274: Chapter 274: Hardcore Unlocking, Art Style Takes a Sudden Turn, Second God of Wealth Appears!

As the red light enveloped him, Zhao Chaoyang's bodily functions began to be forcibly rewritten.

His broad skeleton let out faint, cracking sounds of dislocation as it collapsed inward to a degree visible to the naked eye.

The Adam's apple on his neck quickly smoothed out, and his rough skin shed its keratin, becoming delicate and fair.

His oversized research uniform instantly slumped down, yet two startling curves abruptly bulged out at the neckline.

Zhao Chaoyang looked down, his hands suddenly covering his crotch, his legs clamped tightly together, as he let out an extremely high-pitched shriek.

The scientists in the corridor retreated a step in unison; some nearly dropped the data pads in their hands, while others subconsciously reached out to steady themselves against the cold wall.

Mark Harper's eyes widened to the size of saucers, and he even forgot to breathe.

Su Che stood with his arms crossed, watching the scene expressionless, though inwardly he was marveling at the barbarity of this technology from Kairos.

"Continue." Su Che lifted his chin.

The remaining ten members of Friedman's team braced themselves and stepped up.

Robert Kane stepped into the node, and a 3D diagram of spatial folding reconstruction popped up on the holographic screen.

This Caltech chemistry professor was flustered when faced with a pure geometry problem, and the countdown ended.

A red light flashed; Kane's beard fell off instantly, thick blonde hair grew from his sparse scalp, his sturdy waist rapidly cinched, and in the blink of an eye, he transformed into a buxom blonde bombshell.

Wen Zhiyu stepped up next, facing the micro-particle tracking option, and managed to pass by the skin of her teeth thanks to her foundation in nanotechnology.

Sato Kenta drew high-frequency band separation and made an operational error.

After being baptized by the red light, he transformed into a petite, adorable girl less than 1.5 meters tall, who crossed her arms in terror to cover her chest.

Xu Zhaoning followed closely behind and secured a victory steadily.

After the ten people took their turns, five had passed, and five had followed in Zhao Chaoyang's footsteps.

Su Che glanced at the door panel.

There were forty-eight nodes in total; currently, fourteen had succeeded, six had failed, and thirty-four nodes remained unlit.

"There aren't enough people." Su Che tilted his head to look at Kairos, "Call everyone from the other four teams, including the team leaders, over here."

Not long after, seventy-seven top-tier minds flooded into the corridor.

Tao Zhixing was the first to step into the circle of light; the pure mathematical topology problem posed no pressure for him, and a green light lit up.

Facing a multi-dimensional probability calculation, Albert Shawn missed the precision of the last two decimal places.

The punishment descended, and this MIT professor transformed into a voluptuous young woman, despairingly tugging at her overly long pant legs.

Jiang Zeyu withstood the pressure and completed the logical architecture decomposition.

Park Min-ah stepped into the node.

She was originally a beautiful Korean woman with a graceful figure, but she crashed and burned on the interstellar dark energy frequency decoding.

As the red light covered her, her skeleton elongated violently, thick stubble sprouted on her chin, and her uniform was stretched tight by bulging muscles.

She blankly touched her now completely flat pectoral muscles, and a rough bass voice rolled out of her throat.

Olaf Nielsen was defeated in the ecological chain reverse deduction and turned into a tall young woman.

Shi Yilong successfully lit up the node thanks to his solid foundation in biological law deduction.

Pu Muming analyzed the neural interaction frequency band and passed on the first try.

Ji Fengxing timed out during the adaptive structure reconstruction and ended up as a short-haired hot girl.

This unlocking battle, intertwined with the hardcore and the absurd, continued to progress.

Everyone took turns, and shouts of surprise rose and fell in the corridor.

When the forty-eighth node on the sixty-first door finally glowed green, the door slid open silently to the sides.

Su Che didn't rush to look at the functions behind the door, but turned around, his gaze sweeping over the crowd.

Standing in the corridor were twenty-two individuals with extremely bizarre appearances.

To light up the remaining thirty-four nodes, a full forty people had been fed into it, with sixteen failures.

Added to the previous six times, one-fifth of the one hundred top-tier minds had been forcibly rewritten in their biological sex.

After the door opened, Su Che was the first to walk in.

Inside the massive cabin, it was not a complex cluster of equipment, but an orderly storage area.

Rows of cylindrical storage tanks, flickering with deep blue energy bands, extended from the floor to the ceiling, and the entire space was filled with a sense of stability and security.

[Ship-borne Antimatter Fuel Secure Storage Area]

Kairos pulled up the functional description.

"Originally used for the safe storage and control of antimatter fuel; equipped with multi-layer magnetic confinement, vacuum isolation, and automatic fire extinguishing devices, it provides power for high-order propulsion systems and weapons."

Su Che's gaze swept across those storage tanks.

He recalled the professional equipment storage area behind the thirty-seventh door, where he still stored nine dark energy crystal cores.

Compared to this storage warehouse specifically designed for ultra-high-risk energy, it was simply the difference between a thatched cottage and a bank vault.

"Kairos." Su Che turned his head, "Go take out all nine of our remaining dark energy crystal cores and transfer them here for the highest-spec containment."

"Understood." Kairos immediately took the order and left.

After dealing with this matter, Su Che walked out of the storage area and looked at the medical team nearby.

"Director Liu."

Liu Nanshan wiped the sweat seeping from his forehead and quickly stepped forward.

"Take them to the Life Source Intervention Medical Center." Su Che pointed to the row of oddly-styled individuals, "How long will it take to restore them all to their original state?"

Chen Junhong and Lillian Brown quickly calculated the parameters on their data pads.

"Three days at the fastest." Liu Nanshan gave a definitive answer, "The gene rewriting for these twenty-two people requires them to enter the main chamber in batches; three days is enough to completely restore them."

"Alright." Su Che clapped his hands, "Except for the medical team, the entire ship is on break for three days. Once they are recovered, we will open the next door."

The crowd felt a sense of relief, and the twenty-two punished individuals followed Liu Nanshan toward the medical center as if fleeing for their lives.

...

Three days later, news came from the medical center that all twenty-two scientists had been restored to their original state.

It was just that everyone's gaze toward the sixty-first door was like looking at a prehistoric monster.

The vacation ended, and the unlocking work continued.

After some more days, the fourth team led by Patrick successfully conquered the sixty-second door.

Behind the door was a ring-shaped thruster array with an extremely precise and complex structure.

[Ship-borne Antimatter Propulsion System]

Originally used to achieve sub-light speed navigation at 0.5 times the speed of light, with acceleration and deceleration times of ten minutes each, it could achieve rapid round trips to neighboring star systems.

Su Che looked at the parameters and calculated in his mind.

"This doesn't seem much faster than the conventional cruise speed that came with the previous jump system?"

"Chief, it is already quite fast." Kairos explained from the side.

"Previously, when you flew to the asteroid belt, the conventional cruise took several hours. Using this system, including the twenty minutes for acceleration and deceleration, the total time spent is less than forty minutes."

"Flying out of the Solar System will take about ten hours or so."

Su Che thought about it; last time, that trade fleet from Karel took two hours to fly over from a billion kilometers away.

Calculating it this way, the speed was indeed quite considerable.

"It does seem pretty good indeed."

"This mothership is the top-tier creation of our Kairos; its cruising speed is definitely not limited to this." Kairos added, "More advanced propulsion systems will be unlocked later."

Upon hearing this, Su Che felt even more anticipation.

Immediately, he called over the five members of the navigation team—Lu Zheng, Jiang Lin, Zhao Heng, Zhou Chuyue, and Han Qiao—and told them to hurry up and familiarize themselves with the operation of this system.

Two days later, Academician Zhong took several members of the fifth team and proactively came to find him.

"Chief Engineer Su, it's a success!" Academician Zhong's tone was filled with irrepressible excitement.

"What is a success?"

"The translation chip!"

Academician Zhong pulled up a holographic screen, which displayed a bio-chip the size of a grain of rice.

"Relying on the mothership's Quantum Computer cluster and language parsing system, plus the perfect environment provided by the high-order scientific research laboratory, our implantable interstellar language translation chip project has completely come to fruition!"

He pointed to the chip and introduced it.

"After implantation into the brain, any language recorded in the mothership's database can be interpreted simultaneously in real-time. It also has an autonomous learning function; when encountering a new language, as long as it listens a few times, it can parse it on its own."

Su Che's focus was very practical.

"Is it safe? Is it stable?"

"All core members of our team have already completed the implantation surgery."

Academician Zhong patted his chest to guarantee.

"Absolutely safe, with no side effects whatsoever."

"Good!" Su Che immediately made the decision.

"Kairos, you arrange it. All personnel on the ship are to undergo the chip implantation surgery in batches—not a single one left out!"

...

The next morning.

Su Che stayed in the rest cabin, flipping through the latest briefing on the Dyson Cloud project.

The communicator on the table rang.

"Chief Engineer Su, there is a situation." Engineer Yang Wanli's voice carried a hint of tension, "The communication system just captured a high-frequency encrypted signal. The other party is actively requesting to establish a dialogue channel."

Su Che put down the data pad and stood up.

"Location?"

"The signal source is not in the Solar System." Engineer Yang Wanli reported quickly, "Coordinate analysis shows it comes from one hundred light-years away."

Su Che walked out of the cabin door; Kairos was already waiting in the corridor.

The two walked side by side toward the communication cabin.

Commander-in-Chief Wang Xueshan and Zhang Zhiyue heard the news and also rushed over; several of them stood in front of the main console.

Su Che nodded at Engineer Yang Wanli.

"Connect."

Several complex geometric ripples flashed across the holographic screen, and then the image stabilized.

In the center of the screen appeared a humanoid creature clad in dark gold battle armor.

The other party's skin presented a metallic grayish-white; their eyes had no pupils, only two clusters of leaping dark red light.

Without any superfluous pleasantries, the humanoid creature spoke and went straight to the point.

"This is the diplomatic ship Anselm of the Roshernia Empire. We are currently docked in the neutral staging area of the Cold Hydrogen Cloud on the periphery of the Horsehead Nebula."

The grayish-white-skinned alien envoy looked directly at the screen, their dark red eyes devoid of any fluctuation.

"We have come to seek technical trade cooperation and hope to establish formal diplomatic channels with your side and conduct face-to-face negotiations on relevant topics."

"If permitted, we will depart immediately and head to the meeting coordinates designated by your side."

Su Che stood in front of the main console, his hands supporting him on the desktop.

He looked at the envoy from the Roshernia Empire of the Andromeda Florin race on the screen.

In his mind flashed the words that Erwin of the Karel fleet had once said to him.

After waiting for over half a year, the second God of Wealth had finally come knocking.