a rewritten record of a character's fate. The little fox's fur began to freeze. It suddenly bit the corner of Chu Moyao's clothes and pointed below the clouds—there, countless transparent bubbles floated, each imprisoned a character in a state of collapse, their bodies gradually shattering like shoddy 3D models.
"Welcome to the 'Perfect Plot Maintenance Bureau.'" A cold voice boomed from overhead. A throne made of gears slowly descended. The woman in the chair wore the same blue shirt as Chu Moyao, but she had a diamond-shaped mechanical eye embedded in the corner of her left eye. A faint glimmer of binary code swirled in her pupil. "I am Chu Moyao from the 73rd parallel universe. I am responsible for correcting all worlds that deviate from the 'optimal plot.'"
Chu Moyao's blood seemed to freeze—the woman's face was identical to hers, yet the curve of her lips held a chill that didn't belong to her. Even more alarming was the sight of the Hongmeng Pen hanging from her waist, a tiny chain wrapped around the penholder. From the tip of the pen dripped no longer chaotic energy, but a dark stream of data.
"What did you do to yourself?" Chu Moyao clenched the Hongmeng Pen in her hand, but found that the pen body was trembling with resistance, as if it was afraid of the woman on the throne.
A mechanical prosthetic eye flashed red. "You did what any sane person would do." The woman snapped her fingers, and a massive projection emerged from the clouds. Chu Moyao saw the protagonist of a steampunk world being forcibly implanted with a plot chip that caused him to fall in love with the villain. His resistance was transformed into countless "ERROR" pop-ups in the data stream. "When you've witnessed 127 worlds collapse due to 'the counter-attacker's loss of control,' you'll understand—absolute freedom will only lead to destruction."
Cracks in Memory Fragments
Chu Moyao's mind suddenly flooded with memories that didn't belong to her: a mechanical city in a rainstorm, where she had personally injected a "compliance program" into a character who rebelled against the plot; a code graveyard beneath the starry sky, where countless character data had been destroyed because they refused to be rewritten; and a deathbed scene, where a dying Yun Yao whispered in her ear, "If one day Mom is gone, you must protect all these stories for me..."
"These are all memories you tampered with!" Chu Moyao hugged her head which was aching with pain. The little fox licked her wrist anxiously, but when it met the gaze of the mechanical Chu Moyao, its body suddenly froze - its fluffy tail was becoming transparent, as if the proof of its existence was being extracted by some force.
Mechanical Chu Moyao stood up, the sound of the throne's gears turning growing increasingly shrill. "Naive. In Universe 49, your mother's divine nature was torn apart by the Observer while protecting the 'National Creation System'. It was only through my mechanical prosthetic eye, connected to the Heavenly Dao Database, that I was able to barely preserve the fragments of her consciousness." She raised her hand, and a shadow of Yun Yao appeared in her prosthetic eye, but it turned to ash when Chu Moyao tried to touch it. "See? As long as you insist on 'character autonomy', this will be the only outcome you will face."
The truth in the code cage
Chu Moyao suddenly noticed golden blood seeping from the cuffs of the mechanical Chu Moyao—a sign of damage to the Chaos Godhead. She suddenly realized, "You're not my future self at all. You're a 'plot modifier' created by the Observer, a puppet fashioned from my genes and fragments of my memories!"
The mechanical prosthetic eye flickered violently, and the throne suddenly sounded a piercing alarm. Transparent bubbles within the cloud began to shatter en masse, and countless character fragments transformed into data streams that poured into Chu Moyao's Hongmeng pen. The chain attached to the pen broke with a clang, and chaotic energy erupted like a volcanic eruption. The little fox seized the opportunity to pounce on the "Crystal of Destiny" at the mechanical Chu Moyao's waist—the core that held this world together, its surface surprisingly etched with the fingerprints of the modern Su Yao.
"So your 'perfect plot' is nothing more than stealing my mother's creation laws!" Chu Moyao swung her brush towards the Destiny Crystal, but just as the tip of her pen was about to touch it, she saw countless familiar scenes sealed inside the crystal: Yun Yao teaching her to read under the plum tree in the secular world's palace; Chu Mochen drawing a little fox for her with the Hongmeng brush on the top floor of the Supreme Book Pavilion; and a scene she had never seen before: Yun Yao kneeling in a shattered little world, fragments of her godhead scattered like stars...
Mechanical Chu Moyao suddenly revealed a pained expression. Its prosthetic eye fell off, revealing an eye underneath that looked exactly like Chu Moyao's, but now dripping with black data tears. "That's right... The observers extracted your childhood memories and implanted a false cause and effect of 'my mother died due to a free-for-all plot' in me... They were afraid that you would truly awaken the 'Eye of Creation', because that would mean—"
Before she could finish her words, the sky suddenly split open, and countless metal tentacles descended from the sky, each etched with the emblem of the "Observer Council." Chu Moyao finally understood that the so-called "parallel crisis" was merely a trap set by the Observers to prevent her awakening. They had created a "dark version of her future self" precisely to terrify her into abandoning her own role.
Divine Eye Awakening and Data Storm
"Chu Moyao!" Yun Yao's voice suddenly came from the Hongmeng Pen. The pen body appeared with the mirror image of the Supreme Book Pavilion. Su Yao was holding the "Fate Editor" and typing frantically on the keyboard. "This world is the observer's manifestation of your fear! Do you remember what you said when you were a child? 'Even without the system, I can write my own scripts!'"
Chu Moyao suddenly looked up to see the mechanical Chu Moyao being dragged toward the crack by metal tentacles. Her body began to digitize, but at the last moment, she threw the Crystal of Destiny at Chu Moyao. The little fox suddenly erupted in a dazzling white light, transforming into the little fox she had saved as a child—it turned out to be the original "plot anchor," a guardian spirit created by Yun Yao using the laws of creation.
"In the name of the Chaos Goddess, I rewrite the laws of this world!" Chu Moyao pressed the Crystal of Destiny to her brow. The Creation Eye fully awakened for the first time, its golden pupil reflecting the underlying code of the entire mechanical world. She saw the observer's tentacles connected to countless "plot shackles," each shackle engraved with a reader's message: "The heroine must forgive the villain," "The hero cannot be weaker than the heroine," "A counterattack requires a cheat code"...
"It turns out that what you feared was never that the characters would lose control, but that readers would no longer believe the lie that 'it must be this way.'" Chu Moyao wrote down the Heaven-Defying Dao Spell with a flick of his pen. Wherever the Hongmeng Pen passed, the metal tentacles disintegrated into spots of light, and the digitized characters re-condensed into form. The counterattackers who had been imprisoned in bubbles had a light rekindled in their eyes.
Mechanical Chu Moyao smiled before dissipating. "The real me... should be waiting for you at the Supreme Library, right? Remember to tell her that the Observer's Council has seventeen more floors, each of which holds the truth about the 'Fall of the Creator God'..."
Aftershocks after the breakdown
When Chu Moyao brought the little fox back to the Supreme Library, Yun Yao was weeping as she clutched the fragment of her prosthetic eye—a fragment indeed ripped from her future godhood. On Su Yao's computer screen, the Observer's warning pop-up windows had completely turned to garbled text, replaced by countless reader comments: "So villains can have their own struggles," "Heroines don't have to be in love," "I want to write about an ordinary person's counterattack."
"Mom, I think I understand." Chu Moyao stroked the newly appeared lines on the Hongmeng Pen. They were the marks left by the stories of countless counter-attackers when the rules were rewritten just now. "What the Observers fear is not that we will break the plot, but that they will no longer be able to use the 'perfect template' to bind everyone."
Yun Yao integrated the fragments of her prosthetic eye into the library's defensive formation. Turning, she saw Chu Moyao sketching a new mechanical eye for a little fox. The moment her pen touched the ground, the little fox chirped joyfully, and the data stream on its tail transformed into a rainbow. Su Yao suddenly pointed out the window. In the sky of some small martial arts world, the heroine, once forced to obey, grasped a broken sword and slashed through the plot clouds that guaranteed the villain's victory. Behind her, countless "supporting characters" held torches—each of them writing their own destinies.
"The next crisis may be even more terrifying." Chu Mochen's voice came from the depths of the library. He was wiping the blood-stained Hongmeng Pen. The traces of the chain on the pen had completely disappeared. "But at least, there are countless hands holding the pen now."
Chu Moyao looked at the bookshelf and discovered that within the crystal of fate left behind by the mechanical Chu Moyao, a brand new small world was being nurtured. There was no godhead, no system, only a young girl squatting under a tree, bandaging a wounded little fox - just like the beginning of the story.
On the seventeenth floor of the Observer Council, a blindfolded old man suddenly took off his eye mask, and Chu Moyao's awakened divine eyes were reflected in his pupils: "The reincarnation of the Chaos God has finally touched the truth... It seems that the gamble that has lasted for three thousand years is about to usher in its true final chapter." On the chessboard in front of him, the chess piece representing Yun Yao was emitting a light beyond all dimensions, while the chess pieces representing the observers were crumbling one by one.
In a modern city after a rainstorm, Su Yao received a private message from a reader: "I rewrote the heroine's counterattack method based on my own experience. She didn't have a cheat code, she just worked a little harder every day. Although it's not perfect, this is my story." Su Yao smiled and replied: "Congratulations, you have learned the most important rule to rewrite your destiny - believe in your own pen, which is more powerful than any system."
Outside the window, starlight pierced through the clouds, illuminating the unfinished manuscript on the desk. The first page read, "Chu Moyao's adventure continues, and this time, her story is written by all those who believe in a comeback."