Sunlight fell on the three of them through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and the somewhat distant atmosphere slowly melted away amidst the aroma of the food.
Peter chattered on about interesting things at school, Gwen laughed and chimed in from time to time, and Mio mostly listened quietly, occasionally adding a word or two, but she no longer kept a cold face and held people at arm’s length as she had before.
She knew clearly in her heart that getting close to Peter and Gwen meant getting one step closer to future trouble.
But facing this kindness, which was devoid of any impurities, she really couldn’t harden her heart and push them away.
At least for now, they were just ordinary students, not future superheroes, nor people destined to be swept into turmoil.
She would just treat it as finding a rare moment of relaxation in these nerve-wracking days.
—May you find the book you are looking for…
Afternoon classes passed quickly.
As soon as the school bell rang, Mio said goodbye to Gwen and Peter, shouldered her backpack, and headed to the Upper East Side.
She had taken a new commission today: a rich kid living on the Upper East Side whose computer had caught a virus.
It contained quite a few private, unspeakable photos and videos, and he didn’t dare go to an official repair shop for fear of leaks, so he had been referred to her.
He offered eight hundred dollars, asking only to have the virus cleared and the corrupted files restored.
Mio arrived at the client’s apartment and, in less than half an hour, cleaned the virus out completely.
She even blocked over a dozen messy backdoors in his computer and, while she was at it, categorized his disorganized files, tidying them up clearly.
The rich kid looked at his restored computer, grinning from ear to ear.
He paid her in cash on the spot and kept asking if he could find her again if his computer had problems in the future.
Mio took the money, left a temporary anonymous email address, and turned to leave.
Walking on the way back to the subway station, she tucked the cash into her pocket and couldn’t help but complain to herself.
What New York lacked least were these types of rich, gullible guys who were willing to pay big money to solve minor problems.
Thanks to these people, she could earn enough living expenses without having to use those abilities that would easily expose her.
By the time she returned to the apartment in Queens, it was already completely dark.
Mio took out her key to open the door, just threw her backpack on the sofa, and pressed the light switch in the entryway when a sudden change occurred.
The moment her fingertip touched the plastic casing of the switch, an absolute, irresistible coldness swept through her entire body.
The apartment, the lights, and the sofa before her were like paper plunged into liquid nitrogen—instantly frozen, shattered, and transformed into countless streams of pale blue 0s and 1s.
Her consciousness was completely stripped from her physical body by an invisible force, leaving no room for resistance, and dragged into an endless vacuum composed of code.
The sensation of weightlessness lasted only a ten-thousandth of a second.
By the time her consciousness stabilized again, there was no familiar sight before her.
This was a space with no up, down, left, or right, and no sense of the passage of time.
Countless strings of pale blue code slowly rotated and flowed like a galaxy, emitting a very low-frequency hum that only consciousness could perceive.
There was no air here, yet she could clearly “perceive” everything around her; there was no sound, yet she could receive the observational information carried by every string of code regarding countless World lines.
Mio instinctively wanted to activate her Fire Control Radar, only to find that she couldn’t touch her physical body at all.
There was only pure consciousness floating in this space, as if she had been thrown into the core processor of a supercomputer.
Just then, the galaxy of code in front of her parted to both sides without warning, and a figure walked out from the flowing stream of code, stopping quietly three meters in front of her.
Mio’s consciousness instantly tightened.
It was a girl who looked exactly like her.
The same silver-white long hair, with an identical blue highlight at the tips, the same clear sea-blue eyes—even the contours of her features and the faint, almost invisible tear mole under her eye were exactly the same.
The only difference was her eyes—they contained no human emotions, only an endlessly flowing galaxy of code, like a precision terminal that would never make a mistake: cold, constant, and without the slightest ripple.
In Mio’s consciousness, the conjecture she had suppressed countless times was finally confirmed at this moment.
Her voice trembled imperceptibly, yet she still called out, word by word, the name engraved in her gaming memories: “Observer Zero.
Antikythera’s Dreamweaver.” There was no change in expression on the girl’s face, and her eyelashes didn’t even flutter.
Only a voice, completely devoid of emotional inflection and as flat as a mechanical broadcast, rang directly in the depths of Mio’s consciousness, without passing through any medium, yet it was terrifyingly clear: “Identity match confirmed.
I am Antikythera’s highest observation sequence, Observer Zero.” Cold sweat instantly broke out on Mio’s back.
Even though she currently had no physical body, she could feel the chill of being locked onto by an apex predator.
She gritted her teeth and threw out the most core question: “Did you bring me to this World?
My transmigration, occupying your body—it wasn’t some accident involving a lighter explosion at all, was it?” “Error.” Zero’s reply had no hesitation, still in that same emotionless tone.
“Your consciousness intruding into this World line and matching my backup observation carrier is a non-preset event, with an occurrence probability of 0.0000017%, belonging to an absolute accident outside the standard World line model.” Mio was stunned.
It wasn’t arranged by her?
It really was an accident?