Beneath the deep well lay the dregs of another world.
Ke crouched in the massive shadow of a sewage pipe's axle. The viscous black sludge rose past his ankles, reeking of a pungent, synthetic fragrance. In the Upper City, this scent was marketed as "Côte d'Azur," but here at the outfall, mixed with sulfur and the stench of rotting data cables, it was nauseating.
Above him, the heavy alloy manhole cover vibrated. Through every narrow crack bled a light that was almost holy—a high-saturation purple.
This was Premium Vision.
For Ke, such light was lethal. Within the primitive algorithms of his low-end optic nerve, processing high-frequency signals like these demanded massive computational power. His left field of vision began to judder violently; the image looked like a shredded oil painting, and red digits flickered like a broken timer: 00:00:09.42... 00:00:08.15...
He had to hold his breath, forcibly cutting off all non-essential rendering. He even deactivated his pain filters, letting the sting of the acidic sludge corroding his ankles sear directly into his brain.
Then, the cover slid open.
In that instant, Ke felt as though he had heard the clamor of heaven. Accompanied by a chime so crisp it could only be perceived through a Full-Spectrum True-Color lens, a young man leaped down with effortless grace.
He wore a silver trench coat woven from optical fibers, its surface shimmering with complex fractal patterns—the "Living Fashion" currently trending in the Upper City. When he landed, he didn't even splash the mud. The gravity beneath his feet seemed to have been altered by a localized compensator.
The youth didn't notice Ke in the shadows. He swayed slightly, flicking a solid gold lighter. As the flame danced, it traced the outline of a miniature, pirouetting fire sprite in the air.
"Dammit," the youth sneered, "even the dust in this landfill smells of poverty."
He laughed with disdain and ignited a "Visual Firework." It wasn't a physical explosion, but a burst of high-intensity, aggressive rendering code.
BOOM.
In Ke's vision, the black-and-white wasteland was instantly overwhelmed by an explosion of kaleidoscopic brilliance. The light was too fierce, too saturated; it burned straight through his GPU.
[FATAL WARNING: ILLEGAL HIGH-ENERGY LIGHT SOURCE ATTACK DETECTED!]
[GRAPHIC INTERFACE MELTED. FORCING SYSTEM SHUTDOWN...]
[REMAINING BALANCE: 00:00:03.00]
A line of scalding, rust-flavored liquid metal leaked from Ke's left eye—coolant seepage from the hardware overload. Three seconds left. In three seconds, he would be nothing more than a blind hunk of meat in the dark.
Fear sublimated into pure killing intent.
He no longer relied on the failing system. Guided by ten years of muscle memory forged in the "Appendix" alleyways, he launched himself from the shadows like a coiled spring.
"Who?!" the youth cried out. In his True-Color vision, Ke was nothing but a low-resolution blur, a foul-smelling heap of pixels.
Ke said nothing; he couldn't. His entire consciousness was locked onto the slight protrusion at the back of the youth's neck—an interface glowing with a faint, violet light.
The interface spike carved a grim arc through the air.
It was a collision of metal and logic. The spike drove home with a stomach-turning clack. It wasn't the sound of piercing flesh, but the sound of forcibly severing a connection to the Central Server.
The youth's scream was cut short. His visual system collapsed instantly, the violet light in his eyes snuffed out. To someone accustomed to an infinite quota, sudden, absolute darkness was like being buried alive.
"Give it back..." Ke's voice sounded like scrap metal dragged over sandpaper. "Everything you owe us... give it back!"
He pinned the youth's spine with his knee, his fingers working like a master butcher's at the edge of the eye socket. A brutal, practiced gouge.
There was no spray of blood—only a cold, electromagnetic hum that shivered up Ke's fingers and struck his heart.
Ke slumped in the black sludge, clutching the newly stripped hardware.
He had expected a bloodshot human eye or a silicon sensor bristling with wires. But in the faint, flickering mosaic-light of the malfunctioning alleyway, he saw what he held.
It was a pure white sphere, as smooth and perfect as a deep-sea pearl. No iris, no pupil, no veins. Its shell possessed a cold, matte finish that felt otherworldly.
At the very center of the sphere, a tiny white ring rotated slowly.
[UNKNOWN EXTERNAL HARDWARE DETECTED. REQUESTING INTERFACE...]
[BALANCE: 00:00:00.01]
[SYSTEM... VISUAL SILENCE.]
The last smear of grey light died in Ke's vision.
The world vanished. The sound of wind, rain, and the youth's whimpering drifted away. He fell into an absolute, nihilistic void. He could feel his old eyeball carbonizing in the socket, the physical scorch of total energy depletion threatening to make him lose consciousness.
"To hell with you... Demiurge."
Ke let out a low, animalistic growl. With trembling hands, he ripped out his charred, smoking left eye. Amidst the agonizing spray of blood, he jammed the pure white sphere into his empty socket.
The moment the interface needles pierced his optic nerve, Ke thought he had died.
It wasn't pain; it was erasure. His consciousness felt like a hard drive being forcibly formatted. Every memory—Su's smile, Xiao Ying's tears, Granny Lin's whispers—was washed away by a violent, tidal wave of golden information.
Time stopped.
When Ke "saw" the world again, he screamed.
It was no longer Lead City.
The cold, moldy sewers had vanished. Under the gaze of his new eye, the entire world had transformed into a transparent wireframe. Every falling raindrop was parsed into a line of flickering blue instructions. The black sludge beneath his feet was a roiling mass of error codes.
He looked up at the structures called "buildings."
The grand towers and the wretched hovels now revealed their identical essence: they were geometric constructs built from millions of shimmering, dense hexadecimal characters.
And above the firmament, the grey clouds were gone.
Ke saw waterfalls of code cascading from the heavens, radiating a divine, golden light. Every line of code represented a person's fate, the life or death of a district, the trajectory of a single grain of dust.
He looked down at his own hands.
The rough, calloused skin was now rendered with terrifying clarity. He could see the underlying logic of every cell, the frequency of the blood pumping through his veins.
In the center of his vision, a dialogue box floated in the void. The script was not the common tongue of Lead City, but an ancient, cold, and authoritative cipher:
[UNAUTHORIZED ADMINISTRATIVE ACCESS DETECTED.]
[UNDERLYING LOGIC: RESET.]
[CURRENT QUOTA: $\infty$]
Ke knelt in the muck, shaking uncontrollably.
He looked at the youth twitching on the ground, missing an eye. In this new vision, a grey progress bar hovered over the boy's head: [DAMAGED FILE: CITIZEN #LX-9921. STATUS: LOGIC COLLAPSE. EXPECTED LIFESPAN: 14:22.]
Ke reached out and gently flicked the translucent bar.
A miracle occurred.
The youth's agonized wailing stopped. His severed blood vessels began to twist and reconnect like a film playing in reverse. Even the splashed blood turned into points of red light and flowed back into his body.
Ke was stunned.
He was no longer a Hunter of Eyes. Under the gaze of this eye, he had become a "hotfix" for the world itself.
But before he could savor the god-like ecstasy of controlling life and death, the vibration frequency of the alleyway shifted. The sound of rain vanished, replaced by an ear-piercing electronic hum.
The white ring in Ke's left eye spun frantically, turning a searing orange.
[WARNING: ILLEGAL DATA MANIPULATION DETECTED.]
[EXECUTING: BAD SECTOR REPAIR PROTOCOL.]
[AUTHORIZED ENFORCEMENT UNIT: AUDITOR DEPLOYED.]
[SOURCE: AUTOMATIC ISSUANCE—ETHICS COURT.]
Space at the end of the alley began to warp like plastic under high heat. Three towering figures stepped out of the nothingness.
They had no faces.
Ke knew that the true nightmare had only just begun.