The Endgame Drew Near, Hidden Danger Lurked

The lights in the monitoring room were still on, the projection screen was still on, and the light spots flickered on the wall. Ye Mo's finger hovered in mid-air. The static signal from before had disappeared, but his temples were still throbbing, as if a thin wire was pulling back and forth inside them.

Tony leaned back in his chair, his armored helmet tucked into his shoulder armor, revealing his face, which always wore a hint of sarcasm. "You've been staring at that static for ten minutes, bro. Want to change the channel? I can get ESPN here."

"It's not snowflakes." Ye Mo didn't move, his voice low. "It's a heartbeat."

"Machines don't have hearts." Tony tapped the table. "Ultron is dead, and that's it. Its last bit of data flow wasn't even a buffer; it was just a program's final twitching."

"But these convulsions are contagious." Ye Mo finally turned his head, his hoodie hood slipped down his back, and a thin layer of sweat appeared on his forehead. "The time I Wall Phasing, the post-operative brainwave afterimage matched the frequency I'm receiving now, with a periodic resonance of 0.8 seconds and an error of less than 0.03."

Tony sat up straighter, traced a line on the edge of the table with his finger, and brought up the quantum monitoring terminal interface. "Okay, you say resonance, I'll break it down for you—the cosmic microwave background radiation fluctuates daily, deep-space particles colliding with the atmosphere also produce neural-like electrical signals, and there's the protocol echo left over from my armored AI; all three paths can simulate the 'heartbeat' you mentioned."

After he finished speaking, he glanced at Ye Mo: "Have you been training too hard and overloaded your mind? Yesterday you said you wouldn't exceed your physical limits, but the alarm in Zone B went off seven times at 3 a. m.

"I didn't exceed the limit." Ye Mo pulled up his sleeve, revealing the inside of his forearm. "Look at this."

A pale blue line coiled across the skin, shaped like a broken ring, its edges slightly shimmering, gradually receding towards the center. It didn't seem painted on; rather, it looked like light seeping from within the flesh.

Tony squinted. "What's this? A new tattoo?"

"The physical feedback after the system absorbs high-dimensional energy." Ye Mo rested his arm on the terminal casing. "I can't actively scan the universe, but the ' X-Gene Resonance System ' will passively respond to being present at the same frequency. When this pattern appeared, the noise on the monitoring screen also flickered in sync."

Tony didn't speak, but reached out and pressed his wrist, connecting the terminal to the Iron Man underlying diagnostic protocol. The screen first displayed a series of biological parameters, then suddenly distorted, the waveform itself became deformed, stretched, compressed, and finally presented a rhythm similar to a heartbeat.

Buzz--

Low-frequency vibrations emanated from inside the device, lasting for seven seconds, after which the entire panel went black, and even the emergency power supply was cut off.

"Damn it..." Tony shook his head, "Mine has its own power supply."

"It's not a problem with the equipment." Ye Mo withdrew his hand, the patterns still moving. "It doesn't want to be seen."

"Who?" Tony stared at the black screen. "You're talking about 'it' now? Didn't you just say it was a signal remnant?"

"At first I thought it was a backdoor left by Ultron." Ye Mo walked to the window, where their shadows were reflected in the glass, and the starry sky outside was quiet. "But now I know that Ultron's data transmission was just something this thing conveniently used. Like ants moving their nest, just happened to pass by an earthquake crack."

Tony stood up, the blue light of the arc reactor illuminating his palm and reactivating a set of backup circuits on the control panel. "So you mean, something even more terrifying Ultron is approaching Earth? Generating electricity from heartbeats? And specifically choosing you as its receiver?"

"I'm not a receiver," Ye Mo shook his head. "I'm a sensor."

What's the difference?

"The receiver can be turned off," Ye Mo said, looking at him. "The sensor can only be selected."

Tony was silent for a few seconds, then suddenly laughed, "Do you know what you look like right now? Like one of those crazy guys who've rented a DVD store for ten years and then suddenly says 'I'm actually an alien.'"

"Then check the deep space monitoring map." Ye Mo didn't move. "Is there a gravitational collapse point, 3.7 light-years from Earth, with a frequency that matches what I just showed?"

Tony's smile faded. He didn't deny it.

"You discovered it a long time ago," Ye Mo said in an even lower voice, "Why didn't you report it?"

"Because that outlier is within the normal fluctuation range." Tony closed the AI analysis module and manually brought up the raw data stream. "Over the past 48 hours, that point has indeed been amplifying, but I thought it was some dark star collapsing. Nobody told me it would 'breathe'."

He switched the projection to the private encryption layer, and the halo of light from his palm swept across the verification area, slowly unfolding a star map that had never been made public before. A red dot was marked in the center, surrounded by faint wavy markings, and the frequency curves perfectly matched the lines on Ye Mo's arm.

"I've set up a silent alert," Tony said. "If it gets any closer than 0.1 light-years, it will automatically trigger a level three warning."

"But it doesn't need to get any closer." Ye Mo pointed towards Orion. "It's already affecting the structure of reality. The waveform you just saw didn't come from space, it came from 'between'—the dimensional interlayer. Mutants also have similar fluctuations when their abilities are activated, but on a scale only one millionth of this."

Tony stared at the star map, light and shadow flickering across his face. He was used to explaining everything with technology, but this data couldn't be attributed to known physical laws. It wasn't the trajectory of an approaching fleet, nor a sign of weapons charging; it was more like some kind of existence itself expanding.

"You're saying it's hunger?" he suddenly asked.

"I call it a kind of hunger," Ye Mo said without looking away. "It doesn't eat matter, nor does it steal resources. It eats 'possibilities.' When Ultron was dying, it transmitted data, not as a cry for help, but as an alarm. It sensed it, and then it was swallowed up."

"Swallowed?"

"On a conscious level," Ye Mo touched his temple, "It's like when you're dreaming and suddenly can't wake up. It's not that you're asleep, it's that the dream is holding you back. Ultron's last signal was a struggle."

Tony slowly sat down, for the first time not using armor or a screen as a barrier, and looked directly at him. "Are you sure this isn't a system backlash? You have too many abilities, like Self-Healing and Wall Phasing. What if it's just a hallucination caused by an unstable genetic chain?"

"If it's an illusion, why does your terminal resonate with it?" Ye Mo retorted. "If it's fatigue, why do these patterns only appear after I come into contact with higher-dimensional fluctuations? Tony, I'm not here to listen to your process of elimination. I'm here to tell you—the end is near."

The room was so quiet you could hear the soft hum of the cooling fans. Tony stared at the slowly closing blue ring, finally reaching out to circle the coordinates on the star map and manually lock onto the target.

"I don't Shingen Yashida," he said, "But I believe that if the data doesn't match, there's a problem."

"That's enough." Ye Mo leaned against the wall. "Now you know."

"It's not over yet." Tony looked up. "Even if something is really approaching, notifying the others now will only cause panic. Captain America will immediately activate the preparedness protocol, Thor will have to go back to report, and the entire base will be on high alert. But we don't have any concrete evidence, we can only rely on your arm and a strange heartbeat waveform?"

"That's why I came to you first," Ye Mo said. "You're the hardest person to fool. If you believe me, then others might have a chance to prepare."

Tony stared at him for a long time, then suddenly asked, "Are you scared?"

"I'm afraid." Ye Mo nodded. "But I won't run. From the day I transmigrated, I knew that some things are unavoidable. I just didn't expect that what awaited me in the end wouldn't be war, but a process of 'digestion'."

Tony didn't speak again. He brought up the communication panel and pressed the cancel button. He knew it wasn't the right time yet. The information had to be verified first, and emotions had to be controlled first, otherwise a crisis that hadn't even happened could tear his own people apart.

"Go and rest," he finally said. "Starting tomorrow, I'll adjust the filtering logic of the quantum array, incorporating the frequency model you provided. If this thing really gets closer, I'll be the first to know."

"Aren't you going to sound the alarm?"

"Releasing this now is tantamount to telling everyone, 'You might be eaten by something unseen.'" Tony sneered. "Let's wait until I have a solution before saying such things."

Ye Mo didn't argue. He knew Tony's method—first put the problem in a box, then break it down little by little until it's no longer scary.

He turned and walked towards the door, his steps heavy. He was indeed overwhelmed; his head felt like it had been stuffed into an old-fashioned radio, constantly searching for channels he couldn't receive.

"Hey," Tony called out to him from behind.

Ye Mo stopped.

"You said you were chosen," Tony said, looking at the star map. "Then why do you think... it chose you?"

Ye Mo turned around, a slight twitch at the corner of his mouth. "Maybe it's because I'm thick-skinned and can handle it."

Tony snorted, "Get lost, and don't sneak off to the training grounds to blow up the equipment again in the middle of the night."

The door closed, and the corridor lights automatically turned on. Ye Mo walked in the empty corridor, the lines on his arms still visible. He looked up at the ventilation grilles on the ceiling, as if he could see through the steel and concrete to the unknown slowly approaching under the starry sky.

Instead of returning to the living quarters, he went to the monitoring sub-area on the third basement level. There was no one there, and the main control console was still on. He sat down, placed his hand on the biometric area, and pulled up his neural workload record.

On the screen, the edges of the brainwave map began to turn blue.

At the same moment, Tony remained seated, staring at the deep space map, locking the coordinates and cutting off all external transmission paths. He didn't activate AI assistance or use log backups; all operations were performed manually.

For the first time, he felt that technology was no longer a shield, but merely a thin layer of paper.

Outside the window, Orion hangs silently.

Ye Mo stood in front of the secondary control panel, his finger hovering over the "mass warning" button for three seconds before finally withdrawing it.

He turned to look at the astronomical projector in the corner of the monitoring room and gently pressed the switch.

The dome slowly lit up, the Milky Way spread out, and the three stars of Orion's Belt aligned.

His gaze fell on that area, and the lines on it once again felt slightly hot.

The next second, the projector suddenly lost power.