Deposed? I couldn't be happier! I wouldn't even be a dog to the crown prince.

On the bustling Zhuque Avenue, the sun shines brightly as people celebrate the Lantern Festival.

Red silk lanterns hung in layers on both sides of the long street.

Tall, colorful pavilions were erected in front of each shop.

Vendors nimbly weaved through the crowds with their wheelbarrows, the sweet aroma of fried dough sticks and sugar paste wafting freely through the streets.

The men from Guanzhong, dressed in brand-new padded jackets, were leading their wives and children toward the troupe of acrobats.

Everywhere was bustling with the vibrant atmosphere of a prosperous era.

"Come and take a look! Newly arrived Suzhou embroidery from Jiangnan!"

In front of a large cloth shop by the roadside, the shopkeeper was fiddling with the abacus beads with a beaming smile.

His small eyes were narrowed to slits as he bowed to the passing pilgrims.

Nobody noticed.

It was located in the middle of the bluestone path, less than five feet away from the cloth shop counter.

A young scholar wearing a faded long gown was strangely rooted to the spot.

The scholar was still clutching a black gourd with a chipped opening tightly in his hand.

His right leg was trembling nervously at a high frequency, and his toe had dug a deep mark in the mud.

In eyes that should have been clear.

At this moment, it was covered with a dense network of scarlet blood vessels, like a spider web.

Because of long-term illegal activities involving the theft of inferior neural network segments in the underground black market.

In a fraction of a second, the core of his visual center was burned black by the reverse-current high-voltage bioelectricity.

"Why is it stuck? Where's my supreme divine weapon? Where are my radiant wings?!"

The scholar suddenly murmured something in a daze, his hands frantically scratching at the air.

His eyes were focused on each millisecond.

It began to exhibit a violent, anti-physical up-and-down tumbling motion.

The surrounding people turned their heads in surprise, but before they could even see his face clearly, the scholar completely lost his final frenzy.

Due to irreversible damage to its brain nerves, it emits a fierce roar at the air.

"roar--!"

A hoarse, beastly roar, completely unlike anything a human could utter, abruptly ripped through the hustle and bustle of Suzaku Street.

The sound was too shrill.

Even on the alloy door panel of the large cloth shop, a faint physical echo reverberated.

The several middle-aged women who were chatting and laughing nearby were so frightened that they trembled all over, and the candied melons they had just bought fell to the ground with a thud.

A close-up of the scholar's grotesque face, with bulging eyes and protruding blood vessels.

The two veins on his forehead swelled up like wriggling green snakes, each as thick as a finger, due to rapid blood flow.

The skin and flesh of his entire face were completely twisted and misaligned.

The corner of his eye was torn open due to the excessive outward protrusion of his eyeball, and two lines of thick, black bloody tears flowed out.

"Wow! An experience monster! A Kraken with its health bar completely red!"

The hallucination turned into reality, and he mistook passersby for demons from a video game, frantically attacking the cloth shop owner.

In the scholar's burned-out retina of code.

The sunlight and lanterns on Suzaku Avenue vanished completely in that microsecond.

Instead, a hell of white bones, flowing with green gibberish, was revealed.

The chubby cloth shop owner in front of me has suddenly transformed into a fully-fledged villainous BOSS with eight tentacles, wielding a festering, bone-sucking monster!

"Slay the demons and monsters! Give me some loot!"

The scholar howled hysterically, his whole body like a mad dog whose ejection switch had been pressed, leaping out into the air with ferocity.

His body left a trail of afterimages in the air, moving at a speed that defied all expectations for a frail scholar.

Before the shopkeeper could even put down his abacus, he was knocked to the ground by a heavy, flying tackle.

The wooden counter collapsed under the heavy physical impact.

The abacus beads scattered all over the floor with a clatter.

"Help! He's gone mad! This scholar has lost his mind!"

The shopkeeper let out a piercing scream as his obese body struggled desperately amidst the splinters of wood.

But the scholar straddled his chest, gripping his shoulders with both hands.

The five fingers were embedded directly into the flesh.

The scholar suddenly lowered his head, opened his mouth, which was covered in white foam, and viciously bit down on the shopkeeper's neck.

"Pfft!"

The sound of sharp teeth tearing flesh was exceptionally clear on the deathly silent street.

Blood splattered everywhere, and the people trampled in terror. The first case of "cyber psychosis" appeared in the Tang Dynasty.

Hot, fresh blood spurted from the corner of the scholar's mouth.

It stained half of his face with a glaring scarlet.

The shopkeeper's screams instantly turned into a leaky bellows as his legs kicked desperately at the ground.

After a brief moment of stunned silence, the onlookers were utterly horrified by the bloody reality.

"Murder! Hysteria is contagious! Run!"

"Don't step on my foot! Good heavens, this scholar is possessed!"

Passersby screamed, "Hysteria is contagious!"

Panic was like an invisible tsunami of emotions, sweeping across the streets within a radius of hundreds of meters in a second.

The peddler, carrying his load on a shoulder pole, abandoned his wheelbarrow and dragged the baby through the mud, tumbling and crawling.

Tragedy erupted across the long street, with countless shoes, socks, and fallen lanterns being trampled into mud in the chaos.

The scholar, his mouth full of bits of flesh, chewed as he stiffly rose from the pool of blood.

His bloodshot eyes were fixed on the fleeing civilians around him.

"It's all weird...it's all dirty code waiting for me to clear it out!"

Li Chengqian! Tonight I'm going to slaughter your entire newbie village!

He roared incoherently, his blood-stained right hand pointing to the sky, his face a mixture of ecstasy and tyranny in a state of madness.

In the very same second, Wu Zetian, who was in the central control room of the Daming Palace, also received the highest-level red alert from the border security gateway.

The main control point on the holographic disk that belongs to Zhuque Avenue.

Strangely, the tranquil azure blue transformed into a blinding, explosive, deathly red in a mere microsecond.

"Sir, the data transmission has failed! The patient's brain-computer interface is sending an overload of junk data back to surrounding base stations!"

The operator's voice was hoarse with extreme shock.

This is a physical rampage triggered by hallucinogenic opium.

This is unprecedented in the history of the Tang Dynasty.

This is a new type of technological disaster that has never been recorded in the annals of the Tian Shu system.

He did not use any of the private soldiers of powerful families.

However, with a piece of dirty code that burned away reason, it turned the most prosperous core area of ​​Chang'an into a bloody slaughterhouse.

"Dragon Rider Security Company 1 & 2! Immediately switch to the Vermilion Bird Gate's physical coordinates!"

Wu Zetian's phoenix eyes flashed with murderous intent, and her cold voice carried a chilling killing intent in the sweltering machine room.

Her beautiful hands gripped the hilt of the particle-bladed short blade.

"This is no ordinary brawl; this is the work of individuals whose minds have been corrupted. The use of Level II physical repression is permitted!"

"Yes! The Great Snow Dragon Rider's duty aircraft has completed kinetic overload and is airdropping!"

On the main control panel, two military mech icons, flashing with pure blue light, moved with an unstoppable steely force in that minute.

From the belly of the air shuttle at an altitude of 1,000 meters.

It crashed down vertically into the center of that blood-red chaos.

The wind and snow on the long street suddenly intensified.

Those civilians who were still frantically trampling and fleeing for their lives heard a sharp, physical sound of something breaking through the air from above.

They all looked up in disbelief, their faces covered in cold sweat.

At this moment, the entire empire's state machinery of violence was finally forced to unleash its bloodiest maintenance measures in this bustling city street.

"Thump—!"

"Thump—!"

Accompanied by heavy mechanical footsteps, two Snow Dragon Rider security mechs arrived, attempting to subdue the madman.