They say I'm a world-destroying anomaly.

Chapter 37 The Final Level

In a small meeting room of the Chengmingxing Branch of the Anomaly Management Bureau, Cheng Xu and Hu Zhou sat facing each other.

On the spaceship returning from Golun Star to Chengming Star, Cheng Xu took the initiative to ask Director Hu if he could have a chat with him.

Hu Zhou naturally had no reason to refuse.

Furthermore, under the current circumstances, being able to engage in an equal conversation with this "final-level anomaly" is something that the Chengmingxing Branch and even the entire Anomaly Management Bureau would be eager to achieve.

Looking into Hu Zhou's eyes, Cheng Xu took the initiative to ask:

"Director Hu, you're not just the director of the Abnormal Control Section, are you?"

When Cheng Xu looked down on everything happening on Golun Star through the planet's will, he saw Director Hu skillfully piloting an exoskeleton mecha and fighting against the Crystal Rock Man.

Her skills and abilities are proficient and capable, and she is no less capable than Fu Chen and Xue Zijing, the two full-time combatants of the Special Operations Division.

Even though Hu Zhou mentioned that he had served in the Special Operations Division, this was clearly not the level of combat capability that a civilian director should have.

"...I belong to the 'Worker Bee' special operations team, which is directly under the General Administration, and I serve as its captain."

Before this conversation, Hu Zhou had a brief exchange with the branch director, Ke Bo.

In the communication, Kober conveyed the instructions from the Director General: Do not hold back, and answer all of Cheng Xu's questions frankly.

Hu Zhou could fully understand the bureau chief's intentions.

After all, when faced with an entity that can rewind time and space on a planetary scale, any scheming or machinations seem utterly ridiculous.

Since that's the case, it's better to be honest. At least the other party has shown a positive and friendly attitude towards the Administration Bureau, and their emotions are stable.

Hu Zhou unconsciously thought of everything he had experienced on Golun Star not long ago.

As soon as the combat command launched the space-based weapon, he, Fu, and Xue, who had already received advance warning, immediately moved away from the battlefield to avoid the impact on the core area.

The giant lava tree shattered under the power of the space-based weapon. He and his two companions intended to wait for the aftershocks to dissipate before entering the ruins to finish up, but they found that the ground beneath their feet began to tremble and crack.

The exoskeleton is an elite piece of equipment for individual combat within the Anomaly Management Bureau, but it's no different from paper in the face of the impact of the shattered star.

The invisible shockwave tore the mecha apart in an instant, crushing his entire body into dust, leaving him no time to even feel the pain.

His consciousness drifted and dissipated into the infinite heights, his last thought being, "So this is what death feels like."

But at a certain moment, his consciousness, which should have dissipated, began to regroup, and his body also "grew" out of thin air from the spot where it had been.

Hu Zhou witnessed his body recover and felt its vibrant life force.

He also saw the exoskeleton mech, which had turned into fragments, reassemble around his body, and the damaged parts became as good as new.

This is simply a miracle.

At that moment, only this one thought remained in his mind.

Although he hadn't witnessed it firsthand, Hu Zhou had already guessed the source of this miracle. Later, seeing Cheng Xu emerge from the core area confirmed this guess.

Hu Zhou understood that if it weren't for Cheng Xu, he would have been stuck on Gelun Star forever.

With this in mind, Hu Zhou revealed his true identity to Cheng Xu without hesitation.

"A special operations team of worker bees?"

After a brief moment of thought, Cheng Xu retrieved information about the name from his memory.

"Is it the Worker Bee Action Team, one of the General Administration's elite action teams that has resolved hundreds of anomaly-related incidents?"

Is Director Hu actually the captain of this action team?

"That's right. The worker bee team received an urgent mission six months ago, and all members rushed to the Chengmingxing Branch."

"Including Xiang Sicun, Yu Xiang, and others, they are all members of the worker bee team."

Cheng Xu had actually been mentally prepared for Hu Zhou's confession.

After discovering that Hu Zhou's identity was not as simple as it seemed, and combined with the unique characteristics he exhibited, he had already guessed many things.

For example, when he joined the company, Hu Zhou was already the director of the Abnormal Control Section.

He concealed his identity and played the role of director within the Chengmingxing branch, and his target was very likely Cheng Xu himself.

Based on this, Hu Zhou deduced that the Bureau of Anomalies had discovered his unusual nature at least six months ago and had assigned someone to deal with it.

Given this premise, the fact that all his colleagues were special operations team members didn't surprise him as much.

"Director Hu, may I ask, from the Bureau's perspective, what exactly am I?"

Cheng Xu asked the question that had been nagging at him.

He has been in this world for twenty-two years, and has always existed as an ordinary person.

Whether in life, studies, or later in his career, Cheng Xu always felt that he was just an ordinary person with a soul from another world.

But when he heard that voice, that cry for help from the will of the planet Golun, the whole world seemed to change.

At that time, because of what Gray had done, and after seeing the future scene of the planet exploding and countless innocent lives dying, an exceptionally strong and pure anger ignited in his heart.

He didn't want any of this to happen; he wanted to prevent the disaster from occurring; he wanted to send that beast, Grayshaku, to hell.

Cheng Xu recalled the scene at that time. He took a step forward and crossed the distant starry sky, stepping onto the land of Golun Star and arriving in front of Gray Shu.

Immediately afterwards, the shattered planet was restored to its original state according to his wishes, and the Crystal Tomb burned out in his will, leaving behind new seeds of life.

By this time, Cheng Xu had clearly realized that he was no ordinary person.

Not only is he not an ordinary person, but he also possesses a kind of extraordinary ability that he himself has never been aware of and that does not fall within any scientific scope.

"What am I, really?"

Such questions began to linger in his mind.

He began to wonder about his own existence and nature.

Cheng Xu knew that he could get more information about himself from the Bureau of Abnormalities and from Hu Zhou.

Upon hearing his question, Hu Zhou was taken aback at first, but quickly breathed a sigh of relief.

Hu Zhou had thought that after this incident, the young man in front of him would have a comprehensive understanding of his own nature.

Just like in those stories and folk tales, the ancient gods who were originally in a dream only realize that they are ancient gods after they wake up.

But it seems that even the ultimate level abnormality itself is still shrouded in mystery regarding its own characteristics.

Hu Zhou handed Cheng Xu the transparent tablet he had on hand:

"Take a look, this is the file the Administration has created for you—as an anomalous file."

Cheng Xu took the tablet, and his gaze froze as soon as he glanced at the information on it.

[Cheng Xu (tentative name)] (Suspected terminal anomaly)

Number: S-009

Description: A dangerous anomaly first identified by Chengming Star due to severe damage to A-057 [Myriad Crystal Eyes]...

Am I a terminal exception?

me?

Cheng Xu was deeply shaken. As an employee of the Anomaly Management Bureau, he knew all too well what a terminal anomaly meant in interstellar society.

It is not the end of destruction, but a cancerous mutation of the laws of nature. It is the beginning of fluctuations in physical constants, the stagnation of the speed of light in local stellar regions, and the reversal of gravity in dark matter clusters—a sign that the underlying logic of the universe is being hollowed out. Like an unprovable axiomatic flaw suddenly appearing in the edifice of mathematics, the ultimate anomaly is a self-contradictory contradiction in the very foundation of existence.

Its terror lies in the crushing reduction of cognition. The scientific paradigm that humanity is so proud of becomes child's scribbles in its presence, the law of entropy increase fails in quantum foam, and even time is shattered into discontinuous frames due to terminal anomalies.

It renders all observers blind and all thinkers fools, as if asking ants to understand the aesthetics of a supernova explosion.

Its deeper meaning lies in the existential abyss. When the membrane structure of parallel universes is abnormally torn apart, trillions of civilizations annihilate each other in a mirror superposition. It reveals the cruel nature of the universe: all matter and consciousness are merely ink stains dripping from the tip of a pen by a higher-dimensional consciousness. The ultimate anomaly is precisely that pen dipped in nothingness, erasing the written epic word by word.

Whenever a terminal anomaly occurs, interstellar society will reshape its understanding of the world and the anomaly.

That is the true end.

Of all the terminal anomalies, Cheng Xu was most impressed by the description of S-05 [Seed of Logical Paradox] in the archives:

In some unknown corner of the vast universe, an anomaly that cannot be detected by conventional means is quietly emerging. It has no fixed form; rather, it is more like a manifestation of a logical error that constantly replicates and refers to itself.

Sometimes it briefly manifests as a visual geometric paradox, such as a dynamically distorted Penrose triangle or a projected light spot on a Klein bottle; other times it transforms into a strange whisper that cannot be fully recorded by any language, is easily forgotten yet lingers deep within the consciousness.

Its core characteristic is "existence is negation"—it exists stably in every moment of reality, silently eroding the underlying logical framework upon which the universe operates. The unchanging laws that form the basis of all things, such as the law of causality, the law of identity, and the law of excluded middle, begin to loosen and disintegrate under its influence.

The most direct manifestation of this anomaly is that the foundations of the physical universe are shaken. Within the region affected by its influence, physical constants become unreliable.

The speed of light may suddenly slow down to the point of crawling like a snail in a certain region, but then instantly reach infinity in the next moment; the direction of gravity becomes chaotic and disordered, sometimes pulling matter towards the Earth's core, and sometimes throwing it into nothingness, causing planetary structures to collapse and reassemble like sandcastles.

Even the strong and weak nuclear forces that maintain the stability of the atomic nucleus become unbalanced. The atomic nucleus may become exceptionally solid and indestructible, or it may become so fragile that it dissipates as easily as smoke. The properties of space itself are distorted, becoming viscous or slippery. The shortest distance between two points is no longer a straight line, and Euclidean geometry completely fails.

The timeline is broken into countless fragments, with scenes from the past, present, and future potentially overlapping in the same area, and the causal relationships between them completely reversed and confused. For example, one might witness a building ruin appear out of thin air before an explosion occurs.

Matter loses its inherent "identity"; a rock, under observation, may simultaneously possess the electrical conductivity of a metal and the fluidity of a liquid. The law of conservation of energy is broken; energy appears out of thin air and disappears just as suddenly. This is like the universe's stable operating system suddenly being infected with a deadly virus.

What's even more disheartening is its contamination of the cognitive abilities of intelligent life. Any conscious individual, whether human or advanced AI, will suffer irreversible corruption in their thought processes once they perceive this anomaly or its derivatives. Victims will be trapped in an unsolvable paradoxical loop of "this statement is false," completely losing the most basic ability to judge "truth" and "falsehood," "possibility" and "impossibility."

Scientists' meticulously designed experiments can be self-contradictory, and the derived formulas can become distorted and obliterated on paper; military commanders cannot formulate coherent plans because the premise of any decision is negated by themselves the moment they think; the core code of AI gets stuck in a logical loop, outputting chaotic superposition results.

The group falls into collective hysteria, explaining the distorted reality before them in ways that sound "reasonable" but are utterly absurd, based on flawed axioms. For example, they might interpret the thermal motion of molecules as countless tiny sprites dancing, and even fanatically defend this distorted "new logic." This is a complete formatting of the rational thinking foundation upon which intelligent civilization depends for survival.

In the core area affected by the anomaly, even the meaning of "existence" itself becomes blurred.

Things can appear in completely different or even contradictory states due to the observer's own logical confusion. Macroscopic objects may be in a superposition state that never collapses, like Schrödinger's cat, or they may even disappear completely from all physical records and perceptions for a short time, leaving only a chilling "emptiness".

A person may be simultaneously "confirmed" by different witnesses to be in different locations and possess different identities; an object may appear to one person as a teacup for drinking, while to another it may appear as a poisonous snake that can bite, both exhibiting corresponding physical characteristics. Historical records and personal memories become unreliable, and the existence of key events becomes a mystery. This leads to a profound, collective existential crisis, with individuals and civilizations developing fundamental doubts about "who I am" and "what the world is," often ultimately triggering large-scale mental breakdowns or waves of nihilism.

The most challenging aspect is its powerful contagiousness and proliferative capacity. Attempts to understand, describe, record, or even merely imagine its behavior can lead to the replication and mutation of its core paradoxical logic fragments in thought or information carriers, giving rise to new and more complex "subspecies".

A research report about it may itself be a logical trap, infecting the reader; a video recording its image may distort the logic circuit of the playback device when played, or even drag the viewer directly into a local abnormal field; a survivor's nightmare about it may become a new source of infection, spreading quietly among the population.

This makes any form of information blockade extremely difficult, and any contact and thought itself becomes a dangerous means of dissemination.

After the initial shock, Cheng Xu gradually calmed his turbulent emotions and continued to review the information Hu Zhou had provided him.

He soon understood why the Anomaly Management Bureau categorized itself as the most mysterious and dangerous anomaly in the world.

[Myriad Crystal Eyes] was severely injured simply because it cast a glance at him.

The "Resentment Cultivation Box" changed its very essence simply because of a few words written in its action report.

In addition to this time

In that light, I might actually be a terminal anomaly?