Chapter 185 System Upgrade: Mechanical Undead Catastrophe

The giant blood-red eyeball hanging at the edge of the mist merely cast a cold glance, seemingly uninterested in the struggles of ants, and vanished into the darkness of a deeper dimension in the blink of an eye.

But for Lin Yuan, this was enough.

With that truly terrifying existence no longer interfering, the remaining "watchdog" was just a pile of premium consumables waiting to be dismantled.

"System, don't save energy for me. Crank up the 'morning grouchiness' of these old guys to the max!"

Lin Yuan hovered above the ruins, the deep blue data stream in his eyes surging to its limit.

At his command, the originally dead-silent graveyard of stars was like a bucket of cold water poured into a pot of boiling oil, completely exploding into action.

Rumble—!

This wasn't an ordinary tremor; it was the crust of the entire Land Abandoned by Gods turning over.

Countless mountains of metallic trash piled up like mountain ranges collapsed with a roar.

The wrecks of titan battleships at the very bottom, long since deemed "irreparable," now acted like veterans hearing a charge bugle, forcefully pushing aside the tens of thousands of tons of scrap metal pressing down on them.

Screech—Bang!

The ear-piercing sound of twisting metal rang throughout the universe.

A seven-kilometer-long heavy dreadnought burst from the ground.

Its originally rusted hull no longer appeared solid, but instead took on a translucent, ghostly state.

The blue flames were not burning fuel, but rather a certain obsession that had been pent up for ten thousand years.

"Ghost state... materialization?"

A Ji, who was watching the battle from the bridge of the great xia dragon sparrow, nearly popped his eyes out; he didn't even feel it when the wrench in his hand smashed onto his foot.

"This is a quantum superposition state of matter and energy! This is the legendary lost 'Valhalla' technology of the Titan Civilization!"

"What Valhalla?" Chen Weiguo asked, looking bewildered.

"Simply put, these ships have 'come alive'! And they are controlling their material shells in a soul form!" A Ji was trembling with excitement.

"This is a miracle! Only someone with the highest authority of the titan royal family can awaken them!"

Chen Weiguo watched Lin Yuan on the screen, who was waving his arms like a bandit leader, and his mouth twitched.

"I don't know if it's a miracle or not, but I know that if we don't run, we're going to be crushed flat by these ghost-fire battleships."

Indeed, the situation was already out of control.

It wasn't just one or two ships.

It was an entire full-strength titan mechanized legion.

Tens of thousands of battleships burning with ghostly blue fire densely covered every inch of the starry sky behind Lin Yuan.

Their muzzles were no longer rusted, their engines no longer stalled, and that ancient, murderous aura caused the temperature of the surrounding space to instantly drop to absolute zero.

And for the Rust Lord, this was not just a nightmare, but an "amputation scene."

"No... come back... you are my body..."

The Rust Lord's massive mechanical skeleton body began to tremble violently.

The only reason it could grow to three thousand meters tall was by forcibly attaching and piecing together the wrecks of these ancient battleships.

Now, the victims had come knocking, and they were going on strike and quitting.

Crack!

The right leg it had just lifted, before it could even take a step, saw the three cruisers that made up its thigh bone suddenly turn their bows, spewing blue exhaust flames, and ruthlessly break free from its control to fly toward Lin Yuan's camp.

Following that were the ribs, spine, arms...

"Ah—!"

The Rust Lord let out a devastating, electronically synthesized roar.

It was just like a Lego giant being forcibly dismantled.

No matter how it urged the nanoviruses within its body, attempting to use logic chains to bind these "parts" back together, all it got was a cold "access denied."

Pitter-patter.

In less than half a minute, that mechanical giant, which had been so arrogant just a moment ago and nearly crushed the Earth like a marble, watched helplessly as its own body fell apart.

In the end, only a bare, several-hundred-meter-diameter core sphere remained, floating lonely at the top of the tower.

The overwhelming red mist surrounding it, having lost its carrier, looked like a pond drained of water, appearing incredibly awkward.

"Yo, successful weight loss?"

Lin Yuan stood with his hands behind his back, his body slowly floating forward.

Behind him were eighty thousand ghost battleships lined up in formation; the scene was a hundred times more breathtaking than any interstellar blockbuster.

He looked down at the Rust Lord, which was now just a head, with his usual punchable grin on his face.

"Old bones, it seems your popularity isn't that great. You used their bodies for ten thousand years without even paying an overnight fee, and now they've come to collect the debt."

The Rust Lord's core flashed red frantically, and its two giant electronic eyes stared fixedly at Lin Yuan, revealing an air of unbelievable malice.

【Authority... Impossible... Clearly a lowly carbon-based lifeform... Why can it tamper with my underlying protocols...】

"Stop spouting that useless code." Lin Yuan picked his ear; his nonchalant attitude was the greatest insult to an artificial intelligence.

"I'm a reasonable person. You wanted to dismantle my home just now, so now, I'll dismantle you once too. Fair, right?"

Having said that, Lin Yuan suddenly raised his right hand; there were no flashy movements, just a simple snap of his fingers.

Snap!

The crisp sound rippled through the void.

"Brothers of the 33rd Legion!"

Lin Yuan's voice, amplified by the system, exploded directly into the depths of the souls of every ghost battleship.

"I know you've been stifled. Tossed here like trash for ten thousand years, used like bricks under the feet of this fake for ten thousand years. You've got fire in your hearts, right?"

Woo—!

Responding to him were countless shrill and angry long blasts of ship sirens.

That ghostly blue soul fire suddenly surged three zhang high, dyeing half the star sector the color of the underworld.

"Having fire is exactly right!" Lin Yuan's eyes sharpened as he pointed his finger straight at the bare core.

"Today I won't stop you. Unleash all the morning grouchiness you've built up over these ten thousand years!"

"Target: That pile of scrap metal."

"Fire!"

Boom! Boom! Boom!

There was no deafening explosion like that of conventional artillery.

What the ghost fleet fired was a strange, translucent beam—the Nether Cannon.

This thing didn't bypass physical defense; it specifically targeted energy structures and logic cores.

Tens of thousands of pale beams converged into a tsunami, instantly submerging that lonely core sphere.

If Lin Yuan's Void Energy was a vacuum cleaner earlier, then this attack was a high-pressure water gun washing away years of grime.

Sizzle, sizzle, sizzle—!

The Rust Lord didn't even have time to send out a signal for mercy.

Its proud nanovirus defense layer, in the face of this soul-striking artillery fire, was like snow under the scorching sun, vaporizing without lasting even a second.

【Error... Logic collapse... Memory sector lost...】

【Pain...】

An artificial intelligence without pain receptors was now letting out a scream as if it were being skinned alive.

That was the pain of its core code being forcibly erased and rewritten.

And on the periphery of the battlefield.

Those hundreds of "rebel" detachments that had originally been frantically besieging Earth with glowing red eyes now seemed to have had a pause button pressed on them.

They looked at those "ancestors" climbing out of their graves, looked at the ghostly blue fire filling the sky, and the red virus programs in their cores suddenly began to self-doubt.

"What are you still standing there for?"

Lin Yuan turned his head and glanced at those dazed red-eyed ships.

"Waiting for the New Year? Come over here and surround this grandson for me!"

Swish.

It was like a school of startled fish.

Those hundreds of enemy ships defected almost instantly, even more enthusiastically than the old ghosts.

They immediately turned their muzzles and joined the siege of their former master, terrified that if they were too slow, Lin Yuan would dismantle them as scrap too.

"This... this works too?"

On the great xia dragon sparrow, the staff officers' eyes all but fell out of their sockets.

Just a moment ago it was an impending disaster, and in the blink of an eye, the enemy leader had been stripped down to a lone commander, and was now being beaten up by its own former underlings.

The script flipped so fast that even Academician Wang forgot to take his blood pressure medication.

"This is no titan divine power..." A Ji watched the arrogant figure on the screen and swallowed hard.

"This is clearly an interstellar bandit leader coming down the mountain to snatch a bride..."

At the center of the battlefield.

The Rust Lord's core had already been whittled down to one-tenth of its original size.

It was not reconciled.

It had operated here for tens of thousands of years, devoured countless ships, and was on the verge of evolving into a true mechanical deity, only to be ruined by a human who scavenged for junk.

【Unforgivable... Unforgivable...】

That broken core suddenly stopped trembling.

The originally chaotic flashing red light suddenly turned into an extremely dangerous, extremely stable pale white.

A gravitational fluctuation that made Lin Yuan's scalp tingle suddenly erupted from the collapse inside that core.

"Hmm?" Lin Yuan's brow twitched violently, and the system alarm blared as a long sound in his mind.

【Warning! Singularity reaction detected!】

【Warning! Target is forcibly reversing the gravitational field; it is attempting to create an artificial black hole!】

"Lin Yuan! Retreat quickly! That lunatic is going to self-destruct!" Chen Weiguo's roar came through, heart-wrenching.

"It wants to suck the entire Land Abandoned by Gods in to be buried with it!"

"Want to die?"

Lin Yuan watched the white light sphere that was rapidly collapsing, with the surrounding light beginning to distort.

Instead of retreating, he licked his somewhat dry lips, a glint of light even crazier than the opponent's flashing in his eyes.

He hated two types of people most in this life.

One was those who owed money and didn't pay it back.

The other was prodigals who held onto good things without knowing how to cherish them, always wanting to self-destruct and waste resources.

"Such a high-density energy core, what a pity to blow it up."

Lin Yuan's figure flickered.

Not only did he not run, but he charged straight toward the gravitational waves capable of tearing space apart, like a meteor.

"Since you don't want to go out with dignity, then I'll help you collect these old bones!"

The Void Energy rune in his palm instantly shone to its limit, tearing open a gaping maw of the abyss in front of him that was even greedier than the black hole about to form.

"Give it... to me!"