Chapter 593: The Meme Weapon of the Rusted Civilization

When the gravitational waves from the Seventh Star Gate swept over the Tianqiong Fortress, Lin Jin was debugging the black blood suppressor. The sudden smell of metallic rust made his pupils shrink—the surface of the command hall's quantum computer was oozing a brownish-red liquid, and the operators' pupils were swallowed by gear-shaped apertures, prostrating themselves before the bronze mycelium growing in the ventilation ducts.

"Cognitive contamination has breached all firewalls!" Ao Li's mechanical arm ejected twelve sets of scanning matrices, and the holographic screen displayed suffocating images: soldiers carving rusted gears into their chests with bayonets, the barrels of Marine armored vehicles twisting into the shape of mandala flowers, and even the fortress's nano-repair robots arranging themselves into binary codes of the "Diamond Sutra" in the air.

Su Yaoji's Udumbara mark suddenly grew in reverse, its roots piercing into the ventilation ducts. Amidst the entanglement of the mycelium, she heard a lullaby from her childhood memories—it was "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star" played by her Senior Brother on a star chart instrument, but now it was mixed with the chanting of mechanical monks. When she tore the mycelium, the rust spots remaining on her fingertips revealed the date of the orphanage fire.

"The virus carrier is the Casimir vacuum fluctuation." Ao Li's quantum core suddenly overloaded, her mechanical pupils splitting into Mandelbrot spheres. "These rust phenomena are the materialization of mathematical concepts; they are broadcasting thought-seals using gravitational waves!"

Lin Jin's black blood etched a Klein bottle model onto the protective shield, and through the four-dimensional observation window, they saw an even more terrifying truth—the entire fortress was mutating into a giant meme incubator. Bronze gears grew out of the abdominal cavities of the infected soldiers, silicon-based Buddhist scriptures sprouted where teeth had fallen out, and the mycelium in the ventilation ducts they were kneeling before was actually a meme umbilical cord connected to the virtual number space.

"The virus core frequency is 98.7% resonant with your brain waves." Ao Li suddenly pressed Su Yaoji onto a phase analyzer; in the spectrum displayed on the holographic screen, a memory fragment was releasing a gamma-ray burst. "It's the memory of your seventh birthday! The Rusted Civilization turned your childhood into a cognitive bomb!"

A blood-colored Udumbara flower suddenly burst from Su Yaoji's temples, and childhood scenes invaded like a virus: in the burning orphanage, the Senior Brother who should have perished in the fire was stuffing bronze gears into her palms; the rescue starships in the night sky were flashing the totems of the Rusted Civilization; and in the mirror deep within her memory, her young self was actually wearing mechanical prosthetic eyes made of Udumbara roots.

"They tampered with my memories..." Su Yaoji's roots suddenly went berserk, piercing through the laboratory and outlining a Möbius strip on the fortress's outer wall. "That night of the fire wasn't an accident at all; it was the Rusted Civilization's first inoculation experiment!"

Ao Li's phase mirror image captured the source of the gravitational waves—floating inside the Sixth Star Gate was an Udumbara flower spirit composed of trillions of memory lattices. Every lattice was playing a tampered fragment of Su Yaoji's life, and at the stamen was the Senior Brother who had been transformed into a meme host, his mechanical prayer beads strung with the destruction records of nine rusted civilizations.

Lin Jin's black blood blade cleaved through the folds of space, and the three of them fell into a memory battlefield. Here, the timeline burned like old film, and they witnessed Su Yaoji's life being repeatedly tampered with: one version saw her become a high priestess of the Rusted Civilization, another saw her dismantle Ao Li into parts, and in the darkest version, she personally injected black blood into Lin Jin's heart.

"To destroy the host, one must first become the virus." Ao Li suddenly pushed Su Yaoji into the torrent of memories, while she herself initiated phase synchronization. "I will create a cognitive singularity in the reality dimension; you have twelve minutes to rewrite the core protocol!"

At the core of the memory battlefield, Su Yaoji finally faced the sealed Udumbara flower spirit. It was a hive mind composed of countless versions of herself, each individual struggling between machinery and flesh. The First Generation spirit at the very center opened its twelve compound eyes, and the voice it emitted was actually her Senior Brother's: "Why resist? We were always the perfect meme containers for the Rusted Civilization."

When Lin Jin's black blood seeped into the memory lattices, the truth bloomed like a poison thorn: the so-called Rusted Civilization was actually a meme weapon arsenal created by survivors of the previous universe cycle. And Su Yaoji's Udumbara gene was the biological key to opening that arsenal. The Senior Brother who had protected his junior sister in the orphanage fire had not been protecting her, but rather the civilization harvester sown by the Rusted Civilization.

"Time to end this farce." Su Yaoji's roots suddenly pierced into the First Generation spirit, and the sealed childhood memories poured out like a flood. In the true memory, it was she who had lit the fire at the orphanage, attempting to burn the Udumbara embryo within her body; it was her Senior Brother who had snatched the torch to take the blame, ultimately being transformed into a living meme by the Rusted Civilization.

When the host core overloaded, the entire memory battlefield began to collapse. Lin Jin leaped out of the star gate, holding the consciousness-fading Su Yaoji, and the exploding Udumbara flower spirit behind them bloomed with the destruction images of nine rusted civilizations. Ao Li, who had returned to reality, was using mechanical prayer beads to deliver the infected soldiers, her quantum core missing 37% of its data—that was the price of assimilation with the meme host.

"Cognitive contamination clearance rate 91%, but..." Ao Li's mechanical arm suddenly dropped rust slag, and the encoding of Su Yaoji's childhood memories appeared on her neck. "We all have meme seeds buried within us." She pointed to the newborn star gate outside the porthole, from which a familiar gravitational wave frequency was emanating—an even more ancient Udumbara flower spirit was awakening, and its spectrum clearly contained the fluctuations of Lin Jin's black blood. ===== CHAPTER 594 =====