Chapter 334

Chapter 335: Taking Precautions

Before today, Yu Sheng didn’t feel a deep, real fear of Holy Revere Hermitage. He knew they were a crazed extremist group. He knew how shameless they’d been with the Artificial Saintess and the Bronze Knight. He knew they owned a lot of black tech and squatted in their own territory, causing headaches for many forces. But he still lacked a concrete sense of the threat this Organization posed to the outside world.

In fact, the Angel Cult had left a stronger impression on him. They had actually awakened a sleeping Dark Angel and almost blew up the Borderland.

Now he understood why Holy Revere Hermitage stood alongside the Angel Cult and the Blackpoint Group as one of the world’s three major cancers. In his view, the Hermitage Order might even be more dangerous than the Angel Cult.

Because they have culture. Not just culture, but organization. And they have a firm, clear action plan.

Angel cultists chant when things happen and hope the Dark Angel gets annoyed enough to show up. Beyond that, they are a loose mess. But these Hermitage Order fanatics treat Angels as research material. They want to make weapons of mass destruction and then mass-produce and deploy them. To reach that goal, they were willing to hide a single ship in the treacherous Otherworld for ten years, to actively hunt for Dark Angel Descent points, and to dance on a knife’s edge right under the noses of the Borderland Council and the Grand Void Spiritual Axis.

Bai Li Qing spoke with unusual gravity and said: “We’ll contact Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain and other factions at once. The Hermitage Order followers we found in the Borderland and at Featherwing-13b may not be all of them. These cultists are like roaches. If you find one, they might already be everywhere.”

Yu Sheng added: “Focus on places where a Dark Angel Descent has happened. The Hermitage Order’s target is the Angel Catalyst that appears after Angel Fall, but Dark Angel Descent has no pattern. The best they can do is to watch and sample former Descent sites.”

“That’s the logic,” Bai Li Qing said. “And not just the places. We also need to find the survivors of those Descent events. The Hermitage Order will likely try to make contact.”

Foxy, who had been quiet, suddenly spoke up and said: “It’s been more than ten years. Some people may already have contacted the Hermitage Order and even become their hidden assets. Be careful not to scare them off.”

Yu Sheng glanced at the fox lady in surprise, realizing she hadn’t been daydreaming at all. She had kept up with the talk, unlike Irene, who was truly spacing out.

Luna was even more extreme. She seemed to have frozen again.

Bai Li Qing nodded solemnly and said: “Don’t worry. We’ll be careful.” Then her eyes went back to the Anka Aila crystal sitting on the platform not far away.

Yu Sheng noticed her look.

Bai Li Qing said calmly: “We still don’t know how to trigger a ‘reaction’ in these crystals, but one thing is clear: the Angel Catalyst is not as harmless as it looks. We need to add a few safety rules.”

Yu Sheng nodded and said: “Like never perform a jump while carrying an Anka Aila crystal.”

…

After leaving the Special Affairs Bureau, Yu Sheng didn’t go home. He took Irene, Foxy, and Luna straight to the ship in the valley.

Technical Experts from the Special Affairs Bureau were still wrestling with the ship’s strange, complex core System.

To be honest, when Yu Sheng “drove” normally, he barely used most of the Systems onboard. Piloting this ship was basically like moving his own body; teleporting home was just adding a coordinate for the Door into the Phase Engine’s jump parameters. The whole process was outside the System. In Borderland terms, it was closer to having a Machine Spirit drive the ship.

He himself was the ship’s Machine Spirit.

Even so, he knew the control Systems were necessary, especially navigation and jump.

His Door can teleport randomly or to places he has already been, but to reach new coordinates on a Youth Form Chart he’s never visited, he needs the ship’s own navigation and jump functions. As the Machine Spirit, he could only make sending commands to those Systems easier.

Inside the Control Hall, a tall, skinny, stubbly middle-aged man was busy at the main console. The console’s casing was off, several external cables ran from its open guts to multiple terminals beside him, and every screen was flooding with dizzying data and graphics.

Nearby, assistants worked in other spots. Some attached extra readers to other stations, some reset subsystem states, and others spoke into communicators with teams elsewhere. While the Control Hall buzzed like a hive, other groups were also working in the server bay, the subsystem bay, and the backup database.

When Yu Sheng and the others walked in, they saw the whole frantic scene. Aside from the stubbly man at the main console looking up to greet him, no one even had time to raise a head.

Yu Sheng didn’t mind. He understood that technical staff need total focus. Still, he felt a little strange himself.

Because he was connected to the ship.

He could feel those teams plugging in cables inside his “body,” then pushing data through the Systems.

That’s right: they were flashing the System. The Technical Experts were rewriting the core program of this Hermitage Order ship to the Special Affairs Bureau’s version, and they would update its transponder ID to a legal sequence.

Foxy watched for a bit and said: “My father used to do stuff like this. We had an old Celestial Shuttle at home. Sometimes it wouldn’t fly right. He’d hook up a bunch of wires like this, and then it was fixed. Sometimes it wasn’t, and then my mother would scold him and we’d send it to the factory.” She tugged a sausage from her tail, bit the wrapper open with a fang, and mumbled: “But that ship was way smaller than this one.”

Yu Sheng rubbed the soft fur behind her ear, walked to the main console, and asked with interest: “How’s it going?”

The stubbly Technical Expert looked up and said: “We’ve started rewriting the main System, and it’s going more smoothly than expected. The cultists wiped the original Youth Form Chart and nav data clean, which actually saves us trouble. But the Phase Engine’s data port is… unusual. Most common Youth Form Charts can’t mount directly. We need time to recompile.

“Also, we were ordered to crack the Holy Coffin’s database without damaging the Coffin itself. We’ve only just begun. It’s our first time with this thing. It still uses the Hermitage Order’s classic instruction framework, but the underlying code has a lot of weird additions. Our old tricks don’t apply.”

Yu Sheng thought it over, didn’t really get the tech details, and asked something else that interested him more: “This ship’s ID code is still the Hermitage Order type, right?”

The Technical Expert paused, looked up, and said: “Yes, but once we update the main System, we’ll switch it to a legal sequence…”

Yu Sheng said seriously: “Can we keep the old one?”

“Huh?”

“I mean keep two transponder IDs,” he said, scratching his hair. “I don’t know the tech. Sorry if I’m using the wrong words. Is it possible to keep both the Hermitage Order code and the legal code, and switch when needed?”

The Technical Expert blinked, then understood and said: “You want…”

“Just in case,” Yu Sheng said, touching his chin. “Might be useful for infiltration.”

The Technical Expert said, a bit troubled: “That’s technically possible. It’s just keeping a ‘shadow System.’ But in practice, you probably won’t get the result you want. This ship is almost certainly flagged by the Hermitage Order by now, especially since it’s an infiltration vessel. They treat ‘lost contact’ as ‘defection’ by default. The old ID is likely on their warning list. If you flip to it, you won’t infiltrate anything. You’ll probably call in a whole fleet.”

Yu Sheng said: “Fair point.” He thought a bit, then waved it off and said: “Doesn’t matter. Keep the old one anyway. Just in case.”

The Technical Expert blinked again, not quite used to how Yu Sheng would think for two seconds and then toss out a new idea. But he quickly remembered what his superiors had told him before they left the Bureau: Don’t dig into “his” thinking. Don’t question “his” aims. That’s the Director’s job. Do whatever “he” says, as long as he’s not trying to overthrow the entire Borderland.

He straightened and said: “Understood. We’ll do exactly as you want.”