novelraw Chapter 133: Whispers on a Blank Card
Chapter 133: Whispers on a Blank Card
Lin Jie stood before the solitary desk, the surrounding world already fading away.
The sound of rain outside the window, the ticking of the ancient grandfather clock in the hallway, and his own slightly rapid heartbeat were all shut out by his highly concentrated awareness.
His eyes were fixed solely on the white postcard lying quietly on the table, its back printed with a scenic view of Heidelberg Castle.
This was the starting point of all the strangeness, the challenge issued by the Doppelgänger, and also the only clue he could currently grasp leading to the enemy's lair.
He knew full well that his next action was a gamble.
But its risks far exceeded those of touching the Twisted Man's Anchor Point, which served merely as a coordinate.
Last time, he faced a distortion of physical laws;
this time, he would be confronting an information deluge capable of formatting his entire self.
Lin Jie slowly closed his eyes, beginning the final preparations before interpretation.
He did not recall battle scenes of power and victory;
on the contrary, he began replaying in his mind, over and over, the ordinary, mundane daily life unique to the real "Lin Jie" of the 21st century.
He remembered the quiet streets of his hometown on a summer afternoon, filled with the chirping of cicadas, and the nagging, reluctant farewells from his parents before he left.These memories held no legendary colors or heroic halos;
they were trivial, boring, and tinged with the smoke and fire of everyday life, yet they were the most real.
They were the most solid foundation constructing the personality of "Lin Jie," emotional imprints that falsehoods and forgeries could never mimic or replicate.
Only after using these real daily memories to build his mental world into a sturdy fortress of thought did Lin Jie open his eyes.
The last trace of hesitation and fear had faded from his black pupils, leaving only cold focus.
He extended his right hand, simultaneously concentrating his mental energy at his waist to activate the mental protection of [Serene Heart].
A gentle, moonlit halo emanated from within him, forming a barrier against mental pollution.
Then, resolutely and decisively, he picked up that white postcard.
[Reverberation Touch]!
"BOOM————!"
In that instant, Lin Jie felt as if his entire soul had been run over head-on by ten thousand steam locomotives starting simultaneously, in the most brutal and savage manner.
No images, no sounds, no memories.
Only a boundless, pure white that consumed all color and form.
A pure philosophical white noise, constructed from hundreds of millions of contradictory, negating, attacking philosophical concepts and logical paradoxes, surged wildly into his mind through the hand in contact with the card, attempting to wash away and drown the fortress of thought he had just built from real memories, right from the informational foundation.
"To be is to be perceived, but what if the perceiver itself is an illusion that can be set?"
"Time is the measure of change, but what if both past and future can be arbitrarily written and altered by this present moment?"
"Ego, id, superego, real, false, meaning, nothingness..."
Countless ultimate concepts that had driven history's greatest philosophers to spend their entire lives in pursuit had, in this scene, transformed into vicious, lethal informational weapons.
They no longer aimed to enlighten wisdom, but to destroy it, to negate everything, to deconstruct everything, to reduce all thought edifices built upon order and logic back to their most primitive chaos.
Lin Jie's brain felt as if it had been thrown into a high-speed blender whose blades were forged from paradoxes.
His self-awareness as a time traveler, imprinted with the 21st century, grew blurry and thin under this informational assault originating from absolute nothingness.
For a moment, an absurd and terrifying thought arose: perhaps that Lin von Stein, who sought to replace him, was the real one, while he, this Lin Jie carrying all sorts of unreasonable memories, was an error that should not exist.
The protective white light of [Serene Heart] flickered uncertainly under this attack that could be called a conceptual weapon.
Just before Lin Jie's last line of mental defense was about to be swallowed and assimilated by this white ocean.
A logical loophole he had captured in the previous round of the memory war, like a faint miner's lamp suddenly igniting in a bottomless abyss, boldly pierced through this void of pure white.
Emotion!
Within this ocean constructed from reason and logical paradoxes, only the irrational element of emotion was missing.
Lin Jie seized this lifeline, abandoning the futile resistance of using his own equally rational mind.
He went the opposite way.
He transformed his last flickering consciousness entirely into illogical emotional resonance.
He turned his consciousness into a sensitive scalpel, then used this scalpel not to oppose but to feel, to listen for any possible emotional static that might exist within this seemingly uniform white ocean.
Then, he finally "heard" it.
Deep within that noisy, cold ocean of white noise, at its core where even light could not reach.
A faint whisper, not belonging to philosophy, logic, or reason, carrying the most subjective emotion, arose.
It was a young, hoarse German voice, filled with immense despair and resentment, repeatedly murmuring its curse-like incantation to the entire universe.
"Why..."
"How come... how come you can so easily possess the 'reality' I exhausted my entire life pursuing yet could never obtain?"
The moment Lin Jie's soul "heard" these words carrying "human" emotion, he immediately understood.
This was the first victim, that pitiful philosophy student Schultz, who lost himself in Kant's philosophical maze and committed suicide, the lingering obsession reverberation left behind after his soul was consumed by the UMA.
The essence of this UMA was indeed not mere erasure.
But a more greedy theft and occupation.
After devouring a person's soul and identity, it would also steal for itself the obsession that persisted until death within that soul.
A tragic, fateful cycle of killing patterns was constructed within Lin Jie's mind.
Philosophy student Schultz, unable to find the ultimate answer proving his own real existence within abstract philosophical speculation, fell into an existential crisis and thus became the UMA's first prey.
After consuming him, the UMA also stole his pathological longing for absolute reality.
This longing drove it to find Lin Jie in this city.
So then, what exactly was its weakness?
After seizing this opportunity, Lin Jie's consciousness attempted to delve deeper into that dark core of the emotional whisper;
he wanted to know where the most fundamental flaw in this program driven by obsession lay.
But at this moment, the Doppelgänger UMA clearly also detected his audacious reverse invasion.
The white noise immediately intensified more than tenfold, becoming a singularity.
Lin Jie's consciousness was violently thrown back like fragile glass before this world-destroying information storm.
"Pfft—"
In the real world, Lin Jie's body suddenly jerked backward, and a mouthful of blood sprayed from his lips, splattering onto the manuscript paper covered with his handwriting before him.
And in the very last second before his consciousness was expelled from that void.
He saw it.
He saw his own black diary, lying flat on the desk as proof of his existence.
Without any external force, it flipped open to a brand new page with a "rustling" sound, as if moved by an unfelt wind.
On the pristine, blank manuscript paper.
Lines of the familiar, elegant handwriting he knew.
Were being rapidly written by a pen controlled by an invisible hand.