An Unauthorized Experiment, Danger at Every Turn
As the sunlight climbed onto the corrugated iron wall, Scott was still sitting on an old plastic stool in the data analysis room. Ye Mo had taken his backpack and main control equipment with him when he left, but he hadn't taken the spare sensor in the corner—a black cuboid with a crack in its casing, which it had dropped during testing last week. This thing couldn't connect to Pym's cloud and could only record locally; Ye Mo said it was "half-crippled" and he left it here as a backup.
Scott didn't move, holding the controller in his arms, his thumb unconsciously rubbing the red light on the current limiter. The light had already gone out, but it had just lit up once, indicating that the system had detected an abnormal operation, which he had manually disconnected from the communication module to suppress.
He looked down and opened the report on his lap, turning to the conclusion. The words "[Recommendation to suspend Extreme Challenge]" were highlighted in bright fluorescent ink. He stared at it for ten seconds, then suddenly reached out and tore the entire paper off, folded it into a small square, put it in his mouth, chewed it twice, and swallowed.
"Pause?" he whispered. "Pause makes you stronger?"
He stood up and walked to the marked circle in the center of the experimental area. The mineral water bottle was still in its original place, with a thin wire lying across it like a taut string. He squatted down, pressed his fingers on the ground, and felt his way over inch by inch until he found the miniature signal receiving point that Ye Mo had buried last night—a metal piece the size of a fingernail, embedded in the cement crack, used to provide positioning data during synchronous shrinkage.
He pried out the metal piece, examined it against the light, then unscrewed a hidden slot on the side of the controller and inserted the piece.
"You said we can't break the limit," he muttered to himself as he connected the phone, "But you didn't say what would happen if we did."
The controller screen flashed and a warning popped up: [Security Agreement Clauses 3, 5, and 7 are locked. Forced unlocking will result in the automatic signing of a liability waiver].
Scott" confirm".
The screen switches to a completely black interface, and after a three-second countdown, it starts up.
He pressed the button.
His body temperature plummeted, his eardrums rang, and the ground instantly rose into a gray-white plain. His vision narrowed, his breathing became rapid, and his lungs felt like they were being stuffed into a constantly shrinking tin box. He steadied himself, stood within the marked lines, and looked down at his hands—his skin began to glow with a pale blue light. It wasn't the slight weightlessness he felt last night, but a real sense of lightness, as if his body was being lifted up little by little by the air.
3.2 centimeters.
He paused for five seconds, his heart rate soaring from 82 to 120 per minute.
Then, he pressed the controller again.
Breaking the red line.
His body continued to collapse. Three centimeters, two centimeters... His vision distorted violently, the patterns on the ground turned into huge ravines, and the air currents formed miniature storms. A tearing pain came from the soles of his feet, not a muscle strain, but more like something was drilling out of the gaps in his bones—a feeling of particles being peeled away, ten times stronger than last time.
"I can still hold on." He gritted his teeth. "I'm still conscious... I haven't given up."
But his projection had already become unstable. In the image captured by the camera, the tiny figure, about two centimeters tall, flickered between light and shadow, like an old television with a poor signal. Dust swirled around him, forming a miniature vortex less than half a meter in diameter, sucking ground debris toward the center and then violently bouncing it away.
Meanwhile, 300 meters outside the factory area, Ye Mo was walking back.
He had already left, preparing to go to the east of the city to pick up a batch of newly arrived quantum filters. But as soon as he got into the car, he heard a vibration notification on his wrist—an abnormal alarm set by the backup sensor, which would only be triggered when quantum fluctuations exceeding a threshold were detected.
"Who the hell turned it on at this hour?" He frowned, pulled up the bracelet's data, and immediately saw that the waveform was distorted.
The peak occurred at the center of the abandoned factory area, with a frequency highly consistent with when Scott lost control last night, but the amplitude was twice as large.
"Damn." He floored the accelerator, and the SUV spun around and turned around on the spot.
Ten minutes later, he rushed into the factory gate and immediately noticed the strange atmosphere in the experimental area—light was slightly refracted there, like the heat waves on a summer asphalt road, but denser and more irregular.
"Scott!" he rushed over, "Shut down! Shut down now!"
The figure stood still, offering no response. Its body had shrunk to less than two centimeters, its appearance semi-transparent, with fine, crack-like patterns of light appearing on its skin, as if its internal structure was disintegrating layer by layer. It raised its hand, seemingly trying to press a controller, but its fingers trembled so badly that it couldn't quite reach the button.
Ye Mo rushed forward and reached for the controller. But as soon as he touched Scott's shoulder, a tingling sensation shot through his fingertips—not an electric shock, but some kind of high-frequency vibration, like countless fine needles piercing his nerve endings at the same time.
He abruptly pulled his hand back and found that the skin on his fingertips had turned white, as if it had been instantly dehydrated.
"The suit is locked." He stared at the constantly flashing device. "He bypassed the surveillance himself, but couldn't get the retrieval process working."
He quickly pulled out his tablet, connected to the local network, and attempted to forcibly access the controller's backend. A blood-red warning popped up on the screen: [Insufficient permissions, the target system is in offline jailbreak mode and cannot be remotely intervened].
"Good lad, you really dare to do that." Ye Mo gritted his teeth, "You even dared to break Pym's encryption?"
He threw down the tablet, closed his eyes, and activated his brain's systems.
[X-Gene Resonance System] activated, his consciousness sinking into the "Gene Spiral Tower". Currently unlocked to the 19th level, fragments of abilities are scattered like stars, but most require specific combinations to activate. He quickly scanned the residual mutant ability fluctuations at the scene - there were no new sources of contact, the most recent being the Vibranium Resonance sensed three days ago on the border of Wakanda, leaving only an unnamed "Molecular Anchoring" fragment, which had never been used.
"I can get through Wall Phasing Technique, but I can't save people," he thought to himself. "I have plenty of Self-Healing fragments, but those repair physical damage, not stabilize the quantum field..."
He opened his eyes and stared at Scott's almost vanished figure.
Two centimeters, and the duration has exceeded one minute. The nervous system's workload index has exploded, the respiratory rate has reached a critical value, and the body mass distribution curve has shown a precipitous decline. If it drags on for another ten seconds, there might really be nothing left but a bunch of randomly flying elementary particles.
"Couldn't you have waited for me to come back before you did this stupid thing?" Ye Mo roared, tearing off the silver lanyard around his neck and throwing it to the ground—it was a prop he used to disguise the system, usually pretending to be some kind of high-tech necklace.
He braced himself on the ground with both hands, sweat beading on his forehead, his mind racing.
Is there any combination of capabilities that can forcibly fix the microstructure?
Wade's Self-Healing combined with Shadowcat's Wall Phasing equals Regenerative Phasing, but that's self-repair after penetration damage, so it's not applicable.
The Iceman's Low-Temperature Solidification combined with the Nightcrawler's Spatial Jump? No, that's not quite right either; one involves cooling, and the other involves displacement.
etc.
He suddenly thought of something.
"Molecular Anchoring... plus... Mental Power Pull?"
The system didn't give any prompts, but he remembered that last time in the Quantum Tunnel, he had briefly stabilized a collapsing particle stream using his weak mental energy. If he could replicate that experience in the current scenario, he might be able to buy a few seconds of window of opportunity.
He took a deep breath, placed his hands on the ground, concentrated all his attention, and released his mental energy in Scott's direction.
It's not about control, not about mind reading, but about "pulling"—like using an invisible thread to hook the dissipating core of consciousness and pull it back to reality.
Scott's body shuddered violently.
The trend of becoming transparent paused briefly; the skin cracks narrowed slightly, and the eyes blinked.
He's still awake.
"It works!" Ye Mo felt a surge of excitement and increased his output.
At that very moment, the controller suddenly emitted a sharp beep and automatically initiated an emergency recovery procedure. The system attempted to restore the user to their original state, but because the quantum field had already become unstable, the restart process instead triggered a reverse tearing motion.
Scott convulsed violently, his figure blurring instantly, like a video being fast-forwarded.
"No! Don't start it now!" Ye Mo rushed forward and reached for the controller's shutdown button.
My fingertip was half a centimeter away from the button.
Scott suddenly froze, his pupils dilated, and his lips moved slightly, as if he wanted to say something.
The next second, his right arm began to become transparent and spread, like a wisp of smoke being blown away by the wind.
Ye Mo's hand froze in mid-air, his entire body tense.
He knew that if he had been three seconds later, this person would have been completely wiped off the face of the earth.
He bit his tongue, forcing himself to calm down.
[System, is there any capability to freeze microscopic decay?]
There was no sound in my mind.
There was no sound, no options, nothing at all.
He looked down at Scott's fading hand, his breathing suppressed.
"If you dare die right now," he stared at the face, his voice barely audible, "I guarantee I'll smash your daughter's piggy bank in the next second."
The moment he finished speaking, Scott suddenly raised his left hand and gripped the edge of the controller tightly, his knuckles turning white from the force.
He can still catch him.