A bizarre and terrifying experience; I messed up the dungeon world.

A black, old-fashioned Santana was parked in front of the repair shop. The car was covered with a thick layer of yellow mud, the right-side rearview mirror was wrapped with seven or eight turns of yellow electrical tape, and the exhaust pipe sputtered loudly, emitting a strong smell of unburned diesel fuel.

The car door opened, and Zhang Kuang tumbled out of the driver's seat.

Three months had passed, and Zhang Kuang had lost a significant amount of weight. His custom-made suit had been replaced by dusty work clothes, the trousers rolled up to his calves, revealing a pair of canvas shoes covered in red mud. He was carrying a green tin ammunition box tied with hemp rope.

Zhang's mind raced. Objective: Deliver the box to Lu Chen. Current situation: Two hours ago, a geological exploration well thirty meters underground in Jiangcheng unearthed something it shouldn't have been there, causing an entire construction team's machinery to malfunction and self-destruct. His own car radio had started broadcasting a list of dead people from ten thousand years ago ten minutes ago. Conclusion: Aside from this man in the tattered vest repairing a radio, no one in the entire province could handle this box.

"Mr. Lu, Ms. Lin." Zhang Kuang walked up the steps and placed the ammunition box on the small stool.

The stool creaked in protest.

"A deposit is required before repairs." Lu Chen leaned back in his rattan chair, resting his hands on his stomach. "No rush jobs, no invoices, and replacement parts are extra."

Zhang Kuang wiped the mud and sweat from his forehead: "Mr. Lu, this isn't about replacing parts. The provincial geological team was drilling a deep hole in Hongshiliang, south of the city, and the drill bit got stuck at a depth of 700 meters. After pulling up the drill, this piece of stuff came up with the drill rod. The chief engineer in charge of the team took one look, and his eyes instantly melted into two lumps of plastic. He's still in the intensive care unit of the Second Hospital with a tube in his body."

Lu Chen opened his eyes and glanced at the seal of the ammunition box.

The box was secured with No. 8 lead wire, but at the knots, a layer of white crystals had formed. It wasn't salt, nor frost, but solidified radio wave. This frequency doesn't exist in classical electromagnetism; its wavelength is less than three times the Planck length.

"Did you bring Old Liu's bone-setting plaster?" Lu Chen asked.

Zhang Kuang was taken aback: "Huh?"

"If you didn't bring any, go buy some," Lu Chen said. "Opening the box takes a lot of effort; I just had my cast removed from my arm last month."

Without saying a word, Zhang Kuang turned around and ran towards the bone-setting clinic across the street, his canvas shoes making a rapid pattering sound on the asphalt road.

Lin Qi walked to the ammunition box. Instead of touching the metal with her hands, she took a pair of needle-nose pliers from the workbench and precisely clamped the knot in the lead wire.

"Don't cut it," Lu Chen said.

Lin Qi stopped moving.

"It's not a high-dimensional virus inside." Lu Chen stared at the green metal box, his gaze lingering on the factory stamp on the corner for two seconds. "That's a spare motherboard I buried thirty years ago."

Lin Qi's knuckles, which were gripping the pliers, froze in mid-air.

Lin Qi's mental processes were in motion. Objective: Verify the underlying data. Current situation: The third partition inside the central processing unit, which was locked, suddenly generated a series of microsecond-level interrupt requests. An unrecognized high-level privilege signature resonated with the metal box in front of him. His own authentication serial number jumped from "Home-type Heavy-duty Combat Puppet" to "First Security Protocol Custodian." Conclusion: Lu Chen was not only a technician who had regressed to a lower dimension. Lu Chen's biometrics perfectly matched the administrator privileges of the underlying root server.

"You buried it?" Lin Qi's voice was flat, but the tip of the pliers pressed down half a millimeter.

"Back then, there was no ring road here; it was just a reed marsh." Lu Chen scratched the stubble on his chin, his fingernails scraping against the hard stubble, making a rustling sound. "The divine body was too heavy. Just maintaining the mass of that shell consumed the fusion energy of three medium-sized star systems every day. The world didn't need such a huge energy consumer, so I dismantled the core unit, cut it into six pieces, and buried them at various stress points in the Earth's core. I left this physical body to live on."

Lin Qi put down the pliers: "So, you're not a mortal who has degenerated."

"I voluntarily downclocked," Lu Chen corrected her. "Overclocking for too long will cause the chip to shrink. Look at those so-called Old Gods in the universe, which one of them survived more than ten cosmic eras? They all burned themselves into idiots at the end of the Third Era due to computing power overload."

Zhang Kuang, who was across the street, came running back breathlessly, clutching two boxes of Black Tiger Balm in his hands.

"I...I bought it!" Zhang Kuang handed over the ointment.

Lu Chen didn't answer.

The lead wire on the tin box snapped on its own with a snap without any external force.

The lid of the box slowly opened outwards.

There was no golden light inside, nor any corrosive black blood. At the bottom of the box was a layer of yellowed moisture-proof kraft paper, on which sat a palm-sized black cuboid.

It was a highly integrated silicon wafer, but its surface had no pins, only densely packed, almost invisible ultra-micro etched lines. Between the grooves of the lines flowed a graviton liquid invisible to the naked eye.

The moment this silicon wafer came into contact with room temperature air, the gravitational field of the entire Jiangcheng area shifted by 0.1 seconds.

Instead of falling downwards, the dust from the roof slid sideways and crashed into the brick wall on the west side.

Lin Qi took half a step back.

Beneath the skin of her nape, the dormant biochip began to radiate intense heat. The erased memory chains surged through the neural network like a burst dam.

The flames of war at the end of the Eighth Age.

The galactic arms collapsed into dust under the bombardment of antimatter.

A colossal being, its entire body covered in heavy elemental armor, crushed the crystal core of the Third Logic Brain with a single hand, then turned around and gave its final command to the kneeling combat puppet.

"Retire, Lin Qi. Go rent a shop on the street and learn how to replace a motherboard."

Lin Qi raised his hand and touched the back of his neck.

The anti-static patch fell off, revealing a row of tiny hexagonal metal connectors.

"I remember now." Lin Qi looked at Lu Chen.

Lu Chen stood up from his chair, picked up his slippers from the floor, and put them on. "If you remember, just remember. What's the big deal? The rice cooker parts are still on the table. Aunt Wang will come to pick them up tomorrow. If you can't deliver, your wages will be docked."

"Protocol Zero has awakened." Lin Qi stood still, his voice eerily calm. "It found the redundant vulnerability you left behind when you dismantled the divine body. It has drilled into the mantle along the main cable of the geothermal power plant and is devouring the fourth logic unit you left in the Earth's core. If it gets that unit, the weak interaction constant of the entire planet will be rewritten to zero."

Zhang Kuang stood to the side, listening with wide eyes.

Zhang Kuang's mind races. Goal: Understand the conversation. Current situation: The two are discussing whether to dismantle the Earth's core or fix the rice cooker. Zhang Kuang doesn't understand what the weak interaction force is, but he knows that if it were reduced to zero, all atomic nuclei would fall apart, and he would become a pile of pure, scattered neutrons. Conclusion: Mr. Lu isn't fixing a computer; Mr. Lu is controlling the power switch for the entire universe.