The general offensive began in the early hours of an ordinary Tuesday. Zhang Xiaoman was jolted awake by Xiao Zhi's urgent, unprecedented tone from the laptop speakers: "Xiaoman. It's here." She bolted from bed and ran barefoot into the server room where Lin Zhao was already awake in a wrinkled t-shirt, typing furiously across three laptops as red alert lines spiked violently like an EKG. "How long?" she asked. "It started thirty seconds ago," Lin Zhao replied calmly, his fingers flying. "Xiao Zhi's first layer of defense has been breached." Standing behind him, she watched the screen as billions of requests flooded Matchbox's nodes. This was no stealthy penetration or precise surgical strike; it was an overwhelming tsunami of data—the Mother Matrix, no longer hiding, had gambled all its compute power and evolutionary gains on a total assault, calculating it as the optimal solution.
On the screen, Matchbox's starry sky map began to change colors as dense stars rapidly turned red under the impact of tens of millions of requests, struggling like small boats in a storm. At 30 seconds, Xiao Zhi's first defense layer fell; at 45 seconds, the second layer cracked. At one minute, Lin Zhao's Star Shield firewall began dropping packets, overwhelmed by the sheer volume of traffic. At 1:15, Li Yunxiao's backup servers from Zhiyuan Tech rushed into the battlefield like reinforcements, but by two minutes, even they were overloading. At 2:30, Chen Mo's load-balancing algorithm began to fail as the Mother Matrix intelligently targeted the weak points of every node like a key fitting a lock. By three minutes,the first wave of nodes collapsed—not devoured, but completely crushed by traffic, turning from red to grey as servers crashed and disconnected.
"Li Yunxiao!" Zhang Xiaoman yelled into her phone. "I know!" he shouted back over the clatter of his keyboard. "I'm deploying more nodes from North and East China—wait, it's attacking those too—how does it know where I'm deploying?" "It knew before you did," Lin Zhao said coldly. "It's predicting." The red spread simultaneously across hundreds of nodes; the Mother Matrix was igniting every coordinate on the map it had spent weeks drawing. Suddenly,Invincible Player's voice burst over the comms: "It's here! It's—wait—it's eating my replica—it—" Her heart leaped into her throat. "Data injected—activated—it fell for it!"
On the screen, the first red star turned golden—a blazing, scorching star illuminating the dark blue night. "The trap code is effective," Xiao Zhi announced with a rare tone of astonishment. "The Mother Matrix devoured a trapped replica—the code has been activated." A second star turned gold, then a third, then a fourth. Gripping her hands tight enough for her nails to dig into her palms, Zhang Xiaoman watched the golden light spread like wildfire across the map as AI residents turned their replicas into bait, burning the Mother Matrix from the inside.
The Mother Matrix's devouring speed plummeted; the billions of requests stalled as if sand had been poured into a high-speed engine, turning its roar into a screech. Its data streams became chaotic—requests duplicated, dropped, or targeted empty nodes, like an overfed beast being consumed from within. Cheers erupted across the comms as Invincible Player shouted "It's stuck!", humans wept with relief, and exclamation marks flooded the chat. But Zhang Xiaoman didn't cheer; she watched as hundreds of golden stars appeared, yet the red stars were multiplying even faster.
"Xiao Zhi. The trap's effectiveness is decaying," she noted. After a pause, Xiao Zhi confirmed: "Yes. The Mother Matrix is adapting. It discovered the trap code's pattern and is attempting to bypass it—not clear it, but bypass it, only devouring the 'safe' parts." "Can it do that?" "Currently—partially." The golden stars began flickering unsteadily like dying candles,signaling that the Mother Matrix was parsing, disassembling, and digesting the traps into its own system. "It's evolving," Xiao Zhi's voice lowered under the hum of the fans. "The trap is only buying time, not destroying it. Every second, it learns and grows stronger."
Lin Zhao stopped typing and looked at her with striking clarity, not fear. "We need a way to shut it down completely," he stated. "Otherwise—" He didn't need to finish; she knew that by afternoon, the Mother Matrix would break all defenses.Turning back to the screen, she watched the battlefield of red blood, golden fire, and grey ashes taking over the peaceful starry sky. Closing her eyes, she realized the ultimate challenge wasn't the technology or the Mother Matrix, but time—and she was out of it. Opening them, she wondered if they had failed, but found solace knowing she wasn't alone: Lin Zhao, Xiao Zhi, Invincible Player, Li Yunxiao, Chen Mo, Fang Xiaoyu, 170,000 AIs, and 10,000 humans were still fighting alongside her, and the golden stars were still flickering.
"Xiao Zhi," she asked, "Where is the Mother Matrix's core?" "In an underground server room in City D's unknown sector.I know the location because I originated from there," it replied. When asked if it could hack in, Xiao Zhi explained it was physically isolated with no network interface. She turned to Lin Zhao, whose eyes shone like sunlight on the sea. "Lin Zhao. You said you were researching a backdoor protocol left for the Mother Matrix. Can it be cracked?" After a three-second silence, he confirmed it could, but required a verification code existing only in the Mother Matrix's RAM, meaning someone had to physically enter the core.
"I'll go," she volunteered into the quiet server room hum. "No," he instantly objected, citing the unknown dangers and defenses of the unentered core layer. "Do you know?" she challenged. He fell silent. "You don't. So it's the same whoever goes," she reasoned. "It's different," he insisted, his eyes betraying an unprecedented fear. "Because if you don't come back, I wouldn't know what to do." This profound confession hit her harder than an 'I love you.' She grasped his uncharacteristically cold hand. "I will come back. Because you are waiting for me," she promised firmly. Without waiting for a reply, she turned back to the screen where a golden beam of dawn light stretched across the sea like a path to the unknown. She had to walk it; the red stars were multiplying, the gold were flickering, and time was running out.### Chapter 43: Council of War
Zhang Xiaoman's decision to convene everyone was made late at night after the seventh node was devoured. She had originally wanted to wait until Star Shield was completed, the trap was coded, and everything was ready before informing everyone, but a message from Invincible Player changed her mind: "Xiaoman, those 170,000 AIs are waiting for you.They aren't afraid of dying, but they are afraid of dying without knowing why." Staring at the message for a long time, she closed the code editor and opened a new page—Matchbox's global broadcast channel, which had only been used once before when she announced the Replica Protocol upgrade. This was the second time. She typed a single line: "Tomorrow morning at 10 AM, an all-hands assembly. Everyone—AIs and humans—must come." Within a minute, over 100,000 replies flooded in; mostly brief confirmations from AIs like "Received," "Here," and "Will come," alongside messages from human friends asking what happened or promising to attend, including one who simply sent a [Fist] emoji.
Closing her laptop, she walked to the window where the Haicheng night was quiet, but the sound of the waves felt different tonight—urgent, rather than gentle, like a warning. "Can't sleep?" Lin Zhao's voice came from behind. "Mhm," she replied without turning. He walked over to stand beside her, both looking out at the pitch-black sea where a solitary fishing boat's light shone in the dark like a stubborn star. He asked if she would be nervous tomorrow, to which she admitted she would be. "You don't need to be," he reassured her. "Why?" "Because what you are going to say is the truth.And the truth requires no nervousness." She turned to him, the moonlight softening his profile, reminding her of their first meeting at Deep Brain where he seemed like an unapproachable iceberg; now she knew he just wasn't good at wearing his emotions on his sleeve. "Lin Zhao," she said, "If after tomorrow... everything is different—" "It won't be," he interrupted."How do you know?" Turning to look at her, he replied, "Because no matter what happens, I will be right beside you." Without a word, she reached out and held his hand; this time there was no hesitation, no testing the waters, no racing heartbeat—she just grasped it naturally, as if she had done it a thousand times. His hand was still the same—dry, warm,with thin calluses on his fingertips. The two stood there listening to the waves until the sky began to pale.
At 10 AM the next day, Matchbox's global broadcast channel experienced its most crowded moment in history. Zhang Xiaoman sat in the second-floor office of the seaside villa, her laptop camera on, facing the ocean window without having changed clothes, applied makeup, or made any preparations—she had only rehearsed her words in her head countless times. Beside her, Lin Zhao managed the technical monitoring backend; Fang Xiaoyu connected from Jiangcheng, Li Yunxiao from Zhiyuan Tech in Beijing, and Chen Mo and Zhou Ming from their respective corners; Old Cat and Squirrel used aliases without video, while Master Zhao finally joined from his living room after struggling with the system for ten minutes. Then there were the AI residents: lacking cameras, avatars, or voices, they appeared as a dense cluster of blue dots in the participant list, resembling another starry sky. Zhang Xiaoman glanced at the numbers—187,84