148: Chapter 152 Smash Your Server Along the Internet Cable

The expansion of the Star Martial Epoch's grand map was accompanied by an extremely piercing spectrum refresh on the holographic radar panel.

In this real universe projection, which had broken away from the enclosed Battle Royale stage, the coordinate scale zoomed out from tens of thousands of kilometers to a macroscopic span measured in light-years.

Hundreds of thousands of star sector light spots lit up one after another on the dark screen.

Before Li Cang's hand could even move away from the zoom button on the console, an extremely slender, dark red detection wave with intense hostile stripping properties cut directly into his ship's core coordinates.

No alarm sounded, because the level of this detection wave was so high that it directly bypassed conventional fire control radars.

That was a high-dimensional peek emitted from the edge of the Crimson Machine Monastery territory, thirty thousand light-years away, which was marked by the system as extremely dangerous.

The detection wave was like an invisible deboning knife, scraping against the newly grown layer of dark gray biological armor on the battle axe frigate, attempting to forcibly read the chassis data of this kitbashed ship.

The muscle fibers on the surface of the biological armor twitched violently under the stroke of the detection wave, and gray-green pus seeped out along the armor seams.

This undisguised scanning had no concept of a system protection period; in the interstellar grand map, this was the purely raw appraisal of a hunter selecting a hog.

Li Cang directly tore off the decoy generator cables on the side of the console used for camouflaging anti-reconnaissance.

He did not activate the shields for passive defense.

An iron pincer, which he hadn't had time to clean since the Battle Royale ended, was slammed hard by him onto the vector coordinate lock lever of the main console.

"Regardless of which sewer this red light was shot from tens of thousands of light-years away," Li Cang's voice was bone-chillingly cold, directly drowning out the noise of the recruits in the lower deck tuning their weapons, "today, the light bulb emitting this light must be chopped off."

Li Cang forcibly wrote the coordinate point of that red scanning source into the destination blind jump map of the subspace gravity fold engine (Dark Gold Grade Mutation).

He didn't even pay attention to the three-page-long Actuarial Report on Mortality Rate for Cross-Sector Navigationless Jumps that popped up from the system.

His finger pressed down on the lever, wagering his entire fortune on the chassis, and pushed it all the way to the end.

The dark gold engine at the rear of the battle axe frigate, crossbred from multiple alien civilizations and Abyssal Star Beasts, erupted with a roar into a mass of black-gold tail flames that warped the gravitational constant.

The one hundred and fourteen Astartes, who had just filled their ranks and were in peak condition, showed no hesitation due to their status as recruits.

They immediately pulled out the metal crossbars on the fixed piles and used mechanical servo arms to forcibly press down the engine cooling pipelines, which had begun to jump wildly due to overload, onto the floor.

Before ripples could even appear in the space in front of the bow, it was like a mirror smashed by a heavy hammer, directly breaking open an extremely irregular Warp rift.

Carrying a full body of murderous intent and the newly fused biological armor, the battle axe frigate roared as it crashed into this boundless purple abyss.

At the edge of the dark red star sector, the outpost monitoring station codenamed Observer-7.

This was an extremely massive semi-mechanical, semi-rock man-made celestial body, over fifty kilometers in diameter, encased in a layer of flowing high-frequency ion shields, specifically used to monitor and mark "recruit" civilizations ascending from various subordinate competition zones.

In front of the data terminals inside the station, hundreds of semi-mechanical operators with thick fiber optic cables plugged into the backs of their heads were methodically categorizing and dehydrating the newly scanned data.

"Target number 409X, detection wave return abnormal, unknown biological tissue attached to the vehicle's hull, preliminary assessment as a medium-sized frigate class with melee threat..."

The high-ranking monitoring officer in the primary seat was looking at the progress bar with his pupil-less red mechanical eye.

"This kind of trash doesn't require the deployment of a formal fleet; just bundle its coordinates and toss them to the nearby Scavenger Mercenaries in exchange for some high-energy ore." The monitoring officer's command had just been converted into binary code.

On the wide-area detection gravity net that the station prided itself on, a massive black hole suddenly appeared that could cause all detectors to burn out on the spot.

No deceleration ripples preceding a spatial fold.

No elegant flight trajectory that any civilization could understand.

In the vacuum less than three kilometers from the station's front shield, an extremely hideous and unstable Warp rift tore open like a gaping mouth.

The battle axe frigate was spat out directly from that purple maw with an incomprehensible acceleration.

Its exterior was a pathetic sight.

During the thirty-thousand-light-year Warp blind jump, the dark gray biological activated carapace had been gnawed into pits and hollows by the turbulence and lesser demons in the abyss, with countless broken metal keels exposed.

But it didn't fall apart.

After absorbing the radiation leaking from the engine, the biological armor was crawling and scabbing over at a speed visible to the naked eye.

More lethally, it brought with it an absolutely unreasonable characteristic of this mutated engine—Gravity Tear.

The moment the warship exited the Warp, the distorted gravity field accumulated from forcibly crossing galaxies turned into an invisible giant hydraulic pincer, clamping hard onto the outer ion shield of the Observer-7 station.

In the face of a mass capable of tearing apart planetary micro-gravity, the high-frequency ion shield didn't even last a microsecond, exploding on the spot into a rain of scattered energy light.

The deformed ram of the battle axe frigate, fused from anti-aircraft towers and wreck cannon barrels, slammed directly into the semi-rock body of the station.

An earth-shattering collision on the physical level erupted in the vacuum with a flash of fire bright enough to blind optical sensors.

The moment of impact, the internal organs and mechanical cervical connections of those hundreds of semi-mechanical operators inside the station were directly shattered by the terrifying kinetic energy transmitted inward.

Before the monitoring officer could even press the alarm system, he was crushed into a puddle of sludge mixed with engine oil by the collapsing reinforced ceiling.

The fifty-kilometer-long station had one-third of its celestial defense structure forcibly smashed through by the battle axe frigate.

The antenna arrays and energy hubs used to emit high-level scanning waves turned into cosmic dust under the nearly barbaric crushing of the Warhammer frigate.

The massive inertia carried the battle axe frigate deep into the interior of the station, with explosion fireballs and gushing toxic gas everywhere.

Li Cang sat in the cockpit, looking at the gray screen prompt on the holographic radar representing the complete paralysis of the enemy's monitoring system.

His wrist swept heavily across the firing sequence panel.

"Blinding its eyes is only the knock on the door."

"Disembark."

"Kill everyone who's still breathing."

The absurdly thick broadside blast doors of the frigate slammed open outward accompanied by the venting of high-pressure gas.

No assembly broadcast needed, no battle mobilization required.

One hundred and fourteen Astartes, whether they were the fourteen veterans bearing battle-damaged scars from the previous round of the Battle Royale, or the recruits who had just walked out of the incubation tanks with brand-new armor paint.

The entire crew activated their magnetic suction boots and, like a swarm of black death locusts, charged out against the secondary explosion flames inside the station.

This was a one-sided slaughter and sweep in the ruins of the station, an environment with zero gravity and filled with various lethal radiations.

The station's defense force was a group of fully armed semi-mechanical cyborgs.

The plasma rifles in their hands hit the Astartes' masterwork armor, leaving nothing but a charred white dot, unable to even slow their charge.

Recruit Number One, holding a freshly forged high-frequency Chainsword, didn't even look at the location of the fire points.

His massive, tower-like body directly smashed through the blast shelters.

Amidst the ear-piercing roar of the motor, the Chainsword split an alien guard, who was attempting to trigger a self-destruct device, into two pieces from the right shoulder to the left waist.

Thick green blood and sparking capacitor circuits sprayed onto his faceplate under the pressure of vacuum-exposed internal organs.

Over a hundred giants holding Chainswords and solid Bolters combed through this fifty-kilometer celestial station from the periphery to the core with extremely high efficiency.

No prisoners were taken.

Those mechanical officers in the depths of the ruins attempting to evacuate in escape pods were blasted into scrap metal along with their pods by large-caliber bolts.

Twenty minutes later.

The entire Observer-7 station fell into absolute physical silence.

Li Cang looked at a star map hard drive emitting a faint blue light that the Astartes had ripped out of the station's data hub.

It was a detailed node distribution map of this area of the grand map, not covered by the system's fog of war.

More importantly, this star map lit up a small area of the dark star sector behind the station.

It was an abandoned dead star system consisting of three barren mining planets and a medium-sized star.

There were plenty of abyssal heavy metals here, the station's remaining energy purification devices, and most importantly, this was a vacuum buffer zone not controlled by any other high-level civilizations.

The battle axe frigate slowly pulled its bloody ram out of the station's wreckage.

The bow turned, and those three Star-Shattering Macro-cannons with exaggerated calibers still emitted the smell of gunpowder that hadn't completely cooled.

Li Cang took the high-level broadcast microphone for the communication frequency and directly patched the frequency into the station's wide-area broadcast system he had just pulled out.

His voice crossed the star sector, following that severed dark red detection wave link, and pushed back extremely arrogantly.

"The ruins of this station, and the three mining stars behind it, I am requisitioning them now."

Li Cang didn't even make any hypocritical aesthetic packaging for his civilization; there was only the most direct declaration of possession.

"Those who find me an eyesore, you'd better bring your entire main fleet over."

"Otherwise, I don't mind following your red light and smashing your home base into this same state."

Twelve thousand Blueprint Points (BP).

Li Cang's index finger tapped rhythmically twice on the edge of the console.

If he relied on step-by-step grinding through those conventional planetary-level instances, he would have to work himself to death for a dozen or so competition years to earn this amount.

And not even a single Astartes veteran could die in the process.

The Battle Royale, a gu-rearing mode with an extremely high mortality rate, had forcibly lifted him from the quagmire of bankruptcy to the level of a nouveau riche.

He didn't look closely at the low-level industrial material drops used for repairing conventional keels and reloading cannons.

His gaze went straight through the waterfall stream, locking onto the special grade loot slot at the very top of the settlement list, which emitted a light of intertwined dark red and sickly green.

There lay a piece of meat that was still slightly throbbing.

This was the high-dimensional core remnant of that Abyssal Star Beast that hadn't had time to completely dissipate on the physical level after being shattered by the Macro-cannon at point-blank range.

The pieced-together heavy hull of the battle axe frigate was currently on the verge of disintegrating.

Previously, to seize the lighthouse, it had endured the concentrated fire of the three-way alliance, and later, it had faced the Abyssal Star Beast's point-blank fire.

The keels in the lower deck, forcibly pressed out from old armor and load-bearing pillars, had undergone extremely severe irreversible metal fatigue.

[part:gemini-3.1-flash-lite]

Repairing this shell with ordinary adamantine is too slow, and it would still shatter the moment it encounters a higher-dimensional strike.

Li Cang's fingers pressed heavily onto the holographic screen.

He directly pulled up the underlying interface of the civilization forge.

He forcefully dragged the remains of the Star Beast living engine, which was as large as several rooms, into the center of the crucible via the interface.

[Warning: Extremely high concentration of unknown Abyssal contaminant detected.]

[This substance is pure high-dimensional biological tissue, violating the underlying mechanical materialist logic of the current ship.]

[Forced assimilation of this substance will cause irreversible physical and flesh-based mutations to the ship.]

Because the contamination level was judged to be too high, the edges of the warning box even sprouted a layer of virtual, writhing electronic granulation.

The rules of the Battle Royale settlement space were warning him not to mess around.

Li Cang didn't even look at that red warning box.

Winning the Battle Royale was just an entry ticket; what he had to face next was the far larger and more brutal struggle for the main universe star sectors.

A broken iron ship that could fall apart at any moment had no qualifications to sail there.

He swiped directly on the balance panel on the right, withdrew 20,000 genesis points, and slammed them into the crucible's overclocking acceleration threshold slot.

The crucible ignited with a roar.

What rose up was not the blue plasma flame of metal smelting, but an extremely eerie, dark golden alien fire.

It ignored the repulsion of those underlying logical layers and forcibly began to ablate.

In the space outside the control cabin.

The tattered black surface of the battle axe frigate began to undergo a hair-raising activation reaction.

The slag and broken metal floating on the surface of the crater were directly melted by an invisible high heat.

The pale green high-level biological muscle bands purified from the Star Beast living engine spread wildly along the ship's broken keel conduits.

They burrowed into those unrepairable metal gaps, replacing the hydraulic bearings that had been blown apart.

These thick, hyperplastic muscle fibers acted like stitches, tightly connecting those precarious outer armor plates together.

Within a few minutes, the overall silhouette of the battle axe frigate became more bloated, twisted, and heavier.

The cold, hard, and pitted black iron surface of the hull now featured a layer of dark gray biological coating that was as rough and tough as shark skin.

At the damaged parts of the armor plates, this dark biological coating was even writhing, growing, and autonomously closing wounds at a speed visible to the naked eye.

[Star Beast flesh assimilation complete.]

[battle axe frigate basic armor upgrade: Heavy Biological Activation Carapace.]

[Trait: Ignores conventional metal fatigue at the battleship level; as long as the reactor core has not stalled, the armor can absorb surrounding high-energy free particles for rapid self-healing.]

[The warship has been reclassified by the system as: Semi-mechanical, semi-biological exotic construct.]

Li Cang glanced at the warship on the 3D map that had completely turned into a monster.

The starship's defensive shortcomings had been patched in the most brutal way possible.

The remaining, and most fatal, problem was manpower.

By the end of the Battle Royale, to fill the battle lines and operate the cannons, the ordinary Thunder Warriors had long since been drained.

The First Legion's Astartes were left with only those dozen or so recruits, covered in dents and with their armor nearly falling off.

The intensity of the next map would only rise exponentially.

Relying on these fourteen men for boarding actions, they wouldn't be able to clear a standard frontline heavy battleship even if they were worked to death.

Li Cang cast his gaze again toward the remaining Star Beast muscle band residue in the crucible.

Inside it, a small portion of extremely high-purity high-dimensional genetic material was still sealed.

He connected to the command channel of the bottom cabin.

"Number Fourteen, go to the Gene Laboratory."

"Plug yourself into the blood extraction tube."

Fourteenth Recruit was currently sitting on a pile of empty bolt shells, wiping that high-frequency Chainsword, which had several teeth chipped off, with machine oil.

His left forearm had been completely erased while scavenging for blueprints at the edge of the poison circle's red line, and blackened muscle tissue and alloy bone stumps were exposed at the broken edge of his armor.

After receiving the order, he stood up and used one hand to heavily unbuckle the armor on the side of his severed arm.

He didn't ask why he was going to have his blood drawn, and strode into the cold, flickering Gene Laboratory.

A thick, nail-like alloy needle mercilessly pierced into Number Fourteen's thick carotid artery.

Pure veteran blood, containing the memories of the first batch of Astartes who died in battle, as well as the extreme high-pressure survival experience from this round of Battle Royale, was forcibly extracted.

This dark red blood flowed through the transparent conduits into the fully automatic gene purification centrifuge.

Li Cang moved swiftly at the console, performing a system-level packaging of this purest combat genetic chain, which carried a strong aura of death.

Then.

He took the high-dimensional flesh essence extracted from the Abyssal Star Beast, along with the massive amount of genesis points remaining from the settlement.

He dumped it all into the underlying compilation queue of this genetic chain.

The civilization forge's extraction of these biological materials reached a heinous extreme.

There was no explosion of golden light on the virtual interface.

There was only a nauseatingly thick waterfall of blood rolling and reconstructing violently on the panel.

Those maddening high-dimensional contaminants were forcibly purged of all uncontrollable thought residues under the extremely violent scouring of Warhammer Gene Alchemy and massive capital.

The system only retained the purest physical hyperplasticity and rule resistance of the flesh.

The purification and reorganization process lasted for a full two hours.

When the last drop of the viscous, mutated stock solution—a mixture of dark gold, deep crimson, and pale green—flowed into the intake of the main culture tank.

Li Cang heavily pressed the [Mass Batch Synchronous Production] button in the center of the console.

In the new Primarch Gene Laboratory at the bottom of the warship, which had expanded to occupy nearly half a deck.

One hundred huge high-pressure glass culture tanks simultaneously lit up with blinding incandescent light.

Inside the murky culture medium.

Clumps of initial flesh, catalyzed by the ultimate high-dimensional nutrients and the veteran genetic map, began to fission wildly at a speed that defied all biological logic.

Within a mere ten minutes, the bones completed high-density calcification that exceeded the hardness of ceramic matrices.

Those secondary hearts, which had been enhanced to twice their original volume, were already emitting muffled, powerful beats in the chest cavities even before the skin of the torsos had fully closed.

This batch of recruits did not experience the pain and adaptation period that the early Thunder Warriors went through, slowly being surgically modified from mortals.

From the moment the fertilized eggs formed, they were ultimate monster killers that had devoured the flesh of high-dimensional Star Beasts.

Within their swollen muscle fibers, a faint, pale green glimmer of biological resistance energy, unique to Star Beasts, could be seen.

[Battle Royale bonus settlement troop production complete.]

[First Legion establishment restored; total active Astartes: 114.]

[High-dimensional flesh underlying fusion detected.]

[All soldiers in this batch automatically acquire the passive talent trait: Potent Immunity to Abyssal Toxin / Mental Corruption.]

The one hundred black giants sleeping in the culture tanks, about to break out of their cocoons, were Li Cang's greatest trump card for entering the next interstellar slaughter.

He did not stop his fingers from operating.

The remaining 20,000 BP were directly allocated in full to the weapon assembly line module.

The hundreds of engineering Servitors in the bottom cabin, following the newly issued full-load order, frantically poured out the remaining ordinary refined metal materials.

One hundred recalibrated large-caliber electromagnetic acceleration Bolters, as well as one hundred extended-version high-frequency adamantine Chainswords.

Rapidly took shape on the enclosed assembly line, accompanied by the harsh sound of stamping.

Li Cang turned his gaze back from the culture monitoring panel to the main screen.

All the loot from the first round had been squeezed dry by him in an extremely short amount of time, like sucking the marrow from bones.

It was completely converted into this iron-hulled ship wearing a biological skin, and the hundred-plus cold killing machines below.

He had no extra savings left.

The brief intermission time between matches also happened to come to an end at this point.

The white-gold settlement light curtain from the system, which had shrouded the entire safe zone, shattered with a bang the moment the countdown hit zero.

The true scene of the grand star map unfolded slowly on the holographic radar without any obstruction.

This was no longer a Battle Royale sandbox that was tens of thousands of kilometers square, filled with poison circles, and where one could survive by brute-force ramming.

This was the edge of the true main universe public area of the Star Martial Epoch's high-dimensional competition format.

On this 3D star map, which was so vast that light-year distances could not be calculated with numbers.

There was no fog obscuring the view.

There were no forcibly shrinking safe zones.

There were only dense, massive power light spots representing various huge star sector super-civilizations and The Agents of ancient gods.

Those ancient high-level officials of the Adeptus Mechanicus (Noctis Labyrinth core network) who had previously secretly tampered with the underlying servers and sent monkey-version blueprints to the Sun Warriors.

Those veteran exploiter players who had relied on raw strength to escape various Battle Royale poison circles and had long since established massive interstellar empires on the periphery of the main universe.

And even some extremely dangerous blind zones that could only be displayed as weird, twisted shapes on the radar, bearing clear high-dimensional deity markings.

All of them revealed their gentle veils at this moment, displaying extremely explicit predatory coordinates before Li Cang.

At the far right end of the radar panel.

A star sector light spot that appeared a depressing dark red, with a volume far exceeding the sum of the Sol System, suddenly flickered at a high frequency.

That position was a staggering distance of 30,000 light-years away from the battle axe frigate's current departure jump point.

But Li Cang clearly saw it.

A high-order deep space detection wave, almost invisible and possessing a substantive, hostile scanning nature.

Following the moment the system lifted the restrictions on the grand map, it crossed this despair-inducing distance and gently swept over the battle axe frigate's newly grown, disgusting biological armor shell.

That was prying.

They were seeing how much this blood-stained axe, which had suddenly killed its way out of the Battle Royale, was actually worth.

The anti-reconnaissance system in the control cabin emitted a sharp alert of being locked on.

Li Cang did not press the evasion button, nor did he initiate the signal scrambling program to hide.

His eyes, bloodshot from long-term high-pressure operation, stared at that massive dark red light spot.

He extended a finger and pointed at the center of the high-dimensional coordinate on the holographic star map that had emitted the detection wave.

He struck it heavily without hesitation.

His finger left the screen.

A string of reverse physical lock-on signals was sent back along the original path.

"I'm coming."