The Insect Swarm

What the hell?

At the sight of the familiar pink figure and the familiar girl in punk attire, Lin Feng's brain froze for half a second.

The next half second, he rolled and sprang to his feet.

"Oh~ you adapted pretty quickly~" Kafka parted her lips slightly in surprise.

"That's a good thing too, darling~"

Kafka still wore a cloyingly sweet smile, and her gaze was unbelievably gentle.

But none of that appealed to Lin Feng.

The first time this happened, he had been somewhat baffled. Now he could venture a guess: he was trapped in an infinite-loop bug.

Could the Simulated Universe have bugs too?

That was right!

Anything programmed by people, whether the Simulated Universe or the space station, was bound to have bugs.

Even Ms. Herta's puppets sometimes ran into unexpected problems.

Ms. Herta herself would never admit it, though. As a genius, she wouldn't reveal that her creations had problems.

The Simulated Universe was an exception—

Only by actually experiencing and running something could its problems be discovered.

A faulty Herta Puppet would be dealt with immediately, and the same went for the Simulated Universe.

It would just be modified rather than destroyed outright.

To put it more plainly, something had gone wrong with this test.

That was also what worried Lin Feng most.

No one knew what kind of problems might arise in a program based on calculations involving Aeons and Paths.

There would surely be backup plans for Stelle and March 7th, who had entered the test.

But he was different. He had barged in on his own.

He had no way of knowing whether this problem threatened his safety.

Forget it. For now, I can only take things one step at a time.

Lin Feng sighed inwardly and met Kafka's pink eyes.

He had to admit, this mommy-tier character had a soothing smile, a fine figure, and a super nice personality.

Kafka sniffed, and her rather long eyelashes fluttered.

"Cutie~ is your body still having trouble adjusting?" she asked softly, noticing the worried look in Lin Feng's eyes.

"Kafka, we should go." Silver Wolf blew a bubble with her gum and pressed the watch on her wrist, opening a virtual holographic portal.

A Voidranger emerged right afterward...

The same familiar sequence of events!

"Time to wake up~"

"Darling~"

Lin Feng had lost count of how many times the loop had repeated.

The endlessly repeating sequence made his head feel swollen, and even his thoughts were growing sluggish.

But he had no idea where to begin, and could only watch helplessly as the brief sequence played out again and again.

"What's wrong?"

"Cutie~"

Kafka's gentle pink eyes met his, her exquisite face only a few centimeters from Lin Feng's.

But Lin Feng couldn't muster the slightest interest.

By his reckoning, this was the hundredth—

No!

Hundreds of times he'd had this same conversation!

"I'm fine!" Lin Feng thought, only for a pleasant female voice to reach his ears.

It wasn't Kafka's voice, nor was it Silver Wolf's.

It was Stelle's voice!

His heart jolted. This body had just spoken the words he'd been thinking!

He tried shaking his head from side to side and looking left and right, taking in his surroundings.

I can control this body!

The thought sprang into Lin Feng's mind.

The next moment, he noticed something else was off: the dialogue options were gone too.

In other words, this body was now entirely under his control.

His earlier gloom vanished, and Lin Feng looked excitedly at Kafka.

She frowned slightly, clearly somewhat puzzled by his behavior, but said nothing more about it. She merely spoke in the same mechanical manner as before:

"I should go~"

Kafka and Silver Wolf disappeared into the portal, and Lin Feng deftly pulled the bat from his waist.

Although it was his first time personally feeling the weight of the bat in his hands, his muscle memory surfaced instantly.

"Next, the Voidrangers will appear. First one, then a whole bunch of them."

Lin Feng gripped the baseball tightly and stared fixedly at the empty space before him.

There was nothing in the empty space!

The Voidranger hadn't appeared as it had before!

He waited another three seconds.

The Voidranger still didn't appear!

Lin Feng tightened his grip on the bat. The fighting stance his muscle memory had assumed looked a little ridiculous.

There was nothing in front of him, only a jarring dead silence.

Something was wrong.

Very wrong!

In the previous hundreds of loops, the Voidranger should have appeared on time, within three seconds of Kafka and Silver Wolf leaving.

As punctual as clocking in for work.

But now, the space before him was empty.

Lin Feng was wondering whether to take a couple of steps forward when the image before his eyes suddenly flickered.

It felt like an old television with a bad signal.

The image began to stutter.

It jumped frame by frame.

Lin Feng tried to raise his bat in response, but his arm was unbearably heavy.

To his horror, he realized that his movements had changed too—slow and sluggish, as though he were mired in mud.

His thoughts were clear and his command was precise, but his body was like a terminal with poor reception, dragging his "attack" command out into a slow-motion movement of raising his arm.

The next second, a scarlet veil abruptly fell over his vision.

It was as if someone had splashed the world with rust-colored blood plasma, staining everything in decaying hues.

The apocalyptic atmosphere of a wasteland bore down on him in an instant.

A bad thought came to him.

At the same time, a sense of tearing began to spread from the edges of his vision.

It was like glass struck by a heavy hammer, cracks spreading little by little.

The space around him began to twist, the textures on the walls stretching into strange shapes.

Red ripples appeared where the portal had vanished, and a withered, malformed arm suddenly reached out.

Here it came!

Lin Feng bit the tip of his tongue. The sharp pain there made his reactions a little faster.

He gripped the bat even tighter, his knuckles turning pale from the force.

Before he could make his next move, he noticed a problem.

Voidrangers poured in one after another, and there were quite a few of them.

But their condition... wasn't right.

They "seeped" out of the scarlet air, their bodies covered in cracks. Stiff as rusty puppets, they shuffled toward him one jerky step at a time.

There were no roars, no charges, only a grating friction that sounded like joints slipping out of place.

Lin Feng's gaze fell on the cracks in the Voidrangers' bodies. They weren't wounds caused by attacks.

It looked more as though they were breaking apart from the inside.

Like porcelain shattering into pieces when dropped on the floor.

The Voidranger didn't even have time to make a sound before its entire body broke into fragments that scattered across the ground.

Lin Feng froze.

The fragments didn't disappear. Instead, they continued to break apart, becoming smaller particles.

Then something crawled out from beneath the pile of fragments.

A bug.

A scarlet, fat bug, its surface covered in slime.

Lin Feng's pupils contracted.

A True Sting.

No.

There was more than one.

One of those disgusting things crawled out from beneath every pile of Voidranger fragments.

They writhed and let out piercing shrieks.

The sensation of space tearing grew more intense.

Lin Feng looked down at his hand.

Fine cracks were beginning to appear in the skin of his palm, just like the space around him.

He could feel his thoughts growing sluggish.

It wasn't because of fear.

The body itself was falling apart.

This is bad.

Cold sweat instantly broke out on Lin Feng's skin.

This wasn't the loop bug from before.

This was a deeper breakdown.

The data stream was being "corroded," and even the "character" he had just gained control of hadn't been spared.

He seemed to have broken out of the cage of the loop, only to fall into an even more bizarre quagmire.

He didn't know what would happen next. More Voidrangers emerged from every direction to greet him.

Then, just like the first one, they began to break apart before they could even find their footing.

In a few short seconds, the ground in front of Lin Feng was surrounded by the scarlet bugs.

They piled atop one another, forming a towering wall.

Lin Feng wanted to retreat.

But his feet felt as though they were filled with lead, and he couldn't move at all.

All he could do was watch helplessly as the bugs flew toward him.

The tear in the image kept widening, spreading to the center of his vision.

All that stood before Lin Feng was a scarlet wall so vast he couldn't see its edges. The wall was moving, and countless scarlet eyes flickered within it.

Those eyes stared at him.

Cold.

Greedy.

Hungry.

Lin Feng's throat tightened.

He drew a sharp breath.

Only one thought remained in his mind.

I'm going to die.

Just then—

"Little one, you mustn't come to harm~"

An ethereal female voice brushed past his ear without warning.

That voice... was unusually familiar.

Lin Feng strained to turn his eyes, trying to find its source.

His neck turned at a terrifyingly slow pace too, frame by frame.

A flash of red abruptly entered the edge of his sluggish vision.

A familiar figure appeared silently between him and the True Stings, her back to him.

Then she moved.

She took small, almost skipping steps, lightly bouncing along.

Toward that expanse of decaying scarlet.

Snap—

With a snap of the fingers, the True Sting in front of him froze in place.

The girl's two braids swayed as her smooth toes touched the ground lightly and she turned around.

Lin Feng's gaze froze, and he blurted out:

"Sparkle?"