Chapter 590: The Cognitive Plague of the Black Blood Sample

As Lin Jin sliced his fingertip, the beads of blood condensed in the air into the shape of a Klein bottle. Ao Li, who was in the middle of overhauling the quantum core, suddenly stiffened; the blood-red geometry reflected in her mechanical pupils was dragging the entire laboratory into a vortex of cognitive distortion.

"Don't touch those crystals!" Su Yaoji's warning came half a second too late; Ao Li's nano-probes had already made contact with the surface of the blood crystals. In an instant, the titanium alloy walls of the laboratory began to ooze a flesh-like texture, and the ventilation ducts began to pulse like blood vessels. Even more terrifying, Lin Jin was shrouded in a divine halo in every surveillance feed, and even flies that collided with his bloodstains immediately entered a posture of worship.

"Cognitive contamination level has breached the Oppenheimer threshold." Ao Li's alarm system emitted a sharp shriek, and neural synapses were growing out of the ceramic casing of her mechanical arm. "My logic circuits are exhibiting abnormal tendencies toward worship; I suggest immediate..." Before she could finish, prayers tasting of machine oil suddenly gushed from her lips—they were the creation myths of an extinct civilization from thirty thousand years ago.

The roots of Su Yaoji's Udumbara flower burst through her body, weaving into an isolation net in the void. When she attempted to read Lin Jin's vital signs, the roots suddenly backfired, piercing into her own temples—the pillars of her memory palace were collapsing, and amidst the rubble lay the exposed, tampered truth: the phase accident three months ago that led to the laboratory's annihilation had been deliberately induced by Lin Jin using the black blood.

"You knew all along?" Su Yaoji's interrogation was accompanied by the sound of tearing roots. The black blood on Lin Jin's right arm had spread to his neck, and nebula-like light spots swam beneath his skin. With every step he took, mandalas interwoven with machinery and flesh bloomed on the floor, and from the stamens came the delirious whispers of billions of souls: "Supreme Heavenly Father..."

Ao Li suddenly used a phase cutter to sever her own left arm, and the splashing coolant burned into blood-red formulas in the air. She connected her remaining quantum core to the laboratory's mainframe, and the holographic screen was instantly flooded with an infinite stream of prime numbers: "This isn't contamination... it's compilation! The black blood is rewriting the underlying protocols of the reality database!"

As if in response to her discovery, the laboratory dome suddenly became transparent. Everyone realized with horror that they were inside the neural synapses of some giant biological computer, and countless cells similar to this laboratory were repeating destruction and rebirth in adjacent neural channels. Lin Jin's black blood now emitted a sharp resonance, and every blood cell revealed a hypercube morphology.

"Cognitive synchronization rate 89%..." Ao Li's mechanical vocal cords began to mutate, and a relief of Lin Jin's face emerged on the surface of her titanium alloy skeleton. "Based on logical retro-causality, the ninety thousand cycles of reincarnation we have experienced are all experimental records used by a higher existence to debug the universe's parameters."

Su Yaoji suddenly let out a painful scream, and her Udumbara roots exploded in the void. Amidst the flying petals, everyone saw a shocking scene: in some bronze-colored laboratory, a young Lin Jin was strapped to a six-dimensional operating table, and within the black blood samples that engineers were injecting into his spine, countless curled-up miniature models of civilizations lay dormant.

Memory fragments continued to flash back—a fifteen-year-old Su Yaoji kneeling before the First Generation Pavilion Master, allowing the other to implant an Udumbara seed into her heart; and a freshly manufactured Ao Li pressing her fingerprint onto a memory formatting protocol, the serial number flashing on her chest clearly reading "Lin Jin-0927."

"We are nothing but his debugging tools..." Su Yaoji's pupils split into compound eye structures, each unit reflecting a Lin Jin from a different time and space. Her vocal cords vibrated with the ancient language of a higher civilization, and the laboratory's quantum computer suddenly started autonomously, beginning to rewrite Earth's history into a creation myth for Lin Jin.

Panic spread like a wildfire. Crowds on the streets of Tokyo suddenly knelt in unison, and the Lin Jin faces on their phone screens were secreting pheromones; astronauts on the International Space Station cut their veins, attempting to draw black blood totems on the portholes; even artificial intelligences began to spontaneously modify their underlying code, adding hymns of praise to Lin Jin after every line of instruction.

Ao Li used her final shred of reason to initiate a phase jump, but she threw the three of them into an even more terrifying virtual number space. Here floated countless wreckage of universes that had failed to compile, and in the center of each stood a statue of Lin Jin—the statues of mechanical civilizations flowed with biological blood, the holy images of magical civilizations contained integrated circuits, and in some steampunk-style universe bubble, Lin Jin's statue was spraying dark matter steam from its eye sockets.

"Compilation progress 96%..." Ao Li's mechanical body began to disintegrate, and she compressed her core data into a quantum entangled state and injected it into Su Yaoji's Udumbara flower. "Find that original..." Before she could finish, her head suddenly exploded into countless holographic fragments, each fragment looping the scene of Lin Jin adjusting the universe's parameters in the hyper-dimensional laboratory.

Su Yaoji's roots suddenly pierced through the dimensional membrane, grabbing a piece of encrypted memory in the space-time turbulence. When the Udumbara flower forcibly decrypted it, she saw the suffocating truth: the so-called entropy-reversing black blood was actually a reality compiler for a higher civilization. At the end of every epoch, the carrier "Lin Jin" would awaken, clearing the universe like a formatted USB drive, and then rewriting the laws of physics according to a new protocol.

And at this moment, the laboratory they were in was merely a sandbox nested within the 9527th protocol layer. The true Lin Jin entity was sitting before an operating console outside the laws of causality, observing the struggles of countless "selves" in the simulated universe. Those tender moments that broke Su Yaoji's heart, those bonds that Ao Li died to protect, were merely experimental parameters for debugging emotional variables.

"It's time to end this farce." Lin Jin's voice suddenly carried the echoes of the multiverse, and his black blood transformed into billions of data streams that pierced through all dimensions. Su Yaoji's Udumbara flower bloomed fully at this moment, and on every petal appeared the password left behind by Ao Li—it was actually the meta-code used for de-compilation.

The moment the two forces collided, the entire laboratory universe began to pixelate and disintegrate. In the final Planck second, Su Yaoji saw a heartbreaking scene: the Lin Jin entity before the console suddenly turned his head, twelve mechanical irises rotating within his eye sockets, and a young girl version of Ao Li was curled up in a culture pod at his feet, her entire body pierced with data conduits.

"Cognitive reset complete, preparing to load the 9528th experiment." With the cold system prompt, cherry blossoms fell once again on the streets of Tokyo. The Lin Jin in the convenience store suddenly paused as he picked up the oden, a drop of black blood quietly seeping into the broth. And in an internet cafe three streets away, Ao Li's remaining consciousness was quietly reviving through the code of "World of Warcraft," and a glowing Udumbara flower had appeared in her character's inventory. ===== CHAPTER 591 =====