Chapter 120: The Narrative Prison (Complete)

"Nothing much, I'm just cooling off."

Li Cheng lowered his head like a kindergarten troublemaker, spat a strand of saliva onto the ground, then shook his head back and forth, making the saliva sway back and forth.

His abstract, performance-art-like motion left Hui Yu utterly baffled. Fortunately, Li Cheng immediately snapped back, slurped the saliva back in with a sharp sound.

"That's disgusting!" Hui Yu blurted out instinctively.

Li Cheng replied matter-of-factly: "What's so disgusting? As this Holy Revelation mentions, a cold fact: many animals—including canines and llamas—use saliva evaporation to cool down."

"Why not just spit it out?"

"Humans secrete one to 1.5 liters of saliva daily, 80% of which is water; the rest consists of mucoproteins, mucopolysaccharides, immunoglobulins, free amino acids, and more. Just from its composition, it's not much different from certain health supplements. Every spit is throwing away money."

Li Cheng sneered, "Besides, water is the source of life. If you're unfortunately stranded in extreme environments like deserts or oceans, you'll need to recycle not just saliva and sweat, but even urine if necessary!"

"Why do you suddenly get excited whenever we talk about shit, piss, and farts?!" Hui Yu's eye twitched, and he silently rejoiced he was a silicon-based lifeform.

"Now, it's time to face the real warden."

Li Cheng instantly returned to seriousness, ignoring Hui Yu's internal complaint, "That was such a forced topic shift!" He straightened his attire and strode toward Room Three, yanking open the wooden door.

The door opened, and the surroundings instantly shifted—both of them stood again in the zero-gravity corridor of the Blood Eagle warship.

Crew members in magnetic boots sprinted through the corridor, alarms blaring from damaged sections of the hull, red emergency lights flashing incessantly.

Everything was identical to when they first entered: every crew member's position, movement, expression unchanged.

【Stage Two Task Objective Completed】

【Stage Three Task Objective: Escape the Narrative Prison】

【Task Time Limit: 10 minutes】

【Task Reward 1: 600 Experience Points】

【Task Reward 2: 700 Game Coins】

【Task Reward 3: One Random Item, Quality Based on Completion Rating】

【Task Reward 4: Micro Life Potion ×1】

【Task Failure Penalty: None】

After glancing at the newly popped notification, Li Cheng crossed the corridor and reached the ship's bridge. Isaac and the rabbit-eared adjutant stood side by side, prepared to greet Li Cheng and Hui Yu; outside the viewport, pirate warships continued bombarding each other.

"We meet again."

There was no need for riddles now. Li Cheng spoke plainly: "Given that the mechanical device in the Misdirection Room called itself the warden, it must have been generated after you seized the Warden's Chamber. I want to know where the real warden is."

"This prison sector has no actual warden—it's controlled automatically by the system."

The rabbit-eared adjutant spoke slowly. Li Cheng standing here and asking this question proved he had uncovered the deception and deduced the truth behind No. 1 Isaac, No. 2 Isaac, and everything else. Otherwise, he would have drawn his weapon immediately.

Li Cheng asked in surprise: "Then how did you get trapped here?"

"Permissions."

The Blood Eagle's captain—or rather, No. 2 Isaac—said slowly: "The original Isaac contracted the Iron Plague virus during her escape attempt. Knowing her time was short, she severed herself and split off me."

"I've tried escaping countless times—and succeeded many times—but I lack full prisoner permissions. Even after enduring immense hardship and pressing five engine room buttons in sequence, I still couldn't open the Warden's Chamber door and leave."

She paused, glanced at the bustling crew aboard the ship, and said calmly: "I refused to return to a solitary cell and wait endlessly—prisoners in the Narrative Prison might face trial decades or centuries later, or never face judgment at all."

"So I entered the Warden's Chamber and, using my incomplete permissions, borrowed functions from other engine rooms."

"The Flashback Room's time jumps, the Continuity Room's disruption of narrative coherence, the Misdirection Room's deception—"

"Combined, these functions transformed the Warden's Chamber into something familiar to me."

"Familiar? It's more than that, isn't it?"

Li Cheng said: "Even from the fragmented glimpses shown in newspapers and past footage, you don't seem like someone who'd drown in fantasy."

"Correct."

Isaac said: "My goal was to use the Narrative Prison's own abilities to create a small world within it."

The Duck Principle—If an animal looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it is a duck.

Similarly, if the small world created by the Narrative Prison follows the same physical laws, operational rules, and time flow as the outside world, then it is a fully convincing, real world.

In this world, No. 2 Isaac could manipulate worldlines, resurrect her comrades and adopted daughter, make up for past regrets, forge a new future, and treat it as her own "reality."

No wonder the contents of other engine rooms all related to Isaac in some way—including the newspaper Li Cheng finally read in the Misdirection Room (actually the Protagonist Effect Room).

He looked around. "Then what's the cost?"

Since Angelina, Anna, and others most important to Isaac weren't aboard the Blood Eagle, something had clearly gone wrong—things hadn't turned out as intended.

"Everything."

Isaac said bitterly: "【Narrative】 has inertia. Even if I saved Angelina on the transport ship at Orion C, she'd still die in a subsequent mission. Even if I saved Anna at Proxima A, she'd still die from Iron Plague infection."

"Including here—under enemy pirate fleet assault, the Blood Eagle destroyed all enemy ships, barely surviving a pyrrhic victory."

"But over eighty percent of the crew, and all the Zelo refugees deep within the ship, died from hull damage."

"On the real timeline, I couldn't save them. Here, I still can't."

"So," Hui Yu took a deep breath, staring at Isaac, "after splitting twice, going through all this, you're back at square one—nothing changed? What was the point of splitting off me?"

"You are the last hope."

Isaac said: "I'm sorry to drag you into this. The original Isaac, with full memory and permissions, failed. I, with full memory and half permissions, failed too. Perhaps you—with no memories, like a blank slate—can achieve a different outcome."

Outside the viewport, thousands of light lances, torpedoes, missiles, and drones still clashed, weaving a dazzling tapestry against the starry sea.

The rabbit-eared adjutant suddenly interjected: "Time is running out."

"What time?" Hui Yu asked instinctively.

"The time for you to leave."

Isaac said: "My form has long vanished. It was my manipulation of the engine rooms that altered the Warden's Chamber. Everything began with me—and must end with me."

As she spoke, she pressed several buttons on the ship's console; immediately, powerful gravity surged from the rear of the ship, pulling Hui Yu and Li Cheng backward.

"Wait!"

Grey Rain gripped the walls with both hands, resisting with all her might. Too many questions clogged her heart — the gaps in her memory, the blanks in her life, the meaning of her existence.

"When I walked out of the automated factory and, for the first time, gazed up at the stars and felt the new life, grey rain was falling from the sky. That is the origin of your name."

Isaac said softly, "You are me, and at the same time an independent individual. Leave this place, and go write the life that belongs to you."

Bang bang bang!

Li Cheng and Grey Rain, pulled by gravity, smashed through hatch after hatch, retreating rapidly. The surrounding hull kept disintegrating and collapsing, until it all turned to flying ash.

No longer obscured by the illusion, the warden's room revealed its true appearance — a spacious room, with only one table, on which sat a green button.

In the middle of the wall directly facing the wooden door was set an alloy gate. The gate was undamaged, with only large patches of black blast marks left on its surface.

Li Cheng pressed the green button. The alloy gate slowly rose, revealing a narrow, long, slanting upward passage.

"The road to redemption lies within. Let's go."

Li Cheng stepped into the passage, but Grey Rain beside him was blocked by a golden light screen that had materialized out of thin air, unable to pass through.

A line of text slowly formed on the surface of the light screen: 【Non-compliant escape behavior detected】

As an individual formed by a secondary split, Grey Rain still did not count as a prisoner in the strict sense.

"."

Her expression went from stiff, to dazed, to relieved. She forced out a faint smile, waved her hand as if it didn't matter, and said, "So it really won't work, huh? Tsk, I knew it. Forget it, you go on by yourself."

Step.

Li Cheng said nothing, stepped back, returned to Grey Rain's side, and pretended to be deep in thought.

"Hey hey hey, what are you doing?" Grey Rain stared at him in utter bewilderment. "You've got a chance to break out and you don't want it? Walk out of the passage and you'll have escaped! There's a whole big world out there waiting for you."

Perhaps too shocked, Grey Rain began to ramble nonsense, spouting things like "Bro, you wouldn't be after my body, right?" "We've only known each other a few hours." "Warning you, I'm not that easy, uh, robot."

"I say, couldn't your 256GB brain capacity be used to store something proper?"

Li Cheng rolled his eyes and complained, "There's no Flower World out there. If I'm not mistaken, outside the passage is just the vacuum of space."

"Huh?"

"The faucets only have warm airflow, the vacuum-flush toilets don't store water, and the drinks in the vending machines all cost money. These designs deliberately keep the factor of 'water' from appearing in the narrative cage."

Li Cheng smiled: "The gravity on a normal planet should be straight down. But when I spat earlier to cool down, I deliberately paid attention and noticed the saliva tilted and curved slightly backward.

This is a sign of artificial gravity.

In other words, we are not on a planet, but on a massive space station that generates artificial gravity through its own rotation."

When a space station rotates at a certain angular velocity, the people aboard will feel a centrifugal force similar to a planet's gravity. Its magnitude is related to the station's rotation radius, angular velocity, and the object's mass.

If the rotation radius is too small or the rotation speed too fast, the gravity felt by a person's head and feet will differ, causing dizziness, nausea, and disorientation.

Li Cheng felt no gravity gradient, proving this space station was absurdly large.

"I don't have a spacesuit, or the ability to breathe in a vacuum, so I'll have to rely on you."

He smiled, drew out that 【Last Salvation】, and pulled the trigger toward the golden light screen ahead.

Hum!

A searing, blindingly bright light gathered at the muzzle, and the surrounding air warped from the sharply rising temperature.

After a brief delay, the muzzle erupted with a thick, long pillar of light that incinerated everything, easily tearing through the light screen. Its force undiminished, it refracted and bounced within the passage until it shot out the exit and vanished.

Crack crack crack.

Having fired its final shot, 【Last Salvation】 had finally completed its mission and self-disassembled. Li Cheng gathered up the broken parts, exchanged a smile with Grey Rain, and stepped into the passage together.

The air in the passage gradually thinned. Grey Rain melted part of her body, reshaping it into an oxygen mask and oxygen tank for Li Cheng to breathe.

The two climbed the stairs, reached the end, and looked upward.

It was a ring-shaped space station so vast it was hard to imagine. The station rotated slowly, connected in the middle by four cylindrical axes, while the outermost layer consisted of a large number of hexagonal honeycomb-shaped modules.

Each module was a prison sector. All the sectors combined formed the narrative cage that held countless prisoners.

"Non-compliant escape behavior detected!"

"Non-compliant escape behavior detected!"

There was still thin air in the passage, so the noisy broadcast could be heard.

The cylindrical axes in the middle of the space station opened valve after valve, from which dozens of X-shaped flying craft emerged, heading toward the two's location, determined to capture the rule-breaking escapee Grey Rain and bring her back.

【Script Mission "Narrative Cage" Complete】

【Rewards Settling】

【5 minutes until teleportation. Teleport now?】

The system chime sounded in his ears. Li Cheng glanced at the silent Grey Rain, removed the oxygen mask, and shouted, "Come with me."

"Go where?" Grey Rain shouted back.

"A world that's not that wonderful, but not that terrible either."

Li Cheng flipped his palm and took out the mission reward item he had just obtained. It was an egg-shaped toy the size of a palm, with a small color screen of about 240p resolution in the middle, and a row of buttons below the screen.

【Item Name: Digital Pet Egg】

【Type: Portable Item】

【Quality: Fine】

【Effect: Love's Sustenance. Use on a creature whose level is lower than the user's and who is favorably disposed toward the user. With the target's consent, it can be stored in the Pet Egg.

【Consumption: None】

【Cooldown: 24 hours】

【Use Condition: None】

【Note: The Pet Egg can only hold one creature at a time. The device itself has feeding, washing, entertainment, education, sleep, and other functions, which can meet the various needs of the creature inside the egg chamber, but does not increase affinity. The creature will also have no memory of living inside the egg chamber.】

【Note: When the stored creature's affinity toward the user drops below 50%, the creature may refuse to enter or leave the Pet Egg, or even choose to defect.】

【Note: If used within a script mission, when leaving the script world, a certain amount of in-game currency must be paid based on the creature's life intensity in order to bring the creature out.】

【Author's Note: I want to give Yaya a complete life.】

"Alright."

Facing the battlecraft accelerating toward them, Hui Yu did not hesitate. She took Li Cheng's hand, and the two vanished from the spot in an instant.

(End of Chapter)