"Don't let the machine define my limits?"
Adam's mind raced on the brink of despair, adrenaline coursing madly through his veins.
"Just thrown into this damned place, and I'm about to turn into a monster because of all this sudden chaos?
Mom's surgery money still needs me..."
The instinct to survive overwhelmed everything.
The pale silver mist that had merely pervaded the air seemed suddenly endowed with life.
It began to stir and rotate restlessly, forming invisible vortices around Adam's body.
Within the mist, pinpoints of silver light condensed and precipitated, transforming into suspended, translucent crystalline fragments that exuded a deep yet dangerous aura, yet held an irresistible attraction for him.
His right hand, completely beyond his control, rose, fingers splayed, and violently seized the nearest cluster of mist crystals!
The instant the crystals shattered soundlessly in his palm, Adam's vision abruptly split and overlapped!
He"saw" blurred, fragmented scenes:
The helpless young man clutching the pendant by the hospital bed... The numb agent on a cold metal chair... The indifferent phantom deep within the silver mist...
On his retina, crimson prompt boxes stabbed in like knives:
[Career Anchoring Completion: 37%]
"It works!" Adam's heart jolted; that icy completion percentage became a faint glimmer in the darkness.
He breathed greedily, trying to inhale more particles.
Each heavy breath was accompanied by the tingling and pricking sensation of particles moving beneath his skin.
They instinctively avoided a certain point near the heart region.
He tried to use the badge to guide the raging energy within him. The badge gave a violent shudder, projecting a blinding red light and a sharp warning:
[Closed Loop Structure Detected!]
[Warning: All Entropy Energy Conversion Rate Locked at 100%!]
[Recommend Immediate Termination!]
The subcutaneous chip deep in his wrist bone erupted with a swarm-like, frantic tremor! On his retina, the holographic bar graph representing the energy conversion rate was firmly locked at the 100% mark!
The out-of-control particles instantly turned savage!
Like billions of red-hot steel needles, they rampaged through Adam's blood vessels, bringing a strong metallic, bloody-sweet taste to his throat.
The skin on his right palm turned eerily transparent, oozing a pale red, abnormally clear liquid.
When the first wisp of rogue entropy energy, like a beast breaking free from its cage, pierced the skin of his fingertip,
a strand of silver-blue arc electricity, smelling of scorching, hissed as it pierced his fingertip and shot towards the ceiling!
"Ugh ah------!" The intense pain jerked Adam back to awareness!
"Can't go on like this!" he roared inwardly, fingers digging desperately into the cold, hard metal edge of the badge. He forced himself to pull back from the brink of collapsing nihilism, like a drowning man grasping the last straw.
Consciousness sank to its deepest level.
Deep in his memory, his mother's gentle voice sounded:"Inhale... like morning dew dripping from leaves... one, two, three... Exhale... imagine yourself as a camel in the desert... carrying grains of sand... moving forward slowly..."
That was what his mother used to say to comfort him after nightmares when he was a child.
He closed his eyes, banished all distracting thoughts, and began to imitate that distant, familiar rhythm:
The terrifying energy flow, locked at a 100% conversion rate, formed a high-pressure vortex within his chest cavity!
"Emotion... emotion is the valve!" Adam screamed silently.
He violently tore open the collar of his uniform, revealing energy cracks on the skin below his collarbone that shimmered with a dangerous blue light like broken chains!
At that moment, the red warning box projected by the badge in his hand suddenly warped and collapsed! Replacing it was a suspended, slowly rotating holographic projection of a Klein bottle!
His mother's voice, transcending time and space, clear as a whisper, pierced through the savage data stream:
"Remember, baby, facing out-of-control emotion isn't about fighting it, it's about dancing with it——just like the topology games we played..."
"Topology... Möbius strip?!" It was like a sudden revelation for Adam!
He slammed his burning forehead fiercely against the cold wall, marshaling all his mental strength,
forcing himself to trace the path of a Möbius strip—a one-sided, endless loop—within the raging energy turbulence inside his body!
The light from the badge died completely, turning into a dead grey:
[System Overload]
[Unable to Provide Visual Support]
Adam had completely lost external guidance.
He gritted his teeth, roughly tore open the sleeve on his right arm, directly exposing the feverish skin—watching with his own eyes how those out-of-control particles moved!
Beneath the skin, silver-blue streams of light, like trapped mad dragons,frantically battered against the body's surface constraints.
And at the location of his heart, all the chaotic light streams pointed to a core—a nascent, pure energy construct taking the form of a Klein bottle!
"Klein bottle?!" Adam's pupils constricted sharply."It... how is it... inside my heart?!"
Adam's pupils constricted sharply. Was his mother's cold pendant existing in such a bizarre way?
When his consciousness focused on the energetic Klein bottle projection in his chest, an even more startling discovery shook him to his core: every intense emotional fluctuation, whether fear or anxiety, was like grains of sand dropped into the bottle's mouth, causing the entire structure to tremble slightly and emit energy ripples that only he could"hear," like distant camel bells.
"Sand grains... emotions are sand grains?" A sudden insight struck Adam.
He tried to take the immense, mountain-heavy anxiety about his mother's condition—this heavy as a mountain emotion—and forcefully"injected" it into the Klein bottle projection over his heart!
Like scalding magma flowing into cold glaciers.
That soul-burning sense of anxiety, the moment it fell into the Klein bottle's impossible"mouth," was captured and tamed by a strange force... Finally, under Adam's incredulous gaze, a strand of ice-blue energy crystal, imbued with an absolute sense of order, like condensed ice, slowly"exuded" from it!
However, another anomaly occurred!
The savage silver-blue light beneath his skin, like spiders scenting blood,frantically converged towards the Klein bottle!
Blood vessels swelled and groaned, accompanied by intense, needle-like pain.
Even worse, parts of the bones in his right index and middle fingers began turning transparent and blurry! The ice-blue particles of order seemed to be greedily devouring his flesh and blood!
"Damn it! It's eating me!" Boundless fear instantly seized him!
Adam bit down hard on the tip of his tongue! The intense pain and strong taste of blood acted like a stimulant, jolting his last shred of consciousness.
He threw all his mental strength, as a last desperate gamble, towards the Klein bottle projection over his heart—both his hope and his trap.
A miracle happened.
Those energy flows madly rushing towards his heart, about to tear him apart, suddenly changed direction the moment they contacted the Klein bottle projection!
They no longer inward (struck inward), but instead began to swirl along the bottle's smooth, twisted surface, faster and faster, like billions of sand grains caught in a desert storm!
Within this topological channel without beginning or end, the energy flows were forced to repeatedly double back, cycle, and expend their own savagery!
Adam realized sharply: his own extreme,out-of-control emotions, were being transformed by this paradoxical construct into some kind of cold, pure energy of order!
He cautiously relaxed his mental suppression, adjusting his breathing to mimic the frequency of the silver fluid circulating inside the pendant...
The viscous silver-blue light that was about to tear his skin suddenly became... obedient?
It began to spontaneously flow and swirl along the energy structure of the Klein bottle!
"Crack..."
An extremely faint, crisp sound, like fine porcelain cracking, came from Adam's knuckles.
The tamed silver light suddenly became extremely active, as if gaining new life!
He watched helplessly as the surface of the skin on his arm developed a spiderweb of fine, blue-glowing cracks!
Ice-blue light was seeping out from these cracks strand by strand, no longer savage, but instead carrying a strange sense of order, condensing in the air into sharp, tiny yet stable energy crystal clusters!
This eerie sense of order made Adam feel like he was falling apart.
"Stop! Stop it!" Alarm bells screamed in Adam's mind. The Klein bottle's conversion efficiency was astonishingly high; the output" order energy" was like an icy deluge, rapidly exceeding the load limit of his bodily tissues! He stared futilely at the projection over his heart.
"Click... click..."
The pinky finger on his right hand suddenly began to tremble madly at a bizarre, uncontrolled frequency!
Newly born entropy energy particles, like little silver snakes breaking their final bonds, violently tore through the epidermis on his fingertip, transforming into a thicker, more solid strand of ice-blue arc electricity, hissing as it shot towards the ceiling!
"Damn it! Won't stop!" Adam was both shocked and furious, swinging his fist and smashing it hard against the metal floor beneath him!
This act of venting didn't alleviate the situation but instead accelerated the energy overflow! The ceiling above was scorched with honeycomb-like charred holes by the splashing energy arcs.
The massive recoil sent him staggering into the cold metal wall with a dull thud.
He clearly heard an unnerving, grating sound from within his body, like a desert storm scraping over thousand-year-old dried bones—that was an excess of icy ordered entropy energy, forcibly reshaping his body!
Below his collarbone, the energy-based Klein bottle projection suddenly began to rotate in reverse!
The bottle's surface twisted and tangled, instantly shattering the fragile energy cycle order that had just been established!
At the moment the final surge of out-of-control ice-blue energy particles, like a bursting glacial river, was about to completely consume him——
Adam's consciousness, his concern for his mother, his desire to live, his anger at everything that had happened so suddenly, lit up like a supernova!
He"saw" that all the energy flows, whether savage or icy, regardless of their form, were following a common, profound trajectory—self-topological folding! Moving along the Klein bottle's"impossible" inner and outer surfaces in infinitely complex yet self-consistent squirming !
Words his mother had once said on her sickbed, eyes dazed, as if delirious, pierced through the dust of time and space, ringing out loudly:
"Baby, remember... true circulation... doesn't need an entrance or an exit..."
Hummm——!
Adam's pupils abruptly lost focus, dilated! The phantom image of the Klein bottle pendant his mother had given him, lingering on his retina, perfectly overlapped with the self-consistent topological structure of pure energy forming within his body!
He no longer tried to control, no longer tried to understand, but completely emptied his mind, letting his breath, heartbeat, even the pulse of every cell, imitate the perfect topological motion represented by the pendant's phantom—a rhythm without beginning, without end, only eternal flow and transformation.
The ice-blue light beneath his skin, which had been on the verge of bursting out, suddenly quieted.
It no longer struck out, no longer condensed into clusters, but began to spontaneously, elegantly weave itself.
Like countless silver threads, following the most exquisite topological laws, they re-wove a more stable, more complex energy structure conforming to the paradoxical aesthetics of the Klein bottle within Adam's meridians, blood vessels, and cells!
Chaos was replaced by order; savagery was tamed by circulation.
The completely fried badge vibrated slightly in Adam's palm, as if unwillingly popping up one last, cryptic message:
[Self-Consistent Energy Loop Structure Detected!]
[Warning: Second Law of Thermodynamics Locally Invalidated!]
[Unknown Cultivation Mode Detected]
[Analogous File:AD... Rite... Record]
[Error 404: Memory Not Found]
A cold voice, tinged with a strange sense of release, whispered in a dimension he could not perceive:
"See, this is why I must disappear... You simply... don't need me."
Within the room, the pale silver mist slowly settled, ice-blue energy crystals floating like stardust.
Adam leaned against the cold metal wall, sliding down slowly to sit on the floor.
He opened his slightly trembling palm, which still held the residual heat from the revolver's barrel and the cold, sharp edges of the badge.
Over his heart, a miniature, perfect energy phantom of a Klein bottle slowly rotated, silently inhaling and exhaling silver-blue mist.
The phantom of his mother's pendant and his own existence, in this moment, achieved a kind of transcendent, paradoxical harmony beyond time and space.
"NK-2124-03..."
He silently recited this ID number branded onto his retina, each syllable like an ice shard scraping his throat.
The subcutaneous chip deep in his wrist bone still ached faintly, reminding him of the anchoring storm he had just narrowly survived.
Fatigue engulfed him like a tidal wave, his eyelids too heavy to lift.
He closed his eyes, not to rest, but forced to sink into a deeper, dark vortex filled with the smell of disinfectant and unknown symbols.