128: Chapter 128 Abandoned TV Station

The taxi bumped along the muddy dirt road for over ten minutes.

It finally stopped at the edge of an open space overgrown with wild grass.

"We're here." The driver pointed ahead. "The road is completely cut off further up; the car can't pass. You'll have to walk the rest of the way. Brother, take my advice: this place is eerie. Finish your filming and get out quickly."

Jiang Feng pushed open the car door.

"Thanks," he replied casually.

The taxi turned around, the driver slammed the gas pedal to the floor, and sped away instantly.

The red taillights vanished into the curtain of rain in the blink of an eye.

Jiang Feng stood where he was, sizing up the building before him.

The Abandoned TV station in North City—not even the breath of a living creature could be found around it, not even a stray dog.

Jiang Feng stepped through the puddles and walked toward the building's entrance.

The TV station's main doors had long been stripped and sold as scrap metal, leaving only a wide, gaping doorway.

He walked into the first-floor lobby.

It was deathly dark inside.

Jiang Feng didn't pull out his phone to use the flashlight; he stood in the center of the lobby with a casual expression.

If he hadn't guessed wrong, there were no armed guards or obstacles here right now.

The place was so quiet it was unsettling; the only sound was the drip-drop of rainwater falling through cracks in the roof onto the concrete floor.

"They've made this quite mysterious," Jiang Feng muttered in the darkness.

He soon found a guide.

Directly opposite him, at the stairwell, a tiny green indicator light was lit.

It was an emergency light powered by a battery; its green glow was extremely conspicuous in this dilapidated place.

Jiang Feng walked toward the green light.

He headed down the stairs, where large patches of damp wallpaper were curling and peeling off.

With every step he took, his soles crunched against the dust and gravel-covered stairs, making a creaking sound.

There was nothing on the first basement level, only empty echoes.

The indicator light was glowing further down.

Jiang Feng continued downward.

Second basement level.

Upon reaching here, the smell of mold could no longer mask another odor—the scorched smell produced by a large number of electronic components running for a long time with poor heat dissipation.

Jiang Feng followed the corridor to its end.

There was a heavy soundproof door here.

A rust-covered sign hung on the door with blurred writing that read: Master Control Room.

The door wasn't locked; it was slightly ajar, leaving a gap the width of a finger.

Light leaked out from inside.

Jiang Feng raised his foot and, without a moment's hesitation, kicked the door hard.

With a loud bang, the soundproof door slammed against the wall.

Jiang Feng stepped inside.

He had thought that since this person dared to call himself the Prophet, play with big data deduction, and treat the Jinghai City police like monkeys, this lair should at least be a high-tech base filled with holographic projections.

As it turned out, it was all complete nonsense.

This was just a dilapidated server room that even a scrap collector would reject.

Several rows of server cabinets were piled messily in the room, their cables hopelessly tangled in a chaotic mess.

A few old tables were pushed together in the center, topped with dozens of computer screens of various sizes.

In the middle of this pile of junk sat a wheelchair.

The wheelchair was facing away from the door.

Hearing the sound of the door being kicked, the wheelchair slowly turned around.

Jiang Feng saw the person in the wheelchair clearly.

The discrepancy was truly ridiculous.

It was a man, but he was so thin he looked skeletal, wearing an oversized shirt that was held up entirely by his bony frame.

His cheeks were deeply sunken, and his face was deathly pale and bloodless.

The most striking thing was his lower body.

His two legs were completely withered, shriveled like two pieces of rotten wood, resting limply on the wheelchair's footrests.

His hands rested on the wheelchair's control lever; his ten fingers were bony with prominent veins.

This was the mastermind behind the city-wide blackout and the moral kidnapping involving four hundred lives.

The Prophet.

He stared straight at Jiang Feng.

Those eyes held a bizarre sense of morbid madness intertwined with machine-like calculation.

A familiar synthetic electronic voice came from a broken speaker nearby.

"You've arrived, Anomalous Variable."

The Prophet himself didn't open his mouth.

Jiang Feng saw a black patch attached to his neck—an Electrolarynx.

This man had even lost the ability to speak, relying entirely on the device to convert throat vibrations into sound.

Seeing his appearance, Jiang Feng burst out laughing.

"I thought you were some kind of god with three heads and six arms."

Jiang Feng's voice was full of mockery. "After all that effort, you're just a paralytic who can't even stand up and can only hide behind a screen tapping on a keyboard?"

Jiang Feng pointed at the broken servers around them.

"You relied on this junk to cause such a huge scene? Your altar is quite pathetic."

A normal person would have been enraged by such insults.

The Prophet didn't get angry at all.

His eyeballs rolled, and the electronic voice spoke again.

"The shell is merely a useless vessel."

Madness filled the Prophet's eyes as he continued to spout his twisted logic.

"The human physical body has limits; it gets sick, ages, and is swayed by emotions—all low-level biological traits."

"Only algorithms, only absolute data deduction, are the ultimate truths of the world."

"In the network, I am an omniscient and omnipotent god; I have no need for these crippled legs."

Jiang Feng picked at his ear; he was getting tired of hearing this kind of anti-human preaching.

Wan Qing was a mad dog, and this Prophet who took over was just as mentally ill.

"Enough, stop farting," Jiang Feng interrupted. "You went to all this trouble to get me here just to fix your broken algorithm, right? Cut the crap. Where's the information about the cure for the terminal illness?"

The Prophet manipulated his wheelchair to back up half a meter.

This movement revealed a small table in front of him.

"You want the information? Fine, but you'll need to pay a small price."

Jiang Feng's gaze landed on the tabletop.

There were no electronic devices on the table, only two identical transparent glass cups.

The cups were filled with clear water.

The Prophet's withered fingers left the control lever.

He pointed at the two glasses of water, his mouth pulling upward with effort to squeeze out a weird smile that looked worse than crying.

"Since you think I'm just a cripple who can only hide behind a screen..."

The electronic voice echoed in the server room.

"...then we shall play the most primitive game."

"A life-and-death match without thermal weapons, relying purely on probability, to prove that my algorithm is absolutely correct."

The Prophet looked toward Jiang Feng.

"The game begins now."