180: Chapter 184 My Big Mud, Specifically for Blocking Your Highway Exits

The massive and battered hull of the battle axe heavy cruiser pulled a murky wake through the vacuum.

The engines gave a few muffled, stalling twitches. This behemoth, laden with high-tier alien wreckage, slammed into the deep underground central dock of Mining Planet No. 3 in the most brutal manner possible.

On the surface of the mining planet, the brand of the double-headed eagle—burned through to forcibly summon a cross-dimensional gaze—remained terrifying. More than half of the fortress's defensive positions had been reduced to scorched earth, and choking radioactive toxic smoke still permeated the air.

On the holographic radar inside the cockpit, deep red hostile cursors were packed so densely they almost formed a blinding, straight line of death.

Those five top-tier civilizations had not only failed to retreat, but had instead activated a full-spectrum deep space mother-ring scan. That self-proclaimed noble "Chess Player," in conjunction with several surrounding Ancient God-level major powers, was mobilizing bounty hounds across the entire universe to frantically search for the coordinates of 409X. The intensity of this joint manhunt had already far exceeded the bottom line of a regular season.

Li Cang did not tremble before the dense, life-threatening locks.

He sank into the deep gray anti-magnetic camouflage pilot's chair as if drained of strength, his eyes glowing a ghostly green as he stared at the large isolation shock-pool in the center of the cabin.

Inside was the loot just carried in by the Astartes phalanx—[Deep-Dive Contamination Terminal: Ancient Men of Iron Malfunctioning Data Dead-Core]. The surface of this wreckage, larger than the front hood of a battle tank, emitted a nauseating stench and was covered in mechanical short-circuit lines resembling granulation.

"Looking for me? Shining all your searchlights right at my front door, are you?"

Li Cang didn't even put on a basic protective suit. With bare hands, he grabbed the cheapest, heavy-duty magnetic cutting pliers from the Mars terminal tool library.

He held no reverence or curiosity toward this ancient divine object. Like a chef dismantling hard-shelled seafood in a back kitchen, he stepped forward, clamped the core's outer shell tightly with the pliers, and suddenly yanked with all his might.

Puchi—

The ear-piercing sound of metal snapping, accompanied by a sharp neural shriek, echoed within the dark vault. A large chunk of toxic data ribbon, still flowing with deep purple chaotic current and spraying out junk code, was violently ripped away by him.

The system panel immediately popped up a series of warnings, flashing red text stating that touching this substance would inevitably trigger an unimaginable rebellion.

Li Cang didn't even look; he hadn't expected to decipher it using conventional means at all.

"Number One!" He connected to the internal private line. "Take that batch of the cheapest basic beacon guide light frames we seized from the great map earlier—the ones even junk merchant ships wouldn't look twice at—fill up a hopper with them and push them over here!"

This piece of dark code—possessing ancient exclusivity, crazed logic, and filled with deep-space malice—was thrown directly into the deep furnace by Li Cang to be physically diluted, crushed, and ground up.

This was a dirty operation with absolutely no bottom line.

The noble Men of Iron dead-core was brutally pulverized, forcibly differentiated into over forty thousand segments of filthy Trojan horses, each weaker than a single-celled fungus.

No precision implantation was needed; it was simply smeared into the interfaces of those tens of thousands of shabby beacon lights, like stuffing minced meat into mud.

The surfaces of these disguised beacons appeared unremarkable, still emitting the legal guidance bands common across the entire sector.

But as long as any high-tier system's detection band performed a handshake authentication with them—even if the gap was only 0.03 seconds—

This shredded, stinking virus would viciously and defenselessly pierce into the opponent's core blood vessels, pushing back forcefully all the way to completely overturn the entire regional main network.

"Blocking my ports and pinning me at home earlier, and even deploying supercomputing power to catch my flaws?"

Li Cang gave a cold laugh. Following the deep-dive spatial rift channel he had privately connected with a hidden back door, he issued the command.

The fully loaded orbital delivery vehicles started up. These forty-thousand-plus hidden poison bombs were dumped, car by car, into the vastness of space tens of thousands of light-years away, quietly spreading a massive dark net without attracting attention.

...

Over a hundred light-years away. Above the core commercial approach bridge of the Eternal Star Crown Federation's home planet, near the high-dimensional master control logistics lines.

The interstellar high-speed network stretched out in all directions.

Thousands of massive, pure white heavy cargo flagships, entirely managed by high-level intelligence, were gliding in formation according to perfectly coordinated signals.

They maintained the highest level of constant curvature speed, flowing incessantly along this major artery.

The physical defenses of the ships were impregnable. However, to maintain the collaborative response of the massive array, their systems' basic beacon guidance ports remained in an open, 'all-green' receiving state for external probes.

A leading Sacred-class heavy container Heavenly King ship was steadily approaching an inconspicuous little beacon floating in a blind spot of the star orbit.

Automatic docking verification began. The authentication light glowed green.

But in less than a thousandth of a microsecond.

The green light suddenly extinguished, turning into a burst of heart-stopping dark red crash-error code!

Inside the flagship, there wasn't even time for the piercing alarm of lost system management to sound.

The main rudder of this massive lead mother-ship suffered a severe lock-up under the input of uncontrolled, crazed code. In the middle of the high-curvature lane, the enormous hull suddenly jerked sideways as if having a seizure, brutally coming to a dead stop across the core of the main artery!

Boom!

The hundreds of ten-million-ton heavy cargo ships following closely behind were similarly flooded with the domineering virus in an instant, losing all braking power.

Pulled by massive physical inertia, they were like a row of out-of-control dump trucks, maintaining a full-speed charge. Steel and steel collided violently with the most primitive kinetic energy!

The explosive firelight from this chain-reaction rear-end collision blinded all observation radars in the area within half a second.

This interstellar hub, which had always been known for being flawless, instantly became a deadly armored landfill. The entire sector's traffic network was paralyzed, and all scheduling cursors shattered into meaningless black static.

The network suffered a total crash.

Meanwhile, Li Cang, lying comfortably behind his dilapidated console, watched coldly as the opponent's main traffic board on the holographic radar turned into a charred map of errors.

His eyes were filled with the pleasure of revenge.

But the system prompts on the screen did not stop there. The rolling command bar brought an unexpected surge of joy:

[Detection Prompt: Unknown Abyss Junk-Code has completely paralyzed the target area's traffic joint-defense ecosystem.]

[Judgment Update: During the chaotic interval where the enemy's system firewall has completely collapsed, the hidden virus has triggered the Reverse Extraction Protocol.]

[Automatically forcibly retrieving massive data for you: Eternal Star Crown Royal Secret Creation Blueprint Library—Underlying Password Layer and Core Resource Evolution Sequence!]

Not only had he smashed their traffic jugular.

This extremely sinister segment of Men of Iron code had actually followed the opponent's disordered main brain cables like a massive, bottomless straw, helping Li Cang forcibly suck back an incalculable fortune of data and assets!