The lights in the monitoring room went out, and the projector didn't turn on again after the power was cut off. Ye Mo stood there, his fingers still resting on the biometric identification area, his palm still feeling the chill of the device suddenly losing its temperature. The air blowing down from the ceiling vents felt a bit rough, as if it were dusty. He looked down at his arm—the blue markings were still there, shrunken to the size of a fingernail, but the edges were twitching slightly, as if something was gently tapping inside.
He didn't return to the living quarters, nor did he go to Tony to confirm the next steps. He had said everything he needed to say; whether people believed him or not was another matter. He turned and walked out of the secondary control area, the corridor lights lighting up one section at a time with each step, the sound of his footsteps echoing in the empty space.
The access control system in the main conference room was still active. Ye Mo pressed his hand on it, scanned it, and with a "beep," the door slid open. No one was inside; the long table was clean, and the central projector was in standby mode. He walked over, imported the neural load data he had recorded the previous night into the main control terminal, pulled up the frequency waveform diagram, and then used a portable scanner to photograph the lines on his arm, simultaneously uploading them to the shared screen. After doing this, he leaned against the wall, took off his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose.
Five minutes later, Tony arrived, his armor partially disarmed, the shoulder armor still faintly glowing. His first words upon entering were, "You've ruined my 3 a. m. dream again."
"It's not a dream." Ye Mo pushed the data to his tablet. "Look at this fluctuation cycle; it's exactly the same as what the star chart locked last night. It hasn't disappeared; it's just changed its transmission method."
Tony frowned and flipped through a few pages, then suddenly looked up. "Did you just go into the control room alone?"
"Secondary controller," Ye Mo corrected, "I didn't touch any logs, and I only used basic read permissions."
Tony grunted and walked to the main control panel to manually bring up the raw signal stream. The screen flickered, and the waveform started running on its own, with a steady rhythm, cycling every seven seconds, just like a heartbeat.
"Damn it," he muttered under his breath, "I clearly cut off all the receiving ports."
"It doesn't go through the ports." Ye Mo put on his glasses. "It goes through the 'gaps,' like signal crosstalk, seeping in from the Silent Zone between devices. You can block the data flow, but you can't block this low-frequency resonance."
The door slid open again, and Captain America walked in, still in his combat suit, carrying a water bottle. "You two are doing some kind of mysticism so early in the morning?" He glanced at the screen. "This waveform... something's not right."
"Something's not just wrong." Tony projected the coordinates onto the map. "Three hours ago, this point moved forward another 0.03 light-years. It's not a large number, but it's not moving at a constant speed; it's pulsed, happening every seven seconds, synchronized with this lousy heartbeat."
Thor followed closely behind, Mjolnir slung over his shoulder, his brow furrowed. "I didn't detect anything unusual in my Asgardian senses, and the Watchers of Asgard didn't give any warning either."
"That's the problem," Ye Mo said, pointing to the diagram. "It doesn't consume energy, disturb magnetic fields, or trigger spatial curvature alarms. What it consumes is 'possibility,' that tiny crack that leaks through when the structure of reality loosens. You can't find it because it hasn't fully entered yet."
Black Widow and Hawkeye arrived together, one carrying a coffee, the other a quiver. "So you're saying there's something unseen creeping towards Earth, surviving by sucking up our future potential?" Hawkeye placed the quiver on the table. "That sounds even more absurd than the nightmare I had last week."
"But Ultron's last signal was definitely an alarm." Black Widow sat down and pushed her coffee towards Ye Mo. "The intermittent audio you saw in the monitoring sub-area wasn't a program crash; it was a distress call."
"And my system responded passively." Ye Mo took the coffee but didn't drink it. " The X-Gene Resonance System usually only absorbs fragments of Mutants abilities, but since last night, it has started receiving feedback from higher-dimensional frequencies. This isn't an upgrade; it's been chosen."
The room was silent for a few seconds.
Captain America put down his water bottle. "If we go on full alert now without any real enemy targets, the entire base will fall into a state of anxious preparedness. Wasting resources is a minor issue; the key problem is that morale will be dragged down."
"That's why I didn't issue a group warning." Ye Mo nodded, "But now you all need to know. One person carrying the burden of information will inevitably cause trouble sooner or later."
Tony stared at the screen, then suddenly chuckled. "You know what's most ironic? I always thought technology could explain everything, but now it's telling me something's getting closer in a way that's 'outside of reality,' and the only one who can sense it is this deep-thinking guy in the hoodie next to me."
"The advantage of being thick-skinned is that you can withstand pressure." Ye Mo took a sip of coffee, scalding it and wincing.
"Alright." Tony straightened up. "Since the data matches, let's treat it as a real matter. But we need to change our approach—no external alerts, just activate the ' Gray Shield Protocol ' internally."
" Gray Shield?" Thor asked.
"Between overt and covert operations," Captain America continued. "No alarms, no outside help, everyone maintains their daily rhythm, secretly intensifying monitoring and training."
"Yes." Tony brought up the system interface. "I modified the quantum array filtering logic, adding the frequency model provided by Ye Mo. If this thing gets any closer than 0.01 light-years, it will be automatically marked as a Level 1 anomaly. At the same time, I disabled AI autonomous analysis; everything is manually verified to avoid interference."
" Hawkeye and I will lead the intelligence team." Black Widow opened her tablet. "Review the unusual events that have occurred globally over the past 48 hours to see if there are any collateral effects similar to the low-frequency resonance. Switch all communication channels to encrypted shortwave to prevent signal infiltration."
"I'll lead the tactics team in conducting simulations." Captain America walked to the whiteboard. "Assuming the threat source is invisible and unpredictable, how do we fight? How do we evacuate? How do we protect civilians? We need three contingency plans by 4 PM today."
"I'll go back and work on the armor's underlying code." Tony patted Ye Mo on the shoulder. "You shouldn't be idle either. Connect your neurofeedback system to the medical monitoring network and transmit data in real time. In case you suddenly have a seizure one day, we'll know it's not because you've been staying up too late."
"I want to go into the training field again," Ye Mo said. "The cooldown time for Regenerative Phasing has been getting longer recently, probably due to increased system load. We need to test if it can withstand the strain under extreme conditions."
"Don't go too far," Tony said, pointing at him. "You blew up three stun gun poles in Block B last time, and the repair bill hasn't been reimbursed yet."
"That was an accident." Ye Mo shrugged. "The system notification told me to rush in."
"Stop blaming the system," Black Widow rolled her eyes. "We're all tired of hearing it."
The group dispersed. Ye Mo went to the medical department for a neural interface implantation; a thin catheter was connected to the back of his neck, transmitting brainwave data to the main control screen in real time. The doctor reminded him not to shake his head violently, and he said he understood, then turned and went into the training field.
He was only on his third lap of the weighted sprint when the stun cones triggered prematurely. He rolled to the side to avoid them, his knee scraping the ground. Thor, who was lifting dumbbells nearby, glanced at him and said, "With that build, you'd fall apart after a few more crashes."
"It won't dissipate." Ye Mo gasped as he got up. " The Steel Bone is still there."
"But people get tired." Thor put down his equipment. "You don't sleep, you don't rest, you keep pushing yourself to deliver messages. Aren't you afraid that if you collapse, no one will catch you?"
Ye Mo stopped and wiped his sweat. "I'm scared. But I'm even more scared that when I close my eyes and wake up, the world will have changed."
Thor didn't say anything more, but walked over and placed his hand on his shoulder, feeling a little warmth in his palm.
3 PM, Tactical Team Meeting Room.
Captain America posted an old-fashioned bulletin board with the following words: "Enemy unknown. Method of attack unknown. Time of appearance unknown. But we know it's approaching. So we don't wait, we prepare."
The list below outlines six tasks, with each person assigned one. Ye Mo's task, "Analysis of the Linkage Between Abnormal Signals and Physical Feedback," is listed first.
As the meeting ended, he passed by the training field and saw the captain standing in front of the sandbags, writing a sentence on them with a marker. "We are not fighting for victory, but to prevent the world from changing too much."
He stood there for a few seconds without saying a word.
Back in the monitoring sub-area, the data flow was stable, and the blue lines had faded to almost invisible under the skin. He sat down and pulled up yesterday's neural load curve for comparison, finding that the peak interval was shortening—from 0.8 seconds to 0.75 seconds.
He stared at the screen, his fingers tapping lightly seven times on the table.
At the same time, Tony received a manual push notification in the lab: [Frequency synchronization accelerated, it is recommended to increase monitoring priority].
He looked up at the ceiling and muttered, "Damn, they're really rushing to meet the deadline."
At eight o'clock in the evening, the base returned to a superficial calm. Some people were eating, some were training, and some were adjusting their equipment. No one was shouting slogans or giving speeches. But everyone knew that something was different.
Ye Mo was undergoing a routine scan in the medical pod, with a catheter still attached to the back of his neck. Black Widow pushed open the door and handed him a freshly brewed cup of coffee.
"It's hot," she said. "Don't drink anything cold, it'll upset your stomach."
He took it, smiled, and said, "Thanks."
She stood by the bed, watching the fluctuating waveforms on the monitoring screen. "You're not the first person to see the storm. Agents have reported anomalies before, only to be dismissed as crazy. But what they said might actually be true."
"But nobody believes it." Ye Mo lowered his head and blew a breath.
"But now we believe," she said softly, "Because you've shown us."
He didn't reply, but just gripped the paper cup tighter.
At 10:00, he left the medical department and returned to the monitoring sub-area. The main control console restarted, the screen lit up, and the frequency model continued to run. He sat down, reconnected the catheter, and brought up the deep space map.
In the direction of Orion, the red dot is still there, but the ripples have spread out more densely.
He stared at it for a long time, then suddenly felt an itch on the inside of his right arm.
Looking down, I saw that the blue stripe under my sleeve was starting to expand outwards again.
He didn't call anyone; he simply pressed the communication button, typed a message, and sent it to Tony: "[It's awake.]"
Then he took off his glasses, rubbed his temples, picked up the half-cold cup of coffee, and drank it all in one gulp.
Outside the window, the starry sky was silent.