Translator: Helliot
Editor: NH
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By dawn, the strongest soldier of the human race was fully armed.
When the scientists and engineers evacuated this planet a century ago, and buried the entrance to the planet’s core behind them, it was apparent that they had destroyed the means of transportations of which they used to reach the depths. With the need to head back down in short order a century later, they would have to rely on temporary modified geographical exploration lifts.
Without a single word, Zhong Yan stood in front of the surveillance screen. He was dressed in a solemn black suit that he had never taken off since he arrived in the Institution Star, because he had never stopped to rest for a single moment through day and night. His skin had been pale to begin with, but now it was morbidly so with bruises emerging under his eyes and color draining from his lips. Anyone could tell that he was in bad shape even without any medical experience.
The command hall was located in the School of Engineering’s Experiment Building, and the team that would assist Adrian in getting underground had arrived. Fayn said to Zhong Yan, “Your Excellency, he has passed through the dirty bomb layer. Everything is going smoothly so far.”
Zhong Yan nodded. “Good.”
This message had been broadcast five minutes ago by the team in the command hall that was monitoring the equipment on Adrian’s body in real-time, so Zhong Yan was sure that Fayn wasn’t here to tell him this. Sure enough, Fayn continued. “Zhong Yan, why don’t you take a rest? Adrian still has a long descent ahead of him and they’ve already cleared the section. There’s nothing dangerous there. Moreover, he won’t turn on the cameras so there’s nothing to look at either.”
He called Zhong Yan by his name instead of by his title, indicating that this was a private conversation between them. Zhong Yan’s expression changed slightly and he asked, “Did he ask you to pass on his word?”
“Yes. He told me before heading down that he’s worried your body won’t be able to hold up.”
Zhong Yan shook his head. “It would be outrageous for the President to run off to sleep when a man is out there struggling on the frontlines to save humanity. What’s more…It’s not like I can sleep.”
Under such situations, Zhong Yan wasn’t alone. Perhaps, there was not a single person on the Institution Star that would be able to sleep. There was a tense and busy atmosphere surrounding the temporary command hall, but in fact, only a dozen people were working the monitoring station and console. The others who joined in the mission were reluctant to go out and were silently standing by the corner of the hall, silently watching the fate of humanity without disturbing the people working at the consoles.
Unable to persuade him, Fayn could only give up and headed back to his seat at the monitoring station.
The President stood in his black suit with his hands behind his back in front of the monitoring station, just like a stiff sculpture. Not only was he a human like the rest, who was waiting for his fate to be pronounced, he was also the one in charge of the operation, as well as the partner of the man proceeding with the mission. Everyone felt sympathetic to him but encouragement would be too hollow, and comfort would be too weak, so nobody came forward to interrupt him.
By logic, the President who was the supreme head of the operation was qualified to sit in front of the command station, but Zhong Yan refused, stating that all positions should be occupied by people who played roles in the operation.
Hours passed, and Adrian’s figure appeared on the screens as he released the first hovering camera.
“Command, I’ve just broken past the detector’s limit distance. No equipment lost, no injuries. All is well.”
Everyone in the hall breathed a sigh of relief. The detection limit he mentioned was not due to the detector’s technical inability to continue downwards, but due to the fact that it was stopped by a protective identification mechanism. Unable to decipher the century-old passcode, they could only break past by force. The men on the surface tried countless times to do so and were unable to succeed even after destroying several detectors. Many in the group feared that Adrian would also be stuck here without success, or worse, end in demise.
But from what they could see of the footage, there were quite a few pieces of fresh mechanical wreckage lying at Adrian’s feet. They were all the scrapped detectors from yesterday and today, but he himself and the equipment on his body were all completely intact as he said. Whispers and sighs of relief rang through the hall.
After breaking past the limit point, there were no more pre-arranged lights prepared by the surface team. Adrian turned on the lights on his combat helmet and walked forward. For him, he was walking forward, but from the imagery that represented him that the monitoring team could see, he was heading deeper inside. Clearly, the gravity system had been adjusted in the planet’s interiors. These must be the adjustments made by the engineers who had built the planet back then to facilitate their own access.
Adrian saw the light switch on the wall and reached out to turn it on, lighting up the entire passage in an instant. The men in the command hall were shocked. Fayn who was in charge of the operation shouted into the comms mic. “Commander! Can you talk to us before you touch any switches? What if that wasn’t the light?!”
“But it says light on there. Aren’t you guys a little too nervous?” Adrian was helpless. Even if that wasn’t written on there, what else could these style of switches be used for? The tense air of the command hall seemed to be able to pass through his headset. He suddenly realized that Zhong Yan probably would not heed his advice and go rest, and was definitely there overseeing the situation. Feeling his heart soften, he quickly changed his tune and said, “Alright, I got it. I’ll inform Command next time.”
With the lights on, his journey went by quicker. Adrian continued on deep underground, encountering protective mechanisms every few hours. Each one of them got progressively more dangerous, but fortunately, the equipment he brought with him were carefully selected from the best of the best after taking into account the various situations he might encounter. This was simply like adding wings to a tiger for Adrian. The few other times they came down, they suffered many losses to their equipment, but the personnel only received light injuries.
The image on the monitoring console disappeared. After the mechanisms destroyed two of the hovering cameras, Adrian decided not to release the last one for the time being. So, for a very long period of time, nobody in the command hall could see him, and they didn’t want to talk to him so much in case they drained his energy, so they could only keep track of his condition with the medical officer who was staring at the numbers transmitted from the testing equipment attached to his body.
When night came, Adrian rested for an hour under Wei Lan’s suggestion.
Any explosions happening too close to the dirty bomb layer would be dangerous. Moreover, the entire section underneath the dirty bomb layer seemed to be “Butterfly’s” main server according to the experts. If the section that they detonated was not the core of the server, then they may not necessarily be able to “kill” the AI. They had to go deeper into the core and use a small range of bombs to destroy it to make sure their plan was foolproof.
The lights were brightly lit in the temporary command hall deep into the night. Before heading down, Adrian asked Fayn for help in looking after Zhong Yan, and Fayn could see at this moment that Zhong Yan’s complexion really was looking terrible. With the excuse that “Adrian is already nearing the core and may need the President to make a decision” he at least managed to persuade him to sit down at the command console.
But that wasn’t a lie either. Adrian really was nearing the core. The end of the passageway had begun to appear like a series of room-like structures, and it did take Adrian some effort to break past the mechanism at the entrance. He dealt with his injuries that were deep enough to reach the bones simply and released the last camera.
Even though Adrian didn’t show it, his physical health indicators have already slipped down to dangerous levels, and there were only a few hours left before “Butterfly” reawakens.
Everyone’s nerves were tense and their minds were all focused. Adrian manually operated the camera as he walked, filming the interiors of the rooms with the intricate machinery that blended into the walls for the expert team.
An AI expert recognized the machines at a glance and called out with excitement. “That’s it, that has to be it! That’s the super-AI server signal emitting structure!”
“That doesn’t look quite right,” an AI researcher said. “Isn’t this the classic structure from two centuries ago? Textbooks don’t even have diagrams for this structure anymore.”
Adrian kept on walking through the room that looked like a mechanical lair until he finally stopped outside of one of them.
Everyone in the command hall was in high spirits, and the sight before them drew their attention.
It was a huge and empty passage with a cylindrical platform about half a person’s height, with a gap in the middle of the wall behind it that could barely be discerned with the naked eye. Other than that, there didn’t seem to be anything in the circular passageway. The smooth white walls were spotless and gave off an air of holiness.
They had no proof of it, but everyone felt that this must be the place. This was their goal. The core that they were seeking must be at the end of this clean passageway.
The bandages on Adrian’s wounds from before had fallen off from his strenuous activity and his blood that dripped down his body had long since drenched the lower half of his battle suit. He walked towards the end of the passage to observe the cylindrical platform, leaving behind him a trail of bloody footprints that looked especially striking on the clean and spotless floor.
Many people sucked in their breaths. Adrian had been acting so normal that none of them had any idea how serious his situation was. Fayn looked at Zhong Yan, and he could see that his eyes were shut. Fayn was shocked. He thought that Zhong Yan finally fell over after being unable to take the stimulation under his extreme fatigue, but unexpectedly, Zhong Yan opened his eyes again after he blinked twice, and was still sitting there calmly. No matter how you looked at him, he looked like a calm and reliable decision-maker, as if the hurt in his eyes that instant was merely an illusion of Fayn’s.
Above the cylindrical platform was a slightly recessed scanner panel.
“Commander, use the deciphering equipment.” One of the tech crew reminded him.
Adrian removed the deciphering equipment from the backpack that was attached to his combat suit and secured it around the edges of the panel and casually took off his bandages that had come loose, setting them into a pile on top of the panel.
The pure white room was unresponsive, but the deciphering device sent back an error message to the surface.
The principles of the scanning panel were not that complicated. It only required an object of the right medium to access some permissions. Generally speaking, a fingerprint was required. However, looking at the shape of the panel, the passcode didn’t seem to be a fingerprint.
“It’s cosmic matter!” After some time, a cipher staff exclaimed. “The correct medium to activate the panel is cosmic matter!”
“What kind of cosmic matter?” Adrian asked, frowning.
The head of the technical team said with a sunken expression, “Any sort of extraterrestrial matter will do. What an ingenious idea. No one would carry such a thing with them except for those who knew of the key! Unfortunately, all of the equipment on the Commander is created from intra-atmospheric matter.”
It was too late for them to find a piece of cosmic meteorite to send down. Only two short hours were left before “Butterfly” awakened.
Fayn was silent for a moment and asked, “Is it feasible to execute the final stage of the plan in the passage without entering that last room?”
The final stage was the installation of explosives and preparation for demolition. It was anyone’s guess whether it was feasible or not, but in order to make sure that the dirty bomb layer would remain unaffected, the power of the bombs Adrian carried with him were not very strong.
“Then there would be no point,” one of the experts said under their breaths.
Indeed, their plan was to find the core of “Butterfly’s” brain and detonate it with precision. But if they could not find the core, they would still have the same uncertainties as if they were detonating the bombs anywhere else, and they would’ve wasted all these hours sending a man deep underground.
When they were stopped at the final stage by the protection mechanism designed by their ancestors over a century ago, all their hearts were filled with resignation. But right at this time, Adrian suddenly asked, “What is the definition of cosmic matter? Is something born in the universe considered that?”
Though the head of the technical team was surprised that Adrian would use the word “born” and believed that the commander must have made a mistake in his wording, thinking that he may mean to say something “originating” from the universe instead, it didn’t affect his understanding of his sentence. And so, the person in charge affirmed. “Yes.”
“I have it,” Adrian said.
There was a clamor in the command hall. Fayn reconfirmed his words, almost in disbelief, “You have cosmic matter on you?”
Adrian did not say another word. Instead, under the gaze of everyone, he undid the layers of his heavy combat gear and took out that precious object he kept near to his heart. It was a white, somewhat flattened felt ball.
It was the lucky pendant Zhong Yan had made for Adrian, using the fur of the giant space rabbit that was born in the cosmos.