Another Kind of Illness

Here...

Everything was logically consistent and clearly organized.

There were even ranks.

The boy nodded to himself.

Was all this a dream I had constructed?

Interesting.

Boss Meng patted the boy on the shoulder. "Kid, don't get discouraged. The longer you stay here, the more your integration level will grow."

"Even in the Experimental Zone, you can't expect things to appear out of thin air."

"It's like geometric shapes. Stack one block on another, and eventually you can build a wall stretching thousands of miles!"

"Keep at it."

"One day, your brain will unleash its potential too."

"Maybe you'll awaken a one-in-eight-billion reality enhancement."

"When that happens, you can watch my back."

The boy smiled with his lips pressed together. "I'll get a good night's sleep tomorrow and dream up something nice."

"You silly kid. You're not dreaming, but you keep talking in your sleep!"

Just then, something strange appeared in the distant sky.

A black barrier suddenly emerged from the distant sea of clouds.

It was as though someone had stood a black scroll upright between heaven and earth.

Then slowly unfurled it.

It was extraordinarily thin, like black paper, connecting the sky above to the earth below.

Now, both ends of the "scroll" curved inward, slowly surrounding them and slicing through the sea of clouds.

The boy startled. "What's that?"

Meng Jihe merely smiled. "Don't worry. Just a competitor of mine."

A competitor?

Wasn't that guy more like a Mahayana Stage master?

Meng Jihe explained unhurriedly, "The Experimental Zone may be vast, but the land still has owners. That thing you're looking at is called the Iron Curtain. It's technology from the Metaverse, an enhanced plasma defense shield. Think of it as a fence for marking out territory."

Understanding dawned on the boy. "Your competitor is another design company? What's the point of fencing himself in?"

"Heh, it's just like a dog pissing to mark its territory. He's staking his claim in front of me!"

"The company's called Mingtu. They're currently ranked second in Echo Hill."

"They bought the land around mine and want to 'isolate' me."

Meng Jihe smiled. "It's actually pointless. Their design capabilities don't measure up."

"Mingtu..."

Qin Yiguan asked curiously, "Does their boss have a 'reality enhancement' too?"

Meng Jihe gave a wry smile. "You could say that. Their boss likes keeping birds. After his reality enhancement, he could talk to them, chirp away in bird language. Sometimes he sends sparrows and the like to eavesdrop on our meetings. What a piece of trash."

The boy stared blankly. "That's possible too?"

Eight hundred kilometers away.

Inside a huge black warehouse, a greasy-faced, overweight middle-aged man with patchy bald spots stared at two black crows in a cage before him.

He opened the cage. One crow landed on the back of his hand, the other on his arm.

The fat man grinned viciously. "Meng Jihe... the Gemini Superbrain made it very clear. Order: -50%!"

"Then I'll act according to the superbrain's logic. Business competition is too boring. My goal this time is simple... I'm going to kill you!"

"My two little darlings, off you go... when you come back, tell me all about Meng Jihe's miserable end! Haha!"

The two crows flapped their wings and fluttered high into the sky!

Inside the Geometry Design Group building.

The boy watched the Iron Curtain approach from the distance.

Like a black blade, it silently sliced through everything.

Meng Jihe looked startled. "Wait... that's not right. It's crossed the boundary! It's already on my land! Damn it, since when did he get so bold?"

He had barely finished speaking.

The Iron Curtain spanning heaven and earth suddenly expanded, surging dozens of kilometers in an instant. It reached both sides of Meng Jihe's airborne building, pressed tightly against it, and snapped shut into a circle fifty kilometers across!

Meng Jihe was no longer as composed as before. A trace of panic crept into his eyes. "What's that bald bastard trying to do? Cut my building in half and send it crashing down? Has he lost his mind?!"

Boom!

A muffled sound echoed between heaven and earth, as though an invisible war drum had been struck.

In that instant, everything around them plunged into darkness.

The lights inside the building went dark, and so did the world outside.

Meng Jihe cried out, "It's blocked all visible light inside the Iron Curtain! What's that bald bastard trying to do?"

But this darkness...

It wasn't the absolute darkness of the boy's room. As he looked into the distance, he felt black rays of light twisting within it, his vision swimming as though his eyes had gone blurry.

"Some places inside the Iron Curtain aren't completely covered..."

"Either pitch-black..."

"Or brightly lit..."

"I can't see other colors or faint light in the dark..."

Qin Yiguan's expression turned troubled. He instinctively took a step back, as though afraid of the darkness ahead.

Meng Jihe steadied the boy and chuckled. "I almost forgot. You've got that psychological condition. In the dark, you always mistake clothes on a chair for a demon, then curl up under the covers, drenched in cold sweat and trembling!"

"Or when you're walking outside town at night, you mistake swaying trees for skeleton monsters lunging at you!"

"Haha."

"When you were little, I always held you while you slept."

"Yiguan, you had nothing to worry about as a child, and you have even less to worry about now. I'm here!"

"That bald bastard is only trying to scare me. He wouldn't dare go too far!"

"I'll settle the score with him later!"

Creak...

Crash!

The ceiling in the distance suddenly burst apart. Sparks flew, and chunks of building material fell!

The thin Iron Curtain had begun expanding again, slicing into the building inch by inch!

Meng Jihe looked around, his brows tightly furrowed. "He's actually doing it! He wants to bring my building down and kill me!"

By now, Qin Yiguan's expression had gone rigid.

He stared into the darkness ahead, where the dark light twisted, and felt fear rising from the depths of his heart.

Cold sweat beaded on his forehead.

Ordinary children got scared in the dark and mistook objects for monsters. That was common.

I was different.

Mine was severe.

Dr. House had diagnosed it.

That illness... was called level 16 [gestalt collapse]!

It could manifest in two ways.

One of its manifestations...

When someone stared at a Chinese character for too long, their brain would block repetitive neural information to reduce energy consumption, creating the illusion that they had suddenly forgotten how to recognize that character.

That was manageable.

But the other manifestation...

If visual information was incomplete in the dark, the brain would work on its own, filling in the scenery with whatever its owner feared most!

The boy's face trembled. "I often get trapped in it, terrified, unable to pull myself out. Sometimes I even suffer a mental breakdown!"

Just then, from the darkness in the distance...

Two crows with scarlet eyes suddenly flew out.

The birds weren't very large. From a distance, they looked like two writhing black dots.

Yet their sudden appearance sent enormous ripples through the scene before the boy's eyes.

"What are those..."

"Two birds?"

The corners of the boy's eyes twitched.

He felt a searing pain in his brain as his consciousness surged, completely beyond his control!

In his vision, a pitch-black tide swept in, swallowing everything before frantically gathering again and pouring into the two black birds.

Unseen by anyone, the Metaverse code ahead also plunged into violent chaos in an instant.

The code seemed to have been stirred up, losing its original arrangement.

"No..."

"Those don't look like birds..."

The boy's eyes widened further and further.