53: Chapter 53: 30,000 points altered record, death report heard in secret room.

These two different interpretations lead to the same destination: The b-2 bomber could be built.

But they point to two completely different underlying settings.

If Diana accepted the "Nazi scientist theory," then the logical foundation of the "Extraterrestrial Visitor" script—alien technology—would be decoupled from the b-2 bomber.

Once decoupled, the relationship between the Hoover Dam hydropower anomaly disappearance incident and the b-2 bomber would cease to exist.

The causal relationship between the records in Kramer's possession and the Grey Alien eyeball would also be overturned.

The biggest suspicious point of the script would be torn open from one corner by this misplaced puzzle piece.

Therefore, she could not be allowed to find an answer that she "thought made perfect sense but had nothing to do with aliens."

She had to be led to find a reverse-engineering process that perfectly meshed with the Hoover Dam and the Deep State.

Zhang Yi reached out and brought up the correction function panel on the system interface.

He asked the system directly:

"How many emotional points are needed to correct all records in the 'Extraterrestrial Visitor' script involving the b-2 bomber's development process, including all first-level text records and second-level real-world items preserved by the three parties—Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology—and to complete the entire logical chain related to alien reverse engineering?"

[Three million.]

Zhang Yi's mouth twitched, and he replied almost instantly: "It's not fifth-level."

"Do not modify buildings or relics, do not modify collective memories, and there is no need for void creation."

"I only need the first-level and second-level text records and real-world items."

"Blueprints, notes, experimental records, old documents, things like that."

"How much?"

The system was silent for a second, as if it were recalculating.

[Thirty thousand.]

Zhang Yi took a deep breath.

Thirty thousand was a 99 percent discount compared to three million, but his brow still furrowed.

He rubbed his chin with the back of his hand and issued a rational protest to the system:

"Last time, when I corrected the Hoover Dam part, it was also first-level plus second-level—Kramer's autopsy report, newspaper archives, police transcripts—and it only totaled fifteen thousand."

"This time you've doubled it."

"Why?"

[The last correction only involved Kramer alone.]

[This correction involves multiple independent information preservation parties: Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, each possessing independent text records, experimental logs, and prototype blueprints.]

[The correction work requires parallel application to three different archive systems and the physical creation of multiple sets of laboratory manuscripts, partner memorandums, and patent drafts.]

[Thirty thousand is already a discounted price after deducting repetitive work and the host's past purchase history.]

Zhang Yi stared at the immovable quotation reason on the system interface, feeling as if he were arguing with a vending machine that never negotiated.

He remembered his glory days of haggling with vegetable vendors in the market in his past life.

Back then, he could talk a bunch of water spinach down from three-fifty to two in three rounds.

But the system was not a vegetable-selling aunt.

The system was made of iron, written in code, and couldn't be bargained with.

"Fine." He squeezed the word out through his teeth and clicked confirm.

Eighty thousand minus thirty thousand, balance fifty thousand. Just when he should have been buying an apartment, he was still fixing holes in the script.

"Buy."

...

Arizona, Scottsdale, Casablanca Manor, three days later.

There was a windowless room in the east wing of the manor that the successive heads of the Hopkins Family called the "Silent Room."

It was built on the oldest stone foundation of the manor, with walls thick enough to block the midday heat of Los Angeles, and the inside of the door was lined with three alternating layers of copper mesh and soundproof felt.

In the center of the room was a long black stone table surrounded by six high-backed chairs. The pendant light above the stone table was the only light source in this secret room.

A ring of cold white LED light illuminated everything directly beneath it in sharp detail.

At this moment, four people were sitting around this stone table.

Diana sat at the head of the long table, wearing an unmarked black tactical jacket, her hair tied in a low ponytail.

Her entire demeanor was completely different from three days ago when she was arguing with Charles at the Carver auto repair shop.

Back then, even in her anger, she still carried a certain restraint locked by blood ties toward her brother.

But at this moment, she had nothing she needed to restrain.

She sat in that chair, her elbows resting on the armrests, her fingers interlaced in front of her, her gaze cold and focused, like an arrow with the bowstring already drawn.

To her right sat Harlan Croft, still in the same dark gray casual jacket, sitting upright, with a glass of untouched ice water in front of him.

The other two people sat across from her on the other side of the stone table.

One was Wallace Keating, fifty-six years old, gray-haired, wearing old-fashioned metal-rimmed glasses, looking like a classics professor at some community college.

His true identity was the Field Operations Director of the Colt Association. Twenty years ago, he had worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency for fifteen years, rising from a frontline analyst to the deputy station chief of an intelligence station in the Middle East. When he retired, his file was bought out by the Hopkins Family in a private capacity.

The other was Beatrice Mosley, forty-three years old, the team leader of the Colt Association's intelligence archiving and data retrieval group, thin, capable, quick-spoken, and never making unnecessary expressions.

Spread out on the stone table in front of her was a whole row of file folders with different colored labels, each with a colored index tab peeking out from the edge.

"It's been cleared up."

Beatrice opened the blue-labeled file on top, her speaking pace steady, but that flat rhythm itself was paving the way for the large amount of information to follow.

"After Northrop Grumman merged and was established in 1994, although the funds were allocated directly from the Hopkins Family's private accounts, at the technical R&D level, they were just an integration platform that had incorporated some patents from the old Northrop and Grumman companies, and did not yet have independent deep R&D capabilities."

"So the company management sent cooperation invitations to Boeing and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the autumn of 1994, asking these two to provide endorsements and academic support for the b-2 bomber project's technical advancement."

"To put it bluntly, it was borrowing their reputation to ask The Pentagon for a budget, and incidentally, fishing out a few usable key technical modules from their laboratories."

She turned a page and continued.

"Boeing did not take this invitation seriously."

"They were fully competing for the Joint Strike Fighter project at the time, which was the later JSF, the predecessor of the F-35."

"The concept of the b-2 flying wing stealth bomber was, in their eyes, just a gimmick created by a clueless new company."

"So Boeing only symbolically sent one person over."

"An engineering liaison named Felix Randall, not high-ranking, who had done structural stress analysis in Boeing's commercial aircraft division for seven or eight years and had never participated in any classified military projects."

"We also initially classified this person as a low-priority target."

"Compared to him, the team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was obviously more important..."

She pushed another file with a green label to the center of the stone table.

"The Massachusetts Institute of Technology sent a team of twelve researchers to join the project, covering multiple key fields such as aerodynamics, stealth materials, flying wing structures, and flight control."

"These people were deeply involved in the core R&D work of the b-2 between the end of 1994 and the beginning of 1997."

"Our investigation's initial goal was to start with these twelve people to see if we could find the original technical clues destroyed by Northrop Grumman during the b-2 development process from their private documents."

Beatrice paused suddenly when she said this.

She turned the green-labeled file to the last page, which had a list organized in a table:

Twelve names, each followed by the same word in bold red.

DECEASED.

"But in the process of tracking, we discovered a problem far more serious than the missing information."

Beatrice's voice was still steady, but her fingertips pressed on the file page unconsciously used more force, causing the edges of the paper to curl up slightly.

"From 1997, when the b-2 officially entered service, to the end of 1999, in just two years, all twelve of these people died."

She read down the list one by one.

Her tone did not change, but each line of text felt like another cold coin stacked on the stone table.

"Carl Stollman, core researcher of the aerodynamics group, June 1997, drowned while fishing in Montana over the Fourth of July weekend."

"The water at the drowning site was less than three feet deep."

"He grew up in the Great Lakes region and knew how to swim."

...

"Claire Watanabe, head of the stealth material coating laboratory, December 1997, carbon monoxide poisoning in her own garage in Boston."

"The police conclusion was that the vehicle engine was accidentally left running."

...

"Michael Renshaw, flying wing control system designer, fell down the stairs of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology laboratory in February 1998, broke his neck, and died on the spot."

"The laboratory stairs had anti-slip strips; he went up and down twenty times a day and had never fallen."

...

"Sara Olcott, director of the computer simulation group, encountered a high-speed rear-end collision on the interstate in October 1998, and the vehicle burned to the ground."

"The driver of the offending vehicle was driving a stolen pickup truck; the driver himself was found dead elsewhere the next day, with no identification documents on him."

...

The list Beatrice held between her fingertips continued to flip; every line was summarized, but every pause made the air in the Silent Room grow denser.

Twelve people, twelve ways of dying:

Traffic accidents, drowning, sudden illness, accidental falls, drug overdose, disappearing in the wild...

Each one was recorded as an accident in the case files of the respective local authorities.

Every autopsy report was compliant, closed, and filed, without any procedural flaws.

"The timing of these deaths was extremely evenly distributed; no two people died in the same way."

"But having no pattern is the most terrifying pattern of all, indicating that someone is deliberately avoiding the formation of any 'death cluster' that could be detected statistically."