153: Chapter 157 Singularity

After the confirmation button was pressed, nothing happened.

Three seconds.

Five seconds.

The lights in the operation pod went out.

This wasn't the normal deduction loading process. During a normal load, the holographic panel would shrink into a spinning blue dot and expand into an image within three seconds.

Now, even that blue dot hadn't appeared.

The console was burning hot.

This heat wasn't external radiation from an engine overload, but a physical high temperature literally burned out of the underlying computing chips by a volume of data far exceeding their design capacity.

When Li Cang lifted his hand from the confirmation button, his fingertip was slightly singed by the temperature of the metal surface.

The twelfth second.

A crack split open in the very center of the darkness.

It wasn't light, nor was it an image.

It was a line of golden characters, squeezed out of that crack; the strokes had a coarse, grainy texture, and every word trembled slightly, as if the system carrying them was being propped open from the inside by some immense power.

【Civilization Evolution Singularity conditions detected.】

Li Cang didn't touch the screen.

The golden characters were scrolling down on their own.

The speed was slow, popping out line by line; with every line that appeared, the console's temperature rose by one degree.

Gene Alchemy. Standard met.

Extinction-level Stress Test. Standard met.

Underlying Belief Logic. Standard met.

Forge World. Standard met.

Origin-level Deduction. Triggered.

After all five lines had finished appearing, the entire operation pod fell silent for about two seconds.

Then, the final line appeared.

The font size of this line was larger than all the previous ones, the color deeper, and its edges carried an extremely faint but visible golden pulse that constantly rippled outward.

【Generating: Civilization Will Embodiment.】

An extremely faint sound of metal deforming came from beneath the armrest of the chair.

Li Cang glanced down.

Without him realizing it, his right hand had gripped the armrest so hard that his knuckles were white.

It wasn't fear.

It was an immense, mysterious premonition he had never experienced within this system.

It felt as if something incredibly heavy was rising from a very, very deep place, and he was sitting directly above it.

The pop-ups didn't stop.

Four more lines appeared.

These four lines did not use gold.

They used red.

【This entity possesses completely independent self-awareness.】

【The Commander has no control authority over this entity.】

【Non-replicable. Non-tradable. Non-storable.】

【Continue?】

Four red restrictions.

Every single one was saying the same thing.

You've raised something you cannot control.

The temperature in the operation pod was still rising.

Li Cang's back was already soaked with sweat—not from the heat, but the kind of cold sweat the body automatically secretes when you realize you are about to touch some irreversible, monumental event.

He spent three seconds staring at that red 【Continue?】.

Then he raised his hand and pressed it.

The screen exploded.

Not an explosion.

It was countless fragmented holographic data streams, carrying an energy density that almost burned through the projectors, spinning out in a storm within the operation pod.

Li Cang was forced to turn his head away by the intense light.

By the time the light stabilized slightly, he could finally see the image before him.

That wasn't Mars.

The timeline had been pulled back.

Pulled back to a very distant place.

The image showed a desolate, grayish-white plain of death. There was no sun in the sky, only a layer of thick, concrete-textured clouds.

At the edge of the plain stood a half-collapsed building; its original function was indiscernible. Rebar and broken bricks were mixed together, scorched into a blackened charcoal color by radiation.

The camera pushed closer.

Through the collapsed walls, through corridors sealed by nuclear dust, through a rusted-shut iron door.

A basement.

Extremely dim.

On a metal table sat something wrapped in rags.

The bundle of rags was moving.

There was the rise and fall of breathing, extremely weak but extremely steady.

A kind of light seeped through the gaps in the cloth.

It wasn't blinding or ostentatious; it was even somewhat soft.

But it was that very softness that felt wrong. On this wasteland where even the soil had been killed by radiation, no form of light should carry warmth.

Li Cang leaned forward slightly.

The image didn't give a close-up of the bundle of rags.

It jumped directly.

The second scene.

Outside the fence of a tribal camp.

A dozen corpses lay on the ground.

The ways they died varied: some had snapped cervical vertebrae, some had collapsed chests, and some had faces that were no longer recognizable.

But there was one commonality—all the fatal wounds were clean and efficient, with no redundant cuts and no secondary injuries caused by hesitation.

Every strike had been a one-hit kill.

A youth stood in the corner of the frame.

He was still wearing those same rags, though they were now tied with a few pieces of rope, barely hanging onto his body.

The youth held no weapons.

The knuckles of his ten fingers were long, the proportions of the bones clearly different from those of an ordinary person.

He was using those hands to unhurriedly pry a bone dagger from the grip of a corpse.

After prying it loose, he took one look and threw it away.

Too blunt.

Then he walked toward the next corpse.

This time, the image lingered a bit longer.

As the youth crouched down to search the deceased's equipment, his face entered the camera's clear focus for the first time.

It was a very young face, but that youthfulness was completely disconnected from the surrounding wasteland.

His features possessed an extremely precise symmetry; every line appeared too perfect, perfect to the point where it made one instinctively uncomfortable.

Because a human should not look like this.

The color of his pupils was indistinguishable in the dim light, but the speed and rhythm with which they scanned the equipment were so cold that the image itself seemed to freeze.

This calmness wasn't a facade created by suppressing emotions.

It was that there were no emotions at all.

The scene cut again.

This time it jumped much further.

Era unknown, location unknown.

What appeared in the image was a massive fortress wall that was currently being breached.

The area below the wall was densely packed with people.

There were infantry phalanxes in homemade iron armor, fire teams carrying pipe rifles, and suicide squads with bare torsos frantically smashing at the gates with metal clubs.

The defenders atop the wall were pouring down fire—lasers and solid slugs covered the area simultaneously, and the people at the foot of the wall fell in swathes.

But they did not retreat.

When the first row fell, the second row stepped over the corpses to take their place; when the second row fell, the third row charged through the blood.

It wasn't because of courage.

Because as the camera pulled back, the gazes of all the besiegers were locked onto a single point.

The highest point of the wall.

A figure clad in golden armor was already standing there alone.

There was no visual record of how he got up there.

When the image showed him, he was already there, his feet planted on the corpse of the defending Commander, his right hand holding a smoking power sword taken from the corpse's hand.

He stood there motionless, looking down at the soldiers who were throwing their lives away beneath the wall.

He didn't wave, he didn't shout, and there were no heroic gestures of encouragement.

He just stood there.

But every single person below the wall, the moment they saw that golden figure, went completely mad.

Not the madness of a breakdown.

It was an absolute, unreserved, suicidal frenzy to charge.

The scene cut for the final time.

Li Cang was now pressed completely against the back of his chair, the back of his head against the cushion, both hands death-gripping the armrests.

It wasn't fear.

As he watched, he had been using his gamer's instinct to analyze this entity's combat power, range of influence, and utility value.

But with every step those cold calculations took forward, they were pushed back a step by something surging out of the images.

He couldn't say what it was.

In the final segment of the footage, that person was now wearing a complete set of golden armor.

Standing atop a mountain peak so high it was just below the clouds.

Beneath his feet was an entire conquered planet.

There was not a single person behind him.

He stood there alone, head tilted up, looking at something beyond the gray sky.

He looked for a long time.

Then he spoke.

This was the only line of dialogue in the entire montage.

His voice wasn't loud.

There was no echo, no background music, and even the sound of the wind stopped in that second.

"Not enough."

The weight with which those two words landed was heavier than all the previous battle scenes combined.

The golden figure turned and walked down the mountain.

Walking toward a direction that had just lit up at the edge of the frame.

The fourth planet of the Sol System.

Mars.

The image went dark.

The rapid flashback phase of the deduction had ended.

When the auxiliary lighting in the operation pod came back on, Li Cang found that his hands gripping the armrests were so sore they were trembling.

Only one final static image remained in the holographic projection.

A back view of a figure in golden armor, walking across a wasteland toward the crimson planet at the edge of the horizon.

The system had labeled this back view with a line of small text in the bottom left corner.

【Civilization Will Embodiment · Independent Hero Unit】

【Codename: The Emperor】

【Control Authority: None】

Li Cang let go of the armrests and stretched his stiff fingers.

In the projection, The Emperor had already reached the edge of the wasteland.

He didn't stop, he didn't look back, and he certainly didn't wait for anyone to give him the next command.

A loading bar for the formal phase of the deduction popped up at the bottom of the screen.

【Deduction formally beginning.】

【Current Node: Late 29th Millennium.】

【The Unifier of Terra has dispatched messengers to Mars' orbit.】

The second the progress bar reached one hundred percent, The Emperor's back disappeared into the crimson light.

Li Cang's fingers made a ghost of a swipe across the console.

He had a very bad premonition.

He couldn't even begin to guess what this thing would do once it stepped onto Mars.