294: Chapter 294 "My Space is for You."

"My space is yours."

The countdown began ticking down from seventeen seconds.

After Su Xiaonuan finished saying "Please allow me to disobey," she cut off the private communication.

The public channel was still active.

But her voice did not come through again.

Four positioning pillars simultaneously retracted inward.

The bases of the pillars pressed into the scorched earth, and the black lines on the coordinate motherboard were dragged toward the center bit by bit.

Su Xiaonuan's small space began to shrink.

The categorized shelves disappeared from the edges.

Spare medicines, communicators, and filing cabinets, along with the paper inside, lost their outlines.

The words on the paper faded forward from the last line, as if someone had erased them with an eraser.

Lin Yuan pressed a palm against the space door frame.

Gray-white flowing water poured into the crack, forcefully propping open the closing entrance.

"Lift the lock."

There was no response from inside the door.

"Su Xiaonuan, lift the lock."

The countdown jumped to fifteen seconds.

Beneath Lin Yuan's palm, the space door frame emitted a low frictional sound.

A section of the flowing water was swallowed by the darkness, then gathered together again.

He looked at Tang Qiqi.

"Take over internal permissions."

Holding the coordinate motherboard, Tang Qiqi placed her ten fingers on the control panel.

[Highest steward permission declined.]

She pressed it three times in succession.

The result did not change.

"She has locked herself in," Tang Qiqi raised her head, "Great Demon King, forced ejection will tear Sister Xiaonuan's space apart together."

Lin Yuan did not move his hand away.

"Then tear it apart."

"She will die."

"I am talking about the space."

Tang Qiqi's lips moved, but she didn't dare to reply further.

Inside the door, Su Xiaonuan compressed the remaining space for the third time.

All the shelves collapsed toward the center.

Medicine boxes collided with each other, and glass bottles shattered all over the floor.

She did not bend down to pick them up, nor did she look at the employee ID badge still left on the filing cabinet.

The boundary shrank by one meter.

Her left fingertips lost their color.

The transparent area crept along her knuckles toward her palm, her wristband hung in mid-air, and its red indicator light was still flashing.

"If lifted now, the Zero Coordinate will return to the Small World along the link left by Wang Xue."

Su Xiaonuan's voice reconnected to the public channel.

Her ending notes were scattered by the spatial turbulence.

"The Prime Mother, Ma Chao, and all evacuation achievements will be invalidated."

She paused for half a beat.

"I did not wait for your command."

Lin Yuan stared at that transparent area.

"Because you knew I wouldn't approve?"

"Yes."

Thirteen seconds left on the countdown.

The Zero Coordinate suddenly split.

A second black scar emerged from behind the vanished filing cabinet, bypassed the central supplies, and pressed against the mental connection between Su Xiaonuan and the small space.

Her left hand began to lose its outline starting from the fingertips.

Transparency crawled across the back of her hand and vanished into her cuff.

Tang Qiqi rushed to the coordinate motherboard.

"Eject the holder!"

[Forced ejection failed.]

"Again!"

[Holder bound to internal locking structure.]

"Again!"

[Forced ejection failed.]

Tang Qiqi's fingernails struck the edge of the motherboard, producing several consecutive soft clicks.

She turned her head to look at Lin Yuan.

"Sister Xiaonuan will be reduced to zero along with her space."

The second black scar swallowed a box of medicine.

The space capacity dropped from thirty-eight percent to twenty-nine percent.

Su Xiaonuan did not look back.

She raised her right hand and locked three sets of retreat routes in succession.

Basic supplies reduced to zero.

Backup archives reduced to zero.

Private storage area reduced to zero.

With each completed lock, the black line was pulled toward the same coordinates.

Lin Yuan's voice pressed in from outside the door.

"Lift the lock."

Su Xiaonuan pressed the last button.

"I cannot."

"This is an order."

"Master, your Dimensional Space holds all of Tiangong's strategic supplies."

Her left arm was already transparent up to her shoulder.

"Grain, crystal cores, mecha, and the backup energy of the three locations are all inside."

"Once the Zero Coordinate bites down, Jiangcheng, Shanghai, and Zhe City will all be reduced to zero together."

"This risk cannot be taken."

Qin Yumo stood outside the door, her twin blades jammed into the door crack.

A crack was squeezed into the backs of the blades by the spatial pressure.

"I will go in and bring her out."

"If you go in, even you will be erased," Tang Qiqi said.

"Then I'll just hack faster."

Lin Naer spread her four wings, and the Holy Light locked onto the four corners of the door frame.

As soon as the tips of her feathers approached the abnormal coordinates, a small piece of them vanished.

She immediately retracted her wings.

"Master, the coordinates do not accept external force."

Jiang Yun gripped Wang Xue's wrist.

"Mom, think of a way."

Wang Xue leaned against the side of the control panel, her chest rising and falling with two consecutive missed beats.

Her connection with the Small World was still there, but half of it had been bitten by the Zero Coordinate.

"It has already entered the core."

Countdown: nine seconds.

Su Xiaonuan buckled the third space bridge into the isolation layer.

The black lines stopped spreading.

The fourth space bridge was connected.

The breach in Wang Xue's Small World stopped expanding.

Her arm, which had become transparent up to the shoulder, also stopped.

[Zero Coordinate internal closure completion rate: eighty-seven percent.]

Tang Qiqi recalculated the curves.

"As long as Sister Xiaonuan leaves, the bridge will lose its in-frequency support."

"The black scars will open an exit again."

No one spoke inside the control area.

The evacuees outside the door looked at that figure through the protective screen.

They had all seen Su Xiaonuan registering supplies, verifying battle losses, and arranging daily meals.

She wrote every single potion and every crystal core into the ledger.

Now, she had written herself into the loss column.

Lin Yuan connected to the highest permission channel.

"I no longer ask you to lift the lock."

He only said four words.

"Report real-time coordinates."

Su Xiaonuan lowered her eyelashes.

But her right hand opened the evacuation System a step earlier.

The white dot representing her flashed twice.

Afterward, it disappeared from the personnel roster.

The directional access request on Lin Yuan's wristband lost its target.

The Dimensional Space could not lock onto her.

Tang Qiqi stared at the emptied coordinate column.

"She erased her own positioning."

Su Xiaonuan dismantled the remaining space into dozens of groups of invalid data.

"That way, you won't be able to find me."

"Nor can you pull me into the Dimensional Space."

Lin Yuan did not reply.

A permission handover package was transmitted to his terminal.

Tiangong's highest steward permissions.

Resource scheduling for the three locations.

Mecha production lines.

Cold storage inventory.

Core member archives.

Pregnant women medical contingency plans.

Lin Motong's cake quota.

Tang Qiqi's weekly candy limit.

All permissions removed Su Xiaonuan's exclusive authorization item by item, transferring them to Lin Yuan's terminal.

Tang Qiqi looked at the screen, her voice stuck in her throat.

Lin Yuan looked at Su Xiaonuan through the space door.

"You are not inventory."

"This is not a loss you can approve."

Su Xiaonuan's right hand pressed on the control panel flinched.

The next second, she pressed down tightly again.

Countdown: five seconds.

Behind her, only that employee ID badge remained.

The black scar grazed past the edge, and half the face on the photo disappeared.

The old ID badge number was still there.

That was the item she received when she first entered the company before the apocalypse.

The girl in the photo wore an ill-fitting professional suit, her shoulders slightly shrunken, with her hands crossed in front of her.

Su Xiaonuan glanced at it.

She did not reach out.

"Lin Yuan."

For the first time, she did not start with "President Lin."

The spatial turbulence swept away the jasmine scent on her body.

"I cannot watch you exchange the space containing the entire Tiangong for me."

Her right hand was still pressing on the lock button.

"This time it's not a steward's judgment."

She raised her face.

"It is my own choice."

Lin Yuan turned his head.

"Qiqi, reopen Wang Xue's Small World core control interface."

Tang Qiqi was stunned for a moment.

"If we reopen it now, the Zero Coordinate will bite back along the old connection."

"Do it."

"Yes!"

Su Xiaonuan's small space shrank by another chunk.

Wang Xue suddenly grabbed the control panel.

"It's useless."

The spatial patterns on her arm lit up one by one.

"The core recognizes my active will."

"You can hold down the entrance, but you can't reach the highest permissions."

Lin Yuan looked at her.

"Hand over the authority."

Wang Xue did not let go.

"Once handed over, my Small World will no longer belong to me."

"Do you still have a choice?"

She lowered her head to look at her transparent left arm.

Jiang Yun stood by her side, her fingers clasping her mother's wrist bone.

"Mom, don't lock yourself inside anymore."

Wang Xue's lips pressed into a straight line.

Countdown: three seconds.

There was only a narrow slit left in the space door.

Most of Su Xiaonuan's figure had its outline cut away by the Zero Coordinate, and her right hand was still pressing on the locking device.

Wang Xue glanced at Jiang Yun, who was protected by Qin Yumo.

Then she looked at that transparent sleeve inside the door.

She raised her other hand.

Her fingertips pierced into her palm.

Blood dripped onto the spatial patterns.

One circle.

Two circles.

The core, which had originally rejected external Mental Energy, began to loosen.

[Small World highest authority unlocked by ten percent.]

[Thirty percent.]

[Fifty percent.]

Su Xiaonuan's small space shrank violently.

The Zero Coordinate was dragged by the new mental channel, and the black scars moved away from her body, crashing toward the space core.

Lin Yuan's flowing water pressed in accordingly.

Wang Xue dug her five fingers into the scorched earth.

"My space is yours."

She raised her head, her voice falling both inside and outside the door.

"And you must bring her back too."