155: Chapter 159 Who is the Master?

Kaland did not stand up.

He knelt on the metal floor in front of the shrine, his hands clutching the dirty blanket with a death grip; if he didn't hold onto something, his entire body would tremble so much his vision would fail to focus.

The outpost's observation window was only a meter wide.

Light crashed in through that meter-wide gap.

It wasn't the blinding glare of an explosion, but an incredibly dense gold that possessed a heavy, physical mass.

The warship swept past directly above him.

Kaland could clearly see the deep gouges on the hull's lower jaw armor, scraped out by the asteroid belt; he could see the molten ion tail flames flowing once more through the diversion channels that should have been completely rusted shut.

The bronze gear on the shrine, which he had touched for nineteen years, shone brightly under the engine's light.

A sound like a leaking air pipe escaped Kaland's throat, like an old exhaust pipe gasping its last.

He wanted to recite the passage of the scripture he hadn't finished earlier.

But in a state of extreme system crash, his vocal organs couldn't assemble a single complete sentence.

Tears rolled out of his only organic eye, splashing onto the oil-stained floor.

This wasn't out of fear of pure power.

This was a low-level believer who had sat withered in the darkness of space for nearly seven thousand days and nights, who, after spending most of his life thinking he was talking to a piece of scrap metal, suddenly discovered that on the other end of the line, someone was actually listening.

God is alive.

And He was personally piloting a ship, crushing the space above his head.

The light of the holographic projection sliced the Core Council Chamber into two halves of light and shadow.

Twelve chairs, twelve holders of the highest power on Mars.

No one was sitting in the chairs now.

Ferion's right foot was stepped on the edge of the holographic table. His mechanical arm, originally meant for crushing armor plates, was now twitching in mid-air at an incredibly bizarre frequency.

That was a hardware conflict in the low-level servo motors caused by the neural interface receiving an overload of panic.

"Shoot it down..." Ferion's synthesizer voice cracked. "That's fake! That's a holographic disguise! Activate the orbital cannons immediately and shoot it down!"

Motilla stood opposite him.

This Dogma Guardian did not respond to Ferion; he didn't even spare a glance at the warship outside.

His head was lowered, his fully mechanical skull nearly pressed against the surface of the holographic table.

Two items were spread out on the table.

On the left was an incredibly ancient physical scripture, its cover bound in some kind of synthetic human skin.

The book was open to the first page.

An inscription composed of gears and binary code was engraved upon it.

On the right was the high-frequency analysis data map of the warship's engines, just pulled from the sensor network.

These two sets of data—one from a myth thirty thousand years ago, the other from a reality three minutes ago.

Motilla's mechanical fingers slid back and forth between the two sets of data, moving so fast they were mere afterimages.

He was calculating the infinitesimal differences.

He was trying to find even the slightest flaw that could prove the thing was a forgery.

If he could find even a 0.1% mismatch, he could order it blasted to dregs in the name of the Dogma Guardian.

His fingertips brushed against the yellowed paper of the scripture, then across the cool blue holographic projection.

Once, twice, seven times.

Motilla's hand stopped.

He raised his head and looked at Kolosius, who stood at the head of the table.

From the Dogma Guardian's expressionless faceplate came an incredibly dry sound of mechanical friction.

"Identical," Motilla said. "Even the decay curves of the low-level infrasound mesh with absolute precision. Those barbarians on Terra, who can't even build a satellite, couldn't possibly forge this Golden Age base frequency that even we have lost."

"That's exactly how he forged it!" Ferion was still roaring, his mechanical arm slamming onto the holographic table, creating a screen of static. "High Priest, order fire! If he doesn't die, what do the dogmas we've established over these thousands of years mean? What do we mean?!"

Kolosius didn't look at either of them.

He stood with his hands behind his back next to the empty chair representing the omnissiah.

The air conditioning in the council chamber blew against his heavy red robes.

He listened to Ferion's loss of composure and Motilla's despair.

More importantly, he was listening to his own heartbeat.

That blood-pumping organ, which had been replaced by an artificial heart six hundred years ago, was now pumping blood into his synthetic vessels at a dangerous pressure level.

If the person standing at the bow of that warship truly was the omnissiah...

The power Kolosius had wielded for thousands of years as God's proxy had, the very second that warship descended, been legally reduced to zero.

This was a deprivation more terrifying than death.

But he was the High Priest.

He hadn't reached his current position through blind faith, but through an absolutely cold-blooded judgment of the situation.

He reached out his only flesh-and-blood hand and pressed a button on the holographic master console.

"Ferion, deactivate all orbital defense fire control radars."

"Impossible!"

"Shut up." Kolosius's mechanical eye suddenly flared with a blinding red light, projecting directly onto Ferion's face. "Do you think a being capable of reawakening a dead Golden Age warship from a pile of space junk would fear your few outdated orbital cannons? The only result of you opening fire would be to bring a true extinction upon Mars."

Ferion's twitching stopped.

Not because he had calmed down, but because Kolosius's authority had locked his weapon control protocols directly from the system's core.

Kolosius turned his head and looked at the scripture on the table.

Then he performed an action that terrified everyone present—including Motilla, who had advocated for verification.

He closed the scripture.

"Open the main forge gates of Olympus Mons."

The High Priest's voice regained its cold, hard metallic quality. "Mobilize the entire cult. Lay out the highest specification reception array outside the mountain gates. Tell the priests below that no one is allowed to carry weapons."

Motilla's synthesizer made a jamming sound: "You... you acknowledge him as God?"

"I do not acknowledge him as God."

Kolosius walked to the main door, his hand on the valve, without looking back.

"I acknowledge him as the Master. And a clever Master always needs a capable steward to help him manage his estate."

The sealed door slid open.

Kolosius walked out.

He was going to strive to preserve Mars' last bit of leverage in this sudden reshuffling of power.

Even if that leverage could only be presented while kneeling.

The temperature in the operator's cabin dropped.

The near-catastrophic high-load operating state of the system had subsided.

Li Cang leaned back in his chair.

The deduction's imagery was incredibly grand.

On the surface of Mars, the main gates of Olympus Mons—which were said to have never fully opened since the civil war—were sliding back to either side with extreme slowness.

Countless red-robed Tech-Priests and semi-mechanical Skitarii lined the hundreds-of-kilometers-long alloy boulevard.

Not a single person dared to look up.

Amidst a gargantuan roar, the white warship hovered steadily in the low sky, less than a hundred meters from the gates.

All the ceremonies were prepared.

All the bowing was complete.

High Priest Kolosius stood at the very front of the array, hands crossed over his chest, maintaining a posture of absolute humility.

But the scene did not cut to the next step.

The warship's hatch did not open.

That golden figure standing at the bow still looked down upon Kolosius before the gates with an incredibly cold gaze.

He did not come down.

He was waiting.

Li Cang's gaze swept from the left of the holographic projection to the right.

He suddenly understood.

Mars opening its gates and laying out the most grand reception seemed like submission.

But in the underlying logic of diplomacy and politics, this was still the 'host accommodating the guest'.

Mars was the host.

The warship was the guest.

The guest stopping at the door, waiting for the host to welcome him in—that was an acknowledgment of the ownership of this territory.

The Emperor hadn't died in the wastelands of Terra; he certainly understood this.

He didn't want to be a guest.

So he stood there, saying nothing, using a silence more oppressive than cannon fire to exert an unimaginable psychological weight over the heads of millions of Martians.

He would not speak first.

Because the side that spoke first, or moved first, would lose in this silent gambit.

Time ticked away second by second in the extreme silence.

Li Cang saw Kolosius in the image—the High Priest to whom even Ferion, whose neural interface was shorted by fear, had to bow.

The top-tier politician who thought he could still preserve his status as a steward in this card game.

His knees were bending, inch by inch.

He wasn't being pushed down by physical force.

His final political backbone was being snapped alive by a silence that transcended the entire Martian industrial system, a silence that was completely impossible to interpret or counter.

Kolosius knelt.

It wasn't a ceremonial single-knee bow.

Both knees crashed onto the cold alloy floor, his forehead pressed against the gear patterns wiped clean with engine oil.

This was the result.

It wasn't 'Please come in'.

It was 'Mars belongs to You'.

The score in the bottom left corner of the screen jumped wildly again.

[Current Deduction Logic Consistency: SSS]

[Emotional Resonance: Upper Limit Exceeded]

[Hidden Achievement Triggered: Bloodless Conqueror]

Li Cang's fingers slowly tapped twice on the console.

He had won the deduction.

But as he looked at the golden figure in the image finally stepping off the warship,

the clothes on his back, already soaked with cold sweat, felt even colder.