181: Chapter 181 The Last Ark

Gu Ran's small submarine sailed continuously through the deep sea for seventy-two hours.

When the energy was about to run out and everyone fell into a daze due to oxygen deprivation, an entirely different sea area appeared ahead of the submarine.

The murky, bloody seawater filled with bizarre wreckage formed a clear-cut boundary with the crystal-clear azure before them.

Through the observation window, they could see that the seabed below was covered with rune arrays emitting a soft glow.

Shark-shaped mechanical patrol units, trailing blue exhaust flames, cruised regularly among the arrays.

A powerful and orderly purification force field turned this sea area into an isolated "Safe Zone".

The submarine slowly surfaced.

A gigantic building that defied description pierced through the sea fog, thrust straight into the clouds, and came into everyone's view.

That was not a city, but a tower.

A giant tower-like building complex composed of smooth white alloy that continuously grew upward.

The surface of the tower was carved with energy circuits as complex as integrated circuits, with flowing light slowly drifting within them.

At the top of the tower, a huge artificial sun released intense light sufficient to dispel the fog within a radius of a hundred miles.

The last hope of human civilization, the last Ark—Daylight Tower.

After they docked, a team of soldiers wearing full-coverage white combat uniforms used cold instruments to conduct identity verification and contamination testing on them for a full hour.

Afterwards, Gu Ran was brought before an official.

The gaze of that official was different from all the struggling doomsday survivors he had ever seen; it was a condescending and emotionless examination.

"Welcome to the Ark, Captain Gu Ran."

The official's voice came through the loudspeaker, equally cold, "Here, your value will be re-evaluated by the Final Council."

In the subsequent interrogation, Gu Ran learned that this Daylight Tower was absolutely ruled by an institution named the "Final Council", which had subordinate departments such as the Armed Department, Technology Department, Population Management Department, and Records Department.

They possessed the world's most complete system permissions, the most advanced technology, and a cruel system of screening and cultivating "optimal humans" from the gene pool.

When Gu Ran mentioned Xu Baiheng and Lin Qiu, the official calmly pulled up their files.

"Recorder No. 07, Xu Baiheng. Healer No. 11, Lin Qiu. High-value talents."

The official's voice had no ripples, "The Records Department has long known of their existence through remote signals. Being captured by the 'Tree' is a huge loss, but they are still continuously generating valuable intelligence, which is still within acceptable limits."

This attitude of treating living people as "intelligence assets" that could be discarded at any time made Gu Ran shudder.

He finally understood that the survival philosophy of Daylight Tower was never salvation, but "seed preservation".

Preserving a spark of human civilization that they considered "pure, excellent, and sustainable".

For this, they could sacrifice any external survivors judged to be "valueless" or "risky".

...Meanwhile, a thousand miles away.

Jiang Ming had already sent one of his sensory tips to the periphery of Daylight Tower through the abandoned underground fiber-optic cable channel.

He could clearly sense the powerful purification force field and system permissions emitted by the giant tower.

But he also sensed the tower's fatal arrogance.

One of his reconnaissance roots, when trying to approach the purified water area on the periphery of Daylight Tower, was instantly evaporated into nothingness by the force field.

But at the very last moment before evaporation, the root sent back a final trace of information.

Jiang Ming's tree heart had already begun to analyze the energy frequency and structural weaknesses of this purification force field.

Inside Daylight Tower, because of his "high-potential combat genes", Gu Ran was assigned to the "Outer Territory Clearance Team" under the Armed Department.

His first mission was to pilot an aircraft to annihilate a small group of tattered wandering survivors trying to approach Daylight Tower.

For the first time, he faced the cruelty of the "Ark" directly: for the absolute safety within the tower, they would proactively clear out any survivors who might bring risks, regardless of whether the other party was human or not.

On that very day, the Population Management Department of Daylight Tower initiated a new proposal.

The title of the proposal was: "Final Cleansing Protocol".

The content was to use the highest system permissions they held to conduct a "final guidance" on all known coordinates of external refugee camps surviving on the continent.

Guiding them all to several preset "death buffer zones" filled with high-level anomalies, in order to completely cut off all external pollution sources.