You open her. You see her. She is called Trigger. Not a weapon, not a button. Something with a confused meaning and vague power, but awakening.
In the wilderness city of “Zero Zone”, data is dust, chips are rust, and Dingni is blood. You have to feed her with blood and plate her bones with rust.
She is clean, at first. She is like a child who has just left the ward. You have to prepare these things for her:
Basic electric shock chip ×25
Advanced electric shock chip ×75
Specialized electric shock chip ×250
Primary breaking cognition ×4
High-level breaking cognition ×32
Breaker certification badge ×30
Grip of bloody wind ×9
High-dimensional data: life-threatening cutting ×60
Hamster cage access device ×5
Senior investigator record ×300
Dingni ×3,705,000
These names are like nightmares. Like the words you hear the doctor whisper during an operation. You collect and split at the same time. You don’t know whether you are building a warrior or destroying a human.
Grip of the Bloody Wind, Array Breaker Certification Seal, Hamster Cage. Each noun is like a monster that escaped from the future. You piled them in her body. She began to mutate.
She is no longer human.
Then you gave her the Sound Engine. Give her the echo of heartbeat.
Breaking Components ×4
Enhanced Breaking Components ×32
Specialized Breaking Components ×30
Sound Engine Energy Module ×200
Dinny ×400,000
You open the simulation room late at night. You no longer remember the air and sunlight of the real world. You are calculating components, you are recycling modules, you are burning your obsession with “her”. You begin to question: Are you cultivating her? Or is she devouring you?
Every upgrade is a physical experiment.
Her breakthrough, from level 10 to 50, is like a girl crawling through broken glass and crossing the wasteland:
Primary Breaking Cognition ×4, Dingni ×24,000
Advanced Breaking Cognition ×12, Dingni ×56,000
Advanced Breaking Cognition ×20, Dingni ×120,000
Breaker Certification ×10, Dingni ×200,000
Breaker Certification ×20, Dingni ×400,000
You are paying. But you don’t know what you are paying with. Is it gold coins? Is it time in reality? Or is it your increasingly exhausted spirit?
Her skills are also evolving. Is it a virus? It is the process of organ alienation. It is the only way to go from human to combat unit.
A to F.
A: Dingni ×5,000
B: Death Cut ×2, Dingni ×12,000
C: Death Cut ×4, Dingni ×28,000
D: Bloody Wind Grip ×2, Death Cut ×9, Dingni ×60,000
E: Bloody Wind Grip ×3, Death Cut ×15, Dingni ×100,000
F: Bloody Wind Grip ×4, Death Cut ×30, Dingni ×200,000
“Death”, “Cut”, “Dingni” – these words are like annotations on the medical record of a high-risk patient. You are not upgrading your skills, you are dealing with a machined corpse. She is reborn. But she is also corrupting. You can’t tell which one is more real.
The upgrade process of ordinary skills is the same:
Chip ×several
Hamster Cage Accessor ×1
Dingni ×more and more
Each number is like a ladder leading to the abyss. The deeper you sink, the clearer she becomes. The more perfect she is, the more blurred you become. You start to lose yourself.
You forget who you are.
You are just the hand that clicks the upgrade button. Not a person, but a servant of the algorithm.
She was born from your hand. She will also swallow you.
In this city, only she and you are connected. Everyone else is background noise. All are virtual images. All are phantoms of the future.
She stands on the corner of the street, behind her is a collapsed building, a signal of cold light flashing, and a whisper that echoes repeatedly in your dream:
“Upgrade me.”
You do it.