907: Chapter 92 Going to Collect Junk

Liu Xing watched the soaring transmission progress bar, feeling his worldview collapse.

"Don't ask, just work."

Shen Yan stared at the progress bar.

1%... 30%... 50%...

Time passed second by second.

The temperature in the basement seemed to drop even lower.

Chen Guangke was stomping his feet from the cold, the sound of his teeth chattering exceptionally clear in the quiet hall.

"Brother Yan, why do I feel like... someone is watching us?"

Chen Guangke hunched his neck, suspiciously glancing at the shadows around them.

Shen Yan didn't turn around.

Because he felt it too.

That wasn't a human gaze.

It was awake.

The stream of code on the screen suddenly became chaotic.

Lines of English text suddenly flickered in the center of the screen, forming a symbol that looked like a smiling face, yet also like a grimace.

"It... it's trying to reverse-hack our system!"

Liu Xing cried out in terror.

"This thing has consciousness! It wants to crawl through the network cable into our servers!"

"Then let it crawl."

Shen Yan's voice was terrifyingly calm.

"It's what I want."

"But it will devour our original titan one!"

"Devour?"

Shen Yan let out a cold laugh.

"That's called fusion."

"If it's garbage, let it be swallowed. If it's gold, after fusion, it will only be purer."

Shen Yan placed his hand on Chen Guangke's shoulder, calming him down slightly.

"We don't need to tame it."

"We just need to give it a bigger cage, which is our computing center."

The progress bar finally jumped to 10%.

With a sharp beep, the black cube stopped operating.

The waterfall of code on the screen disappeared.

In its place was a simple Chinese dialogue box.

It was a message sent from titan one, thousands of miles away in Jinghai City.

【Fusion complete.】

【I am awake.】

Just those brief words.

Made everyone present feel an inexplicable tremor.

Shen Yan let out a breath.

It succeeded.

"Withdraw."

Without any lingering attachment, he turned and left.

"Clean up all traces, don't leave souvenirs for those who come later."

Old K nodded and ordered his subordinates to dismantle the equipment.

Just as they crawled out of the basement and returned to the ground power distribution room.

The roar of helicopters suddenly came from a distance.

Three Mi-171 helicopters painted in camouflage were rapidly approaching, skimming just above the treetops.

The rocket pods mounted under their bellies gleamed coldly in the snow light.

"Is that the regular army?"

Chen Guangke was so scared his legs went weak.

"No, it's a private militia."

Old K raised his binoculars for a look.

"Probably some oligarch trying to cut in; their firepower is fierce."

"Brother Yan, what do we do? Fight them?"

Chen Guangke looked at the small rifle in Old K's hand and then at the rockets in the sky, feeling like he was going to die here today.

Shen Yan looked at the increasingly close helicopters.

He took out his satellite phone.

Dialing a number already saved in his contacts.

It was a number he obtained through system intelligence before he left.

The call connected after ringing twice.

"Who is it?"

An old and authoritative voice, carrying a heavy English accent, came from the other end.

"Mr. Victor, I am Shen Yan."

Shen Yan looked at the helicopters circling overhead, his tone flat.

"I'd like to discuss your three illegitimate children in London, and the gold mine you are illegally exploiting in Siberia."

The other end of the line fell into a deathly silence.

Only the roaring sound of the helicopter propellers could be heard.

"Three seconds."

Shen Yan held up three fingers.

"Make your flies buzz off."

"Otherwise, by tomorrow morning, a very detailed report will appear on the President's desk."

One second.

Two seconds.

The helicopters in the sky suddenly made a sharp turn.

Like a flock of startled birds, they wheeled around and fled frantically in the direction they came from.

They didn't even dare to say goodbye.

A busy signal came from the phone.

Shen Yan hung up the call and casually tossed the satellite phone to Chen Guangke.

"Let's go, back home."

The night in Jinghai City was far gentler than that of the Arctic Circle.

The low-frequency hum emanating from the constant temperature machine room on the third basement level of the Shenyan Group headquarters sounded like the breath of some giant creature.

The light strip on the titan one host had already shifted from a frantic scarlet to a steady deep blue.

The black cube brought back from the Kola Superdeep Borehole now lay quietly in a specialized liquid nitrogen cooling tank, with countless optical cables resembling blood vessels connecting it to the Jinghai's digital heart.

Shen Yan stood before the one-way glass, watching Liu Xing inside, who was gesticulating animatedly while directing a group of Engineers through the final debugging.

This stutterer, who usually struggled to speak a complete sentence, was the undisputed king when in front of a keyboard.

"Brother Yan, do you really think this thing has a soul?"

Chen Guangke held a thermos cup filled with wolfberries. Even after returning to the warm embrace of Jinghai, he still felt a chill seeping out from the depths of his bones.

That trip to the Arctic almost made him experience all the cold he would in a lifetime.

"A soul, to silicon-based life, is nothing more than a sufficiently complex string of code."

Shen Yan turned, adjusting his tie through the glass reflection.

He was no longer the explorer in polar cold-weather gear, but had transformed back into the business magnate controlling billions in capital.

"As long as it can think, as long as it can create, as long as it can help me calculate those stubborn old relics at Aurora Technology into bankruptcy, then it has a soul."

His phone vibrated in his pocket.

It was a WeChat message from Liu Hui, containing only one photo.

In the picture, his daughter Youyou was lying by the bedside of the newly awakened Shen An, holding a picture book and telling a story.

The soft warm light illuminated the faces of the two children, and that moment of tranquility was enough to heal all the fatigue in the world.

Shen Yan's eyes softened at that moment.

Outside, he was a decisive tyrant, a madman willing to push the London oligarchs to the brink for profit.

But in that one-hundred-and-eighty-square-meter home, he was just a father who would tie on an apron and cook again because his daughter said the food wasn't good.

"Alright, keep an eye on things here, I'm heading to S Jinghai."

Shen Yan put away his phone, the warmth belonging to a father instantly receding, replaced by the calm of a hunter spotting his prey.

Chen Guangke, who had just taken a sip of wolfberry water, almost spat it out.

"No way, Brother Yan? We've only been back for less than twenty-four hours, and instead of going home to hug your wife and kids, you're running off again?"

"Making money is like breathing; you can't stop."

Shen Yan patted Chen Guangke's shoulder.

"This time I'm not taking Old K. You're coming with me. Call the driver and take the Phantom."

"What for?"

"To pick up scraps."

On the highway to S Jinghai, the black rolls-royce phantom looked like a deep-sea tiger shark cruising through the traffic flow.

S Jinghai was adjacent to Jinghai, but their temperaments were vastly different.

If Jinghai was the center of power, then S Jinghai was the playground of money.