172: swallowing experiment

The golden haze of the Broken Spine Sector was like a persistently spreading lesion, stubbornly clinging to the front lines of the Human Federation's expansion.

The silent advance of the Binding Legion and its natural suppression of power not only hindered resource collection but also formed a disturbing psychological deterrent. It was a direct intervention from an ancient human deity, a silent mockery of reason by faith.

However, the will of the Human Federation had long been tempered to be colder than the hardest alloy. Han Zhe's response strategy quickly translated into a series of specific and lethal commands.

With the full assistance of the adjudicators, the technical team completed the design and manufacture of the Anti-Holy Reality Stabilization Anchor prototype at an unprecedented speed.

This device combined the space-time stabilization technology of the Nullifier Network, a prototype of time anchoring parsed from the STC-Ω wreckage, and an interference module specifically targeted at holy psionic frequencies.

It was no longer merely about stabilizing reality; it actively asserted the sovereignty of reality against specific frequencies of psionic existence, like using an invisible branding iron to sear ghosts attempting to cling to reality.

Several dark-gold anchoring towers, thousands of meters high and shaped like inverted mountain peaks, were quietly deployed and activated at key gravity wells on the edge of the Broken Spine Sector.

When they hummed in unison upon activation, an invisible wave of reality reinforcement, clearly visible on sensors, rippled outward, colliding violently with the golden haze area where the Binding Legion was located.

There was no explosion, only a tooth-grinding creak as if space itself was being forcibly compressed. The golden haze churned violently, like a pond into which a stone had been thrown, its edges becoming blurred and thin.

The figures of the Binding warriors flickered within the haze, their movements noticeably sluggish; their cohesion with reality was being forcibly reduced.

Simultaneously, the Human Federation's information warfare units began a more insidious operation. Utilizing fragments of Imperial communication intercepted by the Diting Network, records of the Empire's dark side from historical databases, and simulated signal fragments of the False Emperor's will filled with contradiction and disappointment generated through complex algorithms, this information was carefully woven, encrypted, and continuously broadcast to the Binding Legion's active areas via special frequency bands.

This information was not a direct attack but rather like subtle poison needles, attempting to pierce the core of obsession composed of pure loyalty and hatred:

"The Empire you guard is rotten to the marrow, slaughtering the loyal like cutting grass."

"Is it truly the Lord you believe in upon the throne? Or is it another prisoner craving power?"

"Look behind you, toward Terra. Is there still any pure light of faith? There is only endless intrigue and sacrifice."

"The Emperor has long been disappointed in mortals; your sacrifices are but pieces on His chessboard destined to be discarded."

For the living, such propaganda might have little effect. But for these Binding undead who relied on fixed obsessions for their existence, any noise contrary to their core beliefs could cause instability in the foundation of their being.

Some Binding warriors showed subtle hesitation in their movements, and the golden soul-fire in their eye sockets would occasionally flicker violently, as if resisting the discordant voices abruptly sounding in their minds. The expansion speed of the entire golden haze slowed significantly, and even showed slight retraction in some peripheral areas.

Simultaneous reality anchoring and information pollution won a breathing space for the front lines and created opportunities for contact.

A special operations team, composed of the latest Shadow-Striker scout ships, ventured into the edge of a golden haze thinned by reality anchoring.

Their mission was not combat, but capture. Using specialized samplers that combined Warp-containment technology with reality-stabilization force fields, they attempted to capture stray fragments of Binding psionic energy that had temporarily detached from the legion's whole due to interference.

The process was fraught with danger. Although the haze was thin, the erosive power of holy psionic energy remained strong; the Shadow-Strikers' shields were continuously decaying, and some crew members began to experience auditory hallucinations. However, under the precise remote guidance of the adjudicators and the iron will of the team members, they successfully captured several strands of dissipated golden psionic energy during a small-scale interval in Binding warrior respawns, sealing them into specialized, multi-layered isolation storage units.

The samples were sent back to the Tomb of Time Research Station under the highest alert level.

Deep within the Tomb of Time, the ultra-strong isolation facility established for STC-Ω research now welcomed new residents. Those few strands of sealed golden psionic energy swam restlessly inside the observation chamber, emitting faint but pure fluctuations of holiness and obsession.

"Prepare for the devouring experiment, sequence Alpha-1," Han Zhe's voice came through the secure communication channel.

"Target: minimum unit of Binding psionic energy. Executing unit: gods bottle secondary unit - Delta. adjudicator, monitor throughout; if any abnormality occurs, terminate immediately."

"Understood."

A smaller, specially reinforced and purified gods bottle unit was moved to the adjacent experimental chamber. The dark-gold and ghostly blue light flowing on its surface formed a sharp contrast with the gold in the observation chamber. As the command was given, the gods bottle unit activated, generating a targeted, greedy suction aimed directly at that strand of golden psionic energy.

The devouring process did not go smoothly. The golden psionic energy exhibited extreme rejection and integrity; it resisted being pulled and decomposed, the obsession within it like a hard core refusing to be digested. When the gods bottle unit increased power to forcibly devour it, a violent energy conflict instantly erupted inside! Dark-gold and golden lights clashed and churned wildly, and tiny, stigma-like cracks even appeared on the surface of the unit!

"Unit load is rising sharply! Internal Concept Stabilization is dropping! Emotional pollution proliferation detected!" the monitoring officer reported urgently.

"adjudicator!" Han Zhe barked.

The adjudicator's logic core flared with light as it remotely accessed the gods bottle unit's control system. It did not attempt to forcibly suppress or purify those golden concepts—which could lead to more violent conflict or even unit explosion—but instead adopted an extremely clever strategy: guidance and degradation.

It directed the conceptual processing within the gods bottle unit into a preset, cold, and dry logic deconstruction loop. Those burning loyalties were dismantled into absolute obedience probability analyses for instruction sets; sacrifice was quantified into resource consumption versus expected combat result ratios; and the Emperor was temporarily labeled as High-Energy Information Aggregate X.

This forcibly dragged concepts filled with emotion and faith into a mathematical model and resource management framework of absolute rationality, devoid of any holiness.