The time left for Ren Zhong is only half an hour.
It seems ample, but in fact, it's not.
He must contact Sun Ai as quickly as possible, and have Sun Ai complete the work of forced shutdown and format program writing.
But before all this happens, there's a prerequisite—he must awaken Sun Ai's personality.
Ren Zhong tried diligently to observe his surroundings, attempting to capture some information he could recognize.
After a moment, in a haze, he finally "saw" some flickering light shadows in the void.
Sometimes these light shadows were green, sometimes red.
The two kinds of light shadows appeared suddenly and then extinguished instantly.
The position of each appearance was also inconsistent, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes left, sometimes right.
This indicated that fierce confrontations and struggles were happening in the communication module of the computing power where his consciousness resided.
From an intuitive perspective, the two colors of light shadows gave him different feelings.
Red was more chaotic, filled with a violent aura, as if wanting to tear apart everything it touched.
Green was stable and peaceful, giving a sense of orderliness.
After brief consideration, Ren Zhong decided to try approaching the red light shadow.
He was taking a gamble.
Of course, even if he gambled wrong, it wouldn't be a big problem.
Anyway, the current "net" couldn't send out information, it couldn't do anything.
Even if exposed, well, it would just be a death.
However, Ren Zhong found it extremely difficult to capture the red shadow. Even though he had lost track of time, he still felt that the speed of light shadow changes was too fast, impossible to ponder or touch, let alone exchange information with it.
At the same time, Hua Yuelan and Chen Qiao, standing outside the light wall, also began to act.
Hua Yuelan opened an instrument resembling a searchlight and aimed it at the back of Ren Zhong's neck, then pressed the launch button.
A cable slowly floated out from the hole in the front end of the instrument, crossing the barrier of the light wall and attaching to the back of Ren Zhong's neck.
Then, the top of the cable began to probe out superconducting wires made of biomass material as thin as capillaries, piercing into the back of Ren Zhong's neck and continuing to extend inward, weaving into a web and wrapping around his spinal nerves.
On this side, after seeing the connection success prompt on the instrument, Chen Qiao pressed the start button.
In the next moment, a large amount of biological microelectric signal released by simulated neurons during information transmission entered Ren Zhong's spinal nerves through the superconducting wire and directly acted on the depths of Ren Zhong's brain.
These signals "deceived" Ren Zhong's body perception, causing his brain to start frantically secreting dopamine, further elevating his mental excitement level.
Under this stimulation, Ren Zhong's consciousness in the data ocean suddenly inflated and began to be controllable by thoughts.
The concept of such behavior is equivalent to Ren Zhong having completed consciousness upload, temporarily storing his consciousness in the "hard drive", with the program having self-awareness, capable of autonomously choosing partitions in the hard drive to occupy.
Finally, a red light shadow briefly appeared by his "side", and before it disappeared, Ren Zhong quickly spread his information over it.
In the next instant, his physical perception suddenly changed.
In front of him was no longer nothingness, but a huge lattice instead.
Ren Zhong immediately recognized the lattice as the physical structure of the "net".
At this moment, the lattice was still lush green, with occasional blocks of yellow, red, and black appearing.
Suddenly, a smudge of strange red appeared in the corner.
Then the red began to spread in all directions.
The green part suddenly brightened, with streams of data flowing towards the red area.
The red was frequently on the verge of being engulfed by the data flow, seemingly just a step away from being swallowed, but it always managed to escape danger at the last minute, finding gaps in the huge data flow, bursting out, and spreading even faster until finally rivaling the green and each occupying half of the territory.
Yet, just as the red occupied area was about to reach 50%, the intensity of the green's resistance suddenly increased, with a sudden increase in the magnitude of counterattacks against the red blocks.
Thus, the two parties engaged in a tug-of-war around the 50% boundary, vying for dominance, evenly matched.
Ren Zhong immediately understood the significance of these block changes.
It was precisely the process of confrontation between Sun Ai incarnated as a virus and the "net" itself over the past twenty years.
The reason why Sun Ai's progress was smooth in the early stages, but encountered difficulties near 50%, should be because the creator of the "net" set up a underlying protection system to prevent the "net" from being completely destroyed.
For the past twenty years, the "net" hadn't actually been damaged, it was just busy entangling with Sun Ai and had no time for anything else.
Back when they entered the "net," Sun Ai had said she would try to self-destruct to perish together.
Now it seems she couldn't achieve that.
If no external interference occurs, she must continue entangling with the "net" in this space until the end of time, until the "net's" energy is exhausted, simultaneously falling into slumber.
Or, the "net" could be dragged back to the headquarters of the Mechanical Empire. Then, top-notch programmers would intervene to assist the "net" in destroying Sun Ai from the outside, or they could physically intervene, dismantling the "net" and clearing all the useless data inside.
For the Mechanical Empire, the truly useful data is the cosmic hash value, not the "net" program itself.
They had acquired it long ago.
Looking at the changing light shadows, Ren Zhong thought, this data should be the "memories" of Sun Ai.