Chapter 138 Bomb Disposal Expert

There is no light here.

Or rather, light has lost its medium of propagation here.

Lin Yuan felt as if he had been stuffed into a drum washing machine filled with cement; his internal organs were shifting, and his soul was being infinitely stretched and then forcibly compressed. This was the price of "Space Displacement"—if not for the system protecting him, his physical body would have disintegrated into elementary particles the moment he entered this dimension.

"Cough..."

A mouthful of stale blood was stuck in his throat, and Lin Yuan struggled to open his eyes.

The surroundings were not the flagship bridge filled with alarms, but a deathly silent gray mist. Above his head, several massive, broken stone pillars were faintly visible, covered in ancient titan Runes.

This was System Area 007: titan · Astral Spirit Temple.

A Subspace legendary for enshrining the heroic spirits of the Titan Race and even capable of communicating with high-dimensional souls.

But Lin Yuan was in no mood to admire these ancient ruins now.

Because less than two meters in front of him, that damn "Antimatter Core," flashing with a blinding red light, had followed him in.

"Dammit..." Lin Yuan looked at the frantically ticking countdown on the core, his mouth twitching.

Countdown: 0.03 seconds.

Here, the flow of time seemed to have become extremely slow, or perhaps his thoughts had been infinitely accelerated. Lin Yuan could clearly see the force field on the surface of the core disintegrating; the ball of antimatter energy inside, powerful enough to blow the moon into powder, was like a mad dragon about to escape its cage, battering against its final restraints.

Run?

Where to?

This place was only so big; once the antimatter annihilation occurred, let alone this Subspace, even Lin Yuan's brain, which was connected to this place, would be blown into mush.

"gaia..." Lin Yuan called out in his mind, but there was no response. This place cut off all contact with the outside world; even an AI could not enter.

A dead end.

A true dead end.

"I went through all this trouble and overthrew 90% of my life just to change locations and be blown to death?" Lin Yuan leaned back in the damaged cockpit seat; due to excessive blood loss, his vision had begun to darken.

His gaze swept across the system interface somewhat vacantly.

The gray [Astral Spirit Temple] icon was lit, but his mental strength was long exhausted, making it impossible to drive any defense mechanisms here.

The countdown was like a death warrant from the Grim Reaper.

0.02 seconds.

Lin Yuan's fingers moved unconsciously in the void, touching the most basic, inconspicuous function icon at the very bottom of the system interface—the one he had relied on to start his journey.

【Deep Space Salvage Operation】.

This was a passive skill and the core underlying logic of the system: Recycle, Analyze, Reforge.

Previously, Lin Yuan had used it to recycle space junk, warship wreckage, and even enemy corpses.

In his eyes, there were only two kinds of things in this world: useful and useless.

And useless things were scrap.

"Wait..."

Lin Yuan's originally cloudy pupils suddenly lit up with a glint of cunning, like a terminal lucidity.

He stared fixedly at the Antimatter Core that was about to explode.

In the eyes of a normal person, this was a world-destroying bomb.

But in the system's judgment logic?

This was a mechanical creation that had lost its controller, had a damaged shell, and was leaking energy.

"Since no one wants it anymore..." Lin Yuan grinned, revealing a mouthful of bloody foam, his expression looking much like a hobo who had found a gold bar in a pile of trash, "then it's ownerless property."

"It's trash."

"If it's trash, it can be recycled!"

0.01 seconds.

The white light of the Antimatter Core had already pierced through the shell; the destructive energy was about to sweep through everything.

At that critical moment, Lin Yuan used the last ounce of his strength, his skeletal hand suddenly reaching out and slamming hard onto the scalding core.

"System! Get to work!"

"Collect this junk for me!!!"

Buzz—!

The expected explosion did not happen.

The moment Lin Yuan's palm touched the core, a familiar and cold system prompt echoed in this silent Subspace.

[High-energy material source detected.]

[Item Judgment: Damaged titan-class Antimatter Power Furnace (Type III).]

[Status: Extremely Unstable/Discarded.]

[Complies with Deep Space Salvage Protocol.]

[Executing forced recycling...]

The irreversible physical rules of the real world, in the face of the system's overbearing logic, were like a "retract" button being pressed.

That ball of antimatter energy, which had already begun to expand and was about to release billions of tons of equivalent energy, was suddenly frozen by an invisible force. Immediately after, a massive black vortex appeared out of thin air above the core.

It didn't seem to be absorbing energy; it was more like it was cutting this "data" out from the physical level.

"Slurp—"

A highly comical sound, like someone slurping noodles.

That terrifying bomb, capable of destroying the inner ring of the Solar System, distorted, shrank, and finally turned into a streak of light, being sucked into the black vortex representing the [Recycle Bin] right before Lin Yuan's eyes.

There was no earth-shattering explosion.

There was no tragic parting between life and death.

Just like that... it was gone.

[Ding!]

[Recycling successful!]

[Obtained High-Purity Antimatter Crystals x500 units.]

[Obtained titanium alloy (Refined) x2000 tons.]

[Detected high-dimensional data residue in this item, analyzing...]

[Congratulations, host, you have obtained a special item: Mechanical Divinity (Fragmented/Contaminated) x1.]

[Points obtained from this recycling: 3,000,000.]

A series of golden lights flashed frantically across the system interface.

Especially that long string of zeros, making Lin Yuan's eyes a bit dizzy.

"Three... three million?"

Lin Yuan froze for two seconds, then burst into a violent fit of coughing—he had laughed so hard he choked.

With the core recycled, the energy support point of the Subspace vanished.

The surrounding gray mist began to dissipate, and those broken stone pillars faded back into nothingness.

The sense of gravity from the real world returned.

...

Solar System, Near-Earth Orbit.

The wreckage of the "doomsday" flagship still floated quietly in space.

A full minute had passed since the Archbishop initiated the self-destruct sequence.

Inside the command room, everyone maintained a head-covering impact posture; it was deathly silent.

Chen Weiguo was in tears, clutching his military cap tightly, waiting for the final judgment.

However.

One minute passed.

Two minutes passed.

The expected blinding light did not appear, and the shockwave did not arrive.

Even that piercing self-destruct countdown alarm had mysteriously stopped.

"What... what's going on?" Academician Wang tremblingly raised his head and looked at the large screen.

On the screen, the enemy flagship that should have turned into a supernova was now like a dead fish, with even its last red lights extinguished.

"Energy readings... zero?" gaia's voice was full of unbelievable logic errors, "The antimatter reaction has disappeared!"

Everyone looked at each other in bewilderment.

Just then, a weak communication signal penetrated the flagship's thick armor and connected to the public channel.

"Zzt... zzt..."

Static crackled.

Then, Lin Yuan's signature lazy yet extremely weak voice came through.

"Hey, Old Chen."

"Does our cafeteria... have braised pork tonight?"

Hearing this voice, Chen Weiguo froze on the spot, then suddenly lunged at the communication console, frantically grabbing the microphone, his voice trembling: "Lin Yuan?! You brat, you're not dead?! Where's the bomb?! Where's the antimatter bomb?!"

"Oh, that."

On the other end of the communication, Lin Yuan was currently lying in the cockpit of the mech name, looking at the pile of shiny points in the system warehouse, and made up a story on the fly: "I saw that the workmanship on that thing was pretty crude; it seemed like a counterfeit product, a dud. It didn't explode."

A dud?

A freaking dud?!

Academician Wang looked at the peak data recorded by gaia—that was an energy reaction capable of leveling half the Earth, and you call that a dud?!

But regardless, the wild joy of surviving a disaster instantly overwhelmed all doubts.

"It's good that you're alive... it's good that you're alive!" Chen Weiguo scolded with a smile while wiping his tears, "Get your ass back here! There'll be plenty of braised pork!"

...

The "mech name" mecha was slowly towed out of the flagship wreckage by a tractor beam.

Lin Yuan lay in the driver's seat; although his body was in as much pain as if it had been run over by a steamroller, his spirit was exceptionally excited. Three million points were enough for him to upgrade the "Heavenly Court" fortress another level and even repair his physical damage.

This was a massive profit.

But just as he was about to close his eyes and rest for a while, a red prompt box popped up on the system interface again.

[Warning: While analyzing the recycled item 'Mechanical Divinity (Fragmented/Contaminated)', a residual high-dimensional memory fragment was captured.]

[Read?]

Lin Yuan frowned.

Was that something left behind by the Archbishop?

"Read."

Buzz—

His vision went black.

Lin Yuan's consciousness was forcibly pulled into a first-person perspective scene.

That wasn't the Solar System.

It was the center of a galaxy so brilliant it was breathtaking, one Lin Yuan had never seen before.

Here, stars were as dense as grains of sand on a beach. Countless massive man-made celestial bodies, tens of thousands of times larger than Earth, were operating in an orderly fashion.

That was the headquarters of the Mechanical Papacy—the "Hall of Truth."

The view zoomed in.

Lin Yuan saw countless warships.

If he didn't count the three thousand he had just destroyed, the number of warships docked here was at least—hundreds of millions.

They were densely packed in the starry sky, forming a black wall of steel. And at the very front of these warships, three massive figures emitting divine radiance hovered.

Each figure was a hundred times more terrifying than the "Doomsayer" Archbishop from before.

"Cardinal..." The term automatically surfaced in Lin Yuan's mind.

But that wasn't what terrified Lin Yuan the most.

In the image, this invincible fleet, capable of sweeping across the entire Milky Way, was not attacking, but... defending.

Their muzzles were all pointed towards the edge of the galaxy, at that pitch-black void where even light could not escape.

Something was writhing there in the darkness.

In the darkness, an eye opened.

That eye was indescribably large; just a single glance caused thousands of stars to dim and extinguish simultaneously.

Fear.

A primal, irresistible shuddering sensation originating from biological instinct was transmitted deep into Lin Yuan's soul along the data stream.

The image transmitted the desperate prayers of those arrogant mechanical priests:

“The Void... has awakened...”

“We must flee... flee to the fringe star sectors...”

“For the spark of civilization... purge all weak civilizations... collect resources... build the ark...”

The image came to an abrupt end.

Lin Yuan snapped his eyes open, his body drenched in cold sweat.

The bit of joy brought by the victory instantly vanished without a trace.

He panted heavily, his heart pounding wildly.

So that's how it was.

So this was the truth.

That arrogant Mechanical Papacy, that powerful civilization that viewed humans as insects, was actually just a group of... stray dogs?

That Crusade fleet that almost exterminated humanity was merely a tiny, tiny scout team they used to scavenge for travel expenses along their escape route?

“Heh...”

Lin Yuan raised his hand, blocking the blinding light, a dry laugh escaping his throat.

“Old Chen...”

He murmured to himself in his heart.

“I'm afraid I won't be able to eat that braised pork in peace.”

The real monsters are still behind.

And it's even bigger than a god.

“Beep—”

Just then, Lin Yuan's private communication channel suddenly lit up.

It was an encrypted, extremely weak signal.

The source wasn't Earth or the Moon, but from... deep space that had already been blasted into nothingness by the antimatter cannon.

The signal contained only a very short, intermittent piece of code, which translated into an ancient titan phrase:

“If... you can see... this message...”

“It means... you have already obtained... the key.”

“Come... find me.”

“I am at... the Place where Old Gods Fell.”

Lin Yuan's pupils shrank.

Was that... the previous titan Lord who had been missing for three million years, whom gaia had been searching for?

Or that so-called "Old God"?

No matter what it was, Lin Yuan knew that the "newbie protection period" for Earth was completely over.

Lin Yuan was still looking at the message when he suddenly lost consciousness and fainted.