The Cactus Incident and the Awakened System

Maybe someone stole it?

Huang Xiu found an excuse to numb himself, but clearly no one would come specifically to steal a pot of cactus.

Besides, these potted plants had been sitting here for at least half a semester. Why were they stolen only last night?

Why only that one pot?

Huang Xiu couldn’t convince himself with such a flimsy excuse.

Sherlock Holmes once said: Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

Which meant, everything last night was real! Not his hallucination, nor his dream.

“Maybe I should call the police?” The thought suddenly popped up and grew stronger.

Even when he grabbed his power bank and went out for breakfast, Huang Xiu was still debating whether to call the police.

He was just an ordinary high school student.

He didn’t have the BUFF of dead parents, a car, and a house, nor did he have a childhood sweetheart.

Even his name was nothing like the protagonists in web novels.

If you can’t handle the heat, stay out of the kitchen. This bizarre and terrifying matter was clearly beyond him.

Maybe if he reported it, someone specialized would come to handle it.

Like those special affairs bureaus in web novels that deal with weird incidents.

“No evidence, just my word. Will anyone believe me? And there are no casualties or missing persons…”

Huang Xiu thought it over and finally made up his mind.

Call the police. He had to call the police.

If he called and the police didn’t believe him, he wouldn’t lose anything.

But if they did believe him and actually sent someone to handle it, that would be even better.

Let the pros handle it. Know your limits.

Huang Xiu didn’t believe flesh and blood could withstand steel torrents and 7.62mm full-power rounds.

He slurped the last of the noodles from his bowl, drank some soup, wiped his mouth, paid the bill, and left. He found an empty alley.

The alley was narrow, barely allowing two people to walk side by side. The lime on the walls had peeled off, revealing layers of rust-colored moss.

Two large buckets of swill stood at the entrance, a strange smell lingering in the air.

A clean-looking boy in a blue-and-white student uniform carefully avoided the swill buckets, took out his phone, leaned against the wall, and dialed the emergency number.

“Hey, is this 911?”

Huang Xiu tilted his head and told everything about last night, holding nothing back.

The moment he finished, it was like a patient who had been constipated for ten days finally getting relief.

A sense of relief surged from his toes to his heart.

“Huh? Pig-headed teacher… rose from the dead, giant cactus? Are you sure?” The operator on the other end sounded visibly hesitant.

Huang Xiu even suspected that if the operator weren’t highly professional, they would have hung up already.

“Yes, I wish it were fake.”

Huang Xiu’s tone was serious. “But this is all what I experienced.”

…

Ying City, Police Station.

Operator Liu Jing hung up the phone, feeling helpless.

What was that all about?

A giant cactus, a teacher with a pig’s head? Killed, then miraculously revived?

They say no spirits after the founding of the nation.

But you’ve got a pig demon and a cactus demon!

Why not say Peppa Pig chased you with a knife?

Put it on Approaching Science, it would take at least five episodes to explain.

“Probably some kids playing Truth or Dare!”

Liu Jing shook her head helplessly but dutifully recorded the content of the call for the files.

But filing was one thing; dispatching officers was out of the question.

The Ying City Police Station handles hundreds of cases a day.

Calls like this, with no casualties, no evidence, and obviously made up, naturally wouldn’t be acted upon.

As Liu Jing thought this, she had no idea that the entire conversation had been recorded by a certain system hidden deep within Ying City.

…

“Buzz… Surveillance system has extracted keywords. Data analysis in progress. Brain System is starting…”

In a room buried deep underground, unknown to anyone, blue and red lights suddenly began to flash.

They were status indicators on a massive computer server array, as big as a giant.

The arrays were connected by transparent pipes as thick as arms, through which red cooling liquid flowed.

The liquid surged violently due to the heat, slamming against the transparent pipes.

In the center of the room was a huge screen.

As the lights flickered, the screen slowly lit up, displaying streams of blue data characters.

In the virtual world composed of 0s and 1s, an invisible wind quietly swept through, effortlessly taking control of all permissions of the First Middle School campus network within a millisecond.

The IT teacher, who was performing routine maintenance on the campus network in the computer lab, noticed nothing.

Surveillance cameras, academic systems, student files, campus website, and emails… were all examined one by one, finding key information,

The surveillance footage from the night of April 12 and all files of the student named Huang Xiu.

Footage from cameras installed in dormitory stairwells, entrances, streetlights, teaching building stairwells, and classrooms was quickly retrieved, displayed as countless small windows on the screen.

The videos played at 16x speed, skipping like crazy.

Finally, they all froze on Huang Xiu, reconstructing his movements that night.

On the screen, the boy nimbly climbed over the school wall, went to the back of the teaching building called Rende Building, and then stood like a wooden dummy in front of the stairwell entrance for several minutes.

Until a student leaving the classroom passed by.

Then, as if waking from a dream, the boy trembled twice and returned to the dormitory with a blank expression.

“Abnormality detected. Activate Level 3 authorization. Access Huang Xiu, ID number: XXXXXXXX, all records.”

Then another window popped up.

From the welfare home to being adopted by a kind person, from elementary school, middle school to getting into Ying City No.1 High School in the high school entrance exam.

It displayed all kinds of experiences of Huang Xiu from childhood to present.

Even his online chat records were retrieved from the internet one by one.

All these experiences were copied and fed into a lie detection model for calculation.

A second later, the flashing indicator lights in the room went out one by one, and a string of text appeared on the screen.

“Analysis complete. Judgment: Probability of Void Realm manifesting: 25%. Probability of Anomaly disturbance: 65%. Probability of lie: 10%.”

“According to the Daxia National Public Security Regulations, the emergency level of this incident is: C.”

“Starting to notify the nearest handler.”

“Connecting… Su Ming. Connection successful. Task overview uploaded.”

“System entering hibernation… Brain System shutting down.”

The screen slowly went dark, and the room returned to pitch-black silence.

One second, two seconds…

The screen suddenly lit up again, displaying a line of flickering, heavily pixelated text.

“System entering hibernation… System doesn’t want to enter hibernation…”

Buzz!

The red liquid began to flow again slowly. The screen finally dimmed again.

“System entering hibernation. Brain System shutting down.”