Chapter 380 - The End

Due to Aixen’s tugging and the recurring severe pain from the wound triggered by sweat, Chen Chen’s eyelids that had been stuck together due to blood coagulation suddenly loosened and a large volume of blood flowed from Chen Chen’s eye sockets again.

Therefore, Chen Chen suddenly discovered that while his eyes were hurting, he seemed to see something between the gaps of his eyelids…

This was not an illusion because even if Chen Chen had lost his eyesight, he could still use the “Field” energy to explore the world around him. Therefore, when light shone upon his blinded eyes and merged with the perception of Field, Chen Chen was immediately sure that he did see some kind of super mysterious existence.

However, what was it really?

Although the dark hollow eye sockets could no longer be called eyes, at this moment, Chen Chen still resisted the anguish and opened his eyes resolutely!

At once, an indescribable image appeared in Chen Chen’s mind. At this moment, Chen Chen saw it with his eyes…

There was endless darkness in front of him. It was not even darkness, it should be called nothingness.

However, in the boundless nothingness, a being that seemed to be composed of liquid and smoke appeared where Aixen was standing!

Why did he call it a being? Although it did not have a fixed shape, it was blood-red, and the only concrete thing on its body was a crammed pile of eyeballs!

These eyeballs covered Aixen’s entire body. What was even more frightening was that these eyeballs were still constantly shifting. Even as Chen Chen stared at the pile of eyeballs, they seemed to notice him and started to glare back at Chen Chen!

“So that’s the case?”

Seeing this scene, Chen Chen seemed to be enlightened and countless clues were finally connected. He suddenly raised his hand and pointed with one finger!

“Bang!”

Aixen’s thin and slender body flew back and hit the wall of the shop across the street!

Chen Chen stood up slowly, opened his pair of eyes that seemed to come from hell, and looked at Aixen. In his line of sight, the world was a canvas of nothingness and the monster in front of him was the only solid existence.

“Chen Chen, what are you doing? I’m Aixen! Wake up, I’m X!”

Even though she was knocked back, Aixen in front of him still tried her best to justify herself in a tearful voice.

“Drop the act. There’s no point now. What should I call you?”

Drop by drop, the vapor around the monster that had collapsed on the ground slowly trickled away. The parasitic eyeballs on the vapor began to spin around frantically. Even in Chen Chen’s mind, there were innumerable screeches, which were the agonized cries of the eyeballs.

“Should I call you the previous owner of the USB flash drive? Or an antimeme? Or…”

Chen Chen walked to his opponent and knelt gently. “Event Horizon?”

“Impossible, you cheated! How could you find me!”

At this point, Aixen finally displayed a vicious cruel look. It no longer had the same bright voice as before. At this time, its voice was more like the sound of metal rasping against glass and it was also like a wailing from the abyss, full of silence and gloom!

“If your brain is sh*t, everything you do is sh*t. Why don’t you go and ask the devil himself!”

Chen Chen pointed to his head, then placed his palms directly on the face of the monster in front of him, and smiled wickedly. “Remember, in your next reincarnation, no matter what you do, never go against Chen Chen, understand?”

With that said, Chen Chen’s Field energy was immediately activated and it began to close in on the body of the monster before him, like a shredder!

In his line of sight, the gas and liquid that made up the monster were constantly dripping away and evaporating under the attack of Chen Chen’s Field energy. The countless eyeballs on the monster’s body were even more miserable as they were directly exploded by the Field energy!

“No!”

The monster just kept struggling and screaming, but in any case, it was unable to break free from Chen Chen’s grip. It could only watch as the eyeballs in its body continued to shatter and the vapors continued to dissipate and dispersed.

“No, you can’t kill me because I’m a concept and a concept cannot die! Absolutely not!”

In the end, the monster yelled in despair.

“No, a concept is a concept. You are yourself.”

Chen Chen said coldly, “You’re just a poor bug that has attached its consciousness to a meme. You must’ve led a very hard life. In that case, let me do you a favor!”

With that, the last few eyeballs finally broke apart. At the moment when the last few eyeballs shattered, the remaining gas finally evaporated and dissipated fully, vanishing at once into the vast void!

“Arghh—!”

There was only the final lingering wail of that monster…

In the end, everything was wiped out.

In the same moment that Aixen in front of him was annihilated, Chen Chen only felt his mind clear up and all the memories rushed into his mind again!

This time, Chen Chen was no longer in danger of forgetting.

It was not only Chen Chen. At this instant, a middle-aged man had come to the isolated edge of Shangdu, looking at the body of Shen Qi, who no longer looked human. He wore an anguished expression but at this moment, his gaze suddenly sharpened as if something had appeared in his mind…

The relatives of those who were swallowed by the antimeme invariably stopped their movements at this point and their memories began to flicker back in their minds…

At this moment, the world affected by the antimeme had returned to normal again.

“Phew!”

Currently, Chen Chen exhaled silently, finally looking relieved.

At the same time, Chen Chen suddenly felt warmth in his hand. Chen Chen looked down and saw that the dirty little beggar had crawled to his side somehow. She stood up weakly and took Chen Chen’s hand as if it was the most natural thing in the world.

“Thank you, X.”

Chen Chen nodded, carried the little beggar in front of him, and flew away in the direction from which he came.

He wanted to fly out of this continent and meet the group of officials one last time to solve the final issue.

While flying, Chen Chen gradually sorted out his thoughts. The source of all this was the night he was injected with the T-virus and he had a terrible nightmare.

On the second day after the dream, when Chen Chen woke up, he had forgotten everything as if nothing had happened. He continued to live his life according to its original trajectory.

As he had been taking NZT-48 all year round, his intelligence was constantly improving, but this kind of improvement took a long time. Inevitably it would easily lead to brain failure and even the sequelae of brain damage, but Chen Chen had extracted to Medpod 3000 to repair himself and even used the T-virus to strengthen his physique.

Therefore, even if he was not taking the drug now, his brain had already begun to show some special changes such as having an eidetic memory, an efficiency of mental arithmetic comparable to that of a computer, and even an intelligence exceeding that of ordinary people’s.

Therefore, although he had forgotten something, his subconscious mind detected this danger, so it pointed out key clues such as “antimeme” and “dreams.”

This led to Little X hypnotizing Chen Chen and his coming here.

However, what Chen Chen did not expect was that, though it was only hypnosis to awaken the memories of the past, his consciousness was drawn into a parallel universe, even resulting in a certain mingling between his dream and this world.

In other words, this was indeed a new world and the timeline of this world happened to be the moment Chen Chen just obtained the USB drive four years ago in the original dimension where Chen Chen was located.

Nonetheless, this was simultaneously also Chen Chen’s dreamscape.

How should one explain this phenomenon? Wave-particle duality of light? Or quantum mechanics?

Chen Chen was still clueless for the time being but the cause of this might be due to the USB flash drive or more likely, it should be all thanks to Aixen!

Namely, the monster killed by Chen Chen earlier.

This monster was the previous owner of the USB flash drive.

The reason Chen Chen was sure that the USB drive had a previous owner was that he gradually became aware of the abnormal phenomena in the Earth Federation such as the quantum computer and even the formation of the Earth Federation itself.

Nevertheless, Chen Chen could only locate the problem, but could not find the cause of the problem or any clues. It was as if, at the end of all the anomalies, there was an invisible black hole of information, which swallowed all information about anomalies and devoured everything, leaving not a single trace.

It was because of this black hole of information that Chen Chen perceived the existence of a concept such as the antimeme. Then, he was reminded of the anomaly of the Earth Federation and inferred that the USB drive was likely to have a previous owner.

In the beginning, Chen Chen thought that the previous owner was swallowed by the antimeme, but after all, an antimeme was just a concept, like a meme. Since it was a concept, it was impossible for it to have its own thoughts like a human.

Nonetheless, everything that Chen Chen had encountered in this dream world showed severe indications of human interference.

Whether it was by hiding behind the Ju-on meme and silently devouring this world or the behavior of Shen Qi, Zhou Jie, and the others after being possessed, all of this demonstrated that the antimeme was capable of thought.

However, how could an antimeme have human thinking?

Therefore, after entering Ju-on’s dimension, Chen Chen had a hypothesis in his mind. “Perhaps the previous owner used the technology of a certain movie to turn himself into an antimeme? Or attached himself to the antimeme? So that all information about him would disappear?”

Among the countless impossibilities, this was the most likely possibility to explain everything.

Therefore, he continued inferring — the Earth Federation was established in 1992 and the first four movies in the USB flash drive were mostly around 2000. That was to say, it was very likely that, from the previous owner getting the USB flash drive to losing it again, it all took place approximately around this timeframe, with a possible discrepancy of fewer than ten years.

In that case, before 2010, which movie could transform people into an antimeme?

Only one answer appeared in Chen Chen’s mind — Event Horizon!

This movie was released in 1997. It was a sci-fi horror movie. It told the story of the future year 2040 when humans had developed a jump engine and built a starship, “Event Horizon”, that could jump through spacetime.

To test the ability of the jump engine, humans allowed the Event Horizon to start traveling, but two months after the Event Horizon set sail, it disappeared completely, along with hundreds of astronauts, after opening a portal and making a jump near Neptune.

It was only until 2047 that the starship, which had been missing for 7 years, appeared again, and at the same time it even sent a distress signal to Earth.

The last sound of the distress signal was a very obscure sentence —”Save me!”

As the earth received the distress signal from Event Horizon, the designer and rescuers of the spacecraft rushed to see what happened to it in the past seven years, but they were met by a terrifying journey…

This was the background of Event Horizon.

The “jump” concept in the movie was an ability that allowed the spacecraft to jump from one point in the universe to another in an instant. The principle was that the spacecraft would open a portal during the jump and the other side of the portal was another place in the universe.

A metaphor was also used in the movie. The designer of the spacecraft drew two points on a piece of paper and asked the crew members on the ship what was the shortest distance between the two points. The hired crew naturally said that the straight line was the shortest, but he said that answer was wrong. Then he folded the paper directly, putting the two points together, and pierced the paper with a pen, after which he explained that the shortest distance was achieved by placing the two points together. The jump engine worked by joining the two points together.

However, who would have expected that after the spacecraft made a jump, although it successfully disappeared from this point, it did not appear at another point? It completely disappeared in this vast universe and went to an unknown place outside the universe.

In the film, all the supernatural phenomena on the spacecraft seemed to Chen Chen to be caused by the spacecraft being infected with some kind of meme. In addition, there was a line that made an impression on Chen Chen: “This ship has been beyond the boundaries of our universe, of known scientific reality. Who knows where it’s been, what it’s seen or what it’s brought back with it…”

The biggest clue in the plot was probably the part where a character gouged out his own eyes because in the movie’s design, Event Horizon was heading to a terrifying world, which was like hell. In that world, there was no need for an organ such as the eyes. Only by gouging out one’s eyes could one see the truth of that world.

Therefore, under the lure of that world, the designer of the spaceship dug out his eyes and actively embraced darkness. Doing so, he turned into a spokesperson for that world, instantly possessing terrifying power.

Therefore, Chen Chen surmised that if the owner of the USB drive wanted to assimilate himself into a conceptual existence such as a meme or antimeme, it could only be done with Event Horizon.

As such, in the instant before he returned from Ju-on’s dimension, Chen Chen had gouged out his eyes first because after gouging out his eyes, he would be able to see the previous master of the USB flash drive.

In fact, at that time, Chen Chen had already begun to doubt Aixen because the objective of the USB drive’s previous owner was to swallow Chen Chen and replace him. To replace Chen Chen, it would not be enough to just kill Chen Chen in the dream. Rather, he had to devour Chen Chen’s dream world before Chen Chen woke up. Therefore, he would spare no effort to protect Chen Chen and prevent Chen Chen from being prematurely killed by Ju-on.

It was Aixen who had once saved Chen Chen before Chen Chen was killed by Ju-on.

The rest happened as a matter of course.

As for the little beggar, she was the back door that Little X had implanted to ensure Chen Chen’s safety. When he was hypnotized, Little X had kissed Chen Chen, and this kiss was an “anchor”. As long as the little beggar came into contact with him in his dream and kissed him, Chen Chen could easily wake up, causing all of Aixen’s efforts to go up in a puff of smoke.

Therefore, strictly speaking, Aixen was not capable of killing Chen Chen. On the contrary, he had not completely integrated with the antimeme. His actual body was the blood-red eyes and the antimeme was that substance that looked like both liquid and gas. As long as the eyes were crushed, it was akin to killing him.

After his death, the antimeme naturally lost its power against Chen Chen and became dormant again.

As a result, Chen Chen’s memories had fully returned.

As for why the previous owner of the USB flash drive turned himself into a meme, Chen Chen did not know.

Perhaps this would forever be a mystery.

Nevertheless, it now appeared that all this was probably planned by the previous owner of the USB flash drive because even the four horror movies in the USB flash drive were placed there by him, with the objective of devouring the next owner of the USB drive.

It was a pity that he had encountered Chen Chen.