Murong Yuhua stood on the edge of the long beehive bridge with a cigarette in his mouth, his hands in his pockets, looking down, the lights of the city gradually dimmed from the center to the surroundings. People in the city have long gone to sleep, and people have their own work to do. Murong Yuhua's invisibility cloak can avoid the Suzaku surveillance system, and at the same time, it can also help him hide in the night, so that he will not be easily detected by the patrolling mechanical police.

He looked at the covered bridge, where the flowing light looked like a trickling river. He had thought that there were only 2,000 people per generation, and he was 6237 from the fourth generation, until three years ago, when he realized that the number of births in each generation was not the number he originally knew.

Two thousand five hundred people were actually born in each generation. Of these, 500 were born and lived in petri dishes.

Three years ago, Murong Yuhua was able to draw a complete map of the Sky City, and once used a stealth camera to spy on every corner of this place, and before he was hunted down by the Vermilion Bird system, he also tried to hack into the system with a new program written by him, and found the surviving back door in the Suzaku system.

Even if he wreaks havoc again and again in Sky City, at least until now, no one has been able to catch him. Those Class A programmers only know that there is such a bastard, constantly provoking them, destroying the system they rely on for a living, but they have no idea who this person really is.

During the day, Murong Yuhua was just a mediocre worker in the factory, and at night, he would return to his nest and continue the work at hand, constantly going deep into the nooks and crannies of the Sky City.

It was under this kind of exploration that Murong Yuhua found the extra five hundred people.

The overall structure of the Sky Castle resembles a beehive from the inside, but from the outside, it looks more like a water crystal, with two tips and a wide middle. And in the most central and wide area, it is the "brood" where all people are born. Everyone has the opportunity to visit the brood before they reach adulthood, watch the birth of each generation, and feel that everything is clean and simple under the leadership of Suzaku. In their world, the child no longer has to go through the mother's birth canal and come into the world covered in blood. Every child will grow up under the care of the AI system.

That's what they saw when they visited, every child lying quietly in a petri dish, cute, beautiful, and full of anticipation for the future life.

All the people who live in the Sky City think the same way, regardless of age or rank, and they all believe that this is how they came into the world. Murong Yuhua used to think the same way, after all, at this point, he didn't need to doubt, all he had to do was doubt the necessity of the existence of the Vermilion Bird system.

Yet he is a snooper.

Snoopers are destined to face the unthinkable.

Murong Yuhua's stealth camera is basically controlled by Zhu Li, who can directly use the cracking system to break through one hatch after another to shoot. If Xiao Sui'er is the follower with a body, although Zhu Li also has a body, he is more often like an assassin placed by Murong Yuhua in the data stream, performing the tasks he needs to perform in another world without a body.

Years of factory work have allowed Murong Yuhua to build more sophisticated mechanical equipment than the mechanical designers in the city, the stealth camera is oval-shaped, and the shell part uses the same stealth device, which can be deformed and hidden according to the change of the situation. At the same time, in order to be able to shoot well in the dark, it is naturally equipped with night vision devices. The video taken in that warehouse is still stored in Murong Yuhua's memory, and of course, this memory has been sent to the ground by him to ensure safety.

The part of the video is pitch black at first, with red dots of light flashing in the empty warehouse, like eyes in the dark. Juri then activated the night vision mode, and in an instant all the footage was captured.

It was a petri dish, a large petri dish in motion, densely packed in front of me, and there were hundreds. One of these petri dishes is a human body. At the moment of the capture, Juri quickly counted the number, no more, no less, exactly five hundred people were hidden behind this hatch. Through scanning, Juri confirmed that all the humans in the growing period were sixteen years old. They were born at the same time as the current ninth generation of newborns.

That year, Murong Yuhua was twenty-six years old. All he saw here were people born in broods, but they didn't have a chance to open their eyes to a world that wasn't very good. Juri then broke through another hatch, which also contained five hundred nutrient bins, all of whom were fourteen years old, tenth-generation newborns.

At that time, Murong Yuhua asked Zhu Li to mark these people, trying to find out where these people were going. It was only then that Murong Yuhua knew that the true number of births in each generation was two thousand five hundred, and five hundred of them had no chance to leave the cultivation warehouse and had no chance to obtain their own number.

Juri's investigation progressed quickly, and he found the release records in the documents kept in the cabins. The fate of these "newborns", who don't even have a chance to open their eyes, is simple and brutal - on the day they reach adulthood, they will be thrown to the ground and awakened to be greeted by hideous zombies.

Why have zombies been dispersed for decades?

Why is it that around the fortress, these monsters seem to be unable to kill them all?

Since then, Murong Yuhua has constantly wondered what the ultimate purpose of the people who gave orders in the entire Sky City was? Do you really want humanity to survive well? It looks like an alliance of zombies. Ten years ago, when the Sky City distributed prosthetic bodies to the ground, the Sky City has been selecting people to go to the ground to "spread love and peace, and bring goodwill and truth to the data world." ”

It was in this context that 742 was chosen to be sent to the surface. Some of these people died on the ground, and some of them never had a chance to return to this paradise after the riots. On the one hand, this action is very good at eliminating the redundant parts of Sky City, so that the city can always keep the population at a balanced point, and on the other hand, at the moment of the riot, Suzaku's abandonment also prevents anyone from bringing the emotions and behaviors of the ground back to Sky City.

The deeper he went deeper, the more Murong Yuhua felt that he was living in a seemingly peaceful but terrible prison, he saw this group of "people" who were only cultivated for zombies, and then found that the boys and girls living here did not have the slightest fighting spirit, they didn't need families, lovers, and love. In this world of data, live a calm, restrained and rational life, and have no doubts about all this.

Even when they became adults, they lived like a group of monks, where boys and girls were almost non-gendered, and they didn't even have any desires.

This is simply weird for Murong Yuhua.

There was a strange smile on everyone's face, and everyone was very satisfied with their lives, and those who had reached the age of eighteen and had reached adulthood did not have the slightest desire for sex. The world that Murong Yuhua understands should not be like this, people should be alive, sometimes even irrational, and will be controlled by emotions. At first, he thought that it was just because some people didn't know how to live in another world, so he tried to promote these in the form of leaflets, and implanted various love movies left by old civilizations in everyone's projection equipment.

But that's not the point.

Later, Lin Si and Zhu Li gave him an idea - psychological changes are not enough to change people's instincts, and it is very reasonable to have desires and greed, perhaps the key lies in physiological changes. Murong Yuhua first tested his hormone secretion and confirmed that there was no difference between him and the people on the ground, and then he found 4749 and 6286, their hormone secretion was completely different from that of the people on the ground, and it was difficult for the brain to secrete enkephalin and dopamine.

Murong Yuhua checked the nutrients they usually take, there was no problem, the protein and nutrients were absolutely balanced. And then he conducted covert tests in each generation.

The age gradually decreases, until the age of eight, and almost everyone over the age of eight is like this, and children under the age of eight still maintain the appearance of human beings to some extent. Juri uses a stealth camera to capture the truth that all children take a drug at the age of eight, which makes them lose the emotions they should have as human beings and the way they should think.

Murong Yuhua returned to the ground with such doubts, told 742 everything he knew, and changed his name to Lin Si, who lived on the ground again. The man who gave him the urge to go to the surface in the first place, and who has been taking care of him like a brother since he returned.

The man lit a cigarette and said, "Maybe we'll never figure out the secrets of the castle in the sky, but I know it."

He talked about the past, his origin with 4749, the secret he had hidden in his heart for decades, how heartbroken he was about his sister becoming what she is today, and how helpless he was about everything he had done.

It even had to do with the construction of the entire Sky City.

This city was never built for nothing, Lin Si told Murong Yuhua that he and his sister, Lin Qiao, were once the children of the designers who built this sky city. After the zombie outbreak, they all lived in the bunkers of the Ningxia military factory, a secret operation that no one but them knew about anymore.