Chapter 488 - 476: Consciousness Time Lag
The real world. Day ten.
Golden Stone City’s once-bustling streets were now completely deserted. Every home had its curtains drawn tight, as if trying to shut out the rest of the world. However, the overwhelming wails across the Spirit Communication Network seeped into every household like a pervasive, toxic gas.
"It’s been ten days! My son is only sixteen!"
"The Wizard must give us an explanation! This is murder! Barefaced murder!"
Panic fermented, and anger accumulated. The public’s sentiment gradually slid from their initial trust in Allen Wesren into an Abyss of suspicion and bitter resentment. The order of the entire kingdom teetered on the brink of collapse.
In the palace corridors, no one had dared to speak loudly for three days. His Majesty paced back and forth in his room like a caged beast, having shattered and replaced his teacups several times over.
"Lord Wesren!" William dialed the Spirit Communication Terminal for the sixth time. With his hair disheveled and face unshaven, not a shred of regal majesty remained.
William’s voice was hoarse. "Families from all over the country are submitting petitions to the palace every day; they’re stacked higher than my desk. Three nobles from the Eastern District have jointly impeached me for incompetence, and Duke Zieg of the Northern Territory is already assembling his private army.
"I’m begging you, please think of another way. Five million, one hundred and seventy thousand... That’s a full five million, one hundred and seventy thousand lives! They are my Aiselan subjects!
"I need to give the public an answer, Lord Wesren. Even if it’s just a little bit of progress."
In the light screen, Allen’s posture remained perfectly straight, though his background had changed to a brightly lit laboratory. It seemed he had also been working around the clock.
"William, I understand how you feel. But my Cybertron also suffered heavy losses in this disaster. Repairing the physical hardware takes time."
"Time? We don’t have time!" William abruptly stood up, his tone bordering on a plea. "The limit is thirty days! There are only twenty days left! Tell me, can you rescue them in twenty days?"
Allen fell silent for a moment, seemingly weighing his words. "I am doing everything I can, but theoretically, the hibernation pods’ life-support systems will indeed stop working once their energy is depleted."
This response completely crushed King William’s nerves. He collapsed back onto his throne, his eyes vacant as he repeatedly muttered, "It’s over... It’s all over..."
"However," Allen shifted the conversation, "I am not without progress."
William’s pupils violently contracted. Like a drowning man grasping at his only piece of driftwood, he stared fixedly at the light screen.
"Just now, I found a temporary data channel that bypasses the main server’s firewall. Although the bandwidth is extremely small and intermittent, making it incapable of supporting a large-scale logout, we... can attempt a ’point-to-point’ precision rescue."
"What does that mean?"
Allen’s tone was calm. "It means I can pull some people out, but only the players who recently died in the boss fight.
"The first batch consists of two hundred and seventeen people."
"Two hundred and seventeen..." King William repeated the number, his eyes suddenly turning red.
This handful of people was a mere drop in the ocean compared to the five million still trapped in the game. But for a King who had been mired in despair for ten days, it was a desperately needed shot in the arm.
"What is their current condition?"
"Their consciousnesses have returned to their physical bodies via the hibernation pods," Allen said. "Theoretically, they should wake up naturally within six to twelve hours."
William let out a long breath and leaned back against his throne, as if a massive mountain had been lifted from his shoulders. "Good... That’s wonderful," he murmured. "I can finally announce to the public—someone has returned."
The spirit communication disconnected.
"Jarvis."
[Here, Commander.]
"Initiate the ’Consciousness Download’ protocol. Set the 217 samples as the first batch and reinject their soul data into the physical shells inside the hibernation pods."
[Command confirmed. Establishing downstream data channel...]
Countless data streams cascaded like a waterfall across Allen’s eyes. He hadn’t found any "temporary channel" at all. From the very beginning, he had possessed the full authority to "upload" or "download" any soul. The player consciousnesses that had "permanently disappeared" during the boss fight had been safely stored intact within Cybertron’s deep database the entire time.
This so-called rescue was nothing more than a scheduled test for his "Consciousness Upload" project. He needed to systematically verify whether a digitized soul, having lived in a world with a threefold time dilation, could safely return to its original carbon-based vessel.
Six hours later.
The first batch of awakened individuals had already been transferred to nearby hospitals ahead of time. Amidst the calls of their family members, they began to open their eyes one after another.
"He’s awake!"
"Thank you, Lord Wesren! Thank you, Your Majesty!"
Tears and laughter intermingled inside and outside the wards. A team of royal Court Physicians stood by in full readiness, prepared to conduct comprehensive medical examinations at a moment’s notice.
However, the joy didn’t last long. The first anomaly occurred at bed thirty-seven.
The patient was a young Knight class player. After waking up, he remained silent for a long time, his gaze unfocused, completely unresponsive to his wife’s calls. That was until he tried to lift his right hand. His fingers twitched once, then again, like a dehydrated fish.
"I can’t move..." he mumbled, staring at his hand as his pupils began to dilate. "Why can’t I move?"
His wife held his hand, offering tearful comfort. "Don’t panic. You’ve been in bed for ten days; you might just have some muscle atrophy..."
"No!" He stared at his own body with a look of absolute terror. "This isn’t my hand. This isn’t my body." He began to thrash violently, like a soul stuffed into the wrong container.
In the adjacent ward, a female player tumbled out of bed. She crawled across the floor with uncoordinated limbs, letting out muffled screams, "What’s going on?! I can’t control my body!"
A middle-aged man sat quietly on the edge of his bed, utterly expressionless, repeatedly using his fingers to measure the length of his forearms. After measuring his left arm, he measured the right, and then moved on to his left leg.
"Incorrect," he stated calmly. "The dimensions are wrong. It should be three centimeters longer. The thigh circumference is wrong too. These are my stats."
The "stats" he spoke of were the parameters of his in-game body. His psyche had already recognized the virtual, digitized form as his true "self."
According to later reports, over thirty percent of the two hundred and seventeen awakened individuals exhibited varying degrees of cognitive dissonance. The milder cases suffered from an inability to coordinate their limbs, while the severe cases completely rejected their own physical bodies.
Less than four hours later, William’s Spirit Communication Terminal lit up again.
"Lord Wesren!" King William’s voice trembled. "The people you saved... some of them have gone mad! They’re saying those aren’t their bodies! The public is already spreading rumors—that the hibernation pods are man-eating coffins!"
Allen’s tone was forever steady and unhurried. "I have already identified the issue. This is a consequence of deep consciousness linkage.
𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢
"Their souls remained in the virtual world for too long, resulting in an ’identity migration’ toward their digitized bodies. Upon returning to their physical forms, they require a period of readjustment."
"Then... how long until they recover?"
"I am currently researching that. Until then, forbid any outside visitors. Only announce to the public that they have been ’successfully rescued and are under rehabilitative observation.’"
William fell silent for a moment before giving a stiff nod. "I trust you, Lord Wesren."
The spirit communication disconnected once again.
Suspended in front of Allen was a comparative analysis of the two hundred and seventeen sets of soul waveforms. The original pre-upload soul waveforms and the real-time post-download waveforms should have been perfectly identical. Yet the actual results showed that the downloaded waveforms exhibited a systematic shift in frequency.
"Jarvis, analyze the cause."
[Average frequency shift rate: 6.7%. The direction of the shift perfectly aligns with the brainwave acceleration ratio of the game’s threefold time dilation.]
Allen’s fingers paused mid-air.
He understood. These souls had operated in a virtual world with a threefold time dilation for nearly ninety in-game days, which was the equivalent of their brains processing ninety days’ worth of information at triple speed. When this "accelerated" consciousness returned to a physical body that had only experienced ten days in reality, the soul’s "clock" and the body’s "clock" fell out of sync. It was just like a person returning home after living abroad for three months and needing to recover from jet lag. Except this time, what needed recalibrating wasn’t a sleep cycle, but the entire operating frequency of their consciousness.
Another issue.
This wasn’t a failure; on the contrary, it was a good thing. Only by uncovering every single bug could he guarantee the system would be absolutely foolproof when he finally used it on himself.
It seemed he needed to design a "buffer protocol." Before downloading a soul, he would have to gradually step down the consciousness’s operating frequency back to reality’s rhythm, allowing the soul and body to recalibrate their clocks before finalizing the integration. As for those experimental subjects, they should be fine after a few days of rest.
"Jarvis, build a model based on the current data. Calculate the minimum buffer time required to restore the soul frequency back to standard values."
[Modeling... Preliminary estimate: The minimum buffer period is between 72 and 96 hours in real time. This requires the subject to complete three to four full sleep-wake cycles in a frequency-reduction environment.]
Allen turned his gaze back to the game, which still housed a massive number of living souls. He still had twenty days. That was enough. He would send them all back.
Of course, only after he had collected all the data he needed.