Starting as a Wallfacer, his defection to the Three-Body Problem shocked the world.

"This is the core you're looking for? It doesn't seem to be anything special."

Lin Xuan slowly walked into the front hall. At this moment, dozens of corpses lay scattered on the stairs behind him. Their deaths were all the same: their heads had been severed by steel wires made of nanobots.

This is also Lin Xuan's most common method of killing—dismemberment.

The reason he developed this habit was because after arriving on Mechanical Earth, he discovered that some of the soldiers here had undergone extremely advanced cybernetic modifications, to the point that even if he crushed their hearts, they could still maintain their commands and launch attacks against him.

"Yes, just put me up there."

Zhi Zi's virtual projection appeared on Lin Xuan's watch, and she pointed to the instrument placed in the center not far away.

The shape of this thing... how to describe it, is like a globe suspended in mid-air, bound to the center of the hall by dozens of tentacle-like pipes, forming a blood-red coat on its surface.

As it rotated, the red light shone on the surrounding walls, turning the entire room a purplish-red hue.

"This thing... I feel like I've seen it somewhere before?" Lin Xuan frowned slightly, feeling a strange sense of familiarity for some reason.

This is very unusual, because his memories have long been digitized by the Super Dream Database, which means that he can view every piece of his memory at any time.

But no matter how hard he tried to recall, he had no memory of this thing, yet the sense of familiarity was undeniable and genuine.

“You’ve probably seen something similar elsewhere before, after all… there’s an identical one on every planet of Mechanical Earth,” Zhizi explained.

"Then why do we have to come to the capital planet?"

Lin Xuan asked that question again. Before, he thought that Zhi Zi was worried that the End Producers would lock down their location, so she deliberately hid it and dared not expose it, and sent Lin Xuan to the capital planet to catch the End Producers off guard.

But even now, at this very moment, the final producer has still not appeared, and no one has come to stop it.

Shouldn't we say that everything seems to have gone a little too smoothly?

After all, according to Zhizi, the core of the machine is connected to the entire network system of the end producers and even the mechanical earth. Once it is successfully hacked, the entire mechanical earth will be paralyzed.

But the question is, why are there only a few ragtag soldiers guarding something so important?

It's like playing a video game where, just as you're about to get close to the boss, you find that the surrounding enemies have not only become stronger, but actually weaker.

I'm afraid anyone would wonder about the specific reasons behind this.

"Who exactly is the final producer?" Lin Xuan asked slowly, her gaze fixed on Zhi Zi.

"Or should I ask you... who exactly?"

Zhi Zi felt uneasy under Lin Xuan's gaze and quickly spoke up.

"Are you doubting me? If you still doubt me, then our cooperation can be terminated at any time, Lin Xuan. I've said this to you more than once. Why don't you trust me?"

"Why should I trust you? Trust my former enemy?"

Upon hearing this, Zhizi sighed deeply and fell silent in despair.

After a long while, she seemed to have thought of something before speaking again.

“I’ll tell you something only the two of us know. When you played chess with me back then, you actually thought about taking Luo Congmin and the others away from Earth directly, because you believed in Luo Ji, and believed that even without you on Earth, Luo Ji would still defeat us, right or wrong?”

"Yes."

"But later you still couldn't let go of your worries and decided to fight us to the death. Was it because you found out that there was an even more terrifying enemy watching the Earth Alliance?"

This time, Lin Xuan did not answer directly. After a moment of silence, she took the initiative to take off the watch on her wrist and went to the core of the machine.

He was now certain that what he had in his hands was the genuine Zhizi.

At this moment, Lin Xuan arrived directly in front of the main core of the device and noticed that there was a circular groove on the control panel below it, and her own watch also had a circular protrusion that matched it.

Just as Lin Xuan was about to put Zhizi inside, he suddenly had a thought.

"system."

The system, which he hadn't used for a long time, was now presented to him.

Lin Xuan glanced at her remaining shock points.

.

The number kept fluctuating, as if someone was continuously feeding him shock points.

He opened the system store, browsed for a while, and then focused his attention on an item worth 100,000.

"Ether Phase Engine: Point Shock Value, which hypothesizes the existence of an unproven medium in the universe, and that when we harness it for our own use, we may be able to achieve true ascension."

Lin Xuan looked at the 140,000 Shock Points she had painstakingly accumulated, gritted her teeth, and still chose to exchange them.

Instantly, the shock value was cleared, and the original 140,000 shock value was reduced to a fraction of its original value.

Before Lin Xuan could see the system's subsequent prompts, he had already placed the watch into the slot.

"Buzz!"

……

The sound of explosions on the battlefield jolted Lin Xuan awake!

When he opened his eyes, all he could see was the flames of an explosion, thick smoke billowed into his nostrils, and the pungent smell of sulfur mixed with the stench of blood spread through his throat.

Not far away, a twisted alloy plate was suddenly torn open, and Su Zilin staggered out of the rubble. Her helmet visor was cracked with spiderweb-like patterns, but fortunately she was not seriously injured, and her precious sniper rifle was also intact.

"Boss, how were you piloting the spaceship? How did it suddenly crash?!"

Lin Xuan helplessly shrugged, and nanobots flowed out of his body, gradually prying open the deformed spaceship structure.

"Where are Zuo Xiao and the veteran?"

"We're fine."

Suddenly, Zuo Xiao appeared beside Lin Xuan. With her powerful spiritual energy, it was impossible for her to be injured by an impact of this magnitude.

Veteran Ding Cunxu was also not seriously injured. After searching for a while, the group found him in the ruins.

"Team Leader Bai, I'm fine."

Lin Xuan reached out to support Ding Cunxu, but when she heard how the other addressed her, she frowned slightly. For some reason, she felt a strange unease.

Before arriving on Mechanical Earth, they always called me Bai Bing, so why do I suddenly feel uncomfortable?

"We've now entered the territory of Mechanical Earth. To be on the safe side, please call me Lin Xuan from now on."

After Lin Xuan briefly corrected the way the others addressed her, she patted the dust off her clothes.

"Damn it, I don't even know where we crash-landed here, and I don't know what those people in the Divine Realm did. How come your team doesn't even have anyone to pilot the spaceship?"

These words, spoken unintentionally, startled all four people present.

"Yeah, why doesn't our team even have anyone who can pilot a spaceship?"

But Su Zilin was the first to react.

"It seems that our captain used to be in charge of it, but since he died, no one has been in charge of it anymore."

Lin Xuan nodded slightly but didn't say anything. She glanced at the spaceship, which was already deformed from the crash. A steel bar had pierced through one of the seats. Fortunately, none of the four of them were sitting in that seat, so they escaped unharmed.

Lin Xuan glanced at her watch; it was 8 PM. But what puzzled her was that there was a marking at the bottom of the watch face, the purpose of which was unknown, and it was currently displaying a number.

"2."