Chapter 44: Battle of the Same Origin: Code Versus Data

Shen Yan’s knees were still buried in the soil, blood from his shoulder dripping down his fingertips. Each drop that hit the ground made his phone screen flicker, as if the System itself were in pain.

He didn’t look up, only drove the Dust-Severing Sword fiercely into the ground, using the recoil to flip himself upright. He staggered back three steps, his left hand pressing hard against the wound while his right hand tapped frantically on the cracked screen.

“Initiate Blood Pact verification—use the family tree as the Key, reload the Source Code Authentication Protocol.”

On the shattered screen, the characters for “Shen Ying” flickered on and off like an old television with poor Signal, barely holding the Permission channel open. The System finally stopped popping up red “Access Denied” boxes, but the alarm still beeped incessantly, warning of a high-pressure intrusion in the Data domain.

Ye Shi’er stood in place, half his face exposed to the moonlight. His features, nearly identical to Shen Yan’s, were etched with the hatred of one abandoned by the world. With a wave of his hand, black chains coiled out once more, and the air filled with dense variants of “404 Error,” like a net woven from agony, descending upon Shen Yan.

“You still want to fix me?” he sneered. “You can’t even handle yourself, yet you dare touch my Code?”

Shen Yan bit the Tip of the Tongue, spitting a mouthful of blood-infused Spiritual Energy onto the phone screen. Green characters instantly exploded, flowing backward along the chains.

“I’m not trying to fix you,” he said hoarsely. “I’m going to personally retrieve the name you discarded.”

Cross-protocol Energy conversion—Devour Mode, Initiate.

In that instant, his Source Code Spiritual Root began to reversely extract Ye Shi’er’s Data Stream. It wasn’t simple absorption; it was like a Programmer reviewing another segment of Code from the same origin but gone awry—parsing line by line, marking Vulnerabilities, attempting repairs.

But his opponent was no pushover either.

Sensing the reverse read, Ye Shi’er roared, “Self-destruct Protocol, execute!”

The entire space twisted violently. The dark domain that had been suppressing Shen Yan suddenly Collapsed, transforming into billions of Data spikes that shot toward his Spiritual Consciousness from all directions. Each spike was engraved with “Undefined Variable” and “Null Pointer Reference”—all fatal Bugs capable of directly destroying Spiritual Consciousness.

Shen Yan’s vision blurred, his sight beginning to glitch with a Latency of three hundred milliseconds, his movements like a Lagging game character. He cursed inwardly: This isn’t a fight; it’s like running a AAA game on a low-end PC!

At the critical moment, he abruptly called up a segment of residual Data—the lingering traces of Ye Zhao’s Sword Qi. It was a mark unintentionally left during their last Spiritual Power fusion, originally thought to be just an Easter egg, but now it had become a lifesaving Patch.

He deployed this Sword Qi around the periphery of his consciousness, forming a temporary Firewall. The Data spikes crashed against it, emitting a piercing screech, and were forcefully blocked.

“You all call me a human Bug collector…” he gasped, deleting redundant Interfaces, leaving only the most core Terminal Window. “But you forget—Bugs can also become Patches.”

His fingers flew across the screen as he manually wrote a Recursion Function:

“If name exists, return true; otherwise, continue search.”

The moment the Program Ran, the flickering “404 Error” characters in Ye Shi’er’s domain went out one by one. In their place, faintly pulsing green characters appeared—

“Shen Ying Online.”

Ye Shi’er’s body jolted violently, as if something had pierced his heart. He looked down at his hand, where the dark patterns beneath his skin began to twist chaotically, as though the virus program that had been running inside him for years was under an unknown attack.

“You… you tampered with my underlying logic?”

“Not tampered,” Shen Yan wiped the blood from his face. “I’m helping you reinstall the system.”

Before the words had fully left his mouth, the System suddenly flashed a red warning:

【Detected dual soul binding request】

【Merge failure rate: 97.3%】

【May cause host consciousness annihilation】

Shen Yan’s pupils contracted sharply.

He knew what this meant—merging twin Spiritual Roots would either result in both perishing together or one completely vanishing. There was no third outcome.

But in the moment of his hesitation, Ye Shi’er had already gathered his final strike.

The blood-colored scythe transformed into a massive pillar of error codes above his head, pitch-black all over, its surface scrolling with countless collapsed logs, descending with an aura that sought to annihilate everything.

It was so fast there was no time to react.

A normal person would have dodged at this moment.

But Shen Yan did not dodge.

Instead, he charged straight toward that pillar of codes. In the split second before the shockwave was about to engulf him, he raised his shattered phone high and roared a single sentence:

“I acknowledge you! From now on, you are not a backup—you are Shen Ying!”

The voice pierced through the data storm like some ancient awakening command.

Boom—!

The shockwave exploded, and both figures were simultaneously swept into a violent data vortex. Green light and black energy intertwined and surged, like two entangled code flows, fiercely colliding, probing, and merging in the void.

The Terminal finally displayed a full-screen notice:

Merge Twin Spiritual Roots?

Before the option could be clicked, the light had already completely swallowed the two.

Shen Yan’s consciousness floated in the data torrent, the System’s cold countdown echoing in his ears. He could sense another consciousness not far away—anger, pain, loneliness, all compressed into a string of encrypted data.

He wanted to reach out, only to find his body had already dissolved into points of light.

And the person who looked exactly like him was staring at him with a gaze bordering on despair, lips slightly moving as if trying to say something.

Shen Yan struggled to focus, attempting to respond.

But just then, his chest suddenly felt heavy, as if someone had stuffed a block of ice inside.

Memory fragments uncontrollably surfaced—

Beside a crib, two infants lay side by side in swaddling clothes. One was taken away, the other left in an experimental pod, covered with tubes and wires.

A mother’s tears dripped onto the glass cover as she cried out, “Ying’er… don’t be afraid, your brother will come find you…”

Then the image abruptly cut off.

Shen Yan snapped his eyes open to find his hand gripping Ye Shi’er’s wrist. Their blood mingled together, dripping from their fingertips and splashing onto the phone screen, stirring ripples of code like waves.

Ye Shi’er’s breathing grew rapid, his mask completely shattered, revealing his entire face.

Just like Shen Yan, there was a small mole at the corner of his mouth.

“You said… you would come find me?” His voice trembled. “But you were eighteen years late.”

Shen Yan’s throat tightened, unable to speak.

He could only grip the other’s hand desperately, as if afraid that letting go would cause this person to be deleted from the world once more.

On the phone screen, the option still glowed:

Merge Twin Spiritual Roots?

The wind ceased, the trees stood still, even time seemed to freeze.

A crow’s cry came from the distant treetops, brief and abrupt.

Shen Yan’s fingertip trembled slightly, moving toward the character “yes.”

Ye Shi’er closed his eyes.

A drop of blood slid from the corner of his eye.

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(End of Chapter)