177: Chapter 176 Hidden Agents and Hot and Sour Noodles

When Zhao Yan discovered the mole, the man was sneaking a meal of hot and sour rice noodles.

The scene was truly absurd—in the futuristic ecological recycling zone, a man in a maintenance uniform was squatting behind a giant hydroponic tank, clutching a steaming bowl of hot and sour rice noodles and slurping loudly. The bowl had been swiped from the cafeteria, and his disposable chopsticks were split a bit roughly. Red chili oil had dripped onto the ID badge on his chest: "Logistics Maintenance Department · Great Strength · Employee ID 0743."

"Do you know that unsealed food is prohibited in this area?" Zhao Yan walked up behind him, his voice low.

Great Strength jerked in fright, nearly dropping his bowl. He turned around, his face still smeared with chili oil. His expression shifted from panic to composure in a mere half-second. "C-Captain Zhao! I... I have low blood sugar, the doctor told me to replenish my energy at any time..."

"Low blood sugar requires hiding behind a hydroponic tank to eat?" Zhao Yan squatted down to meet his eyes. "Besides, the smell of these hot and sour rice noodles can be caught from three floors away. Who are you signaling?"

Great Strength's pupils contracted slightly. It was subtle, but it didn't escape Zhao Yan's eyes.

Five minutes later, the man was taken to the security isolation room. Zhao Yan didn't call anyone else; he interrogated him personally. He poured Great Strength a glass of water, placed it on the table, and sat down opposite him.

"Employee ID 0743, Great Strength. Your employment records show you're a veteran employee who transferred from the 'Deep Space Home' space station three years ago." Zhao Yan pulled up the file, projecting it onto the table between them. "Your performance over the past three years has been excellent, earning 'Employee of the Month' seven times. You have two children, and your wife teaches at the Dragon Kingdom's Lunar Base. A happy family and a bright future."

Great Strength gripped the water glass with both hands, his knuckles turning white.

"So I don't understand." Zhao Yan leaned forward. "Why would a man like you, seven hours before the hearing, use the scent of hot and sour rice noodles in the ecological zone to cover up the act of implanting a data sniffer?"

Silence.

The isolation room's ventilation system hummed faintly. The digits on the wall clock ticked: 7 hours and 18 minutes.

"They took my daughter," Great Strength said suddenly, his voice hoarse. "It wasn't a kidnapping, it was... 'medical isolation.' They said she's infected with some rare genetic disease that only the 'Aurora' medical station, controlled by the Pruning Faction, can treat. The condition was for me to leave a backdoor in the Cradle."

Zhao Yan stared at him. "When did this happen?"

"Two months ago. Shortly after we first obtained temporary permissions for the Cradle." Great Strength looked up, his eyes bloodshot. "They gave me a bio-chip and told me to activate it in the main control server of the ecological recycling zone. The chip disguises itself as a system log cleanup program, sending an encrypted data packet to the outside every twelve hours."

"Sending what?"

"I don't know. The data packets are automatically generated and encrypted. I'm only responsible for ensuring they aren't intercepted by the firewall." Great Strength wiped his face. "Today, they wanted me to send a special signal before the hearing, using the smell of food as cover—they said the evaporation of organic molecules can interfere with the sensitivity of short-range molecular scanners."

Zhao Yan pulled up the surveillance records for the ecological zone. Sure enough, in the past two hours, the molecular scanner data in the seventh-tier area where Great Strength was located showed three 0.3-second anomalies, each corresponding to the times he was 'eating."

"What was the content of the special signal?"

"I really don't know." Great Strength was on the verge of tears. "But I overheard a term in their communications... 'awakening frequency.'"

Zhao Yan's heart tightened. He immediately contacted Lin Shen and relayed the situation.

Lin Shen was silent for two seconds on the other end of the line. "Have him remove the chip. Now. Then take him to the medical bay for a full examination, especially a brain scan. The Pruning Faction might have planted something else in his consciousness."

"And his daughter..."

"Save the hostage first, then we'll talk about the rest," Lin Shen said. "Hand the chip over to β-2 for reverse-tracking. We need to know the coordinates of the signal recipient."

"Understood."

Hanging up, Zhao Yan looked at Great Strength. "Where is the chip?"

"Subcutaneous in my left arm, near the elbow joint." Great Strength rolled up his sleeve, revealing a nearly invisible tiny bump. "It has a self-destruct mechanism. If it's forcibly removed or scanned, it will—"

Zhao Yan didn't wait for him to finish; he pulled a palm-sized medical device from his belt kit. "This is a battlefield-grade rapid tissue isolator. It will instantly freeze and cut out the chip along with half a cubic centimeter of surrounding tissue. The self-destruct mechanism won't have time to react. It'll leave a scar, but it's better than being dead."

Great Strength gritted his teeth and nodded.

The operation took only ten seconds. A piece of frozen skin tissue fell into a tray, with a silver chip the size of a grain of rice embedded in the center. Zhao Yan placed it in a shielded container, then glanced at the neat circular wound on Great Strength's arm—it had already automatically stopped bleeding.

"Let's go. To the medical bay."

"Captain Zhao..." Great Strength stood up, his voice trembling. "Can my daughter still be saved?"

Zhao Yan didn't look back. "We'll do our best. But you have to stay alive first if you want to see her again."

At the same time, in the Core Command Ring.

β-2 was analyzing the chip. Her projection hovered in the center of the data stream, her brow furrowed—this was an expression she had recently learned. Although "frowning" didn't affect computational efficiency for an AI, she found it made her human colleagues take her warnings more seriously.

"The chip's encryption method is very ancient," she said. "It uses the 'Mobius Loop Iterative Algorithm' that was popular in the galaxy five hundred years ago. The good news is that it's easy to crack; the bad news is that using such antique encryption indicates the sender doesn't care if the content is intercepted—they only care that the signal itself is sent."

"The signal itself?" Chu Yunshen asked.

"Like a bell ringing." β-2 snapped her fingers—another gesture she had recently learned. "You don't need to know the content of the chime; as long as you hear the bell, you know what needs to be done. This chip is emitting a 'chime,' and the frequency is... wait."

The data stream suddenly fluctuated violently. β-2's projection flickered.

"The frequency is perfectly consistent with the dormant wavelength of the divine remains seed." For the first time, an emotion resembling shock appeared in her voice. "They are using this frequency to try and 'awaken' something—or more accurately, to try and 'resonate' with it."

Lin Shen immediately pulled up the technology tree system. Under the "kindling protocol" branch, the tree-shaped icon that had previously lit up by 1% pulsed once.

Unlock Progress: 1% → 3%.

"As expected." Lin Shen took a deep breath. "The Pruning Faction is trying to forcibly activate the protocols related to the 'First Sower.' They need the divine remains seed as a resonance medium, but the seed is currently in deep dormancy, so they're using this chip to simulate the seed's frequency, attempting to bypass the dormancy and trigger the protocol directly."

"What happens after it's triggered?" Chu Yunshen asked.

"I don't know." Lin Shen shook his head. "But Seventh Seat proxy mentioned that the 'sower' is a revered existence in the Covenant Network's records. If it's forcibly awakened..."

An alarm blared. This time, it came from the Cradle's outer monitoring points.

"The spatial fold is suddenly accelerating!" the monitor's voice was tense. "Propulsion speed has increased by 300%, estimated contact with the boundary in forty-seven minutes! And... and it's starting to release secondary folds, twelve in total, forming an encirclement!"

On the holographic star map, the originally singular red ripple zone spread out like flowering poisonous vines, extending twelve branches to flank the Cradle from different directions.

"The Dream-Devouring Shadow is coordinating its actions." Zhao Yan's voice came through the communication channel; he had just sent Great Strength to the medical bay. "The Pruning Faction used the chip to ring the 'bell,' the Dream-Devouring Shadow heard it, and has begun its general offensive."

Countdown: 6 hours and 51 minutes.

Lin Shen quickly made a decision. "Director Chu, continue refining the presentation draft, especially the part about the application principles of The Unfinished Court; prepare it as a defensive demonstration. β-2, track the coordinates of the chip signal's recipient. I want to know where the Pruning Faction's outpost is. Zhao Yan, strengthen security in all key areas. I suspect there's more than one mole inside."

"What about Zhou Zhe?" Chu Yunshen asked.

"He's in the medical bay attending to the divine remains seed—even though the seed is dormant, he insisted on staying there." Lin Shen paused. "Tell him to come here; we need him to operate The Unfinished Court."

Medical Bay, Seed Observation Room.

Zhou Zhe was indeed "attending." He sat in a chair next to the seed's dormancy container, an e-book on his lap—not technical data, but a copy of *Three Hundred Tang Poems*. Every now and then, he would look up at the gray, stone-like sphere in the container, then look down and recite a line of poetry.

"Do you not see the Yellow River's waters come from the sky, rushing into the sea, never to return?" He finished the line and paused for two seconds. "This line is about time and its passing. You can surely understand that, after all, you've lived for so long."

The seed, of course, did not respond.

"What are you doing?" β-2's projection suddenly appeared beside him, looking at the e-book curiously.

"Just talking to it," Zhou Zhe said. "Even though it's dormant, what if... it can hear me?"

β-2 tilted her head—another newly learned piece of body language. "According to consciousness dormancy theory, the information reception rate in a state of deep dormancy is less than 0.001%. Your behavior is extremely inefficient."

"I know." Zhou Zhe smiled. "But humans sometimes do inefficient things. Like visiting the graves of deceased relatives, or keeping old love letters, or reciting poetry to a dormant seed."

"Emotional redundancy," β-2 said. "But interesting. Do you need me to help you select poems? I have in my database—"

Lin Shen's communication request interrupted them. Having heard the instructions, Zhou Zhe stood up to leave. Before going, he glanced back at the seed once more.

"Wait for me to come back," he said. "When I do, I'll read *A Moonlit Night on the Spring River* to you. That one is very long."

On the way out of the medical bay, β-2 suddenly asked, "Engineer Zhou, was your behavior just now what humans call being 'affectedly sentimental'?"

Zhou Zhe stumbled, nearly tripping. "Who taught you that word?"

"Captain Zhao Yan. He said Director Chu Yunshen is sometimes very 'affectedly sentimental,' like when he could just give an order directly but insists on saying 'thank you for your hard work' first." β-2's projection followed beside him, her expression serious. "But according to my observations, 'affectedly sentimental' behavior is often accompanied by an increase in team cohesion. So, is this a form of non-explicit management strategy?"

Zhou Zhe didn't know whether to laugh or cry. "When you truly understand why humans are 'affectedly sentimental,' you'll probably truly understand humans."

"Is it as difficult as understanding 'regret'?"

"Harder than that."

Core Command Ring, Countdown: 6 hours and 30 minutes.

Everyone had arrived. Chu Yunshen was adjusting the tone of the final segment of the statement, Zhao Yan was arranging the defensive arrays, Zhou Zhe was familiarizing himself with The Unfinished Court's operation interface, and β-2 was tracking the signal coordinates.

Lin Shen stood in the center, watching the busy team.

"Coordinates locked," β-2 said suddenly. "The signal recipient is in the K-7 star sector, on the far side of a rogue planet designated 'Silent Witness.' There are high energy readings there—it's a Pruning Faction outpost. It's not large, but at least three interstellar-grade weapon systems have been detected in standby mode."

"They're waiting," Zhao Yan said. "Waiting for the results of the hearing. If we pass, those weapons might be used to 'create an accident'; if we fail, they can take over the Cradle legitimately."

"So we must pass," Chu Yunshen closed his electronic notebook. "And we must pass before they have time to react."

Countdown: 6 hours and 15 minutes.

Just then, The Unfinished Court's operation interface in front of Zhou Zhe activated automatically. The holographic projection of that ruined garden unfolded on its own, and the wooden plaques on the withered trees moved without wind, clattering softly as they collided.

One of the wooden plaques suddenly lit up, and the poetic verse on it changed:

"The mountain rain is about to fall, and the wind fills the tower."

—Xu Hun, *View from the West Tower of Xianyang City at Dusk*

"It's... giving a warning?" Zhou Zhe was stunned.

Immediately after, the Cradle's entire external monitoring network issued a maximum-level alert simultaneously.

The twelve branches of the spatial fold suddenly stopped at a distance of 0.1 light-seconds from the boundary.

Then, they began to rotate and intertwine, weaving into a giant structure in the void that covered nearly half of the Cradle's sky—

A net.

Every node of the net was pulsating, releasing low conceptual whispers:

[Show us... your shield...]

[Show us... your regrets...]

[Let us witness... how order contends with the end...]

The Dream-Devouring Shadow did not attack directly.

It was demanding a performance.

A "preview" held solely for it before the hearing began.

Lin Shen looked at the giant net covering the starry sky, then at the line on the operation interface: "The mountain rain is about to fall, and the wind fills the tower."

"Very well," he said. "Since the audience is so enthusiastic."

"Activate The Unfinished Court, set the resonance to 30%. Let's give this conceptual predator... a lesson in human literary appreciation."

Zhou Zhe placed his hand on the activation key and took a deep breath.

He pressed it.

At that moment, everyone in the entire Cradle, no matter where they were, heard a soft sigh.

Like the wind blowing through a deserted courtyard.

Like raindrops dripping onto withered lotus leaves.

Like a long time ago, someone whispering in your ear: "If only, back then..."