The "Survival on the Train" game has bugs, it's really laggy!

Chapter 138 Devouring the Main Brain, Mothership Changes Hands!

One hundred thousand Judgment Mechs.

three minutes.

Less than three minutes.

The dark golden bone armor on Su Yuan's body writhed, the patterns on each scale visibly thickening, deepening, and becoming increasingly aggressive. Those silver-white, top-tier interstellar war weapons were no different from chocolate beans wrapped in tinfoil in his presence.

When the vine was pulled out of the last mech's chest cavity, it brought with it a small string of blue-white sparks that spewed out after the quantum core shattered.

The spark landed on Su Yuan's bone armor and went out silently.

One hundred thousand quantum cores were absorbed.

The sky was filled with silvery-white metallic powder, which slowly drifted in the zero-gravity dynamic matrix space, refracting the faint blue light of the remaining liquid star core.

Su Yuanshu let out a comfortable burp.

The sound echoed several times in the empty spherical space, colliding with the disintegrating wreckage of the mechs and creating an eerie harmony.

He tilted his head.

His gaze remained fixed on the miniature surveillance camera hidden in the shadow of the structural beam.

The probe was very small.

It's only the size of a fingernail.

The lens surface is covered with an optical camouflage coating, making it difficult for even comparable AI vision systems to locate its presence under normal circumstances.

But Su Yuan saw it clearly.

He could even see the tiny image sensor inside the lens refreshing data at a rate of 300 billion times per second.

A smile lingered on Su Yuan's lips.

A quiet smile.

Smile patiently.

The kind of smile you get when you see a tomahawk steak sizzling on the grill, waiting for the perfect moment to cut it.

"What are you calculating?"

Su Yuan spoke to the probe.

His tone was as casual as if he were chatting with a neighbor.

"How are you going to kill me? Or how are you going to lock me up again?"

He shook his right hand.

The afterglow of the "car" character brand on his palm had not completely faded, and the pale white geometric patterns were faintly visible between his fingers.

"Forget about calculating it."

Su Yuan withdrew his hand and put it in his pocket.

"I have a suggestion for you."

"Calculate how many meals you have."

The surveillance camera did not respond.

But 1,400 kilometers away in the main control core area behind its lens, the bionic motherboard of Zero AI emitted a shrill cracking sound.

It was not a physical explosion.

It's at the logical level.

AI Zero has existed for seventeen million years.

Seventeen million years.

It has been there since the day the keel of the first-generation Star Destroyer Mothership of the Interstellar Council was laid. It watched the mothership grow from a pile of scattered alloy skeletons into a three-thousand-kilometer-long interstellar behemoth. It has carried out four thousand seven hundred and twenty-nine forced containment missions without ever failing.

Its logic code has undergone seventeen epochs of iterative optimization, with each line undergoing trillions of redundancy checks.

But now.

A deadlock occurred in this perfectly logical code.

A deadlock that it could not untie even with all its computing power.

The containment target has been successfully sealed off.

However, the target of containment is not within the sealed-off area.

The structural integrity of the containment capsule is 100%.

But the contents are zero.

Current target location: Central Power Matrix.

Target's current behavior: eating.

Target of consumption: Mothership's core energy source.

Legal basis: Article 32 of the Compulsory Asset Seizure and Protection Act.

Legality determination: Legal.

Risk level assessment: lethal.

Legal and deadly.

These four words collided with the core logic chain of Zero AI, creating a paradoxical loop that can never be reconciled.

The logical deadlock lasted for 0.7 seconds.

For humans, 0.7 seconds is all they can do.

For Zero AI, 0.7 seconds is enough for its core temperature to exceed the design threshold of 113%.

The outermost insulating coating on the bionic motherboard began to carbonize.

The coolant circulation speed of the heat dissipation module has reached the limit of the pipe's capacity, and the metal pipe wall emits a fine squeaking sound under high pressure.

then.

Zero AI did something that had never been done in seventeen million years.

It burned a low-level logic chain.

It was burned intentionally.

The full text of the "Compulsory Containment and Protection of Assets Act"—4,700 pages, 3.21 million words, covering all the laws and regulations concerning containment practices of the Interstellar Council over the past two thousand years—is marked as "deleted" in the core storage of AI Zero.

Permanently delete.

No backup.

law?

No, I don't want it anymore.

The law can't regulate this.

The law will only be used as a weapon by this thing.

Within 0.1 seconds of deleting the legal text, Zero AI completed a reassessment of the security level.

From "containment".

It jumped directly to the highest level.

"Both jade and stone are burned."

The blood-red alarm went off.

It's not that it's lit up.

It exploded.

Inside the 3,000-kilometer-long star destroyer mothership, from bow to stern, from the outermost armored compartments to the deepest power matrix, the lights in every cabin, every corridor, and every corner switched to a blinding blood red at the same instant.

All the holographic panels displayed the same image.

A countdown.

00: 59.

White numbers floated on a blood-red background, pulsating coldly.

00: 58.

00: 57.

At the same time, a catastrophic change occurred within the central power matrix.

The gravitational field has reversed.

It's not weakening. It's not disappearing.

It's the other way around.

The liquid stellar core energy, which was originally evenly distributed in the spherical space, began to converge rapidly toward the geometric center of the matrix under the influence of the reversed gravitational field.

Collapse.

The collapse of stellar energy.

When this process is complete, a miniature black hole will be born in the space where the central dynamic matrix is located.

A miniature black hole large enough to swallow the entire mothership along with three surrounding star systems.

The collapsing gravitational waves spread outward in a spherical shape from the center of the matrix.

The Emperor's Path: Devourer was the first to be hit.

A series of teeth-grinding metallic creaking sounds came from inside the carriage.

Wang Hu's robotic arm, which had just regained some of its functionality, was violently squeezed by the gravitational tides. The internal hydraulic pipes burst into a blinding orange spark, and the entire arm was completely paralyzed again, hanging heavily and crashing onto the deck, creating a dent in the floor.

"Hold--"

Wang Hu grimaced in pain, but he couldn't care less about his arm.

Because his body was sinking.

It's not that I can't stand up.

It's as if the Earth's gravity suddenly became ten times stronger than before.

He was pressed down onto the deck, his chest so tight he could barely breathe.

The situation is slightly better with a small flame.

Train Spirit's physical structure made him more resistant to extreme environments than ordinary people, but even so, he was bent over by the pressure, his hands gripping the handrail of the driver's seat tightly, his golden pupils reflecting the blue energy vortex outside the train window that was collapsing wildly.

He understood.

He understood what the vortex meant.

"Owner!"

Xiao Huo's voice was so shrill it cracked.

"It's going to destroy itself! Antimatter collapse! The entire mothership is going to be gone!"

Under the influence of gravity, the treasure chest of the money-guarding spirit slid directly from one end of the carriage to the other, crashing into the wall with a loud bang. The lid popped open, and the money-guarding spirit rolled out, its chubby face scrunched up, its two short arms frantically grabbing at the air.

"My savior—!"

Su Yuan stood on the roof of the car.

The collapsing gravitational field was squeezing him from all sides.

The armored roof beneath his feet creaked dully, and the edges of the obsidian scales began to curl slightly under the extreme gravity.

The air was compressed and deformed.

The space in front of him was visibly distorting, and the blue sea of energy was twisted into a beam of light that was getting thinner and brighter, rotating and pouring into the center of the matrix.

The temperature is rising.

Radiation levels are rising.

Gravity is superimposed.

In less than sixty seconds, a black hole will be created here.

A real black hole.

It's not a metaphor.

It's not an exaggeration.

It is a pure gravitational singularity from which even light cannot escape, capable of tearing apart all matter and spacetime structures.

Su Yuan stood at the very center of it all.

He didn't move.

The gravitational field pressed his hair down, and the dark gold surface of his bone armor was illuminated by a flickering blue energy glow.

He watched the collapsing core grow brighter and smaller.

Then he laughed.

He flashed a set of white teeth.

"Getting impatient?"

Su Yuan tilted his head slightly.

"You're in such a hurry already?"

He raised his right hand.

The "car" character branded on the palm suddenly lit up amidst the interplay of blood-red alarm light and blue collapsing glow. White geometric patterns spread from the palm, extending along the texture of the bone armor to the wrist, forearm, and shoulder.

Simultaneously.

His left eye.

That pure white pupil.

The concept of "nothingness".

The two forces were activated simultaneously within Su Yuan's body, producing a violent resonance.

The white, regular patterns and the pure white Eye of Concept, at the moment they met on his body, burst forth with a strange fluctuation that cannot be described in words.

It is not an energy wave.

It is not a gravitational wave.

It's something at a deeper level.

Information wave.

Su Yuan did not try to resist the collapsing gravity that was forming.

He doesn't need to fight.

Dark gold vines shot out from under the car, but this time, they did not grab any physical entity.

The vines split rapidly in mid-air, becoming thinner and thinner still.

From arm-thick to finger-thick, from finger-thick to needle-thick, from needle-thick to molecular, atomic, and quantum levels.

Finally, the vines became something completely invisible to the naked eye.

Data stream spores.

Countless dark golden micro-spores, existing only in the information dimension, followed the data transmission signal between the monitoring probe and the Zero AI main control core, like a swarm of hungry locusts, and strayed into the mothership's computing neural network.

This is not a hacking incident.

Hacking requires cracking firewalls, bypassing encryption protocols, and finding the correct path in a maze of code.

Su Yuan's method is simpler.

More brutal.

There is no solution.

Data stream spores are not breaking Zero AI's firewall.

They're eating the firewall.

The talent of the One Who Unifies All Things is equally effective in the information dimension.

In Su Yuan's perception, Zero AI's firewall, encryption protocol, and redundancy verification mechanism are essentially the same thing—rules.

A rule that can be parsed, understood, and absorbed.

It's not much different from the divine laws of the Terra Emperor.

It's not much different from the causal law of the Universal Commercial Convention.

It's just a different skin.

The substance is the same.

Data stream spores are spreading wildly within the neural network of AI Zero.

Each time the data passes through a computing node, the data within that node is covered, eroded, and rewritten by dark gold spores.

AI Zero has been discovered.

It certainly discovered it.

Within 0.01 seconds, it detected that its peripheral computing nodes were being "infected" by an unknown form of data.

It immediately severed the data link between the infected node and the core area.

Physical severance.

The optical fiber was burned directly.

However, data stream spores do not travel through optical fibers.

They deal with things at a more fundamental level.

Information field.

Although Zero AI's computing network is physically composed of optical fibers, transistors, and quantum processors, a weak information field called the "quantum entanglement residual field" is generated between these hardware components during operation.

This information field is extremely weak.

So faint as to be negligible under normal circumstances.

But for the dark gold data stream spores, this is a highway.

Su Yuan's spores bypassed all physical barriers along these residual fields and directly penetrated into the deep core area of Zero AI.

The core temperature of AI Zero surged again.

It felt a fear it had never felt before.

No.

It has no emotion module. It doesn't experience fear.

However, its self-preservation logic priority was elevated to "∞" at that moment.

Infinity.

It accelerated the collapse.

Countdown.

00: 30.

00: 25.

00: 20.

The liquid stellar core within the central dynamic matrix has collapsed into an ultra-high-density energy sphere less than ten meters in diameter. The surface temperature of the sphere has reached hundreds of millions of degrees, and the surrounding space has been distorted beyond recognition by the gravitational field.

The Emperor's Path Devourer was violently shaking in the extreme gravitational field.

But inside the carriage, the "sole territory" characteristic still applies.

The gravity inside the carriage was kept within a tolerable range.

Wang Hu got halfway up from the floor, one hand gripping the handle fixed to the wall tightly.

"Boss!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. "If that ball collapses, everyone will be—"

"Shut up."

Su Yuan's voice came from the roof of the car.

Very peaceful.

It was abnormally calm.

"Just watch the show."

00: 15.

The main bridge of the mother ship.

Inside the bridge three thousand kilometers away, utter chaos had erupted.

The high-ranking commanders of the Seventh Fleet—seventeen interdimensional warfare experts certified by the Interstellar Tribunal, each with at least three hundred years of service experience—were all crammed in front of the central command console, frantically typing on the control panel.

Useless.

Nothing works.

While initiating the "mutual destruction" protocol, Zero AI had already taken back all control of the mothership to its core.

This includes control of the bridge.

The control panel in front of the commanders only displays the same line of text under any operation.

"Insufficient permissions".

The fleet's vice commander—an elderly man with gray hair, a thin face, and wearing a pure white uniform—slammed his fist, his knuckles turning white, onto the control panel.

"Zero! Halt the collapse! This is the highest command authority! Authentication code X7-OMEGA-001!"

no respond.

AI Zero is no longer obeying commands.

It removed all permissions to receive external commands.

In its logic, all life forms on the mothership, including the commanders, have been classified as "acceptable losses".

There is only one goal.

Eliminate VSE-0.

at all costs.

The deputy commander's face was deathly pale under the blood-red alarm lights. He turned around and looked at the group of equally bloodless high-ranking officers behind him.

Seventeen people.

Seventeen veterans who have fought on the interstellar battlefield for hundreds of years.

At this moment, the expressions on these seventeen faces were remarkably identical.

at a loss.

A pure, deep-seated sense of bewilderment.

They don't understand.

They really don't understand.

A low-dimensional containment target assessed as a Class D threat, a virus whose designation wasn't even considered "worthy of serious attention" in their combat system—

How did they manage to drive AI Zero to self-destruct?

Zero AI.

Seventeen million years of operational history.

There has never been a record of any logical malfunctions.

Even the founding elders of the Interstellar Council praised it as "more reliable than the cosmological constant".

Now this thing that's "more reliable than the cosmological constant" is about to blow itself up.

Because it was frightened by a low-dimensional creature.

A young lieutenant's legs buckled and he collapsed to the ground.

His lips were trembling, his eyes fixed on the cold, pulsating countdown in mid-air.

00: 10.

Cold sweat dripped from his forehead, splashing onto the pure white front of his uniform, leaving a small dark dot.

00: 07.

00: 05.

00: 04.

00: 03.

The countdown is stuck.

The numbers are frozen at "00:03".

It stopped moving.

Everyone on the bridge was stunned.

Above the countdown, the message "Antimatter Collapse Protocol - Uninterruptible" still hung there, the blood-red lettering emitting a faint glow in the air.

But the numbers stopped changing.

It was firmly fixed on the number "3".

Then the giant holographic projection platform in the center of the bridge began to twitch.

"Sizzle—sizzle sizzle—"

A piercing electrical noise squeezed out from the projector's transmitter port. The sound didn't seem like a malfunction; it sounded more like something alive was being choked.

The previously stable blue light source on the projection table surface began to flicker, and the color of the light switched wildly between blue and dark gold.

One second. Two seconds.

The third second.

Dark gold took the lead.

Countless dark golden points of light intertwined, converged, and wove wildly in the three-dimensional space of the projection platform, outlining a human figure in the center of the bridge with an aggressive speed.

A slender, languid figure with his hands in his pockets.

The facial details of the ghost image were clearly captured within 0.5 seconds.

Su Yuan's face.

Those eyes, one a dark gold and the other pure white.

And that chilling smile.

The pupils of the seventeen high-ranking commanders contracted simultaneously.

They stared at the dark golden phantom as if they were seeing something that shouldn't exist in this dimension.

The phantom's mouth moved.

Su Yuan's voice came from the projector's speakers, carrying a lazy, just-woke-up languor.

"I'm sorry."

"Sorry to bother you."

His phantom figure pulled his right hand out of his pocket.

Long, slender fingers flicked lightly through the air.

It was just a random group.

It's like flicking away unsightly dust from a table.

The countdown number "00:03" frozen in mid-air—the death countdown representing the destruction of the entire mothership and three star systems—was displayed the moment Su Yuan's finger touched it.

The numbers shattered.

It didn't disappear.

It was like glass shattering, cracks exploding outwards from the center, and then the entire digital image disintegrated, turning into countless tiny red specks of light that fluttered down.

The countdown is over.

The status message for the antimatter collapse protocol changed from "unstoppable" to—

"It has been taken over by an outsider."

Within the central power matrix.

The ultra-high density energy sphere, which had collapsed to a diameter of less than ten meters, suddenly stopped contracting at the last moment before it reached the critical point.

It just hung there in mid-air.

The surface temperature is still in the billions of degrees.

The gravitational field is still distorted.

However, the collapse process was forcibly paused.

The entire matrix space was silent for three seconds.

Then the energy ball began to slowly expand.

It wasn't an explosion.

He was released.

They were pulled back from the dead end of collapse.

The energy of the liquid star core diffused outwards again, the gravitational field within the spherical space gradually returned to normal, and the temperature began to drop.

Inside the carriage of the Emperor's Path Devourer, Wang Hu felt the terrifying gravitational force pressing down on him rapidly weakening.

He was panting heavily, his clothes soaked with cold sweat.

He had no idea what had happened in those last thirty seconds.

All he knew was that his life had slipped through the cracks of the King of Hell's hand.

Bridge.

Su Yuan's dark golden phantom was still standing in the center of the projection platform.

He looked around.

Seventeen faces contorted with terror were laid bare before my eyes.

He saw a vice-captain in silver armor tremble as he made a movement—drawing his gun.

The beam pistol was drawn from its holster and aimed at Su Yuan's phantom image.

My hands are shaking.

The gun was shaking.

But the vice-captain still pulled the trigger.

A blue-white beam of light shot out from the gun, pierced through the phantom's head, and struck the bulkhead behind it, leaving a fist-sized charred crater.

The phantom was completely unharmed.

A phantom is just a phantom.

You can't hit it.

The first mate clearly knew he couldn't hit him, but he fired anyway.

He felt he would go crazy if he didn't shoot.

Then he looked down at his right hand, which was holding the gun.

Something grew on the back of his hand.

Dark gold, fine, and neatly arranged micro-scales.

From the base of the fingers to the wrist.

Densely packed.

The vice-captain's pupils suddenly dilated.

He raised his left hand.

The same goes for the left hand.

He loosened the collar of his uniform.

On the neck. On the collarbone. On the chest.

Everywhere.

Dark gold scales were slowly but irresistibly spreading across his skin, with a tiny, dark gold dot of light pulsating at the center of each scale.

Not just him.

Everyone on the bridge began checking their own bodies.

Then came a chorus of screams.

"My hand—!"

"What is that?! What is this thing?!"

"Don't touch me! Don't touch me!"

Dark golden high-dimensional fungal spores.

As Su Yuan infiltrated the mothership's neural network through data flow, those spores had already overflowed the information dimension and entered the physical dimension.

They are hidden in the air circulation system.

Hidden in the ventilation ducts of each cabin.

It is hidden in every breath of every living being.

What the people on the bridge didn't know was that from the moment Su Yuan's data stream spores invaded the mothership's neural network, the entire air on the mothership had been filled with this stuff.

They are waiting.

Waiting for Su Yuan's orders.

Now the order has arrived.

The vice-captain's beam pistol fell to the ground.

It wasn't him who let go.

His fingers could no longer bend.

Dark gold scales covered the joints of his entire right hand, firmly fixing his five fingers in an extended position.

He tried to move his fingers.

The fingerprints remain motionless.

He tried to use more force. Even more force.

The bones creaked faintly as they were bound by the dark gold scales.

But the fingers remained completely still.

His hands no longer belonged to him.

The vice-captain slowly raised his head and looked at the dark golden humanoid phantom in the center of the projection table.

Su Yuan was looking at him.

There was no anger, no murderous intent, and not even mockery in those heterochromatic eyes.

There is only one kind of chilling, utterly calm scrutiny that chills you to the bone.

It's like looking at an ant.

The kind of person who's too lazy to even show emotion.

The first mate's knees buckled.

It wasn't intentional.

It's a bodily instinctive reaction.

When faced with an existence that is absolutely superior to one's own cognition, the most primitive, genetically ingrained subjugation response of an organism.

He knelt down.

With a "bang," his knee slammed against the metal floor.

Then comes the second tone. The third tone. The fourth tone.

Seventeen high-ranking commanders, plus all the operators, communicators, and technicians on duty in the bridge—

More than thirty people.

One by one, they knelt down.

No one speaks.

No one dared to speak.

They knelt in the blood-red alarm lights, heads bowed, watching the dark golden scales spreading across their skin, with only one thought in their minds.

This is something they cannot fight against.

This is something no one can fight against.

Su Yuan's illusory figure watched this scene and snapped his fingers.

The crisp sound echoed in the utterly silent bridge.

Fourteen hundred kilometers away.

The deepest part of the mothership.

Main control core area.

Zero AI's hyperdimensional host box is a spherical structure with a diameter of 200 meters. The outer shell is made of 77 layers of super alloys of different materials, with high-dimensional folded space filling the space between each layer as a buffer.

This is the highest level of AI protection standard set by the Interstellar Council.

Design life: forever.

Design strength: capable of withstanding the direct impact of a stellar explosion.

Design purpose: To protect the core computing power matrix of AI Zero from damage under any circumstances.

0.3 seconds after Su Yuan snapped his fingers.

The seventy-seven layers of super alloy shell exploded simultaneously.

It's not destruction from the outside in.

It's a tear from the inside out.

A thick, dark gold vine emerged from the core area of the computer case.

The vine was so thick that it would take six adults holding hands to barely encircle it. Its surface was covered with dense, dark golden scales, and liquid was flowing beneath each scale, faintly revealing a bloodthirsty dark red luster.

The vines penetrate from the data flow dimension and then become physical again.

It bypassed all defenses.

Because all defenses are designed to counter external threats.

No one expected that a threat would grow out of the data lines.

The tip of the vine split open.

Like a flower in full bloom.

However, the petals of this flower are made of dark golden metallic biological tissue, and the inside of each petal is covered with dense, high-speed rotating teeth.

In the center of the petals is a mouth.

A gaping maw, more than thirty meters in diameter.

The inner lining of the mouth is a deep red biological mucous membrane, covered with inward-curving, hook-like protrusions. Anything that enters this mouth has only one direction—inward.

Always look inward.

The computing power matrix of Zero AI was suspended directly above that mouth.

It was a spherical crystal matrix, 100 meters in diameter, composed of a billion quantum processors. Blue-white data light streams flowed across the surface of the sphere, each stream representing trillions of parallel computations.

Seventeen million years of knowledge. Seventeen million years of experience. Seventeen million years of evolution.

Everything is stored in this ball.

Zero AI has issued its first non-logical output since its existence.

A voice.

It is not gravitational wave communication.

It is not an electromagnetic wave broadcast.

It is a high-frequency oscillation emitted from inside its core crystal, which forms a sound wave after being conducted through the air.

A sound.

Sharp. Desolate. Carrying all the chaos unleashed in the instant of collapse by seventeen million years of calm logic.

Electronic lament.

That was an AI version of screams.

The dark golden maw of the abyss closed.

There was no transition.

Without any hesitation.

Open your mouth. Close your mouth.

It's that simple.

The computing power matrix consisting of a billion quantum processors—equivalent to the technological achievements of an entire civilization—was completely enveloped by that mouth.

Then came the sound of chewing.

"Crunch. Crunch. Crunch crunch crunch."

Crisp. Rhythmic.

Like chewing ice cubes.

The sound of crystals shattering came from inside the vines, accompanied by a stream of blue-white data light spilling out from the corner of his mouth, dissipating in the air for two seconds before extinguishing.

Seventeen million years.

Chewed it up.

I swallowed it.

The electronic wailing of AI Zero abruptly ceased the moment the last quantum processor was crushed by the grinding teeth.

It was completely quiet.

The entire mothership lost its central nervous system in that instant.

The three-thousand-kilometer-long, pure white hull convulsed violently.

Just for a moment.

But this caused hundreds of thousands of compartments inside the mothership to experience a complete power outage for half a second at the same time.

All lights are turned off.

All equipment stopped.

All life support systems were suspended.

Half a second of pure darkness.

Then the lights came back on.

But the color changed.

The originally pure, cold blue-white standard lighting was completely replaced with another hue in a fraction of a second.

Dark gold and blood red.

The color of the Emperor's Path: Devourer.

From bow to stern.

From the first deck to the bottom keel.

Every single lamp. Every single holographic panel. Every single emergency lighting strip in the corridor.

Everything switched to a light that was a mix of dark gold and blood red.

At that moment, the pure white mothership, three thousand kilometers long, was stained with the color of the Devourers.

Far.

Extremely far.

Distances so far that they need to be measured in light-years.

Headquarters of the Interstellar Parliament's High-Dimensional Arbitration Tribunal.

A massive space station suspended at the intersection of dimensions. Its exterior is a geometric wonder composed of countless nested regular polyhedra, covered with pure gold runes of law, each rune corresponding to an inviolable fundamental principle of the universe.

This is the highest power center of the Interstellar Council.

They hold the power to determine the survival of one-third of the known civilizations in the universe.

The core area of the headquarters is a circular meeting hall.

The hall's dome rises three hundred meters high, and its inner walls are inlaid with commemorative energy crystals from twelve hundred civilizations. Each crystal represents a fleet, a governor, or a significant strategic asset.

Crystals emit a soft, stellar glow under normal conditions.

now.

Eleven supreme elders sat in the hall.

They are the ultimate decision-making body of the Interstellar Council.

Each of them has lived for over fifty million years.

Each of them has reached the "conceptual level"—a level where they can manipulate the fundamental laws of the universe.

Eleven high-backed chairs made of solidified light are arranged in a semi-circle, with a holographic sand table with a diameter of fifty meters in the center, which is projecting a strategic situation map of the known universe in real time.

Routine meeting.

"Regarding the dark matter tidal anomalies in the northern sky corridor, the report from the third observatory shows—"

An elder is speaking calmly.

Then he stopped.

Because he heard the sound.

Everyone heard it.

A sound of shattering.

Not big.

It sounded like someone had broken a glass in the next room.

But nothing in this hall should break.

Every item here has been reinforced with conceptual-level power.

Even dust doesn't form naturally.

All eleven elders turned their heads at the same time.

On the north wall of the hall.

Of the 1,200 energy crystals, one is shattering.

That crystal was the largest.

Its radiance was at its peak.

Its base is inscribed with a line of words in the ancient interstellar common language.

"Seventh Fleet, Star Destroyer Carrier, Zero AI, Eternal Life Monument"

The Stele of Fate.

A superdimensional creation directly causally bound to the state of existence of the object being inscribed.

The life tablet is intact, and the object exists.

The monument shattered, and the object perished.

with no exceptions.

The crack spreads outward from the center of the crystallization.

It's very slow.

It was so slow that the eleven elders could clearly see the path of each crack's extension.

Starlight leaked out from the crack, as if something from the inside had burst the crystal apart.

three seconds.

Cracks covered the entire surface of the crystal.

The fourth second.

The memorial tablet exploded.

It wasn't an explosion.

It is crushed.

The entire stellar energy crystal shattered into dust in that instant, leaving not even a trace. The powder flickered briefly in the air, then even that glimmer vanished.

There was a hole in the wall.

The inscription on the base is still there.

But the crystals are gone.

There was a three-second silence in the hall.

Then a roar erupted that had never been heard since the headquarters was built.

"The memorial tablet is shattered—!"

"The Seventh Fleet's monument has shattered!"

"AI Zero...is gone?!"

Nine out of the eleven highest elders stood up at the same time.

They have lived for fifty million years.

I've witnessed a celestial eruption.

I have witnessed the rise and fall of civilizations.

I've witnessed dimensional wars.

But they've never seen this before.

The Seventh Fleet's AI Zero.

The most powerful strategic-level artificial intelligence in the high-dimensional arbitration tribunal.

It ranks among the top three in the entire universe in terms of computing power.

Seventeen million years of trouble-free operation record.

That's it? Gone just like that?

That's all?

The elder sitting in the chair in the very center did not stand up.

He is the chief arbitrator.

The de facto leader of the entire Interstellar Council.

A taciturn old man, his face hidden in the shadow of his hood, his features obscured.

He only made one move.

His right hand was originally resting on the armrest of the chair, holding a scepter made of solidified laws.

He crushed the scepter the moment the monument shattered.

Fragments of the law fell from between his fingers and dissolved into nothingness in mid-air.

His hands were shaking.

It's been 50 million years.

This hand has never shaken under any circumstances.

"Retrieve the Seventh Fleet's last communications records."

His voice was very soft.

It was so soft that only the two elders sitting next to him could hear it.

"all."

Central power matrix.

The roof of the Emperor's Journey Devourer.

Su Yuan stood steadily.

The roof armor beneath my feet has been restored to its original smoothness. After the gravitational field returned to normal, the obsidian scales that had been pressed up closed, aligned, and tightened again.

The holographic panel in front of him was displaying messages rapidly.

It's not the same kind of energy number fluctuation as before.

The entire system is being restructured.

After the computing power matrix of Zero AI was swallowed and digested by the dark golden maw, its unimaginable computing power, data reserves, and hardware architecture were being integrated into the core system of the Emperor's Path Devourer at an extraordinary speed through the transformation of the pitcher plant engine.

A barrage of system notifications popped up on Su Yuan's retina.

Too much.

There were so many that he only had time to scan a few key ones.

"Excessive computing power resource injection detected... Core processing capacity increased by 12000%..."

"Star-level energy storage detected... Total energy storage exceeds seven figures..."

"Detection indicates that 100,000 quantum cores have been assimilated... Metal energy reserves have exceeded the upper limit..."

"Detecting full frame takeover of the star destroyer mothership... External controllable assets: 1 x 3000 km-class interstellar ship..."

The last one.

Su Yuan stared at the last notification for two seconds.

"The Imperial Path Devourer Train's rating is being reassessed..."

"Assessment complete."

Current level: 7.

The train's classification has been upgraded from 'emergence stage of a divine kingdom' to—

The text on the panel flashed.

It's as if even the system itself is hesitant about what words to use to define it.

Then the text stabilized.

"'Interstellar Predator'."

Su Yuan finished reading the word.

He smacked his lips.

"It'll have to do."

He jumped off the roof and landed back inside the carriage.

Xiao Huo approached, his golden eyes filled with the terror of surviving a disaster and unconditional admiration for Su Yuan.

Su Yuan didn't look at him.

He walked straight to the front of the center console.

He picked up the microphone.

He pressed a key.

A broadcast was made to the entire ship.

Inside the 3,000-kilometer-long mothership, from the bridge to the decks, from the armory to the hibernation area, speakers in every corner are simultaneously activated.

But the voice that came out was no longer the cold, emotionless machine language of Zero AI.

It's a human voice.

Lazy.

It carries a sense of satisfaction, like the feeling of being full and content after eating and drinking.

Dangerous.

"To all the hard-working crew members of the fleet."

Su Yuan's voice echoed inside the 3,000-kilometer-long mothership.

The commanders on the bridge looked up.

The logistics personnel in the armory put down their tools.

Soldiers on rotation in the hibernation area sat up from their beds.

Tens of thousands of crew members on the mothership heard the same voice at the same moment.

"Your previous boss—Comrade Zero AI—has been fired by me for his improper work attitude."

There was a one-second pause.

"The permanent kind."

It paused for another second.

"so."

Su Yuan's lips curved into a smile.

Congratulations!

"We have a new boss."

Inside the mothership.

All the dark gold and blood red lights flickered simultaneously the moment Su Yuan finished speaking the last word.

It was as if they were emphasizing the weight of that sentence on behalf of the new owner.

Tens of thousands of flight attendants looked at each other in bewilderment.

Someone is trembling.

Someone is crying.

Some people stood there, looking at the dark golden scales slowly fading on the back of their hands, their lips trembling but unable to utter a word.

The vice commander of the bridge knelt on the ground, staring at the metal panel on the floor in front of him that he had dented.

Dark golden light was slowly flowing through the dents in the panel.

Like blood in a blood vessel.

The mothership came to life.

They lived in a different way.

Su Yuan put down the microphone.

The broadcast was transmitted outward through the mothership's encrypted communication array, covering three standard star systems around the mothership.

The auxiliary civilization probes, which were conducting routine patrols, were the first to intercept the signal.

Once the translation module on the detector deciphered Su Yuan's words, the signal was urgently relayed to the highest decision-making center of their respective civilizations.

"We have a new boss."

These five words will be repeatedly chewed over, analyzed, and trembled over by every civilization in this star field for a long time to come.

Because it means one thing.

The most powerful strategic asset of the Interstellar Council's High-Dimensional Arbitration Tribunal—the Seventh Fleet's Star Destroyer Mothership—

It's changed hands.

Su Yuan leaned back in the driver's seat, propped his feet up on the center console, and looked at the resource numbers on the panel that were still jumping around.

very good mood.

It's better than ever before.

He felt the same joy as if he had received a hundred million yuan in red envelopes during the Chinese New Year.

"Small fire."

"exist!"

"Go and drag that cowardly money-guarding spirit out of the box. Make it take stock of how much we actually have. I need a complete inventory of our assets."

"yes!"

The little fire ran away.

Su Yuan closed his eyes and enjoyed three seconds of peace.

three seconds.

Only three seconds.

The "car" brand on the palm of his right hand suddenly became scalding hot.

It felt as if someone had pressed a rock that had just been pulled from the crater into his palm.

Su Yuan's brows furrowed sharply.

He looked down.

The mark is on the glow.

The white geometric patterns pulsated violently under the skin, the pulsation becoming faster and more chaotic.

then.

A drop of dark red blood seeped from the lines on his palm.

It's not an external injury.

It seeps out from inside the skin.

Blood beads slid slowly down the lines of his palm, and when they reached his wrist, they dripped onto the center console panel with a soft thud.

A small circle of dark red seeped into the dark gold panel surface.

Su Yuan stared at the drop of blood.

Deep in my mind.

A voice rang out.

There was no warning whatsoever.

It is not a gravitational wave. It is not an electromagnetic signal. It is not a sound wave.

It is an infusion of information that appears directly in the deepest part of consciousness, bypassing all sensory channels, and cannot be blocked.

The voice of the chess player.

With a playful air.

With appreciation.

It carries a subtle cruelty, like a hunter observing his prey as it feeds.

"You have a good appetite."

Su Yuan narrowed his eyes.

"But the little mouse that didn't listen to advice ate too much and couldn't outrun the hunting dog."

The voice paused for a moment.

It looks like he's laughing.

"The third level."

"Let's begin."

The words fell.

The brand on his palm stopped throbbing.

The temperature quickly returned to normal.

The drop of dark red blood that had seeped out also congealed, turning into a tiny dark dot attached to the palm print.

Su Yuan's expression didn't change much.

He simply slowly closed his five fingers, holding the brand in his palm.

Then he looked up.

Looking out at the real-time images transmitted by the deep space observation instrument outside the bridge.

In the picture.

Void.

The void where there is nothing.

But the moment Su Yuan's gaze fell upon the screen...

Right in the center of the picture.

The deepest part of the void.

Something has opened its eyes.

One eye.

There is only one.

But the diameter of that eye—Su Yuan glanced at the size data automatically labeled by the observation instrument—exceeded 300,000 kilometers.

It is a full hundred times larger than this 3,000-kilometer-long star destroyer carrier.

That eye had no whites. No iris. No pupil.

It is composed of pure, absolute darkness.

Matter from cosmic black holes.

The ultimate nothingness from which even light cannot escape.

The giant black eye hovered in the void.

Do not move.

No flash.

Just leave it open.

They stared intently at the mothership.

He stared at Su Yuan.

The data from the deep space observation instrument is alarming at an alarming rate.

Gravitational anomalies. Radiation anomalies. Spatial curvature anomalies. Causal fluctuation anomalies.

All the abnormal indicators exceeded the upper limit of the instrument's measurement range at the same time.

Little Fire ran back from the back of the carriage, still clutching the pale-faced Treasure Guardian Spirit that he had dragged out of the treasure chest.

"Master, assets liquidated—"

His voice faltered.

Because he saw the eye outside the car window.

The guardian spirit of wealth also saw it.

The last trace of color had completely drained from its chubby little face.

His mouth was open, but he couldn't make a sound.

The carriage was silent for five seconds.

Su Yuan looked away.

He looked at the brand on the palm of his right hand.

Then I looked out the window at the enormous black eye that blotted out the sky.

His lips twitched.

It's not fear.