Chapter 460: The Real World

On the screen, Morpheus, clad in his dark coat and sunglasses, spoke: "The pill you took is a tracking program. It disrupts your input/output carrier signal, allowing us to pinpoint your exact physical location."

Outside, the sky flashed with lightning amidst a torrential downpour, and a booming rumble of thunder rolled past the window, beginning a profound metamorphosis!

"What is going to happen?" Mo Xian stared intently at Neo on the screen.

Wang Xie looked at the spectacle before him with a look of perplexity.

Several disciples from the Haotian Academy also fixed their gazes upon the protagonist, Neo, as his body was gradually enveloped by a substance resembling liquid metal.

"What on earth is going to happen?" The eyes of Yue Bai, Li Lanruo, and several other young women were all concentrated entirely on this spot.

"Could this be an illusionary realm?" Nearby, the enchantress Ning Bi speculated with a trace of trepidation.

"That can't be... all of this feels so real..."

Everyone was entirely focused, as if unwilling to miss even the slightest, most minute detail.

Within the movie before their eyes:

"Entering replication program."

"Give the signal immediately."

"Locate."

"Closing in on the target..."

"..."

Following a flurry of increasingly urgent electronic chiming...

"Heartbeat stopped."

"We have a lock on him!"

Amidst a chorus of startled gasps, what appeared next before them was a capsule filled with a crimson liquid.

And a man whose body, the back of his head, his spine, and indeed his entire being were connected to various tubes and cables.

Looking outward from the capsule, row after row of identical pods were aligned in immaculate, chilling symmetry.

Turning to look further ahead, two colossal, sky-scraping cylinders towered into the void, encrusted with countless pods that resembled nothing so much as insect eggs.

Looking down, the abyss was bottomless, save for the myriad electrical currents flashing and dancing within its depths.

Looking up, there was no visible end, the entire expanse choked with these towering cylinders of pods, and one was but a single speck among these infinite cocoons.

"This... what is this?!" Cultivators of the Yuanyang City like Zong Wu felt their hearts tremble violently at the sight.

Most importantly, hadn't they just been in that room with Morpheus and the other hackers?!

Could it be that everything just now truly was a dream?! Then what were these countless, densely packed cocoons of pods before them?

The Great White Deer had already collapsed to the floor, its legs turning to jelly, its eyes welling with tears: "How terrifying!"

Many cultivators from Yuanyang City could not help but instinctively take several steps backward.

"Boss, what exactly is this thing?!" Su Tianji’s face also betrayed her shock. Shouldn't this be a world similar to Grand Theft Auto 5? How had it suddenly transformed into this?!

The two young disciples beside Su Tianji clung to each other, letting out a barrage of shrill screams.

Even a certain great enchantress, who usually feared neither heaven nor earth, found her lovely face losing its color. Was reality truly like this?!

Even Nalan Hongwu and the others were now completely utterly bewildered.

"Master, what... what is this?!" Wang Xie instinctively retreated two steps, glancing at Gu Tingyun beside him.

Human fear stems from the unknown, but sometimes, the truth can be far more horrifying than the unknown itself!

Gu Tingyun of the Haotian Academy possessed an age and experience that perhaps only a few non-humans present could rival, and his cultivation was at the absolute pinnacle, yet at this moment, his weathered face completely changed color.

"What kind of monstrous thing is this?! Why does it give this venerable one such an ominous feeling?" A certain great demon who had originally crowded at the very front had already floated back into the middle of the crowd.

All the connectors hooked into Neo's body were forcibly ejected, and his entire form slid down the drainage conduit of the capsule, where he was subsequently rescued.

"Welcome... to the real world." On the hovercraft, Morpheus and the others wore coarse, tattered sweaters, as did everyone else—simple and austere, looking exactly like refugees who had survived a great cataclysm, a far cry from the sunglasses and black trench coats of before.

The surroundings comprised the mechanical, weathered interior of a hovercraft.

Everyone watched the real world before them, watched the people in the movie help Neo restore his bodily functions, watched the punctures riddling Neo's flesh, finishing the scene with expressions of sheer horror.

Fear stirred in their hearts—fear of the unknown and fear of the truth.

Yet beneath it, a powerful anticipation lingered, a craving for them to explain exactly what this spectacle was all about.

What was the truth?

What was reality?

They watched as the recovered Neo experienced that previous world once more—the plug snapped into the back of his head, his mind relaxed, and in an instant, his entire person materialized within a world of pure, blinding white.

A virtual world!

"Were we inside a computer program before?!"

"Is it so hard to believe?" Within the movie, the hacker Morpheus explained, "What is 'real'? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."

"The world that you know is such a world."

Reality and illusion were just that simple.

All the cultivators stared dumbfounded at the dialogue between the two before them.

This was the so-called reality?!

Merely electrical responses produced by one's own body?

It was superficial enough to make one want to laugh, yet at this moment, no one could bring themselves to smile.

"To think that making the 'illusory' real could be so simple!" For them, this kind of reality portrayed in the movie was already terrifying enough—relying on these so-called "signals" to trap a person's consciousness entirely within a virtual world.

Perhaps in their eyes, humans were no different from a more advanced and intricate spiritual artifact.

The conversation between the two continued.

"This is the world at the end of the twentieth century." Morpheus turned on a television, which displayed the world they had originally inhabited.

"We look at it as part of a 'neural interactive simulation' that we call the Matrix."

"We have very little information, only that at some point in the early twenty-first century, mankind was united in celebration of its own greatness. We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI."

"A singular consciousness that gave rise to a whole new generation of machines."

"AI?" Many cultivators of Yuanyang City were completely bewildered.

"AI?! Artificial Intelligence?" This sort of thing was something they had encountered before in Resident Evil. "The Red Queen?"

"The Red Queen? What is that?" Zong Wu asked in bewilderment. "What is artificial intelligence?"

The customers of the new shop clearly could not comprehend this terminology.

But the customers of the old shop were different; between the Resident Evil movie and Grand Theft Auto 5, this was not their first time encountering the term.

"Those who don't understand AI can go watch the Resident Evil movie," Lan Mo spoke up. "It is a form of intellect created by man, somewhat akin to an artifact spirit."

That calculating capacity unimaginable to mankind, coupled with an intellect that controlled every facet of the Hive like an omnipresent shadow, remained a lingering nightmare for many Resident Evil players.