Lujiazui, Quantum Collider Base, Hai hour.
A blood-red moon hung high in the sky. The collider's beam of light slashed through the night, tearing a quantum rift across the clouds. Chen Mo stood at the edge of the rooftop. Below him, bustling "spirit net" users—the chips implanted in the backs of their necks steadily feeding qubits into the collider—remained utterly oblivious that they were about to become fuel for a spacetime experiment.
"Young Master!" Chuntao's spirit talisman buzzed. "The Eldest Miss has pinned down the Tianyan Mecha Squad at the West Gate, but their 'Data Tanks' are about to break through our defense line..."
"Hold them for ten more minutes." Chen Mo gripped his mother's consciousness crystal tightly. The collider's countdown displayed: 00:10:00. He looked up at the spirit cocoon at the peak of the beam of light, where a blue speck of light was flickering—Lin Xiaoman's spirit talisman frequency.
A warning popped up on his retinal interface from Su Qing: "Uploading consciousness will cause your physical body to lose the protection of your spiritual root. The host may become a vegetative state. Proceed?"
Chen Mo chuckled, pressing his fingertip to the center of his brow: "Remember the very first program I taught you?"
"Hello, World." Su Qing's virtual projection smiled. "Good luck, programmer."
Golden code coiled around Chen Mo's body like chains. He felt his spiritual root transforming into a data stream, growing transparent from the soles of his feet upward. As the code spread to his chest, he heard Chuntao's scream, saw Chen Qingyue driving her flying boat and crashing through the wall of fire, and spotted Su Mubai's figure appearing atop the collider, holding Lin Xiaoman's light cocoon in his hands.
"Chen Mo, do you really think you can stop the Heavenly Dao?" Su Mubai's voice carried a mechanical distortion. Inside the light cocoon, Lin Xiaoman curled up in agony. "Look at your mother's consciousness backup. She knew all along that everything was in vain."
The crystal grew scalding hot in Chen Mo's hand, and his mother's spirit talisman automatically began to play: "A'Mo, if you are seeing this recording, it means Mom has failed. Su Mubai tampered with the Great Void Heaven-Deriving Formula. The real glitch isn't the time loop, it's..." The image suddenly dissolved into static, finally freezing on Su Wan'er's terrified face.
Code upload progress: 99%. Chen Mo felt his consciousness traversing countless data streams, catching glimpses of endless parallel universes: in one world, he was the CEO of Tianyan Group; in another, Lin Xiaoman was smiling at him while holding a spirit butterfly. The moment the progress bar hit full, he plunged into a space of pure white, seeing a familiar figure waiting ahead.
"Welcome to Quantum Space, programmer." Lin Xiaoman turned around. Her body was composed of spiritual qi code, with a pair of data-stream butterfly wings on her back, every single "scale" formed from a line of golden Python code.
Lin Xiaoman's wings fluttered gently, and the falling "code scales" assembled into miniature spirit butterflies in mid-air. The antennae of every spirit butterfly were intertwined with code snippets familiar to Chen Mo: the very first program he wrote in his past life, the experimental logs of them cultivating the Twin Butterflies together, and even pages torn from the "Chaos Code Scripture" in his mother's notes.
"Xiaoman..." Chen Mo reached out to touch her, only to see that his own hands were also made of code. When their fingertips brushed, the surrounding pure white space suddenly bloomed with patterns of quantum entanglement, just like the Twin Butterflies they had raised in their past life finally meeting.
Su Mubai's virtual projection materialized in the distance. This time, he was no longer the suited CEO, but instead wore the Taoist robes of an ancient cultivator, holding the Haotian Mirror crafted from data streams: "Did you two really think modifying some code could reverse spacetime? How naive! The true power of the Great Void Heaven-Deriving Formula is turning all dissenters into bugs within the code!"
A beam of black light shot from the mirror's surface, and Chen Mo felt his code-constructed body beginning to collapse. Lin Xiaoman suddenly spread her wings, using her own body to block the attack as code scales shed like falling rain: "Use a recursive algorithm to reorganize! Hurry! I remember you saying every bug has a corresponding patch..."
Dawning realization struck Chen Mo, and his hands wove matrices in the air: "Recursive call on the quantum states of the Twin Butterflies! Xiaoman, our spiritual roots are the best firewall!"
As their spiritual qi merged within the Quantum Space, Chen Mo's physical body down on the ground suddenly opened its eyes—his pupils had turned into whirlpools of binary code. Chuntao watched as he raised his hand and waved it, sending countless spirit butterflies tumbling from the sky, the code on their wings forming a massive "patch program" that blanketed the collider's defensive shield.
"Now, let's run this corrective code." Chen Mo's voice echoed simultaneously from reality and the virtual space. Lin Xiaoman smiled in the Quantum Space, and together, they pressed the virtual Enter key.
Within the virtual space, a massive Enter key condensed from spiritual qi materialized, and Chen Mo and Lin Xiaoman pressed their hands down upon it side by side. In the real world, a golden Enter key icon slowly lit up on the collider's control screen, surrounded by the shimmering light of the Twin Butterflies.
As the Enter key was pressed, cracks spiderwebbed across Su Mubai's Haotian Mirror, and the collider's beam of light began to spin in reverse. Chen Mo saw fragments of Su Wan'er's consciousness fly out from the crystal, merging into his and Lin Xiaoman's code bodies, while his mother's voice resounded in his sea of consciousness: "The real glitch is the past Su Mubai never dared to face..."
In the Quantum Space, time began to flow backward. Chen Mo watched a young Su Mubai weeping in the laboratory, standing before the lifeless body of Su Wan'er—realizing that the "accident" back then had been caused by Su Mubai accidentally triggering the experimental equipment. Guilt and terror had driven him astray, compelling him to use spacetime regression to make amends for his mistake.
"Enough!" Su Mubai's virtual projection collapsed in on itself. "Even if you can modify the code, you cannot change the Heavenly Dao!"
"No, the Heavenly Dao is just a program that needs optimization." Chen Mo took Lin Xiaoman's hand and walked toward the pillar of light. "And we are programmers who will never give up debugging."