Chapter 335
Chapter 335: Prepare in Advance
Before today, Yu Sheng had never really understood how dangerous Holy Revere Hermitage was. He knew it was a deranged extremist group. He knew what they had done to the artificial saintess and the bronze knight. He knew they hoarded black tech and carved out their own territory, stirring up trouble for every major faction.
But the threat this organization posed to the outside world had always been abstract to him. He’d never felt it in his bones.
If anything, the Angel Cult had left a deeper impression. Those fanatics had actually awakened a sleeping dark angel, and they had nearly blown up the borderland.
Now he understood.
Holy Revere Hermitage could stand alongside the “Angel Cult” and the “Blackpoint Group” as the world’s three great scourges for a reason—and in his view, the Hermitage Order was even worse than the Angel Cult.
Because they had culture.
Not just culture. They had structure. They had discipline. They had a clear, unwavering plan.
The Angel Cultists chanted when something happened. If their chanting annoyed a dark angel into appearing, they called it a victory. After that, everything was chaos.
But these Hermitage Order lunatics? They treated angels like lab materials. They wanted to build weapons of mass destruction, mass-produce them, and issue them as standard equipment.
To reach that goal, they could hide a ship in a hostile otherworld for ten years. They could actively hunt down dark angels descent sites across the stars. They could dance on a blade right under the noses of major powers like the Borderland Councilor Council and the Grand Void Spiritual Axis.
“We’ll contact the Thousand Peak Spirit Mountain right away, and the other major factions as well,” Bai Li Qing said. For once, she sounded unusually grave, her expression heavier than usual. “The Hermitage Order cultists we found in the borderland and on Featherwing-13B may not be all of them. These cultists are like roaches—when you find one, they’re probably already everywhere.”
“Focus on screening the places where dark angels descent has happened,” Yu Sheng said. “The Hermitage Order’s goal is the ‘angel catalyst’ produced after an angel falls. Dark angels descent has no clear pattern, so the most likely move is that they’ll trail the places where an angel descent phenomenon once occurred—watching, waiting, and taking samples.”
“That’s the reason,” Bai Li Qing said. “And not just the places where angel descent happened. We also need to find the survivors who lived through those events. The Hermitage Order is very likely to try to approach them.”
“It’s been more than ten years,” Foxy added suddenly. She’d been sitting off to the side, quiet the whole time, listening without interrupting. “Some of them might already have made contact with the Hermitage Order. They could even have been converted into sleeper agents. We also need to be careful not to tip them off.”
Yu Sheng glanced at the fox young lady, surprised. She looked like she was spacing out, but she’d been tracking the conversation the whole time.
Unlike Irene—who was genuinely spacing out.
And Luna was even worse. She looked like she’d crashed again.
“Don’t worry,” Bai Li Qing said. “We’ll handle it carefully.”
She nodded solemnly, then let her gaze fall once more on the Anka Aila crystal resting on the platform not far away.
Yu Sheng noticed the look.
“We still can’t confirm what it takes for these crystals to ‘react,’” Bai Li Qing said evenly, “but one thing is certain: these ‘angel catalyst’ aren’t as harmless as they look. We need to add a few more safety rules.”
Yu Sheng nodded. “For example, don’t make a jump while carrying an Anka Aila crystal.”
…
After leaving the Special Operations Bureau, Yu Sheng didn’t go home. He took Irene, Foxy, and Luna straight to the ship in the valley.
The technical experts from the Special Operations Bureau were still locked in a battle of wits with the ship’s bizarre, complex core system.
To be honest, when Yu Sheng “flew” the ship normally, he didn’t truly need most of the onboard systems. Controlling the ship’s flight was essentially the same as moving his own “limbs.” Teleporting home was just adding a “door” coordinate to the jump parameters of the phase engine. The whole process ran completely “beyond the system.” In borderland terms, it was closer to a “machine spirit” piloting the ship.
And he was this ship’s machine spirit.
Still, he understood why the ship needed a full set of control systems—especially the parts tied to navigation and jumping.
After all, aside from random teleportation, his “door” could only lead to places he had personally been. If he wanted to travel to an unfamiliar coordinate on a star chart, he still had to rely on the ship’s own navigation and jump functions. His “machine spirit” advantage was convenience, not omniscience. He could issue orders more directly, that was all.
Inside the bridge control hall, a scruffy, thin, middle-aged man was bent over the main control platform. The console in front of him had been opened up, and several external cables snaked out from it into multiple terminals beside him. On every screen, dizzying cascades of data and patterns refreshed at high speed.
Several assistants were busy across the hall. Some attached extra read-write devices to other platforms. Some reset subsystem states. Others held communicators and exchanged updates with teams elsewhere. While the control hall ran at full tilt, other groups were doing similar work in the server bay, subsystem bays, and disaster recovery databases.
The moment Yu Sheng and the others entered, they saw the hectic scene. Aside from the middle-aged man at the main console, who looked up to greet him, no one else even had time to lift their heads.
Yu Sheng didn’t mind. He understood the kind of focus this work demanded.
It was just that… his own “feeling” right now was strange.
Because he was completely connected to this ship.
He could actually sense the technicians “plugging in a bunch of cables” inside his “body” as they flashed the system.
Yes—flashing the system. That was their main task: take this Hermitage Order-built ship and overwrite its core program with a Special Operations Bureau version, while also rewriting its traffic identification code into a legal sequence.
“My dad used to do similar things,” Foxy muttered as she watched for a while. “My family has an old ‘celestial shuttle.’ Sometimes it would suddenly refuse to fly properly, and Dad would connect a bunch of wires like this, and then it would work again…”
She paused, then added with a grim little frown, “…and sometimes it still wouldn’t work. Then Mother would scold him, and it would get sent back to the factory.”
As she spoke, she pulled a sausage from her tail, tore it open with sharp teeth, and grumbled, “But that ship was way smaller than this one.”
Yu Sheng reached out and rubbed the fur behind her ears, then walked to the main console. “How’s the progress?”
“We’ve already started rewriting its main system, and it’s going more smoothly than expected,” the scruffy technical expert said, glancing up at Yu Sheng. “Those cultists wiped the ship’s original star chart and navigation data clean. That saved us trouble.”
He tapped a screen, then grimaced. “But the data ports used by its phase engine are… unique. Most standard star chart packages can’t be mounted directly. We’ll need time to recompile them.”
He hesitated, then added, “Also, we’ve received orders to crack the database of the ‘holy coffin,’ and we’re required not to cause any damage to the holy coffin itself. We’ve only just started that work. This is our first time seeing this set of equipment. Even though it still uses a classic command architecture from the Hermitage Order, the underlying code has a lot of strange additions. Some of our old experience doesn’t apply.”
Yu Sheng thought about it. He didn’t understand any of that, and he didn’t particularly care.
So after a brief pause, he asked the only technical question he actually cared about. “This ship’s identification code is still the Hermitage Order set, right?”
The expert paused and looked up. “Yes. After we update the main system, we’ll update its identification code to a legal sequence…”
“Can we keep the old one?” Yu Sheng asked, completely serious.
The expert blinked. “…Huh?”
“I mean, keep two sets of traffic identification codes,” Yu Sheng said, scratching his hair. “I don’t really understand this stuff, so don’t laugh if I’m saying nonsense. But is it technically possible?”
He leaned in a little. “Keep both this ship’s identification within the Hermitage Order fleet system and its identification as a legal ship, and switch at any time if needed.”
The expert finally caught on. “You want…”
“In case we might need it someday,” Yu Sheng said, stroking his chin. “For infiltration or something.”
“What you’re describing is technically feasible. It’s basically keeping a ‘shadowspawn system,’” the expert said, looking troubled. “But in practice, it probably won’t work the way you’re imagining.”
He pointed at a line of scrolling status warnings. “This ship has definitely already been flagged on the Hermitage Order side. Especially for an infiltration ship like this, they basically treat ‘lost contact’ as ‘defection.’ Its old identification code is most likely already on an alert list. If you try to use it for infiltration, you won’t infiltrate anything—you’ll summon an entire fleet almost immediately.”
“Yeah, that makes sense,” Yu Sheng said after a moment.
Then he waved his hand anyway. “Whatever. Keep the old one too. Just in case.”
The expert stared at him, clearly not used to Yu Sheng’s rhythm—one second thoughtful, the next second insisting on something ridiculous. But he quickly remembered the instructions he’d received before leaving the bureau:
Don’t dig into his train of thought. Don’t be curious about his purpose. Those were questions for the director. Just do what he said, and as long as he wasn’t trying to overturn the entire borderland, don’t bother with the rest.
“I understand,” the expert said. “We’ll do everything according to your wishes.”