Weird Game: I brought an old version bug

Seven minutes.

Jiang Chen glanced at the line of text on the screen and quickly made a judgment: "Take what you can take, and leave the rest alone."

Shi Yu didn't waste any words.

She pried open the terminal's data interface, pulled out a memory chip the size of a fingernail, and stuffed it into her pocket.

Then she glanced at the empty syringe tube—it was empty. She put the empty tube away, not to keep it for future use, but to avoid leaving a trace.

The two turned and ran towards the exit.

As soon as Jiang Chen ran out of the small room and into the archives, he heard that sound—exactly the same metallic dragging sound he heard when he first entered the energy hub tower, but this time it wasn't coming from a distance, but from the direction of the passage they had come from.

Moreover, there were more than one, at least four or five, whose sounds were repeatedly refracted and amplified in the synthetic stone channels, creating a kind of three-dimensional, surround-sound sense of oppression.

"They've found the entrance," Shi Yu said.

Jiang Chen did not slow down.

As he ran, he opened the system panel and glanced at it—there were no abnormal prompts, and the system had not locked them yet.

However, those patrol units clearly did not appear out of thin air; they must have been dispatched by the system after detecting energy fluctuations at the entrance to the Seventh Administrative District.

The statement left by 07 was not an exaggeration; the system is indeed monitoring this area.

He did not retreat through the passage he had come from—that way was blocked.

He turned to the other side of the wall in the archives, where there was another door he hadn't noticed. It was more hidden than the door 07 had left. There were no markings or verification slots on the door, only a tiny dent, like the slot for some kind of card or key.

Jiang Chen took out the rule fragment—55% energy remaining.

He pressed the fragment against the dent, and just like before at the energy hub tower, a system option popped up the moment the fragment made contact. But this time, there was only one option:

[Unmarked channel detected. Activate using rule fragment energy? Estimated energy consumption: 18%.]

confirm.

The light on the surface of the fragment dimmed slightly, and the door unlocked silently—just like the door to room 07, without any light or sound, as if the key was meant to match the lock.

Behind the door was an even narrower passage, only wide enough for one person to pass sideways.

The walls on both sides are covered with dense patterns, not decorative patterns, but real circuits—exposed wires and metal contacts extend along the walls, and in some places they are broken, revealing the internal structure that glitters faintly.

Jiang Chen squeezed into the passage, with Shi Yu following behind.

After taking a few steps, he took the flare out of his pocket and turned it on, the light illuminating the depths of the passage—a passage that did not lead to the ground but continued downwards, with the slope becoming increasingly steep.

The circuits on the walls became increasingly dense. At a certain point, the circuits were no longer exposed wires, but became extremely fine light paths embedded in transparent material—the same technology he had seen in the energy hub tower and the entrance to the seventh administrative district, but an order of magnitude more sophisticated.

"This is not an escape route."

Jiang Chen said, "This is a connecting passage to another facility."

"What kind of facility is that?"

"I don't know. But to be able to create a connection channel next to the Seventh Administrative District that allows entry and exit without system verification—either the 07 team dug it themselves, or it's an engineering channel left over from the old version that the system forgot to block."

After walking through the passage for about five minutes, a half-open metal door appeared at the end.

The door wasn't locked; it was being held in place by something—a piece of broken synthetic stone was wedged at the bottom of the door, as if someone had forcibly pried the door open and used the stone to prevent it from closing automatically.

That person probably had only one goal: to allow later arrivals to enter without a key.

Jiang Chen pushed the door open forcefully, the metal hinges making a screeching sound. The door opened wide enough for one person to squeeze through sideways. He squeezed in, Shi Yu following closely behind.

The space inside the door is much smaller than the archives, only about twenty or thirty square meters. But the purpose of this space is very clear—it is a laboratory.

In the center of the room was a large metal lab table, covered with various tools and instruments. Some he recognized the purpose of—circuit testers, data reading terminals, small soldering equipment—while others were completely unfamiliar to him, resembling some kind of custom-made hardware specifically designed for processing game data streams.

On the shelf against the wall are dozens of metal boxes, the same kind as those in the archives, but instead of numbers, these boxes are labeled with "Rule Sample-01" to "Rule Sample-47".

Jiang Chen strode to the shelf, picked up "Rule Sample-01" and opened it.

The box contained an irregular fragment the size of a fingernail, made of the same material as the regular fragment he obtained in the Forgotten Mine, but in a different color—his was pale gold, while this one was silver-gray.

He then picked up sample-04—dark red. Sample-07—deep blue. Sample-12—semi-transparent, almost colorless, but slightly warm to the touch.

He opened seven or eight boxes in a row, and each fragment was a different color, as if each color corresponded to a certain rule or attribute.

Forty-seven samples. Forty-seven rule fragments.

He glanced back at Shi Yu: "The number of rule fragments here—"

"That's enough," Shi Yu replied. She was standing on the other side of the lab, looking at a handwritten flowchart on the wall.

The flowchart was drawn directly on the metal wall with a whiteboard marker; the handwriting was much neater than Lao Shen's, more like a technician's. The core logic consists of three steps:

The first step is to obtain rule fragments—extracting them from rule cracks or recycling them from old version data fragments;

The second step is to analyze the fragment attributes—each fragment carries a "rule definition," which must be analyzed to determine its purpose;

The third step is to write the skill information—by writing the rule definition of the fragments into the player's skill data interface, thus enabling custom skill modification.

At the end of the flowchart is a bolded note: "Rule fragments can be stacked. A maximum of three rule definitions can be stacked for the same skill. The stacking order affects the final effect."

Jiang Chen held Sample-01 in his palm and felt the same energy fluctuations as the first fragment, but weaker—perhaps because it had been stored for too long and the energy was naturally decaying.

He checked the fragment's condition: silver-gray, approximately 71% energy remaining, unanalyzed, and unbound.

He didn't use it immediately; now wasn't the time to sit down and slowly analyze the fragments—the sound of metal being dragged on the ground was getting closer, and the system's patrol units had clearly entered the archives and were searching for the route they had taken.

How long that half-open metal door could hold them off depended entirely on whether the patrol units were equipped with thermal imaging or data tracking capabilities.

"Walk."

He put Sample-01 and Sample-04 into his pocket, closed the box and put it back on the shelf. "Take what you can and get out of here first."

Shiyu peeled the flowchart off the wall, folded it, and put it in her pocket. Then she pulled out a canvas bag from under the lab table. Inside the bag were not regular fragments, but several folded maps and a bundle of paper notes tied with rubber bands.

She glanced at the markings on the bag, then slung it over her shoulder.

"What is that?" Jiang Chen asked.

"The mobile files of Team 07".

Shi Yu said, "When I saw this bag just now, the word 'moving file' immediately popped into my head. The notebook left by Lao Shen was the clue catalog, and this bag contains the main text."

Jiang Chen did not ask about the time again.

He put Sample-01 and Sample-04 into his pocket and glanced at the other side of the lab's exit—a small ventilation duct, just large enough for a person to crawl through.

The pipe opening showed signs of having been opened, and the screws on the edge showed signs of being freshly tightened.

Ventilation ducts.

The first fork in Lao Shen's map is marked as "Abandoned ventilation duct - passable".

"Go this way," Jiang Chen said.

He crawled inside first. There was a thin layer of dust inside the pipe, but it didn't hinder his crawling.

As he climbed, he glanced at the system panel—37% of the rule fragment energy remained. Opening the door had consumed 18%, and with the remaining 55%, the amount was now below a danger threshold.

If another emergency arises that requires the use of fragment energy, the remaining 37% may not be enough.

But the samples -01 and -04 in his pocket gave him a sliver of confidence. As long as he could safely leave this place and find the time analysis, he would have new leverage.

The pipe extends forward for about several tens of meters, then slopes upward.

Jiang Chen judged that they were leaving the underground depth where the Seventh Administrative District was located and climbing towards the surface.

The material inside the pipes changed from synthetic stone to ordinary concrete, indicating that they had entered the normal underground pipe network of New Dawn City.

Just then, Shi Yu's voice came from behind him, low but clear: "Jiang Chen, I've remembered more things."

"What is it?"

"The captain of Team 07, codenamed 'The Watchmaker'."

Shiyu's voice sounded strangely clear in the narrow pipe. "I don't know his real name, but everyone calls him the watchmaker—because he always says, 'The system's time is inaccurate, but our time is accurate.'"

Three days before the old version shut down, he said, "If the system wants to erase us, we'll leave this game first."

Jiang Chen paused for a moment.

He had heard this sentence before—in Old Shen's notebook, in the archives of the Seventh Administrative District, and now Shi Yu was repeating it to him personally.

The three clues converge, pointing not to a person or an organization, but to a clear objective:

Get out of this game.

It's not about escaping the dungeon, or returning to the surface; it's about truly and completely leaving the world of this game.

"Is the watchmaker still alive?" he asked.

Shi Yu paused for a few seconds: "I don't know. The last record before the version update shows that he started a program deep within the Seventh Administrative District. No one has seen him since. Some say he was wiped out along with the data, while others say he succeeded."

"Success in what?"

"Get out of this game."

Shi Yu said, "It's not about 'stepping out' like returning to the real world—it's about making the game itself realize that it's a game. The watchmaker's theory is:"

If the Abyss Game is a pre-designed closed system, then the system itself must have a 'boundary of self-awareness'.

Once this boundary is found, a logical conflict can be created in the system—like one mirror reflecting another, producing infinite reflections until the image in the mirror collapses.

Jiang Chen paused in the pipe for a few seconds.

This theory reminded him of a classic vulnerability in game testing: when a game attempts to process data beyond its own definition, the engine enters a "recursive protection" state, either crashing or forcibly restarting. The watchmaker wasn't looking for an exit strategy, but rather for the switch that would cause the system to crash itself.

"The deepest part of the Seventh Administrative District."

Jiang Chen repeated the location, "Is it somewhere that's not marked on Old Shen's map?"

"Yes. The path the watchmaker took was outside of Old Shen's map. Old Shen only drew up to the 2nd floor of the 7th Administrative District—but there's another path below the 2nd floor, but Old Shen didn't draw it because the path changed after the watchmaker left."

Shi Yu said, "If someone goes through this again, they'll have to find the route again."

Jiang Chen remembered those words. The pipe continued to extend upwards, and the light ahead grew brighter and brighter.

The exit is just a short distance away.