71: Chapter 71 The Eternal Mechanist! One man commands a hundred beasts, shattering the heavens with ordinary iron!

Chapter 71: The Eternal Mechanist! Controlling a hundred beasts alone, shattering the heavens with common iron! Darkness.

No boundaries, no direction, no temperature. Just darkness.

Lin Xiaoman stood alone.

Henry's presence had vanished.

His trial was over; his consciousness had returned to reality.

Only she remained, suspended in this void.

Just like when she was a child.

At six years old, the living room lights had been broken for three days.

Parents gone, neighbors indifferent, property management didn't come.

She dragged a chair and climbed onto the computer desk. In the darkness, only the green standby light of the monitor blinked on and off.

The darkness was not unfamiliar.

She had lived in the darkness for sixteen years.

Then came the light.

It wasn't a golden explosion, but silver-blue—like electric current dancing on the surface of liquid metal.

A figure coalesced from the light.

Silver hair, tied back.

Deep eye sockets, reflections of rotating gears in his pupils.

A grey-green robe, sleeves rolled to the elbows, revealing forearms covered in fine traces of bronze rust.

An iron ruler tucked at his waist, the surface engraved with dense runes.

He looked at Lin Xiaoman.

Without speaking, he simply reached out and pointed his index finger, releasing a beam of silver-blue light.

The light struck her chest.

A cramped wooden house.

Green mountains stretched outside the window, and roosters crowed in the distance.

bronze pieces, gears, and springs were piled on the table. The oil lamp was burning low, the wick making faint crackling sounds.

A yellowed newspaper was pasted on the corner of the wall, with the four ink characters "Qingli Year 6" printed on it.

The hands were small.

Twelve-year-old hands, with old scars from bronze rust and spring scratches on the fingertips.

"Senior Lu Yan! Tinkering with that junk again! Come out and eat!"

A woman's impatient voice came from outside the door.

Not his mother, but the neighbor auntie.

His parents died in a plague when he was three.

People in the village took turns giving him a bite to eat, but no one really cared what he grew up to be.

Senior Lu Yan looked down at the semi-finished product on the table.

A mechanical bird, the wing hinge structure missing the final gear's engagement angle.

He didn't go to eat.

His fingers picked up the thinnest copper wire, bent it, and embedded it.

Click.

The wings moved. The mechanical bird flapped its copper wings and flew up, circled twice in the oil lamp's halo, hit the roof beam, and fell apart.

Senior Lu Yan picked up the fragments, not discouraged.

His eyes were bright enough to illuminate the whole room.

Lin Xiaoman, inside this body, felt a sudden heat in her chest.

Six years old, the first line of code, the screen lit up.

That was... the same kind of light.

Time passed, fifteen, eighteen.

Senior Lu Yan's mechanical arts became more and more refined.

At fifteen, he built a self-patrolling mechanical dog to guard the village granary.

At eighteen, he built a mechanical fish that swam in the water to help fishermen detect schools of fish.

During the Qingli years of the Song Dynasty, the Iron Bureau in Bianjing City had the best craftsmen.

But none of the craftsmen could explain why the things Senior Lu Yan built could move on their own.

"A weirdo."

"Talking to bronze and iron pieces all day."

"Not doing his proper job."

He didn't care.

Just like Lin Xiaoman—as long as there were gears and copper wires, the world was complete.

Until that day.

A middle-aged man in a grey-green Taoist robe stood at the door of the wooden house.

He wore a badge on his chest—a flame supporting stars.

"I have seen the things you built."

The middle-aged man squatted down, his gaze level with eighteen-year-old Senior Lu Yan.

"Do you want to build something bigger?"

"How big?"

"Big enough to cover the entire world."

Senior Lu Yan's eyes lit up.

Lin Xiaoman's heart skipped a beat.

It was exactly the same as when she heard Su Chen say, "Kindling needs a pair of eyes that can penetrate the dark web and monitor global supernatural movements."

Kindling gave Senior Lu Yan resources he had never imagined.

Supernatural metals, rune engraving technology, mechanical blueprints left by predecessors.

More importantly—he finally knew why his mechanical creations could "live".

"You have supernatural power within you."

The middle-aged man in the Taoist robe who brought him into the fold said,

"Every time you touch copper and iron, every time you tighten a gear, you are unconsciously infusing your own supernatural energy into them."

"That's why they move?"

"That's why they move."

The middle-aged man picked up a mechanical bee from the table and placed it in his palm.

It didn't move at all; it was a dead object.

He put it back into Senior Lu Yan's hand.

The wings buzzed once, and the mechanical bee took flight.

"Copper and iron are the bones, runes are the veins, and your supernatural power—is the blood."

The middle-aged man looked at him.

"Without your power infused, they are just a pile of scrap metal. But with you..."

He pointed to the thirty-seven mechanical dogs lined up neatly in the courtyard.

"One person, is an army."

Lin Xiaoman's breathing hitched.

She thought of herself.

One person, one computer, reversing a national-level cyber war in three minutes.

One person is an army.

Senior Lu Yan from a thousand years ago, and she from a thousand years later, used the same method,

Not relying on brute force, but on extension. Projecting their own will and power through a medium into every corner.

Three years.

He created "Heaven's Ear"—fist-sized mechanical bees that could transmit sound back from a hundred miles away.

Ten, a hundred, a thousand.

The mechanical bee swarm covered every inch of land within Kindling's sphere of influence.

On the core gear of every bee, there was a rune circuit engraved by Senior Lu Yan himself.

His supernatural energy flowed along the rune veins into the swarm, like blood being pumped into capillaries.

The further the swarm flew, the more energy he consumed.

Five years.

"Earth Pulse"—a network of gear beacons buried underground that could sense any supernatural energy fluctuations within a ten-mile radius.

Eight years.

"Star Map"—rune relay stations suspended high in the sky, aggregating, analyzing, and presenting all information.

An intelligence network covering the entire continent.

Lin Xiaoman, inside Senior Lu Yan's body, was nailed to the spot as she watched the "Star Map" unfold before her eyes.

Gear beacons—were base stations.

Mechanical bee swarms—were surveillance cameras.

Rune relay stations—were servers.

Star Map—was the global encrypted communication network she had built.

A thousand years ago, a lonely genius used copper and iron to do the same thing she did with code and chips.

The apocalyptic catastrophe descended.

Senior Lu Yan's network became Kindling's most important strategic resource.

The location, number, and rank of every exotic beast that appeared were accurately warned.

Casualty rates dropped by seventy percent.

But intelligence was not enough.

The day the exotic beasts broke through the defense line, Senior Lu Yan stood on a cliff, looking at the battlefield three hundred miles away.

Kindling's sword cultivators and knights were fighting bitterly.

A D-Rank Exotic Beast led over a hundred E-Rank Exotic Beasts to charge the line, and the defense was crumbling.

Behind him was something else he had spent twelve years building.

Not bees, not beacons.

It was war beasts.

One hundred and twenty-seven mechanical war beasts were lined up neatly on the cliff.

Copper wolves, iron eagles, steel pythons.

Each one had thirty-six rune gears embedded in its body, each gear engraved with energy circuits he had carved himself.

Their eyes were dark.

Senior Lu Yan closed his eyes.

Supernatural energy poured out of his body, flowing along the rune array under his feet into one hundred and twenty-seven circuits.

One hundred and twenty-seven pairs of eyes lit up simultaneously.

The silver-blue light was exactly the same as the reflection of rotating gears in his pupils.

"Go."

The copper wolf pack was the first to charge down the cliff.

The joints of their limbs made precise clicking sounds as they ran, sparks flying with every step.

Their claws and teeth were not ordinary copper and iron,

They were metal soaked in supernatural energy, and every bite carried a high temperature that burned the flesh and blood of the exotic beasts.

Iron eagles dove from the sky.

With a wingspan of three zhang, the feathers were sharp rune blades, cutting wounds glowing with silver-blue light as they swept past the exotic beast swarm.

Steel pythons drilled out from the ground, wrapping around the torso of an E-Rank Exotic Beast,

The rune circuits ran at full power, the temperature of the python's body soaring to the edge of the melting point of copper and iron within three seconds, crushing the exotic beast alive.

One person.

One hundred and twenty-seven war beasts.

An army.

On the cliff, two lines of blood flowed from Senior Lu Yan's nostrils.

For every additional war beast he controlled, a portion of his mental strength was split off.

One hundred and twenty-seven streams of consciousness operating simultaneously, his brain feeling like it was being pricked by one hundred and twenty-seven needles at once.

But he didn't stop.

Because people below the mountain were still dying.

Lin Xiaoman, inside this body, felt that tearing pain.

One hundred and twenty-seven streams of information flooded into the brain simultaneously, each one being the vision, touch, and combat data of a war beast.

She thought of the feeling she had when she simultaneously invaded thirty-seven national firewalls.

Dozens of windows jumping on the screen, each requiring her to split a strand of attention.

The same.

Exactly the same.

But the exotic beasts were evolving. They began to target the beacons and hunt the mechanical bee swarms.

More terrifyingly—they learned to attack the rune circuits of the war beasts.

A D-Rank Exotic Beast's mental shockwave swept across the battlefield, and the runes of thirty-seven mechanical war beasts became disordered simultaneously,

Like a server invaded by a virus, gears idling, joints locking up, and they collapsed with a bang.

Senior Lu Yan vomited a mouthful of blood.

The backlash of thirty-seven energy circuits breaking at once was like thirty-seven knives stabbing into his consciousness core simultaneously.

The network was collapsing.

The speed of repair couldn't keep up with the speed of destruction.

The final battle.

The exotic beast army pressed on. Without the support of the intelligence network, Kindling was blind.

Senior Lu Yan walked into the core of the "Star Map".

He merged his consciousness into the mechanical network.

No longer "controlling".

It was "becoming".

His eyes became the compound eyes of a thousand mechanical bees.

His ears became the perception of ten thousand beacons.

His brain became the computing core of the entire Star Map.

His supernatural energy no longer needed to be transmitted through rune circuits—because he was the circuit itself.

Every mechanical bee, every beacon, every relay station, every remaining war beast, all became extensions of his body.

"All units, listen to the order—"

His voice came simultaneously from every mechanical bee, every beacon, every relay station.

"East line, thirty miles out, four hundred exotic beasts, primary target, seventh row, third column."

"West line, canyon entrance, ambush formation in position, wait for them to enter range."

"South line—D-Rank approaching. Everyone retreat, wait for me to mark the weak point."

Kindling won.

Senior Lu Yan's physical body stopped breathing on the third day of the fusion.

At the very last moment, he thought—

"Finally, I'm not lonely anymore. I'm connected to everyone."

Lin Xiaoman's tears fell into the void, making no sound.

Darkness enveloped everything again.

Senior Lu Yan's phantom coalesced before her.

Silver hair, deep eyes, grey-green robe.

He didn't speak.

He reached out and tapped her forehead lightly.

Information flowed in—core principles of mechanical arts, rune engraving frameworks, the coupling method of supernatural energy and mechanical structures.

The "source code" from a thousand years ago.

And an iron rule: Machines without supernatural energy infusion are always just dead objects. The controller's power is the life of the machine. The stronger the power, the more machines can be driven simultaneously, and the stronger the war beasts.

This is why ordinary people couldn't build them even if they had the blueprints—even if they built them, they were just scrap metal.

Lin Xiaoman sniffed.

"Senior... I won't merge myself into it like you did."

Her voice was soft, but she bit out every word with great effort.

"I will stand on the outside. In my own way, I will build a network even larger than yours. Not just a continent—but the entire planet."

Senior Lu Yan smiled.

The curve was very shallow, but the light in his eyes was very bright.

He nodded.

He dissipated, turning into points of light that surged into her body.

Warm, with the power of the slight vibration of rotating gears.

Torch Base.

The golden pillar of light dissipated.

Lin Xiaoman's body descended slowly, her canvas shoes touching the stone bricks.

She opened her eyes.

Deep in her pupils, a very subtle, almost invisible silver-blue data stream was scrolling.

She looked down at her hands. Clenched her fist, released, then clenched again.

Power surged from the depths of her bones, a feeling of fullness completely different from before.

But more importantly—

She could "hear" now.

The status of every node in the base's communication network.

The frequency of the ancient tree's energy cycle.

The faint electromagnetic signals of the holy light flowing in Liu Yuyan's armor.

The pulse rhythm of the holy healing energy within Henry.

Everything flooded into her perception, like opening a door that had never existed before.

She tried to send a wisp of supernatural energy into the phone in her pocket.

The phone screen lit up.

Not a normal brightness—it was the brightness of all pixels being taken over by her simultaneously.

The signal bar jumped from one bar to full, and the running data of background programs unfolded in her mind like a waterfall.

Lin Xiaoman clenched her fist tight, looked up at Su Chen.

Her eye sockets were red, her nose tip was red, but the corners of her mouth were split into a big smile.

"President—I'm back."

Su Chen looked at her. The corners of his mouth behind the mask curved.

"Welcome back."

His gaze moved away from Lin Xiaoman, swept over Henry, Liu Yuyan, and finally landed on the newly grown golden leaves of the ancient tree.

Four people.

Flame Keeper, Holy Knight, Holy Healing Apostle, Mechanical Ascension.

The wind blew from nowhere, the golden leaves rustling.

The oath on the broken pillar was silent in the light.

Su Chen opened his notebook and wrote a line on a blank page.

"Kindling Legion—Initially formed."