112: Chapter 113 Seventy-Two Hours

The Adeptus Mechanicus's feedback arrived less than six hours after he submitted the handover manifest.

Li Cang was dozing off when the notification popped up. It wasn't actual sleep, but a semi-hibernative state his body automatically entered after the life support system pumped a new round of medication into his bloodstream.

His consciousness was still there, but his eyelids were as heavy as lead. He leaned back in the operator's chair, his head tilted to one side, almost drooling onto his shoulder.

The notification sound pulled him back. He wiped the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand and blinked twice to make the words on the screen go from a blur to legible.

It wasn't a complete reverse engineering report, but a provisional report from a Tech-Priest. The format was concise. Adeptus Mechanicus personnel never wasted words; every character seemed squeezed from between gears, dry and precise, reading like chewing his nutrient blocks.

There was only one piece of content: during the disassembly of the gait control module of the second walking vehicle wreck, a non-original chip was found soldered to the bottom circuit board of the module.

The chip's packaging technology was inconsistent with the manufacturing standards of all other components of the walking vehicle, and it was initially judged to be an external transplant.

He scrolled down. The Tech-Priest had attached a macro scan of the chip, with an annotation below the image:

The manufacturing precision of this chip exceeds the equipment limits of this factory by at least two orders of magnitude. Tracing the source is recommended.

Two orders of magnitude.

The precision achievable by the walking vehicle factory's equipment and the precision of this chip differed by two orders of magnitude.

This meant that this chip was not produced by Kara Enzo's factory, nor could it be produced by any facility of the same grade. It came from a place with a much higher technological level than the walking vehicle factory.

Facility Three wasn't just building nuclear-related things; its precision machining capabilities were much higher than he had previously estimated.

He zoomed in on the scan, staring at the chip's packaging structure for more than ten seconds, unable to discern more information. He wasn't a hardware engineer; these things were properly left for the Adeptus Mechanicus Tech-Priests to chew on.

But one thing he saw very clearly was that the solder joints where this chip was attached to the gait control module were very crude, forming a glaring contrast with the chip's own precision.

It was as if someone had clumsily forced a delicate jewel into a rough iron casing.

A rush job.

Who would be in such a hurry to crudely solder a high-precision chip into a walking vehicle's control module?

The answer was: someone who needed to urgently upgrade the walking vehicle's performance but didn't have time to follow proper procedures.

Kara Enzo was rushing. She was patching up her walking vehicle with parts from Facility Three, and she was doing it very hastily.

Why the rush?

Because she knew the Empire was coming.

He jotted down this deduction, then closed the Tech-Priest's report and looked at the constantly flashing countdown in the lower right corner of the screen.

PVP Matchmaking window, sixty-six hours remaining.

He hadn't looked closely at the rules for this window before, but now he clicked into it.

The Competitive Period PVP matchmaking pool operates on a cycle. Each matchmaking window is open for forty-eight hours, followed by a seventy-two-hour cooldown period, during which new opponents cannot be matched.

He calculated that if he missed this window, he would have to wait five days for the next one to open.

Five days.

He had calculated the GP consumption for five days. At the current rate of burning money, his disposable balance would drop to a very unsightly number after five days, so low that even maintaining the basic upkeep of the Thunder Warriors would become difficult.

He leaned back against the chair again, this time not tilting his head but looking up at the ceiling of the operations cabin. There was a thin crack on the ceiling; he didn't know when it had appeared, it might have always been there, he just hadn't noticed it before.

Sixty-six hours.

The Adeptus Mechanicus's complete reverse engineering report was expected in seventy-two hours.

This meant that if he waited for the report to come out before making a decision, the PVP matchmaking window would close.

If he entered PVP matchmaking first, he would have to fight a battle against an unknown opponent with incomplete information and an incomplete roster before the reverse engineering report came out.

He turned the two options over and over in his mind.

The advantage of waiting for the report was complete information, allowing him to decide the next step of resource allocation based on the true nature of Facility Three. But the cost was missing the PVP window, five days of empty burning, and GP dropping below the danger line.

The advantage of fighting PVP first was immediate resource replenishment, but the cost was incomplete information. He didn't know if Facility Three would cause trouble while he was in PVP, and his deck hadn't had time for final adjustments based on the reverse engineering report.

Neither option was good.

His fingers tapped the armrest three times, an uneven rhythm: the first heavy, the second light, the third heaviest. This was his habit when thinking; usually, the answer emerged by the third tap.

The answer emerged.

He sat up straight and opened the pre-registration page for the PVP matchmaking interface.

Pre-registration was not formal enrollment; it was queuing up before the matchmaking window opened. Once the window opened, the system would match according to the pre-registration order. The earlier one registered, the larger the opponent pool and the more choices available.

He filled out the pre-registration form but didn't press submit.

His finger hovered about three centimeters above the confirm button.

The Adeptus Mechanicus's full report was still sixty-six hours away, and the PVP window would also open in sixty-six hours, but the pre-registration deadline was twenty-four hours before the window opened.

This meant he still had forty-two hours to wait.

After forty-two hours, if the Adeptus Mechanicus report came out early, he could go into PVP with complete information.

If the report didn't come out early, he would at least be pre-registered and wouldn't miss the window.

Forty-two hours—this was all the buffer time he could buy.

He saved the pre-registration form as a draft, set an alarm for forty-two hours later, and then closed the PVP interface.

Then he opened the civilization forge.

Regardless of when the reverse engineering report came out, some preparatory work could be done now. He needed to re-evaluate his existing cards and plugins to see if he could still squeeze any value out of this pile of junk before PVP.

When the civilization forge interface lit up, the corner of his mouth curved again; this time, he was genuinely smiling.

Being a scavenger is a very special kind of joy, because you never know if there's a forgotten part hidden in a corner. Although it's unlikely, the process of searching itself is addictive.