176: Chapter 180: Leave a rotten mud man behind, and send your massive computing power to be your father.

Li Cang covered his mouth, forcibly swallowing back the mouthful of metallic-tasting blood.

On the holographic radar, the massive allied fleet—which had just been paralyzed and sent into a large-scale system crash by that cross-dimensional 'Golden Eye'—was now recovering. Since no follow-up attack came, they were erupting from their panicked stagnation into a counter-pressure formation fueled by immense humiliation and a violent will for revenge!

In ten minutes at most, that main force—capable of plowing through this star system ten thousand times over—would definitely cross the newly melted barrier line and charge down.

"Unit One! Cut the planetary core's main vein! Stuff all three thousand of the treasures I just produced back into the cargo hold!"

Li Cang didn't show even a second of lingering attachment to this fortress, into which he had personally poured countless infrastructure resources and just activated the anti-air spikes.

"Don't take a single Servitor from the underground production lines! Issue a dead-lock physical self-destruct command to all of them, and overload the main reactor to detonate!"

Under these ruthless, scorched-earth orders, the entire Mining Planet No. 3 instantly switched from a bustling construction site to a hellish city-abandonment countdown mode.

The massive keel of the battle axe heavy cruiser was riddled with holes after a fierce battle and two major interventions.

Regardless of the damage, it once again spewed out the coarse dust of warp gravity waves.

This rogue black ship was preparing for a 'backdoor dive' that was extremely unfamiliar even to itself.

But within the final one-minute countdown as the boarding chains were all closing...

Li Cang, in the midst of the grand evacuation, didn't stay obediently in the shock-resistant hibernation pod.

He panted heavily, pouring out a tube of waste residue solution—extracted from the leftovers of the smashed Great Emperor's Altar's first-clear core—which was mixed with high-intensity pungent corpse poison spores and gene-frenzy viruses.

Combined with the lingering, terrifyingly idealistic pressure of the 'God's Wrath Remnant Qi' that had scattered and stagnated at the volcano's mouth due to the tall figure's descent and rebuke...

He forced this mass of foul-smelling scrap into the center of the equatorial crater where the gates had just been destroyed.

Using three large Servitors that hadn't had time to self-destruct...

He crudely and wildly molded a faceless mud statue nearly a hundred meters high and wide, its surface covered in twisted flesh-colored veins that were still slightly 'breathing' a purplish hue—an object of incomparable ugliness!

"Don't you high-level big shots love deciphering top-tier cryptographic maps and using super mainframes for data screening and analysis?"

Li Cang looked at this disgusting yet extremely stylish 'assembled fake gift package' on the monitor, his finger maliciously planting a pure 'Low-level Machine Spirit Frenzy Physical Trojan' into the core of the fake mud man.

"I'm leaving such a big exploration Easter egg target for you. Go ahead and calculate; let's see what kind of results you can come up with."

The battle axe heavy cruiser suddenly lifted its bow.

It didn't ascend toward the space filled with cannon arrays. Li Cang directly activated the black-end secret passage he had just connected to, which bore a red system warning: [Dangerous Interference: Origin Deduction Reception Breakpoint].

The massive physical entity of the warship ignored all logic of planar physics. Right there on the surface of the death star that had just finished spewing tongues of fire, it 'slid' unrealistically—like a drop of water entering a pond—into the untraceable dark abyss at the end of the deduction's built-in spatial blind zone.

The very next second after its massive black tail flame completely vanished from these coordinates...

The void sounded like a ruptured drum.

Tens of thousands of Eternal Star Crown Federation and high-level Church 'Expeditionary Fury Fleets' arrived like a tide, carrying the resolve to scour the land with Lance fire at millions of degrees.

With extreme exaggeration and full alertness, they forcibly descended upon the remaining atmospheric layers of the battered death star no. 3.

The main cannons of tens of thousands of capital ships were charged to the limit, prepared to face the terrifying high-dimensional demonic resistance that had just killed their vanguard general with a single glance.

But when their vanguard's ultra-high-resolution detectors swept over the crater below...

They all froze.

No resistance? No fleet? No cannons? There wasn't even the sign of a single living ant?

Only in the center of the crater, set against the backdrop of the violently burning and exploding underground reactor, was that faceless, rotting mass of a mud statue. It emitted a resonance that was completely foreign to their detection systems and bore that mysterious, lingering aura that had just caused tens of thousands of them to suffer instant brain death, pulsing with a faint, abrupt red light toward the army.

"That is..."

Inside the Star Crown Palace, the top regional tycoon, The Chess Player, saw this extremely counter-intuitive and lonely scene through the high-precision holographic transmission line.

Inside his supercomputing brain—which could remain calm even at the destruction of a star—he instinctively determined that this was definitely no simple piece of junk.

"Lock onto the relic statue! Directly deploy the 'Sacred Photon Gene Deconstruction Grand Array Matrix' to perform a microscopic scan and extract a physical data model! He couldn't have vanished into thin air; this must be a primitive vessel containing a high-dimensional warp teleportation beacon array!"

This was a command perfectly fitting for a highly intelligent coordinator—logical, yet greedy to consume and understand everything.

In mid-air...

Forty-two enormous, precious supercomputing detection motherships, specialized in high-level physical plane archaeology and microscopic analysis, broke formation.

They unreservedly targeted that 'toxic material' Li Cang had casually molded—which was not only free but also carried extreme pathogens!

They cast down the deep blue, full-volume gene-stripping analysis scanning beams that represented the server's highest technology!

The moment those light beams, as fine as hair, touched the surface of the mud man!

Within the brief 0.3 seconds they attempted to peel away the layer mixed with 'Extremely Dangerous Flesh Frenzy Mutation Progenitor Liquid' and that indescribable 'Emperor's Oppressive Residual Aura'...

Inside the supercomputing detection motherships, the progress notification sounds—usually cold and clear like the voice of a god—instantly fell into chaos.

[Warning... Unknown parameters cannot be substituted...]

[Error: Extremely overbearing logic-defying formula... The substance is reverse-eroding the main frequency analysis light waves... The core firewall is experiencing auditory hallucination frequencies...]

Instead of normal physical formulas flickering on the large screens, a vast number of virtual blood-eyes and virtual barbed malignant ulcer codes irrationally grew directly out of the radar maps.

And even more fatal were the high-level Elven officials and Church Grand Inquisitors who were operating these instruments via high-intensity direct neural links for calculation.

In the instant their highly evolved brains attempted to understand and assimilate this 'pseudo-logic'!

The highly-polluting idealistic rebellion poison of the Warhammer surged through the direct light-link pipes like a bursting dam.

"Aaaaaahhhhhhhh NO!!!!"

In the flagship's command center, hundreds of high-level operator-research mages and executives, who were originally elegant, cold, and unapproachable...

Before the holographic screen of The Chess Player—who had just undergone a massive change in expression and abruptly cut the link—their bodies uncontrollably swelled and convulsed with terrifying, tumor-like mutations, their eyes rolling back and exploding.

They lost all pride in their technology tree and all Federation rationality, appearing like a group of beings who had reverted to a state lower and more primitive than the most basic, fanatical low-level organisms.

In the large cabin filled with command and control instruments, they actually knelt in unison on the floor toward the screen showing the lump of rotten mud Li Cang had fashioned!

Like madmen, with extreme and frantic piety, they smashed their heads against the floor until they bled, hysterically chanting a chaotic, reverse-fanatical holy language that no one could understand due to their twisted vocal cords!

"Bastard..."

This scene was playing out simultaneously and irreversibly on a massive scale across all forty-two detection giant ships.

The Chess Player watched as the super-sophisticated fleet, which was supposed to be invincible in crushing this 'flea-ridden' land, fell into such a large-scale, illogical endocrine frenzy and collapse—like a circus performance—just because they scanned a piece of broken stone. On his 'undefeated' face, a large, ten-centimeter-long data bar of logical fury cracked open!

What he didn't know...

...was that the warlord who had played their high-end game like a bunch of monkeys...

...had long since hidden his coordinates from the map. He had dived with his true body and crossed into the deepest, darkest historical point of the system's origin—where the 'Mars Dawn Treaty' was about to be signed—to fish for the true capital that could flatten this mess.