Chapter 55 - 23: "The 500 Million Year Button

Chapter 55: Chapter 23: "The 500 Million Year Button

He shut his mouth, refusing to cooperate. He tried to think of other things—of Xia Li, of his parents’ theses, of physics formulas.

Nothing happened. All of this was permitted.

But the red countdown timer remained, suspended in the air. The number, 9998, didn’t change at all.

Before long, Yu Xian began to feel an indescribable panic.

The sense of nothingness was like an invisible hand, slowly crushing his sanity.

It had all the time in the world to wear him down.

Yu Xian gave in.

Compared to the endless void, the repetitive, tedious task actually felt like a form of "salvation."

He had no choice but to begin reciting.

"Article one, Dream Net login regulations..."

9997.

"...this behavior will be ingrained as your instinct."

9996.

Once, twice, ten times, a hundred times.

At first, Yu Xian was filled with anger and resentment toward this system and the TDI project.

But as the repetitions mounted, the anger vanished. Or rather, he had simply gone numb.

In its place came exhaustion, nausea, and a doubt about his own existence.

By the 500th repetition, he understood.

’This is the system’s so-called "dream memory mechanism."’

’This is the fucking "behavioral habit correction"!’

’This is the true underlying logic of TDI!’

In this dream space, test subjects were like machines, engraving a certain behavior or piece of information into the deepest part of their subconscious through thousands upon thousands of repetitive training exercises.

The process was excruciatingly painful, incredibly tedious, and utterly anti-human.

The reason for this type of training was precisely the dream’s forgetting mechanism.

TDI couldn’t control the biological instinct to forget, but they could, like Pavlov training a dog, create conditioned reflexes in the experiment subjects within their dreams.

But it was also because of this forgetting mechanism that once the subjects woke up, the agonizing memory of ten thousand repetitions would be wiped completely clean.

After waking, the test subjects would only find that they had somehow memorized the protocol’s contents, or had inexplicably developed a certain good habit.

They would think:

’This is a miracle!’

’This is the magical effect of TDI!’

’This is an easy and enjoyable "sleep-learning method"!’

Little did they know!

That their subconscious had already performed hundreds of hours of grueling labor in their dreams!

This was the essence of "reinforcement learning."

After listening to Wen Xiao at the coffee shop last time, he had researched AI training models—the two methods of reinforcement learning and deep learning.

TDI treated the human brain as a neural network model.

Through massive amounts of training in the dream, they adjusted the connection weights of the neurons.

Then they deleted the training data—the procedural memory—and kept only the results: the instinct.

"...this behavior will be ingrained as your instinct."

9000.

"...this behavior will be ingrained as your instinct."

8999.

At the 1,000th repetition, Yu Xian suddenly thought of the "smiling suicides."

At the time, he had thought their standardized smiles were like those of flight attendants trained before starting their jobs—the curve of the lips, the number of teeth showing.

But yesterday, Wen Xiao had told him that the deceased had barely smiled at all in the period before their deaths.

He had been puzzled then. If they hadn’t been trained, how had these people managed to produce such uniform and standard smiles?

Now, he had a terrifying theory—

’What if those people were also in this white hell, facing a mirror, pulling the corners of their mouths up, then down, up, then down...’

’...repeating it ten thousand times? A hundred thousand times? A million times?’

’Until that smile became a conditioned muscular reflex, carved into their very bones, one that didn’t require conscious thought?’

’And just like that, the expression was welded to their faces, so much so that not even death could strip it away?’

"...this behavior will be ingrained as your instinct."

5000.

"...this behavior will be ingrained as your instinct."

4999.

Halfway through, Yu Xian could no longer feel any pain.

He had already spent four full days in this white purgatory. For four days, he had repeated that same line without eating, drinking, or sleeping.

He entered a strange "flow state," or rather, a state of complete numbness.

He was no longer Yu Xian. He was a machine on repeat, a piece of code—whatever he was, he was no longer Yu Xian.

"...this behavior will be ingrained as your instinct."

Repetitions remaining: 100.

"...this behavior will be ingrained as your instinct."

Repetitions remaining: 10.

"...this behavior will be ingrained as your instinct."

Repetitions remaining: 1.

When the final recitation of "...this behavior will be ingrained as your instinct" was complete, the red counter hit zero.

A voice echoed in his mind:

"Training complete."

"Protocol contents have been ingrained as deep memory."

"Disconnecting you now."

The wall of text that had oppressed him for nearly ten days began to crumble. The white space trembled violently, and a powerful sense of weightlessness washed over him.

And all the exhaustion, numbness, and long-drawn-out torment of those ten days should have receded like an ebbing tide, as if someone were taking an eraser and slowly wiping away all the pain he had just experienced.

...

Yu Xian shot up from the sofa, panting heavily, drenched in a cold sweat.

His heart was hammering against his ribs as if it were about to burst out of his chest.

The bizarre Schoenberg piece, *Op. 25*, had stopped playing in his ear at some point, and his phone was almost out of battery.

Outside, rain poured down in sheets as thunder boomed.

The wall clock read: 7:10 PM.

Only... three hours had passed?

In the dream, the digital calendar had advanced a full ten days.

’Something’s wrong.’

’Why... do I still remember what happened in the dream?’