The operations room was preternaturally silent.
The low-frequency hum of the servers, which had persisted after Su Xiaolan sent the probe signal, was suddenly strangled as if by an invisible hand, ceasing abruptly. There was no fan noise, no faint sound of disk read/write. The entire space was swallowed by a near-vacuum dead silence, pressing on eardrums, forcing hearts to pound uncontrollably.
The main control screen flickered on its own. Icy blue characters materialized line by line in an unprecedented manner, possessing a certain biological rhythm:
[Ψ Module Initializing…]
[Calibration Running… 1%…]
The surrounding ambient lights flickered in sync, like breathing. An intangible pressure filled the air, heavy enough to evoke the image of ten thousand tons of seawater crushing against a deep-sea submarine's hull.
"This isn't our system's prompt syntax!" Wang Jing whirled around, his voice hushed in shock yet piercingly clear in the absolute silence.
"No," Su Xiaolan's voice was tight, her fingertips icy, "This is… a response." She felt the stone she had thrown hadn't hit water, but the scales of a slumbering leviathan.
A sharp internal alarm suddenly ripped through the dead silence!
"Report!" A technician's voice trembled as he practically lunged at his console. "Abnormal fluctuations in the City West No. 3 power grid! Street lamps and public lighting in seventeen blocks exhibited simultaneous, rhythmic flickering! Lasted three seconds before restoring!"
Almost concurrently, an emergency comms message popped up on another screen: "Multiple hospitals reporting brief medical device reboots! ICU monitors, automated infusion pumps most severely affected. No incidents, thankfully, but all system logs indicate… unknown signal interference!"
More reports flooded in. Subway lines halted for three minutes due to unexplained signal system failure; terrified passengers described information screens inside carriages briefly displaying "chaotic static and a blurred eye"; civilian radio bands were swamped by unparseable low-frequency noise; even the Li Corporation building's own backup generators detected an unexplained power surge.
All anomalous data was urgently collated, visualized, and projected onto the central giant screen. The chaotic data streams quivered violently, then began to self-organize, to aggregate, gradually sketching a heart-stopping (contour)—
A massive eye, composed of countless flowing lights and garbled code.
Its "pupil" was a bottomless vortex of data, slowly contracting and dilating, coldly "gazing" at everyone in the operations room.
"My God… what is that…" someone couldn't suppress a low exclamation, stepping back instinctively.
Su Xiaolan felt a slight wave of dizziness. As the image of that "data eye" imprinted on her retinas, it seemed as if countless layered, fragmented whispers sounded in her ears—not through them, but drilling directly into the depths of her mind.
· · — · — · · · (Deeper)
· · · — — · (Remember)
Morse code. The warning deciphered from Little Fatty Tang's key. But now, they were no longer cold dots and dashes; they had become echoes with intent, resonating as if from tens of thousands of meters below the trench.
She snapped her eyes shut, her fingertips trembling uncontrollably, the sound of her typing becoming disorderly. The floor beneath her feet transmitted an extremely faint, continuous vibration. The entire space truly felt like a submarine descending, with some indescribable behemoth silently gliding just beyond the hull.
"Xiaolan!" Li Chenyuan stepped forward. His broad, warm palm covered her icy, trembling hand without hesitation, the forceful grip offering undeniable stability. "Look at me. Not the screen." His voice was low, like the deepest anchor chain, trying to moor her against the intangible mental pull.
Her breathing was rapid, her face pale, but her eyes couldn't completely tear away from the terrible creation: "It's… looking at us. IT knows we're here."
Li Chenyuan's eyes turned frosty. He looked up and barked an order: "Disconnect all non-essential visual projections! Retain only underlying data stream analysis!"
The technician complied immediately. The "eye" on the giant screen instantly dissolved into the most primitive, waterfall-like torrent of code. However, the feeling of being watched by an omnipresent gaze did not disappear; instead, it grew heavier, permeating the air.
Su Xiaolan took a deep breath, forcefully suppressing the palpitations in her heart. She gripped Li Chenyuan's hand for support and refocused on the console. Her fingers danced across the keyboard again, writing more complex tracking and parsing scripts, attempting to reverse-lock the core source of the Ψ protocol.
The data deluge, as if possessing life, shifted drastically as she tried to delve deeper. It no longer followed linear paths, but formed countless self-nesting, infinitely looping corridors.
"It's not a conventional tree or network structure…" Fine sweat beaded on her temple, her speech rapid, "It's a recursive trap! Like an infinitely descending trench. The more you track it, the deeper the hole you dig. There's no end!"
More disturbingly, the originally chaotic, meaningless codes began to autonomously reassemble during her tracking, sometimes forming blurred humanoid outlines, sometimes twisting into distorted geometric symbols, as if silently mocking.
The tech team was aghast. This had long surpassed the scope of traditional hacking or system anomalies.
"This doesn't feel like executing a program…" Su Xiaolan's voice held a trace of fear she herself hadn't noticed, "This feels more like… demonstrating some form of consciousness."
Just as she was fully engrossed in battling the data abyss, the blood-red countdown timer suspended above flashed wildly again without warning!
The numbers jumped violently from [11:47:21], finally plummeting like a cliff edge to settle on—
[06:00:00]
Time had been directly halved!
"How is this possible?! The system time was forcibly modified!"
"Not modified! The countdown logic itself was overwritten!"
Panic, like icy tidewater, instantly flooded the operations room.
Almost simultaneously, an encrypted channel was forcibly cut into the public comms line. Gu Yu's voice, always carrying a false warmth, now sounded icy and cruel:
[F.LK, playing with fire. Ψ was never a key. It's the prison door that locks us all in. And you pried it open yourself.]
Before his words faded, Su Xiaolan's private terminal vibrated again. Little Fatty Tang's message was simple enough to suffocate, devoid of any ornamentation, like a final lament:
[IT sees you.]
A desperate chill shot up her spine.
Su Xiaolan's fingertips lost all warmth instantly. A massive, primal fear seized her, making her want to sever all connections, to flee this awakening digital deep sea. Had she made an irreparable mistake?
The moment her resolve wavered, Li Chenyuan's hand on her shoulder tightened sharply, the force almost painful, forcing her to turn and meet his bottomless eyes.
"Su Xiaolan," he used her full name, his voice low as iron, yet containing an immovable strength, "See clearly who stands beside you now. You are not that isolated, helpless little girl from seven years ago who could only sign the treaty. This is my sea. And you are under my protection."
His words held no tender rhetoric, only an almost domineering sense of responsibility and acknowledgment, like the sturdiest keel, instantly propping up her crumbling courage.
She sucked in a sharp breath, as if struggling back to the surface from the depths. The hesitation in her eyes was forcibly suppressed, replaced by a desperate, burn-the-boats sharpness.
"Okay," she responded hoarsely, squeezing his hand back firmly, then resolutely turned to face the screen. "Since IT has opened its eyes, I'll make IT see exactly who IT has disturbed."
Her hands landed on the keyboard again, ready to launch a new offensive.
However, at that very moment—
All data streams, logs, and windows on the main screen vanished instantly.
Not a black screen, but replaced by a pure, profound, inky blue.
Then, within that inky blue background, a point of light appeared, lines extended, outlining…
A perfect, clear, massive eye, slowly "opened."
Its structure was terrifyingly precise. The depths of its pupil were no longer a data vortex, but endless, shimmering, star-like pixels, cold, inhuman, yet carrying some kind of incomprehensible "gaze."
All technicians froze in place, faces filled with dread. This was absolutely not any known graphical interface technology!
"It's… it's generating a visual form on its own…?"
The next second, Snap!
All lights in the operations room, and indeed the entire Li Corporation building, went out completely.
Absolute, suffocating darkness swallowed everything.
Only that central giant screen remained lit.
That inky blue, massive "eye," like the pupil of a god or demon suspended in the void, gazed coldly, silently, at the minuscule humans in the darkness.
Beneath it, the blood-red countdown, like a final judgment, flashed mercilessly:
[06:00:00]
Su Xiaolan held her breath; the blood in her veins seemed to freeze solid. In her extreme terror, she heard her own dry voice whisper softly, dissolving into the thick darkness:
"This isn't a protocol…"
"This is Deep Water itself… opening its eye."