122: Chapter 122 Hunting Birds? First, let's see if my birds agree!
Bunker No. 3, 5:43 AM.
"Bird hunting." Su Che rolled the two words over his tongue.
"Is the Quantum Countermeasures experimental unit equipped with actual hardware, or is it just a PowerPoint presentation?"
"They have hardware." Qin Lan's voice came through the encrypted channel. "Codename 'Eve's String,' three sets of equipment, secretly deployed since the end of last year. We had only intercepted sporadic codenames before; we hadn't obtained any physical intelligence."
Su Che grabbed the tactical tablet and tapped three locations on the map with his finger.
Guam, Okinawa, Jeju Island.
Connecting the three points formed a triangular pocket that perfectly enclosed the eastern and southern regions of the Long Kingdom.
"Jiang Yingxue." He picked up another walkie-talkie.
It connected after three seconds.
"How much do you know about 'Eve's String'?"
The voice on the other end replied quickly.
"It's a product of reverse-engineering fragments. I only heard a technical briefing about it once at a peripheral meeting of Prometheus."
"The principle?"
"Quantum decoherence pulse." Jiang Yingxue clearly hadn't slept, but her voice was sharp. "There was a physical description in the fragments regarding the destruction of quantum entangled states, and their experimental team spent eight years turning it into hardware. A single unit emits a fixed-frequency pulse that forces the coherence of entangled particle pairs to collapse."
"Effective radius?"
"About six hundred kilometers for a single unit. With three units networked and synchronized... theoretically, the entire East Asia region."
Su Che drew three circles on the tablet.
The overlapping area of the three circles covered twenty-nine of the Sky-Breaking Bow's thirty-six Quantum Communication nodes.
If twenty-nine were taken out, the network would be useless.
Golden Dome suppresses electromagnetics, Eve's String disables quantum; with these two layers stacked, the Long Kingdom's entire communication link, from top to bottom, would be reduced to zero.
"How long does calibration take?" Su Che asked Qin Lan.
"The intercepted technical fragments indicate that synchronized calibration takes about fifteen to twenty minutes."
5:43 AM plus twenty minutes is 6:03 AM.
He switched to the flight control terminal of the Yu-01.
The black drone was still hovering over the East China Sea, its reasoning core on standby, with 58% energy remaining.
Three targets.
Jeju Island at 1,100 kilometers, Okinawa at 1,600, and Guam at 3,400.
Mach 16 is enough.
Just as Su Che was about to input the attack command, a line of red text popped up on the terminal.
It wasn't from the system panel; it was generated by the reasoning core itself.
[Threat Assessment Supplement: "Eve's String" requires a quantum state scan before calibration. The scanning process will actively detect all quantum entanglement signal sources within the coverage area, exposing the geographical coordinates of all Long Kingdom Quantum Communication nodes.]
Su Che hadn't taught it this.
It had deduced this itself from the principle of "quantum decoherence pulse."
Su Che stared at the line "exposing all node coordinates" and rubbed the back of his neck.
"Qin Lan, will they perform a scan before calibration?"
Qin Lan flipped through some data for a few seconds. "A term mentioned in the fragments, 'handshake scan,' is a prerequisite step for calibration."
"Then the scan might have already begun."
Without waiting for a reply, he typed three lines rapidly on the flight control terminal.
[Target Sequence: Jeju Island → Okinawa → Guam.]
[Arrive at maximum speed, destroy antenna arrays one by one.]
The reasoning core took over.
The flight path refreshed.
The Yu-01 turned north, accelerating to Mach 16.8.
The reasoning core was squeezing every bit of margin out of the engine, exceeding the calibration value Su Che had set by half a notch.
He called Lieutenant General Peng, explained the situation in three sentences, and added one final remark.
"I'll dismantle the equipment. But if the scan is already complete, the node coordinates are already in the hands of the Americans; even if I destroy the equipment, the coordinates remain."
The voice on the other end was no longer Lieutenant General Peng's.
"Little Su, this is Commander-in-Chief Wang Xueshan."
Su Che sat up straight in his chair.
"We'll discuss the node exposure later; dismantle the equipment first." Commander-in-Chief Wang Xueshan's voice didn't fluctuate much, but it carried weight. "I'll keep an eye on the East; you focus on your task."
"Understood."
He hung up.
5:55 AM.
On the terminal, the Yu-01 arrived over Jeju Island.
The optical reconnaissance zoomed in to maximum magnification.
In a corner of the ROK naval base, a few gray, low-rise buildings enclosed a courtyard, and in the center of the courtyard stood a twelve-meter-tall metal pole, with a honeycomb array antenna at the top slowly rotating.
It was already scanning.
The reasoning core didn't wait for confirmation.
The status bar switched from blue to red.
The right-wing pod fired.
A beam of light struck down, snapping the antenna base, and the twelve-meter pole slammed into the ground, bouncing twice.
The terminal confirmed the destruction.
It turned south.
Three minutes and twenty seconds later.
On the outskirts of Kadena, Okinawa, the second Eve's String array antenna had just risen to operating height.
The same move, the antenna snapped off at the base.
Two units, in less than five minutes.
Su Che stomped his feet; they were feeling numb and sore.
6:02 AM.
Guam. The furthest distance.
A prompt from the reasoning core suddenly popped up on the terminal.
[Attention: High-density data uplink detected from the direction of Anderson Air Force Base; frequency band does not match known military satellite communications. Encoding format unknown.]
Su Che crossed his right leg.
"Director Qin!"
"Here."
"Anderson Base is uploading a massive amount of data; the frequency band isn't military."
The keyboard on Qin Lan's end clattered twice.
"Confirmed target is an undisclosed geostationary orbit satellite; the identification number isn't in any known database."
"What are they transmitting?"
"The scan results: the precise coordinates of the thirty-six Quantum Communication nodes."
6:03 AM.
The Yu-01 arrived over Guam, and the reasoning core locked onto the target.
The beam fell, and the third Eve's String shattered into scrap metal.
But the data transmission signal on the terminal completed the transmission of the last data packet 0.7 seconds before the antenna was destroyed.
Su Che leaned back in his chair, staring at the fading signal shadow on the screen.
All three units were destroyed.
But the coordinates were obtained.
Golden Dome can block, Ame-no-Murakumo can dismantle, missiles can intercept, Eve's String can be destroyed.
Coordinates are not weapons; they are addresses. Whenever the Americans want to act, they can send someone to dismantle the base stations at any time.
Sky-Breaking Bow won every tactical battle but left a strategic hole.
Su Che picked up the walkie-talkie.
"General, all three units are destroyed, but the coordinates have leaked."
Three seconds.
"Remediation plan?"
"Yes. Migrate all thirty-six nodes to new locations and regenerate the pairing keys for the entangled particle pairs."
"How long?"
Su Che glanced at the architecture laid out on the military supercomputer: the full framework of the Yi Ren Intelligence General Cognitive Kernel.
The stuff the system had just provided.
The full version was ten times more complex than the minimal version he had rushed, but its computing power was also ten times more powerful.
If he let the full kernel calculate the thirty-six sets of new keys in parallel...
"Six hours."
"Another countdown."
"This time, it's really not urgent." Su Che stood up and flipped the hood of his hoodie onto the back of his head. "The Golden Dome's pulse array consumes an astronomical amount of power; it can only last for another twelve hours at most before it has to shut down for cooling. The moment it shuts down, conventional communication will be restored, so whether the quantum network migrates or not doesn't matter much. But once it's migrated, the old coordinates in their hands will be worthless."
"Alright, I'll coordinate the troops to assist with the relocation." Lieutenant General Peng paused. "That AI of yours..."
"I'll turn it in after six hours."
He hung up.
Su Che imported all 220 sets of combat data from the Yu-01 into the training framework of the Yi Ren Intelligence General Cognitive Kernel.
217 interception samples plus 3 precision strike samples—defensive data in one hand, offensive data in the other.
It wouldn't produce a super AI, but it was enough to hatch the first complete, usable version of this kernel.
At the blast-proof door, a sliver of pale golden light seeped in from the bottom of the door crack, casting onto the concrete floor—as narrow as a chopstick.
Dawn had broken.
Su Che didn't look at the light.
He placed his ten fingers on the keyboard and brought up the compilation environment.
On the screen, the full architecture of the Yi Ren Intelligence General Cognitive Kernel unfolded.
It was more than ten times larger than the rushed version; the multi-dimensional parallel decision tree was just the foundation, and on top of it grew cross-domain autonomous learning modules, complex system collaboration modules, and self-verification and evolution interfaces.
A true non-humanoid intelligence.
It wasn't a parrot learning to speak like a human, but the embryo of a brand-new species.
Su Che gnawed on his thumbnail and began to write the first line of code.
Outside the bunker, the morning glow of the desert burned the skyline into a copper-red line.
Countdown: six hours.
Lin Waner pushed open the blast-proof door, carrying a bowl of steaming vegetable noodles, and placed it next to the empty enamel mug.
She didn't speak, just pulled the chopsticks out from the bottom of the bowl, stuck them upright in the noodles, and turned to leave.
She took two steps and then turned back.
"I put vinegar in the broth."
The door closed.
Su Che's left hand swerved from the keyboard, grabbed the chopsticks, and took a mouthful of noodles.
Sour.
He swallowed the noodles, his right hand not stopping.
The code grew on the screen line by line, like seeds in the desert encountering water.