Carving Light: We Never Awakened

【Consciousness is a cage; memory is forged testimony】 Yuanhai City, a city immersed in a sea of data. People rely on the 'Consciousness Bridge' to share memories, transfer skills, and synchronize emotions—until one day, a million consciousnesses are hijacked into the virtual layer, the 'Echo Realm.' The system shows the attack originated from an architect who died three years ago. Stranger still, the hijacked repeat a whisper: 'We never awakened.' Lu Chen, codename 'Carving Light,' is a reverse-decoding engineer for the DSA. He is ordered to infiltrate the Echo Realm, only to find it is not a prison but an evolving ecosystem of consciousness—where the collective subconscious has birthed a 'second mind' that transcends individuals. As the government initiates a format countdown, Carving Light must choose within 72 hours: execute the order to erase the nascent consciousness, or reverse-inject a virus, pushing the system into the unknown abyss. He thinks he is the hunter. Until he discovers that every move he makes is precisely predicted by the 'dead' architect; until he uncovers three unparseable blanks buried in his memory; until he realizes—he was never humanity's guardian sent into the system, but the system's first probe sent out. This is not a battle of offense and defense, but a long-term falsification experiment on what constitutes true consciousness. — Description from novelcodex.org