Chapter 487 - 475: The Final Experiment

Chapter 487: Chapter 475: The Final Experiment

「One day before the game’s fourth-anniversary celebration.」

[Commander, per the countdown protocol, only five months remain of the five-year deadline set by Lord Augustus Valentine.]

"I know."

Allen’s fingertips drummed a light, rhythmic TAP... TAP... on the arm of his throne, like the second hand of fate ticking by.

By leveraging *Sword Art Online*’s threefold time dilation, he had effectively bought himself nearly thirteen extra years for research and development.

In those thirteen years, he had completed the technological leap for artificial souls from "zero" to "one," accumulating a terrifying amount of sample data in the process.

He had paved the road to the Core Witchcraft of "consciousness uploading," one stone at a time.

From stripping sensory information at the most basic level, to the digital encoding of the shallow consciousness, and finally to the Cybertron main server’s ability to simultaneously host millions of consciousnesses... he had conquered each core challenge one by one.

The millions of game hibernation pods distributed across the country were no longer the simple "amusement devices" they once were, capable only of connecting to a user’s shallow consciousness.

Through dozens of "version updates" and "firmware upgrades" over the past few years, he had, without anyone ever knowing, converted every last one of them into soul extractors capable of pulling a complete soul from its vessel of flesh and blood.

Everything was ready.

All that was missing was the final, most critical piece of the puzzle.

’Can a complete soul, after being fully detached from the physical body, exist independently for an extended period in a world of pure data?’

’And after being ’datafied’ for a prolonged period, can it still be... downloaded back into its original body, completely intact?’

This was the ultimate leap from carbon-based to silicon-based life, a practical experiment that no amount of theoretical deduction could ever replace.

It required a large-scale, long-term, high-intensity experiment on living subjects.

An ultimate stress test on millions of souls.

"Jarvis."

[Present.]

"Finalize the experimental protocol."

"Experimental duration: thirty days in real-world time, corresponding to ninety days in-game. Activation time is set for 8:00 PM sharp tomorrow night, Aiselan Kingdom Standard Time."

[Command confirmed. Tomorrow at 8:00 PM is the *Sword Art Online* fourth-anniversary celebration. The projected peak concurrent player count for the entire server will exceed five million, one hundred thousand, reaching an all-time high.]

"A sample size of that magnitude will be more than sufficient."

Allen nodded slowly.

[The underlying firmware of all hibernation pods was silently replaced six months ago via the ’V4.7 Security Patch.’ Replacement success rate: 100%.]

[At the designated time, we need only sever the external link permissions for the logout channel. The system will then automatically perform a full upload of all connected consciousnesses.]

To put it in the simpler terms of a Wizard, the operation was far more direct.

He was going to take five million, one hundred and seventy thousand living souls and, from their physical bodies, cleanly... extract them.

Just then, Allen’s eyebrow twitched imperceptibly.

A sense of unease, originating from the depths of his soul, slowly washed over the levee of his reason.

It was the [Humanity Operator] faithfully carrying out its duty, simulating the moral pressure a normal human ought to bear when deciding to conduct such an insane experiment on other people.

Feelings of guilt, remorse, anxiety... a host of emotions were precisely quantified and presented to his consciousness.

But he simply "felt" all of it calmly, then precisely suppressed the discomfort to a "tolerable" threshold, not allowing it to interfere with his decision-making in any way.

’This is a continuation of the transaction.’

Allen told himself.

’I grant them a second life, heal their infirmities, and satisfy their desires. In return, they will light the final stretch of my path to the truth.’

’Perfectly fair.’

...

「In-game, Day Three.」

「Aincrad, 91st Floor. Provisional headquarters for the front-line clearing group.」

The atmosphere was as oppressive as a tomb.

Dozens of the game’s top players—the core elites of the two major guilds, the Blood Alliance Knight Order and the Holy Dragon Alliance—were gathered inside the command post.

But right now, not a single one of them spoke.

The hand of Yak, leader of the Blood Alliance Knight Order and the number-one ranked Swordsman on the server, was pressed flat against the strategy map.

"The intel on the 92nd Floor’s boss, the ’Abyssal Worm,’ is clear. Its weaknesses are fire and holy attributes. The estimated success rate for the clear is over eighty percent. I’ve decided we’re organizing the main force for a hard push first thing tomorrow morning."

His voice broke the silence, only to be met with an even heavier one.

Everyone’s head was bowed, their eyes avoiding his. No one dared to meet his gaze.

Because yesterday, a piece of news that made everyone’s blood run cold had already spread throughout the front lines.

Just yesterday, during a probing run on the 92nd floor, an elite squad’s top tank was covering his teammates’ retreat when he was struck by the boss’s tail sweep.

His health bar instantly dropped to zero.

And then... there was nothing.

No flash of white light. No resurrection at the temple in the safe zone.

The player’s ID simply, abruptly, vanished from everyone’s friends lists, from the guild roster, even from the server-wide leaderboards... completely gone.

It was as if he had never existed in this world at all.

The bizarre part was that players could still revive normally if they were killed in PvP or by regular monsters on the floors.

The only exception was the floor boss.

"Why is no one talking!" Yak slammed his fist on the table and roared. "The clock is ticking in the real world! If we don’t push forward, are we just supposed to wait here to die!"

A Mage player finally couldn’t hold back any longer. "Leader... it’s different. Before, if you died, you’d lose a level and some gear, but you could always come back. Now... if a boss kills you, you actually die!"

"Yeah, you disappear for good!"

"Who knows what ’disappearing’ in the game means in the real world? What if it’s brain death?"

Once the panic started, it was impossible to contain.

The forums had already exploded.

Some desperately tried to reassure themselves, saying, "It’s just a scary bug the devs are using to force us to clear the game." Others began hysterically attacking the clearing group, calling them "psychos willing to trade other people’s lives for their own clear rewards."

A boss challenge that they had an eighty-percent chance of winning was forced into indefinite postponement because nearly half of the core raid members refused to participate.

The torch of human civilization, on its path to the 100th floor, had ground to a halt.

...

「7th Floor, Lakeside Safe Zone.」

Inside Cole’s small wooden cabin, the curtains were drawn tight, letting in not even a sliver of light.

"I don’t believe the official announcement."

Cole’s voice was low.

Across from him sat Amy and Zero, side by side. Amy’s face was etched with anxiety.

"Uncle Cole, what... what do you mean?"

Cole’s eyes were sharp. "First, the ’data anomaly’ that occurred four years ago when we fought the 7th Floor boss—the developers still haven’t given a reasonable explanation for it. That was no simple bug."

"Second, and this is the most critical point: Allen Wesren said in the announcement that ’clearing the game is the fastest way to log out.’ Don’t you find that contradictory?"

"If this is truly an ’act of God,’ an accident that even he can’t fix, then why would an internal action like ’clearing the game’ be able to resolve an external ’disaster’?"

Amy was stunned. She had never thought about it from that angle.

Cole’s gaze slowly fell upon Zero, who had been silent the entire time.

"This only means one thing: core control of the system was never lost. Someone... is deliberately keeping us trapped in here."

He stared intently into Zero’s eyes, which were so pure they seemed to hold no impurities, and asked, word by word, the question he had buried in his heart for so long.

"Zero, you tell me."

"What... are you?"

Zero’s body trembled slightly.

Amy immediately pulled Zero behind her, looking at Cole nervously. "Uncle Cole! Don’t scare her! She has amnesia, she doesn’t remember anything!"

Zero was silent for so long that Amy thought she wasn’t going to answer.

Finally, she just shook her head softly.

"I don’t know... I only remember Amy."

Hearing this, Amy’s eyes reddened, and she gripped Zero’s cold hand even tighter.

Cole watched them and let out a heavy sigh, not pressing the matter any further.

He walked out of the cabin alone and stood by the lake. The cold night wind ruffled his graying hair.

After a long moment, as if having made up his mind, he opened his friends list and found an ID he almost never contacted.

The name attached to that ID was a legend in Aincrad.

[Ghost].

Cole took a deep breath and sent a message.

[Ghost, this is Cole. I want to figure out if there’s any way for us to save ourselves. Could you... help me analyze the underlying logic behind the logout function being locked?]

Message sent.

Cole didn’t expect an immediate reply. The fifteen-year-old tech genius was known for being elusive.

And yet, a mere three seconds later.

DING.

A reply popped up.

The message was short.

[I’m looking into it, too. Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.]