Trial Ground of the Consciousness Vortex

As Lin Xiu made his way toward the surface through the subway tunnel, the luminous hands of his tactical watch twitched on his wrist, casting a cold, ghostly blue glow.

9:17. There were forty-three minutes left until their 10:00 appointment.

His boots scraped across the damp rails, sending tiny gleams scattering from the puddles at his feet—then a silvery-white shadow suddenly flashed within that light, like snowflakes scattered by the wind, leaving behind a faint static charge in the air.

He whipped around. The thermal imaging system in his armored visor activated at once, painting his vision crimson. Yet the tunnel bend was empty. Only cobwebs hung from rusted ventilation ducts, swaying softly in the wind with a faint scraping sound.

On the Oracle System's energy-monitoring display, a pale-blue ripple traced a path through the air, like some kind of guiding thread.

"Nonphysical dimensional interference signal?" he repeated the system prompt under his breath. His Adam's apple bobbed, his voice low and dry.

Three days ago, Mia's pen cap at the café had been engraved with "M.C." Yesterday, he had found traces of Nanite Swarm corrosion around the laboratory vent. And now, this ripple had a 0.3 percent match with the quantum resonance frequency on Mia's tracker.

The shadow flashed again.

This time, he saw it clearly. It was a figure in a dark green robe, facing away from him. Tiny starlights fell from its fingertips, as though it were scattering luminous powder to mark a trail. A faint metallic scent and cold fragrance filled the air.

Lin Xiu's Nano Armor grew faintly hot beneath his skin, an instinctive response as it entered alert mode.

He touched the note hidden in his inner pocket. The scent of lavender still lingered in the gaps of the Nanite Swarm—Mia's perfume, S.H.I.E.L.D.'s eagle insignia, and this inexplicable phantom.

"Either it's a trap, or it's a key," he said to the air. His voice was filtered through the visor into a mechanical tone with a metallic echo.

As he stepped forward to follow the shadow, the second hand on his tactical watch suddenly reversed half a turn—the Oracle System was warning him of an abnormal time flow.

The iron ladder at the tunnel exit was rusted through. When he was halfway up, the shadow turned into an old bookstore in the alley.

The faded sign swayed in the wind. The words "Brooklyn Library" had lost much of their paint, like the gnawed crust of a loaf of bread, its edges curled and peeling, giving off the mingled smell of old paper and mold.

The door was unlocked. It let out a piercing creak as he pushed it open, and the stench of mold mixed with rust rushed at him.

Lin Xiu's pupils contracted behind his visor—pale golden symbols floated between the bookshelves like ash blown by the wind. Up close, they became spinning hexagrams, and touching them brought a faint electric sting.

"Nonphysical dimensional interference signal detected." The Oracle System's alert was sharper than usual. "Immediate evacuation is advised."

He did not move.

Nanite Swarm seeped from his fingertips, drawing silver threads through the air as it tried to capture the symbols' trajectories.

One symbol suddenly crashed into a thread. Like a punctured soap bubble, it burst into a small cloud of blue light.

A chill spread across the back of Lin Xiu's neck. Within that blue light, he clearly saw the edge of the wormhole torn open by the Chitauri mothership during the Battle of New York. The energy fluctuations were exactly the same.

"You are not the first outsider to step into this place."

The voice came from overhead.

Lin Xiu jerked his head up and saw a man floating between the ceiling and the floor. His black cloak churned like a living thing. There were no eyeballs in his sockets, only a spinning starry sky, as if the entire universe flowed within them.

His armor automatically deployed its shoulder guards, and the Nanite Swarm formed a defensive matrix around him. Yet the man's voice remained clear, carrying an overwhelming calm. "Whether you can leave depends on whether you are worthy of being known."

Dizziness struck without warning.

Lin Xiu's consciousness felt as though someone had seized it and forced it into deep water. When he opened his eyes again, everything around him had become an ocean of flowing runes.

Every rune glowed with ghostly blue light, leaving a burning sting whenever it touched his skin. The air was thick with the scorched smell of ionization.

His armor still existed in Consciousness Space, but its golden patterns had dimmed somewhat—this place's rules seemed to suppress the power of technology.

"Don't trust any loophole in logic."

A woman's voice came from behind him.

Lin Xiu turned and saw Eileen Wu standing atop a wave of runes.

She wore a white lab coat, its cuffs still stained with fluorescent reagent from the quantum entanglement experiment. But her figure was like paper soaked in water, its edges gradually fading away.

She was the partner who had "disappeared" during the laboratory accident three years ago. Surveillance footage showed that the moment she entered the Quantum Collider, her entire body had crumpled apart like a holographic projection.

"Eileen?" he blurted out, and a brief gap appeared in the Nanite Swarm's defensive matrix.

"This is a game of rules." Her voice carried static. "They're testing your understanding of 'existence.' Remember, the logic here is all artificial..." Before she could finish, a wave of runes swept her away, leaving only the trailing fragment of her voice: "Don't..."

Lin Xiu's nails dug into his palm.

The pain from reality pierced through Consciousness Space, abruptly clearing his thoughts.

The Oracle System projected a stream of data across his retina. "Consciousness Space rules detected: logical consistency > physical laws. Traditional combat methods are advised against. Switch to analytical reconstruction."

He drew a deep breath, and the Nanite Swarm across his armor began to reorganize.

This time, it did not take the form of weapons. Instead, countless fine tendrils extended outward, each one capturing the vibrational frequencies of the surrounding runes.

When one tendril brushed across a string of spiral-shaped runes, the system suddenly buzzed—their vibrational frequency overlapped by 87 percent with the Tesseract's quantum entanglement waveform.

"So that's it." Lin Xiu gave a quiet laugh, the corner of his mouth lifting beneath the visor.

He controlled the Nanite Swarm to weave a quantum model within Consciousness Space, mapping the runes' magical energy into wave functions.

As the final wave crest was locked in place, cracks suddenly appeared across the rune ocean before him, like the surface of a lake struck by a stone.

Boom—

Consciousness Space shook violently.

Lin Xiu's nanotendrils were jolted back into his armor. He looked up and saw Icarus Vaughn materialize in the void.

This time, he saw the other man's face clearly: high nose bridge, deep-set eyes, a crescent-shaped scar on his left brow bone. His pupils were pure black, yet they shimmered with a cold light that did not belong to any human.

"You're learning."

A third voice rang out, a whisper like two slabs of stone grinding together.

Lin Xiu's Nanite Swarm suddenly turned as one, gathering toward an apparently empty direction. There was a blurry shadow there, like crumpled black cloth, with only the outline beneath its hood barely distinguishable.

"This is not a variable you can control."

Icarus's pupils contracted for an instant.

Lin Xiu noticed his fingers curl slightly at his side, as though he were forming a hand seal.

The next second, the runes of Consciousness Space began to collapse wildly, like grains of sand sucked into a vacuum.

Lin Xiu's temples throbbed. For one brief instant, he felt his consciousness split into countless fragments, each fighting for control.

Bang!

A sound from the real world suddenly exploded around him.

Lin Xiu snapped his eyes open and found himself kneeling on the library's wooden floor. Beads of blood from his nails digging into the back of his hand dripped into the dust, the smell of blood intertwining with mold.

The surrounding bookshelves shook, and every book automatically flipped open to the same page. The rustle of paper sounded like countless people whispering to one another.

He braced himself against a shelf and stood, his gaze falling on the book at the front of the row: Dimensional Eye.

At the center of the yellowed page, a line had been written in red ink. The handwriting looked as if it had been written in blood, still glistening faintly with moisture: "Welcome to the real battlefield."

Sirens wailed outside.

Lin Xiu looked down at his watch. It was 10:03—he clearly remembered spending only a few minutes in Consciousness Space.

Nanite Swarm crawled out through the gaps in his armor and onto the page, trying to analyze the red ink's composition. The instant it touched the ink, however, it suddenly curled into a ball as if burned.

The Oracle System sounded another alert, this time with rare distortion. "Dimensional anchor... energy anomaly... detected..."

Lin Xiu closed Dimensional Eye and tucked it into the inner compartment of his armor.

The scent of lavender suddenly drifted from some corner of the room—it was Mia's perfume.

He looked out the window. Searchlight beams swept across the direction of East River Pier, while in the library shadows, a figure in a dark green robe flashed past, its fingertips still dusted with starlight that had not yet fallen away.

"Looks like I'll be late for the East River Pier appointment," he said softly as his armored visor slowly closed.

As golden eyes lit up in the darkness, Dimensional Eye inside his jacket suddenly grew hot, like a piece of red-hot iron.