Chapter 213 Titan Legacy: The Loom of Life

"Boss, something's not right."

Alita hovered in mid-air, a stream of data behind her washing over the golden device named 【life loom】 like a madman. Her small face was pale, yet her electronic eyes betrayed an uncontainable mix of terror and excitement.

"This thing isn't just a simple healing device." Alita pointed to the thousands of golden threads beneath the life loom connecting to the Empress's flesh, "It's a 'real-time compiler'! The reason this big bug can regenerate infinitely, and even instantly evolve resistance based on your attack attributes during battle, is because this thing is 'rewriting her code' in the background!"

Lin Yuan wiped the blood from his face, his eyes grim.

No wonder this woman kept getting tougher the more he fought; she was using a health hack and a mod tool. This wasn't biological evolution; it was clearly live 3D printing—whatever she was missing, she just printed more.

"In other words..." Lin Yuan narrowed his eyes, his gaze passing over the frenzied Empress and locking onto the golden spindle floating in the center of the incubation pool, "If I dismantle this thing, she'll just be a lump of rotting meat with nothing but brute force?"

"Theoretically yes, but it's very difficult." Alita spoke at lightning speed, "That is a titan-grade creation. Although it's been occupied by this bug, the outer energy shield is still active. Plus, it's the core of this hive; the Empress will never let you get within a single step of it."

"She won't let me get close?" Lin Yuan's lips curled into a sinister smile, "That's not up to her."

At this moment, the Empress, who had been knocked into the acid pool, had already climbed back up.

Having lost her human disguise, her current appearance was the embodiment of a nightmare. Her lower body's incubator looked like an inflated toad, while her upper body was a mass of twisted tentacles and bone spurs. Only that beautiful face remained embedded in the heap of flesh, its expression twisted like a demon.

"That is mine!!"

The Empress sensed Lin Yuan's intention and let out a piercing screech.

Boom!

The surrounding flesh walls exploded instantly. Hundreds of thick tentacles, accompanied by the sound of wind and thunder, crashed down upon Lin Yuan like a landslide. Every tentacle was covered in barbs and suckers; one graze would be enough to rip a person apart, skin and bone.

"A Ji! Cry louder!" Lin Yuan roared without looking back.

"Huh? Still crying? I'm already crying until I'm oxygen-deprived!" A Ji huddled in the corner, clutching a rag, his eyes swollen like two walnuts.

"If you don't want to die, cry!"

"Woooo... My life is so bitter... I don't want to die in a bug's stomach..."

Accompanying A Ji's miserable wailing, those tentacle attacks that originally carried highly toxic properties began to sizzle and turn into clear water like they had encountered a natural enemy whenever they got within ten meters of A Ji, the corrosive mucus on their surface dissolving.

Although the attack power remained, that most disgusting "armor-piercing attribute" was gone.

"Thanks!"

Lin Yuan surged forward. He didn't dodge, but instead headed straight for the Empress's large face, rushing into the rain of tentacles.

At this moment, the Void Energy within his body was pushed to the limit, and purple flames condensed on his skin into a ferocious suit of armor. The Void dagger in his hand elongated and morphed, transforming into a three-meter-long giant ship-slashing blade.

"Want to kill me? In your dreams!!" The Empress watched Lin Yuan charging straight at her face, a flash of panic in her eyes.

She could feel the terrifying killing intent condensed on Lin Yuan's blade. That Void Energy, capable of devouring everything, was the bane of carbon-based organisms like her.

"Block him for me!!"

The Empress shrieked, concentrating all her defensive power on her head. Countless layers of bone armor instantly stacked in front of her, and at the same time, the remaining tentacles wove into an airtight net, attempting to block this reckless flea.

Closer.

Ten meters.

Five meters.

Lin Yuan held his long blade high, a deafening roar erupting from his throat as if he intended to split everything before him in two.

The Empress stared fixedly at the descending blade, all her mental energy focused on this one defensive point.

However.

Just one second before the blade was about to touch the bone shield.

Hum.

There was no sound of impact, no energy explosion.

The murderous Lin Yuan, like a hologram that had lost its signal, vanished into thin air without warning.

The Empress was stunned.

That massive slashing motion, that violent energy fluctuation—were they all fake?

The next instant, a chill shot straight up her massive spine to her brain.

"Auntie, have you ever played hide-and-seek?"

That hair-raising voice this time didn't come from the front, but from... behind her.

Right next to the 【life loom】!

【Talent Skill: Void Shift】.

All the feints just now, even the ship-slashing blade he had condensed by sparing no energy, were just to trick her into shifting her defensive focus. Lin Yuan's true target was never this thick-skinned big bug, but that fragile "add-on."

"No!!!"

The Empress let out a desperate roar, her massive body trying to turn, but inertia made her a fatal beat too slow.

Lin Yuan was already standing within that golden light.

He didn't bother studying any complex rune codes, nor did he ask Alita to perform time-consuming decryption. As a scavenger who had struggled and crawled through ten years of the apocalypse, Lin Yuan had always had only one way of dealing with high-tech equipment.

That was—pulling the plug.

He stared at the fleshy cable, as thick as a thigh, connecting the life loom to the Empress's spine, and grinned.

"Physical disconnection is the most lethal."

Splat!

Lin Yuan wrapped both arms around the pulsing cable, planted his feet on the base of the life loom, and put his waist into it—the posture of a tug-of-war.

"Get out... for me!!"

Snap! Snap! Snap!

The muscle fibers on the cable snapped one by one, making crisp sounds like breaking piano strings. A large amount of golden liquid sprayed onto Lin Yuan's face like a high-pressure water gun, but he didn't even blink.

Splat.

With a final dull tearing sound, the main control cable was ripped out by the roots by Lin Yuan, bringing with it a large string of disgusting ganglia and mucus.

The whole world went quiet.

The Empress, who had been frantically waving her tentacles and preparing to turn back for a counter-kill, suddenly froze.

It was like a computer running a large 3A game suddenly having its graphics card and RAM sticks pulled out.

Her vertical pupils, filled with tyranny, cunning, and intelligence, lost focus in an instant, becoming cloudy and dull. The screeching sound still coming from her mouth turned into a meaningless "aba aba" low growl.

Not just her.

Even the billions of insect swarms outside, which were besieging the wreck of the great xia dragon sparrow, showed obvious stuttering in their movements. Some flying dragons even forgot to flap their wings and fell straight from the sky.

"Damn... she really lost her intelligence?"

A Ji peeked at this scene through his fingers, his jaw dropping in shock, "This isn't just pulling the network cable; it's like scooping out her brain!"

Lin Yuan casually threw away the still-twitching cable and turned to place his hand on the golden life loom.

【Ding!】

【Unowned titan creation detected.】

【scavenger system intervening... Brute-force decryption in progress.】

【Warning: Complex genetic lock detected...】

"Be a little gentle, don't break it; I still need to use it later." Lin Yuan said to the system in his mind.

【System: ... Loading 'Master Key' module.】

A few seconds later, the golden light that had originally repelled outsiders suddenly became soft, spreading up Lin Yuan's arm and finally forming a golden control emblem in his palm.

【Decryption successful.】

【Congratulations host, you have obtained the artifact: Gene Editor (Damaged Version).】

Before Lin Yuan could even be happy, the "rotting meat" behind him that had already crashed suddenly began to vibrate violently.

"Give it back... that's mine... mine!!"

The Empress's voice had changed. It was no longer that aloof queenly tone, but had become hoarse and fragmented, like countless vengeful spirits roaring together.

Having lost the suppression of the 【life loom】, the titan genes within her and her original Zerg instincts were completely out of control.

Her body was like a balloon being inflated, starting to expand wildly. Countless cracks opened on her skin, revealing a blinding red light. That was her life force burning uncontrollably.

"Warning! Warning!" Alita screamed, "Boss! This crazy woman is going to self-destruct! This is a living nuke! Its power could blow a hole in the moon!"

"Trying to take me down with you?"

Lin Yuan watched the ball of flesh that had expanded until it was about to fill the entire hall, but he didn't retreat a single step.

He gently patted the golden life loom beside him, as if patting a newly tamed wild horse.

"If it were just a moment ago, I might have had to run. But now..."

Lin Yuan turned around, facing the Empress who was about to explode, the smile on his face wicked to the extreme.

"Hey sis, since your brain isn't working, I'll fill you with something. Your 'server' belongs to me now."

"Alita!"

"Here!"

"Call up all those hard drive data sets I collected from the ruins of Earth previously." Lin Yuan snapped his fingers, "It doesn't matter what they are, as long as they take up memory, pack them all up for me!"

"Huh?" Alita was stunned for a moment, then immediately understood Lin Yuan's intention. A gleam of schadenfreude flashed in her electronic eyes, "Data retrieved! Including the complete series of 'The Temptation to Go Home', three thousand advanced calculus problems, five hundred family ethics tear-jerkers, and twenty million spam text messages... a total of 800TB of invalid junk data!"

"Very good."

Lin Yuan slammed his palm onto the operation panel of the life loom, his fingertip pointing toward the expanding Empress.

"Reverse transmission!"

Hum—!!!

A thick beam of golden light shot out from the life loom, striking directly onto the Empress's already deformed head.

This wasn't an energy attack.

This was an information flood.

The Empress, who had been preparing to detonate her internal energy core, suddenly let out a scream a hundred times more miserable than before.

In her sea of consciousness, there were originally only simple instructions for slaughter and evolution.

But at this moment, countless pieces of information—incomprehensible, illogical, and filled with the dregs of human emotion—rushed in like a mudslide.

"Since you want to pursue excitement, then carry it through to the end..."

"Let f(x) be continuous on the interval [a, b]..."

"Mom! Why do you only love my younger brother and not me!!"

"Hello, I am Qin Shi Huang, send money..."

The complex, chaotic, and even somewhat moronic information instantly overwhelmed the Empress's simple and crude neural pathways.

"Ahhh! What is this! What kind of poison is this!!" The Empress clutched her head with both hands, her nails digging deep into her scalp, "This pain... is even more terrifying than the Void! Stop! Stop it quickly!!"

The energy she had originally used to control her self-destruction was forced to be diverted entirely to process this "junk" that was fundamentally impossible to parse.

Her body, which had been expanding to the point of bursting, actually began to deflate rapidly like a deflating balloon.

"Can't take it already?"

Lin Yuan watched the Empress rolling on the ground, foaming at the mouth, sneered, and increased the transmission power again.

"This is just the beginning; I've still got a curated set of one hundred 'Five Years of Gaokao, Three Years of Simulation' practice tests I haven't even sent yet."

"Boss..." A Ji watched this scene from the side and couldn't help but swallow, his eyes filled with awe, "Killing someone is just a quick death, but this... this is mental torture. It's too brutal, truly too brutal."

With the final wave of data influx, the Empress finally stopped moving.

Her eyes were completely unfocused, only the corners of her mouth twitching unconsciously, muttering some lines that no one could understand: "Is it... are you also a part of the play..."

Consciousness collapsed.

This once-unrivaled Zerg sovereign had been completely formatted into a vegetable-bug by the "mental junk" of human civilization.

The red light in the hall dissipated, leaving only the soft golden light of the life loom flickering.

Lin Yuan let out a long breath, feeling that his shirt under the Void armor was soaked with sweat. This battle, while it looked easy, was actually him dancing on the tip of a blade; half a second slower and he would have been smashed to pieces.

"Done and dusted."

Lin Yuan clapped his hands, just about to check the specific functions of the life loom.

Suddenly, Alita, who had been quiet, abruptly raised her head, her voice becoming unusually serious.

"Boss, don't get happy too soon."

"What is it?"

Alita pointed to the Empress, who had turned into an idiot, her projected finger trembling slightly.

"Her consciousness has indeed collapsed, but the titan genes in this body... have lost their suppression and are autonomously evolving."

As if to verify her words.

The Empress's body on the ground, which had been limp, suddenly cracked open a pitch-black fissure from its back like a pupa breaking out of a cocoon. A pale, slender arm that belonged neither to a human nor a Zerg slowly reached out from inside, gripping the ground tightly.

Immediately following this, a voice devoid of any emotional color, sounding like a mechanical synthesis, came from the fissure.

"Illegal operation of the 'life loom' detected."

"Defense Protocol No. 0... Initiating."