Chapter 15: Twin Blades United: The Genesis of the Binary Sword Formation

Shen Yan’s fingertips were still tingling, his pant leg stuck to the bloodstains on the stone steps, yet Ye Zhao’s grip hadn’t loosened. He looked down at his hand, smeared with shattered screen fragments—the phone lay in his palm, cracked like a spiderweb, resembling a circuit board struck by lightning.

“Can you still move?” Her voice was hoarse, but her grip remained firm.

“I can move, but I can’t access the system.” He coughed, a metallic taste rising in his throat. “That Blood Soul Program earlier was too wild. Heavenly Dao.exe directly blue-screened and restarted. Now I can’t even get into safe mode.”

Ye Zhao didn’t respond, only pushed a surge of Sword Qi through his meridians. That cool, refreshing energy seeped in, like a gust from an air conditioner’s outdoor unit, carving a sliver of clarity through the chaos in his mind.

Seizing this opening, he dipped his finger into the residual blood on the ground and began scribbling on the stone steps. A line of crooked characters appeared, as if someone were writing code on concrete.

“Spiritual Energy Spectrum Analysis… let’s try running the simplest version.”

As the program loaded halfway, the Frost Soul Sword suddenly hummed. The blade trembled lightly, and a wisp of Sword Qi spontaneously overflowed, condensing into a glowing circle in the air—like a capital zero.

At the same time, a bright red “one” popped out from the code he had drawn.

“Huh?” Shen Yan froze. “Your sword… can answer questions ahead of time?”

Ye Zhao frowned. “It moved on its own.”

The two exchanged a glance. The zero and one hung in mid-air, three feet apart, and began to sway slightly, as if greeting each other across a street.

“Wait.” Shen Yan suddenly laughed. “I get it. Your Sword Qi is of the yin attribute, following a path of restraint, naturally carrying a ‘closed’ state. My code is yang, always in an ‘open’ state. Put us together, and isn’t that a basic logic gate?”

“What gate?”

“NAND gate! NOR gate! Anyway, we can build a circuit!” He spoke faster and faster. “How about we try dual-line parallel processing? You output zero, I output one, switching back and forth, creating a binary loop?”

Ye Zhao stared at the two glowing symbols, hesitating for a moment. “I can control the speed, but your Mental Power was just depleted. Can you handle it?”

“I won’t die.” He grinned, blood still clinging to the corner of his eye. “At worst, the system explodes again, and my brain just gets reset to factory settings.”

She didn’t respond to that, only laid the sword across her knees, closed her eyes, and regulated her breathing. The next moment, the Frost Soul Sword hummed again, the “zero” slowly rotating, its rhythm becoming steady.

Shen Yan took a deep breath, his fingers tapping on the stone steps again as he muttered, “Main control core initiating… binding external input device… synchronizing refresh rate to minimum… dual-line protocol, loading—”

Just as his code produced a second line, Ye Zhao’s “zero” suddenly expanded, Sword Qi surging violently and scattering the “one.”

“Damn! Don’t go so hard!” He leaned back. “I just finished initializing on my end, and you’re already outputting at full power. That’s like jamming a USB port with high voltage!”

“Sorry.” She opened her eyes. “I’m used to the rhythm of slaying.”

“We’re not cutting down monsters here; we’re building blocks.” He wiped his face. “Come on, slow it down. Think of it like practicing Tai Chi—contract, release, contract, release. I’ll follow your rhythm.”

Third attempt.

Her Sword Qi flow slowed, the “zero” brightening and dimming like breathing. Shen Yan bit his fingertip, letting blood drip as new code steadily unfolded.

“One… zero… one… zero…”

Glowing points alternated in the air, gradually linking into a flowing data chain. As their frequencies synchronized, the chain extended continuously, eventually weaving into a translucent net floating above the two.

“Did it work?” Ye Zhao asked softly.

“Preliminary closed loop achieved.” He laughed breathlessly. “Though the bandwidth isn’t high and the latency is a bit touching, at least it’s a prototype that can run.”

Before his words faded, a commotion arose from the distant woods.

Several Dark Shadows were retreating downhill, holding broken array cores in their arms—clearly Zhang Huaiyuan’s subordinates. One of them took out a Talisman and attached it to a Magical Artifact, attempting to mask their presence.

Shen Yan’s eyes lit up. “Perfect timing. Let’s use them for a stress test.”

“What do you want to do?”

“Nothing much.” He grinned. “Just making their treasures put on a little show.”

He raised a hand and pointed. The newly formed light net expanded, instantly covering a hundred-meter radius. Data Streams swept through every inch of space like invisible probes.

Something bizarre happened.

The Magical Artifacts originally hidden in their sleeves—copper bells, bone knives, blood banners—all began to tremble violently, as if forcibly awakened. The next moment, they broke free from their owners’ control and flew into the air.

Even more absurdly, these objects automatically arranged themselves mid-air, forming a massive binary sequence.

“This is…” Ye Zhao narrowed her eyes.

Shen Yan stared at the pattern, his pupils contracting. “A permission authentication code?”

He forced himself up, writing a parsing Command in blood on his palm. As the code finished running, a line of large characters appeared in the air:

Mystic Gate Right Protector · Zhang Huaiyuan

“Well, well.” He chuckled. “Lost your hat?”

Almost simultaneously, a muffled groan came from deep within the dense woods. Zhang Huaiyuan stumbled out from behind a tree, blood blossoming on his chest, the Command Token at his waist shattering inch by inch. The backlash force sent him flying into the darkness, and he didn’t get up again.

The night wind swept through, leaving only that string of binary light and Shadow slowly dissipating, like ash from spent fireworks.

Ye Zhao gazed at the sky, the tips of her ears tinged with red. “What do you call this?” she asked quietly. “Borrowed sword technique?”

“No.” Shen Yan plopped back onto the stone steps, too exhausted to say much. “This is called dual-machine interconnection. You’re the Host Machine, I’m the peripheral device. We share one Operating System.”

She turned to look at him, moonlight casting a cold pallor on her face, tinged with a hint of helplessness. “So… I was just acting as your USB Drive?”

“A high-performance solid-state drive,” he corrected. “And encrypted-grade, at that.”

She didn’t speak again, only gently sheathed the Frost Soul Sword. The hilt tapped the ground with a crisp sound.

Shen Yan leaned against the steps, his head nodding, eyelids too heavy to lift. But a smile still lingered at the corner of his mouth.

“What should we call this move of ours?” he mumbled.

“No name.”

“We have to call it something. Like ‘Zero-One Combo’? ‘Code Slash’? ‘Programmer’s Romance’?”

“Noisy.”

He chuckled softly, then suddenly remembered something. “By the way, why did you save me? Last time at the subway station, and today again… what are you after?”

Ye Zhao fell silent for a moment, then raised her hand, fingertips lightly brushing the sword tassel. There was an extremely fine crack there, as if scorched by high heat.

“You shouldn’t be alive,” she said. “That day at the subway station, your code format was exactly the same as the fragments in the ‘Heavenly Dao Compilation.’ That kind of thing… only a Celestial Clan Outcast would have.”

Shen Yan froze.

“So I originally came to kill you.” She looked at him, her gaze calm. “But you saved me. Using a bunch of symbols I couldn’t understand, you repaired my sword.”

The wind stilled.

On the stone steps, their Shadows were close, but neither moved.

In the distance, Medicine Valley was brightly lit. Deep within the medicine storeroom, a bronze cauldron trembled slightly, and a layer of eerie foam rose on the surface of the elixir liquid.

Shen Yan yawned, murmuring drowsily, “Then from now on… you can use my code anytime.”

She didn’t respond, only reached out and straightened the black-framed glasses that had slipped to his forehead.

The lens reflection obscured her gaze.

The next moment, she suddenly frowned, sharply looking toward Medicine Valley.

A faint purple mist was seeping from the cracks of the medicine storeroom window, silently spreading.

(End of Chapter)