39: Chapter 39: Taking Down the Entire Team, Exposing Changsheng's True Nature

Those veterans who had trained in the CIA for over a decade, whose hands had never shaken in critical moments, saw their Glocks slip from their grips all at once; their bodies were like puppets that had suddenly lost power, joints softening as they collapsed to the ground.

From Trent's perspective, he could only see the corridor door burst open under the pressure of some kind of silent pulse, and then he witnessed the entire perimeter team lose consciousness and collapse to the ground in the blink of an eye.

He didn't even have time to draw his gun before the shockwave that had passed through the wall pressed down on the back of his neck.

His knees slammed heavily onto the concrete floor, his vision blurred into a pulsating, dark white, and his entire head felt as if it had been hollowed out, leaving only dizziness.

Just then, a fully armed tactical squad appeared at the end of the corridor, stepping through the gaps between the fallen bodies.

They wore all-black sealed combat suits, and their helmets were custom rail-mounted full-face masks integrated with night vision and thermal imaging.

Hanging on the outside of their tactical vests, instead of the usual magazines and grenades, were several thin-film capacitor arrays and a low-frequency emitter wrapped in Kevlar, which Musk himself jokingly called a "Neural Disruptor."

The principle of this weapon was not complex, but apart from the SpaceX materials team, no third party in the world could manufacture it.

It used high-voltage capacitors to discharge instantly, triggering a very specific infrasonic frequency that could interfere with the human cerebellar vestibular system, the part responsible for balance and the maintenance of consciousness.

It was not lethal, but it could take down the strongest special forces soldier in half a second.

The dozen or so intelligence officers under Walsh had just been hit by this device and had all lost consciousness in less than three seconds.

Elon Musk walked in from the corridor behind the tactical squad, his pace unhurried, as if he were inspecting his own factory floor.

He was wearing a dark gray cut-resistant combat jacket with three letters on the sleeve: the SpaceX logo.

He reached out with his left hand and took a portable device handed to him by a tactical team member; on the screen of that gadget, a multi-frequency display showed automatic recording of communication intercepts, facial recognition, and weapon tracking.

"Sorry for greeting you in this manner."

Musk looked at the unconscious personnel lying on the ground, then at Trent, who was struggling to prop his body up against the wall, and finally fixed his gaze on Walsh.

He didn't smile, but his voice carried the natural certainty of a tech fanatic. "This building is surrounded by my people. All of your communication frequencies from just now have been intercepted, and the two western exits have been locked."

"Director Walsh, don't waste your energy."

Walsh's clothes had picked up dust when he was pushed against the wall by the shockwave earlier.

He lifted his eyes, his face devoid of any unnecessary panic, anger, or weakness, just staring straight at Musk, before pushing his body upright from the wall, the underlying layer of the hyper-vigilant intelligence bureaucrat resurfacing.

"Elon Musk..."

Walsh looked the other man up and down, a faint, cold smirk appearing at the corner of his mouth. "This kind of weapon is a pre-research project that even the Department of Defense hasn't fielded, yet you actually used it on Department of Homeland Security officials."

"This thing?" Musk glanced down at the high-strength capacitor clip on the weapon and shrugged indifferently. "Just a few neural disturbers that won't hurt anyone. It's no big deal."

He raised a finger and said nonchalantly, "Rest assured, Mr. Director, I didn't bring this pile of hardware here to make enemies with someone like you."

"It's just that an old friend of yours wants to see you."

The trace of instinctive resistance that had just flashed in Walsh's eyes froze for half a second upon hearing "old friend."

Then his lips tightened slightly. "Edward Warren."

Musk didn't answer, merely stepping aside. The door at the other end of the corridor was pulled open by a tactical team member.

After the door opened, the light swayed in a short arc against the brick wall, and several attendants in plain clothes appeared outside the corridor.

A tall, gray-haired man walking at the front stepped over the scattered debris on the floor and walked in, his leather shoes making steady, unhurried sounds on the concrete floor.

Edward Warren.

He looked at the intelligence officers lying all over the floor, looked at the sweat-drenched Trent, and then his gaze landed on the face of his old classmate.

There was no smugness of a victor on his face, no apology, and not even any superfluous emotion.

Just then, Musk made a gesture to a squad leader beside him—a gesture that wasn't a precise command common in military terminology, but rather like a boss signaling everyone in a conference room to go out and take a break.

The tactical team members and bodyguards didn't hesitate at all, all retreating from the corridor back to the outer area one by one.

During their retreat, they checked the vital signs of the unconscious intelligence officers, and then followed the route they had taken to retract the blockade line back to the perimeter of the abandoned warehouse area.

Edward also tilted his head slightly, and the two Retainers following him silently stepped back two paces, standing with their hands behind their backs on either side of the corridor entrance like two shadows embedded in the wall.

At this moment, only four people remained in the corridor outside the shielded room—Walsh, Edward, Trent leaning against the wall corner, and Musk, who was still standing a few steps away with his arms crossed.

Walsh looked at Edward before him and remained silent for quite a while before speaking.

His tone didn't sound like an interrogation after being ambushed, but rather like two old gamblers making casual small talk while revealing their hole cards in the final hand at the poker table.

"Ed, you're still the same. Every time you show up, someone ends up on the ground."

Edward didn't reply immediately. He clasped his hands in front of him and tilted his head slightly, as if he had carefully listened to the sting hidden in Walsh's words, or perhaps as if he hadn't cared at all.

His gaze swept over the spiderweb-like cracks left on the surrounding walls after the vibration, then returned to the sealed box in Walsh's hand that he was subconsciously protecting, and then he spoke, his voice flat and plain.

"Eli, you picked a good spot."

"This wall was reinforced in the seventies, right? It cracked in a few places just now, and it looks to me like old-fashioned filler bricks with wire mesh in between. With this quality, it would have been top-tier stuff even in East Berlin during the Cold War."

Walsh tugged at the corner of his mouth; he didn't mean to smile, but he didn't refute this nonsense analysis either.

"If you came here to chat about building structures, my technical manual is in the office; I'll mail it to you later."

"That won't be necessary; I can look it up faster than you."

Edward took two steps forward, kicked aside a spent brass shell casing scattered on the ground with his sole, then stopped and turned his head to look at Walsh.

As if suddenly feeling that the place was a bit cold, he tucked his hands into the pockets of his jacket.

"You've dug over a thousand meters under the Westfield Center, and you've worn the threshold of City Hall brighter than the neon lights of Vegas."

"The pit at the coordinates of your bullet has now been poured with a layer of concrete, thicker than the hide of a contractor. The construction team pulled out overnight, and the building management still thinks you were just fixing the underfloor heating."

He paused for a breath, then continued, "Eli, although I still don't know exactly what is buried down there, a thousand meters underground."

"But I can confirm one thing now: you already know what those people in the Deep State are researching."

Walsh was silent for a few seconds. He looked at Edward's face, which seemed calm as water on the surface but was actually staring at him with every pore.

Then he placed the translucent box in his hand onto the workbench that looked like a freezer, moving very slowly, as if weighing the green felt cloth on the table where they had been pushing chips for half the day.

"I do know. It's this."

He tapped the outer shell of the box with his thumb, and the black-bottomed, blue-veined pupil still rotating in the center of the liquid simultaneously refracted a glimmer of faint light. "They are researching the life force of the Grey Alien, Ed. Not pulse guns, not spaceships, not some interstellar energy source—all of that is just a byproduct."

"Their primary goal is the secret of immortality."

"This is the final piece of evidence that Kramer risked his life to expose, and it is also the thing that has been hidden since the Hoover Dam, which no one has been allowed to speak about."

When the word "immortality" was brought to the table, the air in the room felt like a sealed chamber that had been drained of its last layer of buffer gas.

Edward maintained his steady posture. The expression on Musk's face, which had always carried a hint of playfulness, changed; it was as if an equation he had been writing for many years had finally been provided with the last constant, and all the previously scattered edges were pieced together.

"Before, the two of us could only speculate, guessing step by step based on the evidence, and in the end, we felt it had to be this."

Edward's voice lowered a few notches, as if stating the final confirmation beyond known facts. "Now that I've heard you hold it with my own ears and seen this box with my own eyes, it's no longer a 'guess'."

Musk's gaze never left the eyeball beneath the transparent shell that was still slowly emitting an iridescence in the dimness.

He thrust one hand into the side pocket of his combat jacket, that hand gripping something extremely complex—not a weapon, but a certain contradictory cognition.

In his value coordinates, this object automatically split into two paths: one leading to a new synthesis method for propellant fuel, environmental adaptation technology that could shorten the Mars voyage cycle, and the fundamental gap that could truly send a Starship beyond low Earth orbit; the other path, shorter, uglier, trampled by others yet still scrambled for by countless people, led to immortality.

At that same instant, what Edward was thinking was completely different. A hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years of heritage—when looking down from an airplane window at the grid fields and matchbox cities, he had confirmed it instinctively; now that Walsh had placed the evidence on the iron table, those two words rolled into his veins like an engraving.

Immortality is selfishness, but turning selfishness into a family foundation, that is called heritage.

He understood better than Musk what those people in the Deep State had paid to trade for this eyeball, and exactly what kind of greed, cruelty, and coldness had sunk into the ground with Kramer.

Walsh had been using those old but sharp, hawk-like eyes to scrutinize their reactions. Edward's expression was no different from usual, but the knuckles of his right hand resting on the edge of the iron table were gripping the right angle tightly—that was the subtle action Edward Warren would only reveal when he realized extreme danger.

As for Musk, that expression switch was too poorly concealed; everything was laid out behind his eyes, as if mutating from "scientific curiosity" into "the tension of a possibility being completely locked in."

Walsh was an intelligence veteran; he didn't need them to say it. Musk looked at the eyeball for a few seconds, then cleanly and decisively stated the figure in his mind:

"You holding this thing is completely useless." "Kept in that box of yours, it will only burn hot—hot enough that even your Department of Homeland Security seal wouldn't dare touch it." "Holding it, you can't even mobilize normal administrative means; you can only wait for that group in the Deep State to silently erase you from Washington."