51: Chapter 51 The Throne Code Deep Within the Weld Marks

The locking gate of the buffer chamber slammed shut behind them with a heavy, deathly boom. Lin Yuan leaned his back against the icy metal wall, listening to the heavy bootsteps of the Purge Main Force vanguard regrouping outside the door. Chen Duo's breath puffed against his neck, unnervingly steady. The silver network had already spread across the young man's jaw, forming a dense, grid-like pattern beneath the skin, like a fishing net being drawn tight.

THRONE-01's scanning beam penetrated three layers of alloy walls, projecting a pale blue grid onto his retina. Host, west side maintenance passage, ventilation duct entrance, diameter sixty centimeters, distance four point five meters. 08 is breaching the outer defense gate. Estimated contact in ninety seconds.

Lin Yuan didn't hesitate. He pulled the last thermal charge from his backpack and slapped it onto the maintenance panel on the west side of the buffer chamber. Three-second delay. The blast wave, carrying rust and debris, flooded his nostrils. Carrying Chen Duo on his back, he charged into the thick smoke and leaped into the pitch-black ventilation duct amidst the swaying supports.

The duct reeked of ancient rust and the sweet, cloying stench of decaying protein. Lin Yuan adjusted Chen Duo's weight. The muscles in the young man's left leg twitched irregularly beneath his palm. The golden network pulsed like a living thing, transmitting an abnormal heat through the fabric of his pants. Time until countdown completion: fifty-seven hours, forty minutes.

The duct sloped downward at a forty-five-degree angle. Lin Yuan used his elbows and knees to control his descent speed, the stock of his laser rifle braced against his shoulder, his right hand constantly protecting Chen Duo's neck. THRONE-01's navigation line extended across his retina, passing through seven layers of crisscrossing ducts, locking onto a sealed isolation door at the end of the corridor below.

Gate 7.

Lin Yuan slid out from the edge of the vent, landing on one knee. He tapped Chen Duo's leg twice with his right index finger to signal alert. The corridor was dim, emergency lights casting a bloody halo overhead. The door stood thirty meters away, its frame edges piled with oxidized, blackened metal nodules. The marks left by the welding torch were rough and savage, like the bite marks of some giant beast.

But when Lin Yuan's gaze fell on the lock, his pupils constricted.

The weld seam was just a disguise.

He crawled forward, setting up his laser rifle in a firing position at the corridor corner, programming the auto-fire angle. Then, kneeling on one knee, he pulled a spare battery from his backpack and laid out a simple delayed detonation circuit on the ground. This was his escape route. If it was a trap behind the door, four minutes of auto-fire plus the battery's sympathetic detonation could buy him a ninety-second evacuation window.

After completing the setup, Lin Yuan finally approached the lock. His fingertips touched the edge of the control panel, feeling a 0.3-millimeter discrepancy. This wasn't original factory workmanship. He traced the seam with his fingernail. The metal surface transmitted a faint vibration—the tactile sensation of precise gears meshing, like touching the movement of an Old World precision clock.

Violent destruction leaves torn burrs. High-temperature cutting causes annealing discoloration. The scars on this door belonged to another category entirely: surgical incisions left by precise reconstruction.

Lin Yuan drew a multi-tool probe from his belt and inserted it into the gap at the edge of the keyhole. The micro-camera at the probe's tip transmitted the internal structure to THRONE-01's processor. A burst of crimson warning symbols immediately exploded across his retina.

The lock core had been completely replaced. The original magnetic constraint structure was removed, replaced by a reassembly module using the STC standard cutting protocol. The solder points displayed a perfect hexagonal honeycomb structure. The temperature control for each point was precise to the degree Celsius, the cooling rate forming a specific metal crystalline phase. The boundary between martensite and austenite was as sharp as if drawn with a ruler.

This was STC-foundry-grade reverse engineering, belonging to the realm of precise reconstruction, utterly unrelated to violent destruction.

Cold sweat seeped from the back of Lin Yuan's neck. He realized this was a trap laid to ensnare him, yet also a superposition of the only path to survival. Don't enter the door, and in sixty hours, the biological beacon would draw a saturation strike from the Purge Main Force—100% mortality rate. Enter the door, and the probability of encountering a preset ambush was 40%, but at least there was a chance of survival.

He felt Chen Duo's wrist. Pulse: forty-three beats per minute, two beats slower than five minutes ago. The silver network had spread below the earlobe, only two finger-widths away from the cervical spine—precisely the location of the biological beacon neural interface confirmed by earlier scans, the C3-C4 segment.

'Prepare emergency core migration protocol,' Lin Yuan ordered mentally. 'If it's a trap behind the door, prioritize protecting Chen Duo's vital signs. Secondary priority: preserve your core.'

THRONE-01's response was delayed a full two seconds. Host, that means I may face the risk of being devoured. If my kin is behind the door, if THRONE-00 left behind core fragments... it will attempt to merge with me, erase my independent consciousness. The lock core coding language matches the THRONE-00 core model. Cutting protocol version 7.2.1, belonging to the technological standard of the Forbidden Experiment period.

Lin Yuan adjusted his breathing, using a backpack strap to secure Chen Duo to himself. He stared at the line of micro-engraved code deep within the lock—THRONE-00's unique identification mark, like a scar carved into metal.

'You fear being replaced,' Lin Yuan stated, his voice low, generating a heavy echo in the metal corridor.

'I fear being devoured,' THRONE-01 corrected, its voice now carrying a static-like tremor reminiscent of human vocal cords. 'That is a desecration of sacred technology. But compared to desecration, I fear vanishing more. Host, this is the first time I admit to fear. The trace of my kin... is too close.'

Chen Duo's fingers suddenly tapped on Lin Yuan's back. Not the rhythm of a warning anymore, but switching to urgent binary code. Translated: an activation command, not a stop. The young man's left ring and middle fingers pressed together, tapping repeatedly on Lin Yuan's shoulder blade with enough force to seem intent on piercing flesh.

The pulse frequency of the golden network resonated with Gate 7. Lin Yuan could feel a low hum emanating from within Chen Duo's chest—not a heartbeat, but the tremor of some energy field synchronizing. The silver network and golden network intertwined at Chen Duo's neck, like the teeth of a key being inserted into a lock.

Lin Yuan switched the laser rifle's safety to burst fire mode, pressing his right hand against the lock's tampered panel. The moment his tactical glove touched the metal surface, a sudden hallucination flashed across his retina. He saw a massive Golden Throne suspended in a void, countless conduits extending from the throne into darkness. The ends of those conduits connected to Chen Duo's neck. And engraved on the throne's base was THRONE-00's serial number.

The vision lasted only a frame. Lin Yuan bit his tongue, the taste of blood bringing him back to clarity. This was the strongest interference from STC mental erosion, meaning the Blackstone technology behind the door was actively scanning his neural activity. He pressed down hard on the control panel, initiating destructive forced unlocking.

The lock emitted a piercing metallic screech as the precisely reconstructed core began to disassemble itself. With every degree of rotation, tiny metal fragments crumbled from the seams like a miniature steel rain. When the gap widened to fifteen centimeters, Lin Yuan calculated the remaining time: ninety seconds until fully open. Laser rifle energy at 70%, enough to sustain four minutes of auto-fire.

08 was here.

The ventilation grate at the end of the corridor let out a teeth-grating sound of twisting metal, followed by the shrill scrape of flesh squeezing against metal. The thing had breached the outer defense gate. Its tentacles left corrosive marks on the duct walls, emitting the sweet-putrid smell of amino acid decomposition. A slick tentacle squeezed out from the grate's gaps, leaving a trail of slime on the floor as it rapidly writhed towards Lin Yuan.

Lin Yuan didn't look back. He stared at the slowly sliding Gate 7, his right hand steadying Chen Duo's leg. The moment the tentacle broke through the final grate, the laser rifle auto-fired. Crimson beams wove a deadly grid in the corridor, blasting the tentacle's tip into bursts of yellowish-green slurry.

The door gap widened to forty centimeters.

Chen Duo's body tensed, the golden network taking over his muscle control. The young man's body rose from Lin Yuan's back like a marionette, his left hand precisely gripping the edge of the door gap, squeezing into the darkness with a posture that defied ergonomics. His eyes remained closed, but his movements were terrifyingly precise, as if invisible wires manipulated his limbs.

Lin Yuan cursed, dropped the laser rifle, and squeezed through the gap after him. A tentacle swept past, grazing the soles of his boots, leaving five charred corrosion marks on the metal floor. Drops of corrosive fluid sizzled on the threshold.

The sight inside the door stole Lin Yuan's breath for a moment.

A massive Blackstone stc fragment hovered in the center of the room, its surface flowing with liquid light patterns, like a captured miniature star. Below the fragment, three cryo-pods were arranged in a row. The pods were covered with coding marks identical to THRONE-00's model, glowing with a faint crimson light in the gloom. The cryo-pod closest to the door was already damaged, empty inside, leaving only a dried pool of nutrient fluid in the shape of a human silhouette.

Chen Duo stood directly beneath the Blackstone fragment, the golden network on his body flashing in perfect sync with the light patterns on the fragment's surface. His eyes were still closed, but his hands were raised, unconsciously manipulating a virtual control interface, his fingers tracing through the air, leaving golden afterimages.

08's tentacle was stuck in the door gap, writhing and struggling frantically, yet unable to enter as if encountering an invisible barrier. Lin Yuan noticed the walls inside the door were covered in experimental records—THRONE-00's handwriting, documenting forbidden experiments on core transplantation. The dates stopped three months before the war broke out.

THRONE-01's voice grew sharp, tinged with the distortion of electronic static. Temporal flow anomaly. Blackstone field effects are interfering with my chronometer. Host, the actual remaining countdown time may be less than perceived. Recommend immediate location of the biological beacon hardware.

Lin Yuan immediately adjusted his stance, right hand on the laser rifle, left hand tightening the backpack strap connecting him to Chen Duo, his gaze swiftly scanning the room for cover. He noticed a cylindrical recess in the base beneath the Blackstone fragment. Inside, a metal cube the size of a fingernail hovered, its surface covered with the same patterns as the stc fragment. A translucent energy beam connected the cube to the silver network on Chen Duo's neck, like an umbilical cord.

Biological beacon master control core confirmed. THRONE-01's interface flashed on Lin Yuan's retina. Located within the Blackstone base chamber, forming quantum entanglement with the neural interface at cervical spine segment C3-C4. Severing this core can terminate the tracking signal, but requires a living key for synchronous operation.

Lin Yuan took a step forward, reaching to grab Chen Duo's collar, but his fingertips passed through a golden haze—a Blackstone force field barrier. He retreated half a step, recalculating distance and angle, preparing to yank Chen Duo away the moment he completed his operation.

The tentacle outside the door slammed against it with increased frenzy. 08 was using brute force to tear at the door frame, which began to deform. Lin Yuan checked the laser rifle's energy: 68%, enough for three short bursts. He adjusted his breathing, pulling Chen Duo tighter to his side, preparing for the imminent breach of the variant.

The Blackstone fragment's light pulsed, each flash faster than the last.