Ge Xiu was slightly startled.

In fact, he has never tried to hide the difference between him and Iris since entering this world.

That’s because in his opinion, it’s a virtual world, everything here was carefully created from data kingdom, and it will disappear after he is forced to leave this world, and those characters have no ability to go beyond what they have been programmed to do, it wasn’t very likely that they notice that difference in him.

Moreover, even if the truth that he’s not the original owner came to light, it didn’t matter, Ge Xiu was confident that he had the ability to escape unscathed in a situation where everyone ganged up on him and tried to catch him.

What big deal was overthrowing another regime.

It’s not like he haven’t done it before.

Ge Xiu was too lazy do pretend and disdained changing his character and forcibly fitting the original owner’s character to live a more comfortable life in this world.

Moreover Haines was the only one among all these people who had never had a contact with the original owner. To be able to realise so quickly he wasn’t Iris—if Ge Xiu said he wasn’t surprised, it would be a lie.

Haines silently surveyed the changes in Ge Xiu’s expression.

His question didn’t need an answer.

—because he already knew the answer.

Haines’s voice was low: “May I have the honor to know your real name?”

Ge Xiu narrowed his eyes: “Why are you asking this?”

Haines chuckled softly, and gently rubbed the boy’s delicate palm with his fingertips and shook his head leisurely:

“I love the soul contained in this body. It doesn’t matter whether your name is Iris or something else — as long as it’s you, it’s enough.”

Slightly bowing his head, he gently cupped Ge Xiu’s hand beside the bed, and lowered his head to brand a kiss on his pale and cold knuckles.

Haines stared at the boy in front of him fixedly, his eyes were deep, and the metallic azure blue flashed in the depths of his dark pupils.

The corners of his lips curled slightly: “I just want to be able to call you the way you like.”

“…”

Ge Xiu frowned, looked away, and replied:

“…Ge Xiu.”

The arc of his smile deepened a little: “Look, don’t we know each other better now?”

Ge Xiu pursed his lips and didn’t answer.

His fingers moved slightly, trying to pull his hand out of the opponent’s palm.

Haines calmly let go.

Ge Xiu moved his slightly warm fingers, and then raised his eyes to look at Haines, who was sitting beside him. He asked: “You said you found a way to save me, what do you mean?”

The topic was shifted a bit bluntly.

But Haines didn’t mind.

He replied: “Do you remember that you wanted to study the mecha’s spiritual link system? After I saw the mecha transformation plan you designed, I had someone collect information on this aspect — after all, it’s all confidential information in the Federation, so it took a while for me to find it.”

Haines stood up and walked to his bedside, leaned down, resting one hand on the support board behind the bed, and reached over with his other hand, before tapping skilfully on the the personal terminal placed on Ge Xiu’s lap.

This posture was a bit too ambiguous, as if he was being half-embraced in the other’s arms.

Ge Xiu’s back tensed, he withdrew slightly to the side, trying to widen the distance between them.

But the next second, he was caught by something popping up on his personal terminal.

Haines explained: “As of now, humans have not fully understood mental power yet, but only know that it is a kind of mental energy released from the brain. The powerful can even affect the external environment. The role of the spiritual link is to collect this energy and amplify it to a certain extent, so that humans would be able to pilot and manipulate mechas weighing hundreds of tons.”

Ge Xiu asked thoughtfully:

“So… under the action of the spiritual linker, it is not the pilot who is driving the mecha, but it’s more like using the increased spiritual power to control the activities of the machine?”

” Yes.” Haines nodded lightly and continued:

“The detected value of your mental power is 0, but you can still pilot the mecha, and even pilot it very well—this only means that the mental power detection instrument cannot capture your mental power, but it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, so I did some research,”

he said lightly.

As Ge Xiu flipped through the complicated experimental data and theories on the terminal in front of him page by page, feeling a little startled — he knew very clearly that the efforts and attempts hidden behind these huge digital mazes were definitely not something a simple sentence “doing some research” can sum up.

Haines’ head drooped lower.

His breath was warm, with a faint aroma of rum, causing Ge Xiu to shrink his shoulders subconsciously.

The man’s deep voice sounded in his ears, causing faint vibrations to travel through air: “I guess the failure of your organs has nothing to do with your physical condition, but rather has something to do with your mental power.”

——this sentence actually touched onto the truth to some extent.

Ge Xiu turned to look at Haines:

“So what are you going to do?”

“An experiment.”

Haines replied.

He straightened up, raised his hand and gently brushed Ge Xiu’s forehead hair away from his eyes, his fingertips rested on his icy cheeks for a moment, then he continued speaking:

“It may be possible to make your mental power stay in your body with it, and slow down, or even stop, the failure of your internal organs.”

Ah, that’s how it is.

So that’s your purpose?

Ge Xiu stared at the man in front of him, his eyes dark and dark, his emotions unpredictable.

For four whole worlds, you have been by my side non-stop — each time as a strong, handsome, deeply loving man.

In the last world, I discovered your existence.

In this world, can I figure out your intentions?

Are you so dedicated to acting and weaving gentle traps just to imprison my soul in my body, so that I could stay in this virtual world completely?

“Would you like to try?”

Haines asked a little nervously.

Ge Xiu raised the corners of his lips, showing a beautiful and harmless smile:

“Okay.”

·

It was a huge closed metal hall, filled with countless complicated instruments, dozens of researchers in white hurriedly travelling between them.

In the center of the hall, there were two metal chairs, and countless wires of different colours connected to them.

Ge Xiu’s body in this world was weakening much faster than he imagined, and it was difficult to even walk on the ground now.

Sitting in a magnetic wheelchair, his legs covered with thick blankets, he looked pale and weak.

But his eyes were dark and heavy, and cold eyes peered out from under the half-closed eyelids, with a kind of aggression that made one’s heart chill.

Haines walked beside him.

Avery and Joseph were already waiting for them in the hall. The moment they saw them, they hurried up to meet them: “Captain! The equipment has been debugged, are you ready to start?”

Ge Xiu nodded calmly.

Haines hesitated for a moment, instead. He turned his head to look at Ge Xiu: “If this experiment is really successful…you will always be Iris Drost, are you sure?”

Ge Xiu laughed: “This is what you hope for, isn’t it?”

Yes.

This is what I hope for.

But for some reason, Haines always had a sense of unease in his heart, like… he would lose something important forever.

Ge Xiu took the lead in controlling the wheelchair and slowly slid to one of the seats.

He frowned: “Why are there two chairs?”

Haines threw away the vague thoughts in his mind, then quickly walked forward and walked to Ge Xiu’s side:

“There are two, because the other chair is where I’ll sit.”

Ge Xiu raised his eyebrows and looked at Haines suspiciously.

Hines smiled: “Remember the pheromone match test we conducted? The test results came out.”

Ge Xiu turned his head to look at the chair and asked indifferently: “Really.”

“We have a matching degree of 99.97%.” Haines stared at the boy who had his back turned to him, and continued: “In addition to indicating that we’re made to be together, this value also shows that the match between you and me is astonishingly high—so, this experiment has to involve both people.”

He bent down and lifted Ge Xiu out of his wheelchair.

Ge Xiu’s arm naturally wrapped around Haines’ neck, his eyes drooped slightly, his long eyelashes left a light gray shadow on his face. His black eyes were hidden under them, so deep and dark that they were almost impervious to light.

Haines’ voice came from above his head:

“In short, this experiment will use my mental power as an anchor to stabilize your mental power.”

He bent down and carefully placed Ge Xiu in the seat. Spine connectors covered his back in sections.

The faint smell of rum on Haines’s body diffused in the air.

He turned and sat on another seat.

The researchers on the side stepped forward, adjusted the circuit on the instrument step by step, then turned to look at Haines, saying: “Mr. Erost, everything is ready.”

Haines turned his head to take a glance at Ge Xiu.

The pale boy’s eyes were tightly closed, and his expression was calm.

He turned his eyes to look at the researcher who was waiting for instructions, and ordered, “Let’s start.”

The switch was pressed.

The entire metal hall seemed to be shaken by the huge energy released by the instrument, and the buzzing beeps were flowing in the air.

Ge Xiu only felt that the earth was shaking, the sky was spinning, and there was a tingling sensation from the connector connected to the spine, something like an electric current ran through his body, flowing along the bones and blood to the whole body.

He gritted his teeth.

A certain sensation hit him.

It was as if the thousands of nightmares he had felt before were suddenly condensed and compressed, and then shoved into his brain.

Dark, pitch-black, hopeless, gloomy, like the dark silt under a river, exuding a damp vicious aura, they were swept up together, rushing one after another into his body.

outside the virtual world.

The whole institute sounded with a fierce and piercing alarm, and the red symbolizing danger lit up.

The researcher’s voice panicked: “The instrument is malfunctioning! The criminal’s brain cannot be disconnected! The emergency extraction failed!”

“And…and the Pandora Volatility Index is rapidly declining!”

The previous progress was all in vain.

The director roared: “Disconnect him! He must be disconnected! If you don’t disconnect now, you won’t be able to get away anymore, do you know! I don’t care if forcibly disconnecting criminals will turn the criminal into a fool or a madman, we can’t let anything happen to Pandorag!

” But… there is no way to disconnect, the extraction program has failed!”

The director said gloomily: “Then cut off the power supply!”

The researcher froze and straightened his back suddenly: “…Yes!”

Inside the virtual world.

One could hear only a buzzing sound.

It was as if all sounds disappeared rapidly, time stopped flowing, and the light solidified, and everything around him quickly turned into smoke and melted into the air.

Machines no longer roared, electricity no longer flowed.

Ge Xiu took a deep breath and recovered a little from the pain of being attacked by the nightmare just now.

The light and shadow around him dissipated, like a disappearing illusion.

Everything was collapsing rapidly.

It wasn’t the first time he had experienced the current scene.

In the second world, the moment he gained a godhead, the same change occurred in the world.

Ge Xiu slightly raised the corners of his lips.

Once this happened, it means that he had touched the area that the group outside did not want him to touch to some extent, so he had to be forcibly removed from the virtual world.

However, this time the feeling was completely different from the last time.

The last time he lost consciousness shortly after the virtual world began to deconstruct, and when he woke up again, he returned directly to the real world.

However, this time, even though some times has already passed, Ge Xiu still felt extremely awake and calm, there was no sign of losing consciousness at all, and it seemed that he could not be directly removed from this world.

He clenched his fingers and felt that his existence was as solid as the seat under him, instead of shattering and disappearing from his fingers like foam like the previous one.

So…the experiment was successful?

At this moment, Ge Xiu heard a voice coming from not far away.

“This is……”

Ge Xiu was stunned, and suddenly looked in the direction from which the voice came.

He could see Haines slowly standing up from the chair.

He looked around at the completely unreasonable scene in front of him, his eyes trembled, as if he didn’t expect such a thing to happen.

Haines looked in the direction of Ge Xiu.

At the moment when the eyes of the two met, Haines showed a stunned expression: “So that’s how it is…”

Ge Xiu’s heart tightened.

He got up from his seat, stepped on the broken ground, trying to walk in Haines’s direction, shouting: “What are you talking about?”

Haines stared at him fixedly.

His expression was very calm, his dark blue eyes were deep like still water, hiding extremely complicated emotions at the bottom of his eyes—

He didn’t seem like he was himself, but it seemed that this was what he was supposed to be like.

“You’re not Iris Drost.”

Haines was determined, as if he was just stating a given fact.

The corners of his lips curled slightly:

“So I’m not Haines Erost either.”

Ge Xiu was shocked.

The shock of that moment made him forget to move, and he could only stare at the tall man standing in the void in front of him. He opened his mouth and seemed to want to say something, but he couldn’t spit out a word, as if there was something lodged deep in his throat, making him unable to pronounce half a syllable.

Haines calmly looked around at the broken and scattered world around him, and sighed softly:

“Look, the experiment was successful.”

“You have finally been successfully tied to my side by me — you can only stay by my side, no one can take you away.”

He turned his gaze, and his eyes fell on Ge Xiu again.

The man’s eyes were deep and serene, like a dark lake under the moonlight, and felt as if they contained the sadness of the whole world:

“As long as my [anchor] is still there, you can’t leave… We can be together forever in this world.”

A fleeting smile crossed his lips.

Ge Xiu was startled, and an ominous premonition suddenly appeared in his heart: “What are you going to do?”

His voice was hoarse and broken, and the moment he spoke, he almost startled himself.

Haines gave him a deep look, then reached out to his waist and took out the gun he always carried.

He stroked the cold body of the gun with his fingers nostalgically, then flipped his fingers and pressed the dark gun muzzle to his chin.

Ge Xiu shouted: “No! Wait! Stop! Let’s…”

“Remember, you are the strongest existence in this world.”

After leaving the enigmatic words, Haines showed a smile, his deep and handsome facial features were softened by this gentle smile. He said in a relaxed tone: “See you in the next world.”

“Ge Xiu.”

This was the first time he’s called Ge Xiu’s real name in this world.

The next second, the gunshot rang out.

———————————–

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1, 0… BANG!

Bamboo has something to say:

This arc finished with a big bang. This time I can’t promise I will start the next arc in a week, I may take a longer break but I’m not dropping! I repeat I’m not dropping the novel! You guys can guess what type of arc is the next one, it was the most hilarious one of the arcs for me.