Forgotten Photo Studio

Chapter 23 Quenching
He neither apologized nor wept.

But this almost numb calm, and that fleeting, almost elusive instability, is more chilling than any confession.

He calmly described his friend's tragedy as a "technical accident".

In the distance, a suspended display screen suddenly lit up. The screen was filled with static and noise that writhed for a few seconds, vaguely forming the outline of a distorted human face, before going out again.

There seemed to be an extremely faint humming sound of electricity coming from all directions in the air, out of tune, yet enough to send chills down one's spine.

Ah Zhe stood at the doorway, his face deathly pale in the green light. He swallowed hard, his voice hoarse:
"He...knows we're here."

The air in the laboratory was as thick as oil-soaked sewage.

The disordered flashing of the indicator lights, like malicious eyes, synchronized with the irregular heartbeats of the three people.

"The core node... must be in the innermost control area."

Ah Zhe's voice came through the encrypted earpiece, carrying static from electrical interference, making it sound distant and unreal.

“But I need you to go to backup power cabinet number three and physically connect to this probe so I can bypass its external defense logic…”

He sent a coordinate point and a complex interface diagram.

Xu Yan and Chen Zhiwei exchanged a glance and carefully moved deeper into the area.

The anti-static floor beneath my feet emitted a hollow echo.

"Gluck... cluck..."

Suddenly, a rapid, almost imperceptible sound of keyboard typing erupted without warning.

The sounds were sharp and dense, filled with a kind of frenzied rhythm.

Chen Zhiwei suddenly stopped. The compass needle spun wildly out of control for a moment, then froze in one direction, only to find an empty wall.

Xu Yan raised his camera, and through the viewfinder, he no longer saw a physical server rack, but countless pale white "data streams" composed of broken code and extreme emotions, which swirled and entangled in the space like vengeful spirits.

They tried to pounce on the camera lens, emitting a silent shriek.

“It’s interference… cognitive interference,” Chen Zhiwei whispered, picking up a calming talisman between his fingertips. With a flash of light, the keyboard sounds suddenly weakened, but did not disappear, as if they had shifted to another channel to continue whispering.

They located power cabinet number three based on the coordinates.

Xu Yangang took out the probe that A Zhe had given him, preparing to connect.

"Sizzle!"

A row of overhead light tubes suddenly exploded!
Glass shards fell like rain.

At the same time, the temperature in the entire area plummeted, and breath turned to frost.

A server fan next to them started roaring wildly, emitting a mournful cry as if it were about to collapse.

"It's stopping us!" A Zhe's voice blared urgently in the headset. "Quick! The third port on the left of the access point!"

Without hesitation, Xu Yan thrust the probe in!

At the very moment of contact—

"what!!!"

A drawn-out, distorted, inhuman scream no longer came through the headphones, but exploded directly from every speaker and every resonant structure in the entire laboratory!

Immediately afterwards, all screens, regardless of size or whether they had been lit before, simultaneously displayed the same image:
A young, fanatical face twisted with extreme fear, his pupils reflecting a cascading waterfall of code, his mouth agape, emitting a silent scream.

Terrifying holographic images flashed and superimposed between the server racks:
A pair of fingers twitching as they typed on the virtual keyboard, their nails cracked and bleeding, staining the transparent keycaps red.
A barrage of crimson ERROR warnings, symbolizing a complete system crash, exploded on the screen, like splattered blood...

This time, it won't be playing on a loop.

The data ghost, composed of pain, suddenly "pounced" out of a display screen, carrying overwhelming resentment and the cold malice of the digital world, heading straight for Xu Yan and the other two.

Xu Yan subconsciously raised the camera and lightly pressed the shutter. A blurry photo slid out of the camera's print slot.

The small boat's figure suddenly became clear for a moment, no longer just a torn afterimage.

Ah Zhe was stunned: "What's going on... the frequency suddenly stabilized?"

Xu Yan didn't look up, but his fingertips pressed firmly on the camera shutter, and he said in a low voice, "It's not that he's stable, but that I'm using the shutter to temporarily anchor his lingering regret in the screen."

It was so large and so fragmented that it blended into the overall environment of the laboratory.

The residual energy slammed into Xu Yan, sending him flying backward and crashing his back against the cold server rack.

The ghost hand brand on his right shoulder instantly erupted with bone-chilling cold and excruciating pain, as if it had been completely enraged by this aura.

"Xu Yan!" Chen Zhiwei exclaimed, shaking the Soul-Suppressing Bell. The clear sound of the bell temporarily repelled the terrifying image that was trying to coalesce again.

"No...it...it's already the environment itself..." Xu Yan gasped, feeling the pain from the digital realm frantically assaulting his consciousness through the connection of the ghost hand.

Countless fragments of broken code and desperate emotions flooded my mind.

Just then, A-Zhe's voice rang out again, carrying the excited tremor unique to a tech fanatic who had discovered new possibilities:
"Dude! That thing on your shoulder... it's resonating! It's absorbing this dissipated data pain! Try it! Don't use the camera to absorb it, guide it! Guide it to impact the mark on your shoulder! Like quenching!"

Xu Yan was taken aback, then realized what A Zhe's crazy plan was.

This is asking him to use himself as a furnace, inviting wolves into the house!

But there was no time to hesitate.

More painful data streams are converging, and the crimson ERRORs on the surrounding screens are almost dripping down.

He gritted his teeth, enduring the chaos in his mind and the coldness in his body, and tried to relax his suppression of the ghost hand. Instead, he used the camera as a guide to carefully direct an overflowing stream of cold, bone-chilling pain data toward his shoulder.

"Ugh!"

It was as if red-hot steel was suddenly plunged into liquid nitrogen.

An extreme chill instantly permeated the entire body.

The whispers of code in my brain turned into a sharp howl.

The ghost hand brand throbbed wildly, greedily devouring the "nourishment" of the same origin, while also being violently fluctuated by the impact of this foreign, chaotic energy.

Xu Yan's palms felt cold.

As the ghostly hand struggled within the stream of light, he clearly felt his heartbeat rhythm being pulled along, as if it were about to be forcibly torn apart.

In an instant, he almost saw his entire arm turn into a gray-white data skeleton, his flesh peeling away, and his consciousness being dragged into that blue ocean.

"What if it really swallows me up too? Will I, like those shadows, be collected into some cold, lifeless fragment?"

A creeping fear made him breathe rapidly.

Unfortunately, there was no one present who could share his burden.

A Zhe's gaze was even fanatical, as if he were not a person, but a "container" in an experiment.

Xu Yan gritted her teeth, suppressing the fear of being almost stripped of her self deep in her heart.

A few seconds later, the impact subsided.

Xu Yan collapsed to the ground, panting heavily, his clothes soaked with cold sweat.

My brain felt like it had been washed with ice water; the icy coolness made it exceptionally clear.

He found that he could "hear" the "sounds" of the entire laboratory more clearly: the wailing melody of the servers, the rhythm of the data flow, and... hidden beneath all the noise, the frequency of a faint but persistent core of pain representing the origin of the "ghost".

(End of this chapter)