154: Chapter 154 The Achilles' heel is exposed, and the core is destroyed.

Rockefeller III slowly lowered the hands he had been pressing against his chest and clasped them in front of him. His voice remained deep, but every word was clear and solemn:

"The Rockefeller Family thanks the Great Yuanzi for reporting our information to Grand Commander Nailong!"

"Regardless of the outcome, we will never forget your kindness in recommending us!"

Samuel followed up immediately: "The Astor Family feels the same!"

Isabelle lowered her head slightly: "The DuPont Family awaits Grand Commander Nailong's approval at any time!"

Jacob slowly unclenched the fingers that had been tightly gripping his cuffs and flattened them in front of him: "The Rothschild Family is willing to await Grand Commander Nailong's reply!"

William was the last to speak. He pushed the flask he had just picked up from the floor deeper into his coat and said in a deep voice: "The Vanderbilt Family awaits the Commander-in-Chief's final verdict!"

Yuanzi raised one hand and waved it gently.

The entire space of the underground base suddenly rippled like the surface of a lake into which a stone had been thrown.

Wherever those ripples touched, countless illusory figures began to emerge in the air:

Researchers wearing 1940s laboratory white coats walked through the corridors, holding paper notebooks and discussing temperature control factors and donor matching rates;

Security personnel in old-fashioned work uniforms stopped at corridor corners to change shifts, the metal keys at their waists and their gun belts swaying slightly in the slowly floating images;

Even earlier construction workers, the beads of sweat they wiped away while repairing cables in the sealed experimental area, streaked through the air in time slowed down by several times.

These were all replays of every scene that had occurred in this underground base over the past nearly one hundred years.

In Yuanzi's eyes, which were as clear as cold pools, strings of rapidly scrolling code symbols appeared.

As the scrolling speed of the characters increased, the movement speed of the surrounding illusory figures also began to accelerate, changing from a normal walking pace to a brisk walk, and from a light jog to a sprint.

Countless figures from different eras crisscrossed in the same space, like a centennial documentary that had been put on fast-forward.

Rockefeller III, Samuel, Isabelle, Jacob, and William all looked up, watching this underground space filled with fragments of time, too shocked to speak.

A few minutes later, the code in Yuanzi's eyes stopped scrolling.

The overlapping and intersecting time images around them vanished in an instant, and the basement returned to that cold, desolate silence illuminated by emergency lights.

She looked at Rockefeller III, her tone still flat: "I have backtracked through the entire usage record of this base."

"The Crane Family has never been able to crack the core of the alien technology passed down to them by the Mothman."

"That Nano-Carapace has never truly achieved off-body functionality and remains a semi-finished product to this day."

"The reason Solomon was able to force it to activate to full power today with external help is because a Nano-Core is embedded in his actual skull."

"This core provides a fixed-frequency synchronization signal to all secondary nano-cockroach units, constraining them within a controllable organic form."

"As long as you completely destroy that Nano-Core, this Nano-Carapace will rapidly disintegrate, starting with the failure of the inter-atomic signaling."

After hearing this, Rockefeller III raised his head to look at Yuanzi; his lips moved, but he closed them immediately. Samuel, Isabelle, Jacob, and William were all watching her as well.

They wanted to ask a question, but everyone felt it was a bit overstepping.

Yuanzi did not wait for them to speak before answering the question they hadn't yet had a chance to ask: "I am merely an observation device."

"I can observe that you are qualified, so I report your information to the Commander-in-Chief."

"I can detect the location and functional weaknesses of the Nano-Core, so I tell you how to destroy it."

"But I do not possess offensive or defensive capabilities."

"I can only create layers of illusions from the input end of Solomon's retina by unfolding two-dimensional images, trapping him in a loop where he can never reach his target."

"Killing him is a task that only you can do."

"Until you truly become Zeta Agents, I will not disclose anything more to you than the information necessary at this moment."

After she finished speaking, her body, like a streak of ink dropped into water, began to fade from the edges of her silhouette. The dark gold cloud patterns on her Hanfu sleeves were the last to dissipate, and her cold, aloof face, like a reflection on water ruffled by the wind, vanished layer by layer before everyone's eyes.

After watching Yuanzi's phantom fade away completely, Rockefeller III turned abruptly to look at Solomon, who was still trapped in hallucinations at the end of the corridor, spinning in circles.

He reached out and grabbed the nearest armed assault team captain, his voice kept extremely low, but his speed of speech was extremely fast: "Find that skull!"

"Blow Solomon's actual skull to smithereens!"

"Quick!!"

At this moment, on the outskirts of the manor, the reserve armed forces that Rockefeller III had previously arranged to wait outside had all flooded into the underground passage.

The security teams previously deployed at various checkpoints and intersections on Long Island's Gold Coast, the reinforcement company left on standby in the periphery when the convoy departed, and all the remaining forces that had been arranged in the manor courtyard from start to finish to guard the perimeter and had not participated in the first assault—all of them now assembled into a sweeping unit that, while not elite enough, was sufficient in number to handle the current situation.

Soon, a team of armed personnel found Solomon's skull, which was embedded in the damaged half-edge of the Nano-Core, amidst a large area of shattered torso remains.

They carried the entire skull to a temporarily cleared, empty experimental area and placed directional high-explosive charges and C4 modules around the exposed face of the core one after another.

The moment the detonation button was pressed, the black-carapace humanoid spinning at the end of the corridor suddenly stopped all movement.

Three plumes of black smoke gushed out from the gaps in the carapace and dispersed into the air, unable to coalesce into any form again. They turned from black smoke into black droplets, and from black droplets into large swathes of falling black ash.

The final scream of Solomon Crane himself pierced through the entire corridor and then subsided into silence.

Samuel stood beside Rockefeller, looking at the pile of black ash rapidly drying on the ground, and let out a long sigh.

Then, he turned to Isabelle and whispered in a tone only a few people could hear: "Just now, the Great Yuanzi said that Grand Commander Nailong will receive our evaluation report soon. Do you think the Commander-in-Chief will accept us?"

"Will he think that we are just ordinary Earth capitalist families who couldn't crack the Nano-Core immediately and were almost killed by a semi-finished armor, and that we aren't worth supporting at all?"

Isabelle slowly flattened her hand, which had been clenched so tightly it left deep indentations, and took up the conversation: "He has already seen all our reports on the analysis of the UFO wreckage around Hoover Dam, and he has also seen our entire encirclement operation against Solomon."

"As for being almost killed by the Nano-Carapace..."

"Before the Great Yuanzi revealed that weakness just now, we truly had no way to predict it in advance."