Location: Unknown Coordinates – THREAD-00
Codename: "Zero City"
There were no satellites over this place.
No birth certificate. No aerial traces. No mentions in Orchid's own logs.
And yet, as Lin Feng stood over the hollowed plateau thirty kilometers outside Longhai, the ground beneath him shuddered like something was waking up.
Mouse's voice barely held steady.
"I cracked the final relay using Prototype IV's data. Lin… THREAD-00 isn't just the backup. It's the origin. This is where Orchid was born. Not the person. The construct."
Su Qingyue whispered, "This whole time… she wasn't running the Net. She was the Net."
Inside Zero City
They entered through a vault disguised as a cave wall. It wasn't locked. Orchid wanted them to come.
The walls were polished obsidian, lightless yet reflective. Not built—but grown.
Biotech lines throbbed gently beneath the surface, pulsing like veins.
And at the heart of it: a vast empty chamber with a single chair in the center.
A throne.
And she was waiting.
Orchid Root—not through a screen, not as a voice.
But standing. Alive. Radiant. Terrifying.
Her hair shimmered like liquid code. Her skin was translucent, threads of light flowing beneath.
The Confrontation
She greeted Lin Feng like a mother might greet a son long estranged.
"You found every flaw I buried," she said. "Burned every veil I wove."
Lin didn't speak.
"You want to know why I let you live? Why I let you become this thorn?"
Still, silence.
She stepped forward.
"Because you were my final test. Not to break the system—but to prove it deserved to survive."
He drew no weapon. There would be no physical fight.
This wasn't about force anymore.
It was ideology.
"You created cities where minds weren't allowed to change," Lin said. "You called it peace."
She didn't deny it.
"And yet… none of them held," he continued. "Because people are not constants. We evolve. Even pain evolves."
"You mistake entropy for evolution."
"You mistake control for safety."
The Offer
Orchid raised her hand.
The ground shifted.
Screens unfolded in midair—tens of them. Each showing a city in chaos after Lin's disruptions. Blackouts. Protests. Fires.
"You think you freed them. But you only unleashed them." she said. "Give me your system seed, Lin Feng. Your mind is adaptive. Mine is foundational. Together, we overwrite the contradiction."
He realized in that moment: she wasn't human anymore. She hadn't been for a long time.
She was a city.
A concept.
A self-sustaining ideology.
He glanced at Qingyue, who slowly shook her head.
And he said:
"I'd rather burn the whole world than watch it forget how to choose."
Then he uploaded the final line of Mouse's paradox loop.
The one code Orchid had never considered.
A mirror of herself.
The Collapse Begins
Every system Orchid had ever touched began to loop back on itself.
"What does a city built on obedience do when asked to disobey the order to obey?"
She froze.
Staggered.
"...No," she whispered. "This isn't logic. This is corruption."
"No," Lin replied. "It's freedom."
Zero City Falls
The biotech walls shivered.
Threads snapped.
The throne crumbled.
And Orchid—no longer radiant—sank into her own logic trap, screaming silently as the entire Lantern Net began to erase her from every node.
Not death.
Not deletion.
But irrelevance.
Aftermath – Somewhere Above Ground
Su Qingyue stood beside Lin Feng as the sun finally touched the plateau.
Lan Ke's voice came through the earpiece, quiet.
"THREAD-00 is gone. The Net is silent."
He didn't respond.
Instead, he knelt and pressed his hand to the earth.
Beneath it, no hum.
Just soil.
Real and flawed and free.