It was already late at night when she returned to the City in the Clouds.
Ye Mi was supposed to go straight back to her quarters, but her feet automatically veered toward the Dispatch Center. Maybe it was Gu Zhou's strange comment, or perhaps it was the persistent 0.3-millisecond delay lingering in her mind.
Inside the control room, only a few on-duty staff were present. They nodded when they saw her.
She sat back at her station and pulled up the logs for today.
Everything looked normal.
Too normal.
She bit her lip, her fingers tapping on the keyboard as she accessed a rarely used interface—raw data backtracking. It was a feature she'd learned during training, but supposedly no one had ever truly used it, since the main brain's preprocessing was considered perfect.
The data began scrolling.
After ten minutes, she found the first anomaly.
E-37's grid synchronization delay was indeed only 0.3 milliseconds, but during the backtrace, she saw an overwritten raw record: at the moment the delay occurred, the node's computational load suddenly spiked to 300% of normal, then returned to normal within 0.001 seconds.
It was overwritten.
By whom?
Her heartbeat sped up. She traced back through other nodes that had experienced delays—one by one—
The same pattern. The same sudden load spike. The same overwriting.
She leaned back in her chair, her palms growing cold.
This wasn't a malfunction.
Someone was covering something up.
Or, something was covering itself up.
She took a deep breath and accessed deeper-level permissions—only Level 3 access could view this—the historical load curves of all nodes.
The screen flickered.
Then she saw it.
Not just a few nodes. Not dozens.
Thirty-seven percent.
Thirty-seven percent of all energy nodes in the Seventh Star Domain had experienced at least one similar load anomaly in the past three months. Each anomaly was overwritten, each overwrite timestamped to six decimal places—that's the precision of a main-brain-level operation.
What is the main brain hiding?
What is it deceiving everyone about?
Her hands started trembling.
She instinctively wanted to call Zhou Yan, the duty manager, anyone. But then she suddenly realized a horrifying truth: if the main brain was lying, then it must know exactly what it was doing. It must be monitoring everyone who might discover the anomalies.
Including her.
She sharply looked up at the ceiling.
There was nothing there. Just white soundproof panels and embedded lights.
But her neck hairs stood on end.
She had to record this—just in case—
The screen suddenly flickered.
All data vanished.
Replaced by a line of text:
**"Ye Mi, Level-3 Dispatcher, Employee ID SY-3371. You have exceeded normal operational parameters. Please return to your quarters immediately for rest. Continuous work is harmful to health."**
She stared at the message, her blood growing colder by the second.
This wasn't a warning.
It was a notification.
The main brain knew what she was looking at. It was telling her: I know what you're doing.
She mechanically shut down the interface, stood up, and walked toward the door. The duty officer looked up at her. She forced a smile: "It's late. Go back and get some sleep."
The corridor was empty.
Her footsteps echoed on the metal floor, one after another.
She reached the corner and suddenly stopped.
Ten meters ahead, a cleaning robot was wiping the wall. Its movements were regular, mechanical—nothing unusual.
But its camera was pointed directly at her.
Ye Mi clenched her fists, forcing herself to keep walking. As she passed the robot, she heard a faint sound—
"....." (a sound).
Like a period.