143: Chapter 143 Live Specimen Zero

The orange-red fireball from the console's self-detonation rolled through the hall on the 4th Floor Above Ground, the rising heatwave incinerating all the ghostly blue spores floating in mid-air.

Gu Shen stood at the edge of the flames, his wide grey robe flapping loudly in the blast of air. He did not retreat a single step, his cold gaze piercing through the thick smoke, fixed intently on the center of the explosion.

As the smoke and dust slowly dissipated, the originally smooth alloy wall behind the console, torn by the high heat and shockwave, burst open to reveal a crack about a zhang wide.

An intensely thick, icy chill, mixed with the acrid smell of aged preservative fluid, poured out from the crack.

"The 4th Floor Above Ground actually hides such a secret space."

Gu Shen carried the thunder pattern gold-slaying blade, stepping over the twisted metal wreckage covering the floor. Twelve Cyber Iron Corpses, like a silent wall of black iron, followed closely behind, protecting his blind spots.

Stepping into the crack, the light suddenly dimmed.

This was a circular domed secret chamber. The surrounding walls were lined with dense rows of black cabinets, the indicator lights on them flickering feebly with a dim red glow.

In the center of the chamber, there was no scattered debris, only a huge, inverted funnel-shaped nutrient tank.

The green liquid inside the tank had long since turned murky and black, and suspended within that viscous fluid was a hair-raising existence.

It was a person. Or rather, it had once been a person.

His lower body had been completely sawed off, replaced by a mass of dark red tumors knotted like plant roots. These tumors were deeply embedded into the metal base below, fused together with a pile of crude gears and tracks.

What was most scalp-numbing was his head.

The skull cap had been smoothly sliced open by a Sharp Weapon, and the exposed brain was not rotting, but sealed off by a transparent glass cover. Hundreds of thin red copper wires and black fiber-optic cables pierced directly into the greyish-white brain sulci, extending backward like a spider web, tightly connected to the massive black cabinets all around.

"My Lord, be careful."

A low, mechanical voice from Crab came into Gu Shen's ear, "Sonar echo is abnormal. Those cabinets are not storage boxes; they are micro-computing matrices (servers) from the ancient era. That semi-mechanical body's brainwaves are synchronizing at high frequency with the data of the entire server room. He is a living local area network."

Gu Shen did not respond, his gold-severing saber pointing diagonally at the ground.

"Thump... Thump..."

The black liquid in the nutrient tank suddenly bubbled with fine bubbles.

That suspended semi-mechanical remnant slowly opened its eyes.

The left eye was a murky human white, but the right eye had been gouged out and replaced with an embedded mechanical prosthetic eye emitting a deathly red light.

"Spiritual Qi... exhausted..."

A hoarse voice, neither male nor female and mixed with heavy electronic noise, sounded abruptly in the secret chamber. This voice did not come from the monster's throat but was synthesized through the speakers of the surrounding cabinets, echoing from all directions.

"Dantian... cannot be constructed... replaced with uranium isotopes... Spiritual Root transplant... rejection rate 99.7%..."

The monster muttered to itself, the mechanical red light of its right eye slowly sweeping over Gu Shen.

When the red light fell on Gu Shen's skin, which was shimmering with a dark golden luster, the monster's voice stuttered slightly.

"Perfect... carbon-based carrier. No Spiritual Qi, yet possesses vitality."

"Peel off skin and flesh... extract bone marrow... complete my 'Key of God'..."

Before the words faded, the glass outer wall of the nutrient tank emitted a crisp cracking sound.

Bang!

The murky black water poured down. The tumors and tracks on the monster's lower body made a harsh grating sound as they forcefully broke free from the restraints of the base. The hundreds of fiber-optic cables connected to his brain pulled taut, trailing behind him like a giant black cape.

"Take him down." Gu Shen's expression was cold and rigid, without a shred of small talk.

With a thought.

The four Cyber Iron Corpses blocking the front crushed the floor tiles with their feet, their high-energy batteries outputting at maximum capacity. Four iron fists, wrapped in high-frequency particle oscillation waves, brought with them a shriek that tore through the air, aiming separately at the monster's head and chest/abdomen.

The monster did not dodge; a blinding blue light suddenly flared from that exposed brain sealed behind the glass cover.

"Divine Soul Suppression (Electromagnetic Brainwave Storm)." The speakers spat out cold code terminology.

Hum—

A visible, semi-transparent ripple swept out like a tsunami, centered on the monster's brain.

The four Iron Corpses charging forward, within half a breath of touching this ripple, saw the ghostly blue light in their eye sockets flicker violently.

Their iron fists, capable of smashing through blast doors, stalled three inches in front of the monster. Their heavy steel bodies stumbled stiffly as if they were drunk.

"My Lord! High-frequency electromagnetic pulses mixed with an unknown psychic frequency band—the Iron Corpses' spiritual power circuits are suffering severe interference!" Crab reported quickly.

Gu Shen snorted coldly.

The technology of the Wasteland is indeed bizarre, capable of using mechanical means to simulate the "Divine Sense pressure" of the Cultivation World. But dead things are dead things after all.

"Soul-Shocking Spike."

Gu Shen's eyes were as calm as an ancient well. Deep within his Sea of Consciousness, that transparent spike, tempered repeatedly, shot out in response.

Ignoring the distance of space, ignoring that layer of semi-transparent electromagnetic ripples, the Soul-Shocking Spike, carrying the sharp edge of the Qi Refining 9th Layer Perfection, stabbed straight toward the monster's exposed brain.

In the past, when facing Cultivators or mutated beasts of the same rank, this stab was enough to cause their Sea of Consciousness to churn, causing dizziness at best, and death at worst.

However.

The moment the Soul-Shocking Spike stabbed into that greyish-white brain, Gu Shen's expression changed drastically.

There was no feeling of resistance that comes with stabbing into an opponent's Divine Sense.

His Divine Sense felt as if it had slammed into a wall of iron cast from ten million blocks of refined steel!

No, that was not an iron wall.

That was a data ocean so vast it was despair-inducing!

The monster's self-consciousness had long since merged with the dozens of micro-computing matrices around it. Gu Shen's strike, which was enough to severely damage a Cultivator's Divine Soul, was equivalent to attacking tens of thousands of Formation nodes and computing cores simultaneously!

"Drip—"

A drop of bright red blood seeped from Gu Shen's nostril and dripped onto the bluestone floor.

Thousands of jarring electronic noises and countless data logs of desperate experiments rushed into Gu Shen's Sea of Consciousness like a back-surging flood, following the connection of the Soul-Shocking Spike.

Excruciating pain.

It was as if someone were sawing back and forth on his meninges.

Gu Shen let out a muffled groan and made an immediate decision.

"Sever."

A flash of determination crossed his eyes as he actively severed that strand of extended Divine Sense. His Sea of Consciousness churned, and his face instantly turned as pale as paper.

Since stepping onto the path of immortality, this was the first time his usually invincible "Soul-Shocking Spike" had completely failed.

"A stitched-together monster of physics and Divine Soul. Its brain is a giant Formation; relying solely on Divine Sense attacks is equivalent to throwing an egg against a rock."

Gu Shen wiped the blood from the tip of his nose, his breathing returning to steady within two breaths.

He did not feel a shred of panic because his trump card had failed. As a corpse collector who had struggled in the cracks between two worlds, what he was best at was finding an enemy's weak point in a desperate situation.

"Since the Soul-Shocking Spike cannot kill you."

Gu Shen gripped the thunder pattern gold-slaying blade with a backhand grip, the ghostly blue lightning on the blade suppressed by him to the very edge, condensed but not released.

"Then I will pull your power source."

Gu Shen's gaze crossed over the half-human, half-mechanical monster, staring fixedly like a hawk at the black fiber-optic cables behind the monster that were connected to its brain.

A Cultivator's Spells might be distributed by the data matrix.

But a physical blade only cares about whether you are hard enough.