79: Base defense and attack, and the remarkable “unconscious” counterattack.

At the same time Evelyn Li was being rescued by a "Shadow" agent from the death trap at the charity gala, racing toward the heavily reinforced refuge tunnels deep within the "Candle Dragon" Base in a specially modified armored engineering vehicle, a storm far more violent and cruel than any previous infiltration or probe had already erupted toward the "Candle Dragon" Base like a long-dormant volcano!

Morpheus Li's patience had completely run out, and his intent to kill was set. The "forced recovery" operation he promised was no idle threat. This time, the Prophet Foundation was no longer deploying the disguised "Firefly" team or the "Scavenger" assassins, but the "Thunder" Commando—an elite rapid-response armed force truly designed for frontal assaults and breaking through strongholds!

Several tilt-rotor vertical take-off and landing aircraft, sleekly designed and covered in the latest generation of variable-spectrum adaptive camouflage with engine noise suppressed to a minimum, peeled away from the night like ghosts. Utilizing ultra-low-altitude penetration capabilities far exceeding conventional aircraft and powerful electronic countermeasure systems, they cleverly bypassed the main detection sectors of the base's peripheral conventional air defense radars. Like cunning vipers, they quietly tore through a weak link in the base's long-range early warning network and successfully breached the inner air defense circle!

A piercing, deafening maximum-level combat alarm, capable of penetrating the thickest soundproofing material, instantly rang through every corner of the Candle Dragon Base! A cold, mechanical female voice repeated the gravest warning through speakers everywhere in an unwavering tone: "Warning! Warning! Unauthorized high-speed aircraft intrusion detected! Base entering Level 1 combat readiness! All non-combat personnel proceed immediately to designated reinforced shelters according to emergency protocols! Repeat, proceed to shelters immediately!"

In an instant, the atmosphere inside the base, which had been orderly and filled with a scientific research vibe, tightened to the limit! Heavy, multi-layered alloy protective gates, capable of withstanding direct hits from heavy bunker busters, slammed down from ceilings and walls with muffled hydraulic sounds and the roar of metal friction, quickly isolating corridors into independent defensive blocks. Researchers and clerical staff professionally set aside their work and hurried quickly and orderly toward the nearest shelter entrances, their faces tense but not panicked, clearly having undergone rigorous drills.

Meanwhile, the base's defensive forces were fully activated immediately. Members of the "Fortress" security force, clad in black heavy bulletproof armor and wielding electromagnetic rifles, rushed toward their respective defensive nodes like steel behemoths waking from slumber to occupy key firing positions. Ceilings in corridors and halls slid open, revealing the muzzles of automatic sentry machine guns; hidden panels on walls flipped, exposing laser defense array emitters; even energy barrier generators rose from the floor, preparing to construct the final close-range line of defense.

Inside the command center, the atmosphere was as heavy as a block of lead. On the massive circular main screen, red light dots representing the intruders were closing in on the base's core area at extreme speeds, while green light dots representing peripheral sensors and automatic defense nodes continuously blinked out. The shrill alarms, system prompts, and the urgent reports of operators intertwined to form a highly tense combat symphony.

"Report! Confirmed three 'Phantom' class high-speed assault craft have breached Airspace 3! The enemy is using high-intensity coordinated wide-band electromagnetic suppression and directional particle beam interference! Some of our radars and long-range communication arrays are blinded and paralyzed!"

"Ground vibration sensors have detected multiple abnormal seismic sources! Frequency analysis matches large-scale underground tunneling equipment! Suspect the enemy is using 'Subterranean Dragon' tactical drilling units, attempting to infiltrate through weak underground layers!"

"Cyber Warfare Center reporting! Encountering an unprecedented high-intensity, multi-source, intelligent mutant virus saturation attack! Firewall pressure is extreme! Some non-core subsystems have lost connection!"

Wang Jianguo stood tall at the command post, his face cold as ice and his eyes sharp as an eagle's, like a stabilizing force. Facing the tide of unfavorable battle reports, he showed no panic, and clear, calm, and decisive orders were fired off in succession like precision arrows:

"Activate the 'Golden Bell Shield' plan! Prioritize all backup power to the regional energy barrier systems! Cover the core R&D area and the command center! Maximum power output, regardless of loss!"

"Air defense missile arrays, switch to optical/infrared composite guidance mode, ignore electronic interference, and hunt freely! Knock those flies out of the sky for me!"

"'Fortress' Squads 1 and 3, proceed immediately to sectors B7 and C4 to intercept the underground infiltrators! Authorized to use all necessary force; kill on sight!"

"Technical support team, put everything into countering the cyber attack! Activate the 'Deep Blue' AI-assisted defense system! Prioritize the absolute security of the core command links, the energy control center, and the 'magpie bridge' laboratory! If necessary, physically disconnect all non-critical external connections!"

A battle of offense and defense occurring deep underground, yet representing the world's top military technology, instantly reached a fever pitch!

Above the base, a visible layer of pale blue energy barrier, rippling like water, suddenly emerged in the previously transparent air—the "Golden Bell Shield" system was fully engaged! Almost simultaneously, several blazing beams and high-speed missiles trailing exhaust slammed into it! The violent energy collision erupted into a dazzling rain of brilliant light and deafening roars, and the entire base seemed to tremble slightly under the shockwaves! Air defense missiles whistled into the sky trailing white smoke, engaging in a tragic pursuit and slaughter with the incoming enemy aircraft outside the barrier!

Beneath the ground, muffled explosions and intense gunfire could be heard faintly through the thick rock layers. The "Fortress" squads engaged in close-quarters combat with The Foundation's "Subterranean Dragon" commandos, who had suddenly burst through the earth in fully enclosed exoskeleton armor. Lasers flew across the narrow tunnels, and explosions rang out one after another; the struggle for every inch of ground was accompanied by blood and sacrifice!

In cyberspace, the invisible war was equally tragic. Countless malicious data streams, like a violent virus army, frantically assaulted the base's firewall, engaging in hundreds of millions of offensive and defensive maneuvers per second against the defense system led by the "Deep Blue" AI. System resource utilization soared to the red line, data streams scrolled frantically on the screens, and alarm logs refreshed at an alarming speed!

In the rehabilitation isolation zone, the piercing alarms and the faint vibrations of explosions made Excellence, who was undergoing simple cognitive training with Su Mu's help, shudder all over. The building blocks in his hand fell to the ground with a clatter. Like a startled small animal, he suddenly curled up, clutching Su Mu's arm tightly, his eyes filled with fear and confusion, his voice carrying a sob: "Squad Leader... is it thundering? It's so loud... the floor is shaking... I'm scared..."

Su Mu's heart was also in her throat. Intense fear and worry for her comrades made her palms cold, but she forced down her emotions and comforted him in as calm a tone as possible: "Don't be afraid, Excellence, it's okay. It's just... just the defense system outside doing a routine test, it'll be over soon." As she spoke, she followed the emergency protocol's instructions, quickly assisting the arriving security personnel to move Excellence to the specially designed super-reinforced shelter inside the rehabilitation room, which could withstand heavy bunker busters.

The alloy door of the shelter was over half a meter thick. Once closed, it almost completely isolated the outside noise and vibration, leaving only the soft emergency lighting and internal monitoring screens lit. The screen was divided into several frames, displaying the battle in various parts of the base in real-time. Although some frames were filled with static due to interference, the intense firefights, exploding energy barriers, and constantly flashing damage warnings were still clearly visible. Su Mu stared tensely at the screen, her fists unconsciously clenched, nails digging deep into her palms, silently praying for her companions who were fighting a bloody battle.

However, the situation took a sharp turn for the worse!

Suddenly, the entire base's lighting system underwent an extremely violent and abnormal fluctuation! The LED strips overhead flickered wildly, their brightness becoming extremely unstable as if they would go out completely at any moment! Even the lights in the shelter, powered by an extremely stable emergency power supply, were affected, becoming dim and bright in turns!

"Report! The main power center has been penetrated by an enemy cyber attack! The opponent used some unknown logic bomb targeting industrial control systems! The automatic regulation system is out of control! Voltage and frequency are undergoing catastrophic fluctuations! Multiple transformers and voltage regulators are sounding overload alarms! It's about to trigger a chain reaction of tripping failures!" In the command center, the energy supervisor's voice carried a desperate roar!

Once the power system completely collapsed, all defensive systems—energy barriers, automatic weapons, life support, communication, and command—would become scrap metal! The base would be completely exposed to the enemy's fangs!

When it rains, it pours! Almost at the same time, another fatal alarm rang frantically! It came from the most strictly guarded and highest-protection level "magpie bridge" project laboratory!

"Warning! The 'magpie bridge' prototype is experiencing uncontrollable feedback overload due to violent energy fluctuations! The core quantum coherence state is becoming unstable! Energy field intensity has breached the safety threshold by 200%! Irreversible quantum decoherence collapse is imminent! It will generate extremely strong, unpredictable electromagnetic pulses and spacetime metric disturbances! It will seriously interfere with or even permanently damage all precision electronic equipment and biological nervous systems in the base!" The chief quantum engineer's voice was filled with terror, as if reporting the coming of doomsday!

Inside the command center, everyone's faces instantly turned pale! The power collapse combined with the "magpie bridge" losing control was a double death blow! The base had fallen into an unprecedented, fatal crisis that could lead to a total collapse at any moment!

"We must stabilize that damn prototype immediately! Or we're all finished!" Wang Jianguo growled into the communicator, his eyes bloodshot.

However, all the main access routes leading to the "magpie bridge" laboratory had been completely blocked by enemy assault teams or intense crossfire! The success rate of a forced breakthrough was nearly zero, and there was simply no time left!

At this moment of utter despair, when almost everyone felt powerless to turn the tide—

Inside the super shelter, Excellence, who had been curled up in a corner, trembling from the faint sound of explosions outside and the eerie flickering of the internal lights, suddenly had an extremely abnormal reaction!

He suddenly clutched his head with both hands, letting out a groan of extreme agony that seemed to come from the depths of his soul! His body shook violently, his forehead was instantly covered in cold sweat, and his eyes rolled upward uncontrollably. His eyeballs vibrated at high speed, his pupils sometimes contracting like pinpoints and sometimes dilating to the edges, as if he were enduring some unimaginable, massive internal impact!

"Excellence! What's wrong?! Where does it hurt?!" Su Mu was terrified by his appearance and rushed over to try and support him.

However, just as her fingers were about to touch Excellence, he seemed to be driven by some invisible force and suddenly pushed her away! His strength was astonishingly great, nothing like that of a weak patient! Immediately after, he stood up unsteadily like a sleepwalker, his eyes hollow and devoid of focus, yet faintly glimmering with an extremely abnormal, almost frenzied, and inhuman light of reason!

His gaze locked directly onto the high-precision electronic sketchpad and pressure-sensitive pen in the corner of the shelter, which Su Mu had brought for his cognitive training. He stumbled over, grabbed the pressure-sensitive pen, and his fingers began to move frantically across the digital screen at a speed that left afterimages—a twitching pace that was completely inconsistent with his usual slow and clumsy state!

His movements were chaotic, yet possessed a bizarre, heart-palpitating precision and fluidity! It was as if his fingers were not controlled by his brain, but were transmitting a surging torrent of information from another dimension!

"Excellence! Stop! What is happening to you?!" Su Mu was both shocked and anxious. She tried to stop him but was deterred by the exceptionally powerful, unapproachable aura radiating from him.

"Don't touch him!" Wang Jianguo's urgent and hoarse voice suddenly came through the communicator (the signal was highly unstable due to interference and filled with static). "The technical department has detected... an abnormally high-intensity... information entropy flow in the shelter! He is the source! My God... he's... he's calculating! He's outputting information... in an incomprehensible way! Quick! Everything displayed on his screen! Now! Transmit it to the main control room in real-time! Fast!"

Hearing this, Su Mu suppressed the horror in her heart and immediately lunged toward the console. Her hands were trembling, yet she operated with exceptional speed, forcibly switching the output signal of Excellence's electronic sketchpad into the base's last remaining high-priority backup data channel, transmitting it in real-time to the main screen of the command center!

When Excellence's "graffiti"—which looked like ghost scripts yet contained a pattern so profound it was suffocating—appeared like a waterfall on the command center's massive circular screen, all the top scientists and engineers staring at the screen, including Wang Jianguo, froze in place as if struck by lightning. Their pupils suddenly contracted to the limit, and their faces were filled with unbelievable, almost terrifying shock!

"My God... these... these symbols... are... a highly compressed... set of non-linear partial differential equations?! Describing the... dynamic damping and re-stabilization process of an extremely unstable energy field?!"

"And this structure! This is clearly a... negative feedback control algorithm... based on the theory of quantum vacuum zero-point energy fluctuations?! How is this possible?! This is only a theoretical conjecture!"

"Look here! This iterative sequence! This is simulating... an adaptive cancellation code... for the specific spectrum electromagnetic attack we are currently facing?! How does he know the spectral characteristics of the attack?!"

"He... he is in an unconscious state... providing real-time, tailor-made solutions... for all the fatal crises we are currently facing?! This... this is simply a miracle!"

After a brief, deathly silence came a volcanic eruption of fanaticism and unbelievable excitement!

"Quick! Don't just stand there! Immediately follow the formulas and algorithms he provided! Try to adjust the frequency generator and phase modulator of the 'Golden Bell Shield' energy barrier!" Wang Jianguo was the first to react from the extreme shock. He almost roared the command, his voice trembling violently with excitement! This was a gamble he had never taken in his life—placing all hope on an incomprehensible miracle!

The technical team, at the fastest possible speed and with a near-pious frenzy, scrambled to input the heavenly formulas and parameters flowing from Excellence's screen into the control core of the "Golden Bell Shield" system.

A miracle happened!

The pale blue energy barrier, which had been flickering violently and unpredictably under the double blow of enemy attacks and energy fluctuations, as if it would collapse at any moment, stabilized instantly as if injected with a stimulant! The energy flow on its surface became more orderly and began to fluctuate at a strange, incomprehensible resonant frequency, actually beginning to partially absorb the energy of the enemy's attacks and partially deflect it at extremely sophisticated angles! The defense efficiency skyrocketed instantly!

"We're saved! The energy barrier has stabilized! Energy consumption has actually dropped!" a surprised shout came from the energy department!

Following that, another set of complex codes targeting the network attacks was entered into the Deep Blue AI defense system. The AI immediately generated and deployed a dynamically changing firewall with extremely bizarre encryption logic. Like a living thing, it quickly swallowed and neutralized the violent stream of virus attacks, and the pressure of the network attacks plummeted!

Finally, the riskiest step! With a desperate mindset, the technicians entered a set of the most complex and dangerous-looking formulas—concerning quantum state forced stabilization and energy guidance—into the emergency control interface of the "magpie bridge" prototype, which was already on the brink of explosion!

A suffocating scene occurred—the volatile prototype, emitting dangerous light and terrifying energy fluctuations, had its internal, frantically surging energy flows gently smoothed over by an invisible, incredibly delicate hand. It began to run slowly and obediently along new, stable paths, and the overload alarms gradually weakened and disappeared!

Not only that, but under the guidance of Excellence's formulas, the originally destructive abnormal energy field generated by the prototype was skillfully tamed and modulated. It then spread silently through the base's ventilation and circulation piping systems to all the combat zones... The Prophet Foundation's "Thunder" assault team members, who were attacking smoothly, suddenly felt a wave of intense, uncontrollable nausea, dizziness, and severe migraines without warning! Their sense of balance was completely lost, the scenes before them twisted and spun, their tactical goggles were filled with meaningless noise and distorted images, and even their trigger fingers stopped following orders! It was as if an invisible, yet incredibly powerful force was directly interfering with and attacking their vestibular nervous systems and visual processing centers!

"Report! Enemy attack intensity has plummeted! The enemy is experiencing large-scale, non-combat attrition symptoms! They are moving slowly, and their attacks have lost accuracy! It's as if they've collectively fallen into some kind of... physiological discomfort!" an unbelievable report came from the frontline observer!

"It's the 'magpie bridge' energy field! After being modulated by Excellence's formulas, it turned into a targeted, wide-range, non-lethal neural interference weapon! God... he... he had calculated all of this long ago?!" The chief scientist's voice cracked with extreme shock and excitement!

The battle situation underwent a stunning reversal under this series of incredible, "divine revelation"-like solutions provided by Excellence in his unconscious state! The Fortress squad took the opportunity to launch a fierce counterattack, advancing step by step, gradually regaining control of the corridors, and systematically dividing and surrounding the confused enemies!

In the super shelter, almost at the exact moment he finished writing the last set of formulas, Excellence seemed to have all his life force drained away. The pressure pen in his hand fell to the ground with a clatter. The abnormal light in his eyes suddenly extinguished, and his body slumped backward like a puppet with its strings cut. His face was as pale as paper, and his breathing became extremely faint and rapid, like a flickering candle in the wind, as he completely lost consciousness.

"Excellence!" Su Mu cried out and immediately rushed forward, holding him tightly in her arms. Feeling the coldness of his body and his weak heartbeat, her tears instantly broke through, rolling down like broken pearls. Her heart was filled with an inexpressible, tsunami-like shock, insurmountable heartache, and... a faint but incredibly real light of hope rising from the abyss of despair.

Excellence, this seemingly fragile young man with a fragmented consciousness, had once again, in a deep level of consciousness he himself could not understand or control, turned the tide in a way that surpassed modern human scientific understanding, saving the base and everyone in it.

Inside the command center, there was a post-disaster silence. Everyone looked at the various data points gradually stabilizing on the main screen and the young figure lying unconscious in the shelter, their eyes filled with awe, gratitude, and incomprehensible shock. Wang Jianguo slowly sat back in his command chair, took a deep breath, and closed his eyes, his fingers trembling slightly from exertion. He knew that what they had witnessed today was perhaps a true "miracle" beyond the boundaries of human cognition.