Chapter 5: Source Code and the Dead

"Welcome home."

Those four blood-red words looked like they were just squeezed out of a human artery. Under the pale light of the flashlight, I could even see the thick blood slightly bulging on the paper. It was still steaming a bit.

My scalp literally exploded. A freezing electric current shot right up from my tailbone to the top of my head.

This wasn't some optical illusion, and definitely not some random code on a screen. This was real blood. Human blood with that disgusting metallic smell. The black book Hell's Eye, which had been sleeping in the ziplock bag for God knows how long, just came alive.

"Throw it away!"

Old Chen jerked his head around. For the first time, I saw something close to panic on his usually deadpan face. He didn't even bother to sheathe his bronze sword. He just lunged at me, trying to slap the book out of my arms.

But I was a second too slow. Or rather, this weird space didn't plan to give us any time to react.

Right when Old Chen's hand was about to touch the black book...

BOOM!

That "Yin Gate" made of white bones and black cables suddenly let out a massive, muffled roar. It wasn't an explosion. It felt more like a super low-frequency infrasonic wave. It pierced right through my eardrums and smashed into my heart.

My chest tightened. A sweet and metallic taste rose in my throat. I stumbled backward uncontrollably and stepped right into a mud puddle. Old Chen was also staggered by the invisible shockwave. He had to stab his sword into the mud to steady himself.

The absolute darkness inside the door started moving.

At first, it was like a pool of dead water. But now, it was boiling.

The black optical cables wrapped around the bone doorframe suddenly came alive, like poisonous snakes smelling blood. Their skin shined with a disgusting slimy gloss. Inside the dead cables, blue light spots started flashing crazily. That meant extreme-speed data transmission.

Crack, crack, crack...

A teeth-setting bone-rubbing sound came from the door.

Those cables weren't just wriggling, they were growing out like crazy!

Hundreds, maybe thousands of black cables burst out from the empty darkness like a giant black spider web. They rushed at us covering the whole sky. So fast I could only see blurred shadows.

"Get back! Move!" Old Chen roared. He grabbed my collar and literally threw me several meters back.

While I was in the air, I saw a black cable as thick as a grown man's wrist whip down hard right where I was standing a second ago.

Smack!

Mud splashed three meters high. The ground was whipped into a deep trench. The dirt on the edges was instantly scorched black by high voltage, smoking with a horrible smell.

Old Chen didn't retreat.

He gritted his teeth, twisted his wrist, and swung that ancient bronze sword in the green rain.

"Break!"

The blade precisely hit three or four cables rushing at his face.

Blue electric arcs exploded!

It wasn't normal sparks, it was high-density plasma. Old Chen let out a muffled groan. The huge rebound force pushed him back five or six steps. The skin between his thumb and index finger split open, and blood dripped down the sword handle.

And those cut cables? They didn't die after falling into the mud. Instead of copper wires or glass fibers, a thick, glowing green liquid oozed out from their cuts. Just like the rain falling from the sky.

Worse, more and more cables were pouring out of the door.

They acted like they had intelligence, flanking us from both sides, trying to trap us in this abandoned construction site for good.

"Yunfeng! Think of something!" Old Chen yelled at me while blocking with his sword. I could hear a bit of despair in his voice. "We can't cut them all! They are sucking power from the underground!"

Me? Think of something?!

Physical attacks were totally useless against these half-machine, half-ghost freaks!

I scrambled in the mud and grabbed my mini PC. It was covered in dirt, but miraculously, the screen with "CONNECTION ESTABLISHED" was still on. That line of green code was blinding in the dark.

Connection established.
Connection established...

My grandpa's words from back then flashed in my head: Never try to rewrite karma with code.

But if I don't rewrite it right now, we'll both become new bones on that damn doorframe!

"Screw it, worst case is death!"

I bit the tip of my tongue to keep myself completely awake through the pain. I tore the bottom of my jacket and roughly wiped the mud off the PC ports. Then, I pulled a special cable from the hidden pocket of my backpack.

It was a modified cable. One end was a standard RJ45 network plug, but the other end had six thick, bare copper wires exposed. I usually used it to force physical data reads from dead hard drives.

I stared at the Yin Gate.

At the base of the doorframe, there was a pedestal made of several human skulls. Most of the black cables were drilling out from the empty eye sockets of those skulls, and the blue light was flashing the craziest there.

That was its "hub", its data exchange center!

"Old Chen! Cover me! Three seconds!" I screamed at him. My voice was so hoarse I didn't even recognize it.

Old Chen didn't look back. He just threw his bronze sword backward.

"Go!"

The sword flew with a sharp whistling sound and pinned right in front of the skull pedestal. A blue electric field popped open instantly, forcing back the cables on both sides. It cleared a death path less than half a meter wide for me.

I didn't hesitate. Hugging the mini PC, I dashed forward like a cornered beast.

The air was full of freezing death-energy and the sharp smell of ozone from the cables.

Just one step away from the base.

A tiny transparent optical fiber, like an invisible poison needle, sneaked out from the ground and wrapped around my ankle.

A piercing pain hit me. The thing actually pierced right through my hiking boot into my flesh. A freezing data stream rushed up my veins straight to my heart. Half of my body went numb instantly.

I collapsed in front of the skull base, less than ten centimeters away from that blue-glowing "eye socket".

"Plug it in!" Old Chen roared behind me. He was already tightly wrapped around the waist by several thick cables, hanging halfway in the air.

I used every last bit of my strength. I even used my teeth to bite down hard on my numb right wrist, forcing my shaking fingers to stab those six bare copper wires right into the dense blue light in the skull's eye socket!

Squish—

No metal clashing sound. It felt like stabbing into a piece of freezing rotten meat.

At the exact same time, my left hand smashed the keyboard, directly running a core-level virus I spent three years writing. It was designed to cause a logic deadlock in servers.

Enter key, pressed.

One second of dead silence.

Then, my mini PC screen turned blood red. A giant, crazy spinning Tai Chi Bagua symbol appeared in the middle. But every line of the Bagua was made of binary 1s and 0s gibberish.

BOOM!

The Yin Gate shook violently. The cables wrapped around Old Chen suddenly looked like they lost power, instantly shriveling and dropping to the ground. All those black cables dancing in the air froze, and their blue spots turned into blinking red warning lights.

Did it work?

I slumped into the mud, panting heavily, watching the data stream on the screen pouring down like a waterfall. It was an unimaginably massive amount of low-level data. Behind this door, it was connected to a "network" totally beyond human understanding.

Old Chen hit the ground, coughing hard, struggling to crawl towards me.

Just when we thought we were temporarily safe...

The cooling fan of my mini PC let out a miserable screech, and black smoke blew straight out of the motherboard. The Tai Chi symbol shattered, replaced by an endless, pitch-black screen.

My heart sank to the absolute bottom.

It burned out. My virus couldn't digest the sheer amount of data behind this door.

But the weirdest thing happened.

Those frozen cables didn't attack us again. Instead, like they received a higher-level command, they slowly moved to the sides, lining up neatly on both sides of the Yin Gate.

It looked like they were... welcoming someone.

From the thick darkness inside the doorframe, a sound came out.

Not that disgusting dial-up noise.

It was footsteps.

Tap. Tap. Tap.

Extremely regular, extremely steady. Like leather shoe heels stepping on hard stone.

In that emptiness that swallowed even light, a tiny red glow lit up.

It was the glow of a cigarette. Getting brighter and dimmer as the person breathed.

The sharp smell of cheap tobacco instantly covered up the engine oil and blood, drifting into my nose.

My pupils shrank violently. All the blood in my body froze completely.

That person, or that "thing", walked out of the darkness.

He was wearing a worn-out old military winter coat. The bottom was covered with black, dried blood and dark green mud.

The hand holding the cigarette was nothing but white bones, but there were weird tiny red wires connecting the joints.

And that face.

That face faintly lit by the red glow of the cigarette.

"Yunfeng."

A dry, hoarse voice, with a super strong electronic synth effect, exploded directly in my brain.

"It took you fifteen years to find this place."

Looking at that face, I felt my organs churning violently. Fear grabbed my heart like an invisible giant hand.

It was Grandpa.

The same Grandpa who bled from all seven orifices and died in the basement on New Year's Eve fifteen years ago, right after I pulled the plug. The one I watched getting nailed into a coffin and buried deep underground.

He looked at me, a stiff cold sneer forming on his bony mouth.

"Now, give Hell's Eye back to me."

Author's Note: This serial novel is 100% original content written by me. It was initially drafted in Chinese and then manually translated into English. I strictly stay away from AI-generated creative writing. Thank you for supporting genuine human creators!