Chapter 91: Umbilical Blood Key

When the eye sockets of the sugar-crystal skeletons shot out dark red lasers, Lin Jin's bronze right arm was decomposing. Those metallic-lustered nano-swarms were like piranhas smelling blood, frantically gnawing at the blood-colored light beams. The swallowing sound made by the friction of metal particles reminded him of the abandoned babies fed in the orphanage—those embryos packed into glass jars always greedily sucked on nutrient solution.

"The cognitive blocker is dissolving!" Ao Li's warning carried a metallic tremor. The mechanical dragon girl's fingers suddenly pierced into the back of Lin Jin's neck, and the syrup seeping from the dragon scale gaps congealed into a mirror surface between the two. In the reflection, Lin Jin's pupils were undergoing data collapse; countless "Lin Jins" wearing white restraint suits were struggling in culture tanks in different dimensions, and standing outside every tank was Ao Zhan with a Taotie pattern embroidered on his chest, the dark blue liquid in his syringe glowing with stardust.

A roar of gears turning came from the abyss rock wall, and those three-meter-diameter bronze gears were actually twisted from the blood vessels of immortal hearts. The Heavenly Workshop Master was dragged by the wreckage of the mechanical centipede and crashed into the rock wall, and what sprayed from the broken spinal tether was not blood, but the same pale golden liquid as the umbilical blood bottle—the liquid congealed into crystals with a DNA double-helix structure the instant it touched the air.

"The starship is reconstructing the initial program!" Ao Li's left eye shot out a holographic projection, the image showing the Primordial Laboratory twenty years ago collapsing. The blood-stained Ling Yue put the baby into an escape pod, and what she took out from her small abdomen was not an umbilical cord, but a bronze key carved with star patterns. Lin Jin suddenly clutched his collarbone, where a piece of skin was burning—it was exactly the shape of the Taotie pattern on the top of the key.

When the sugar-crystal skeletons' chests split open, countless umbilical-cord-like bio-electric cables hung down from the sticky transmission tunnel. The instant Lin Jin grabbed Ao Li and leaped in, his right-arm nano-swarm suddenly went berserk. Those metallic particles with copper-green hues were devouring his flesh in reverse, and a star pattern identical to Ling Yue's key emerged on the surface of his ulna. The pain reminded him of the sour sensation of a scalpel scraping against bone when the Master implanted the mechanical arm into him at seven years old.

"Welcome home, Subject 009." The starship AI's voice suddenly became clear; this was clearly Ling Yue's voice from twenty years ago. The two fell above the circular console, and floating in the transparent tank cover beneath their feet were thousands of brains soaking in syrup. The culture tank in the third row of the seventh column glowed slightly, and the plum blossom birthmark on the frontal lobe of that brain perfectly matched the shape on Lin Jin's collarbone.

Ao Li's dragon horns suddenly transformed into a data interface, and dark gold patterns crawled onto her face along her neck: "The clone brain of the Master is tampering with the core code..." Her words were interrupted by the suddenly lit star map. The blood-colored navigation lines intertwined into a Taotie totem on the dome, and the final coordinate pointed to made Lin Jin's whole body turn cold—it was the ruins of Medicine King Valley burning on the surface at this moment.

The syrup in the culture tank suddenly boiled, and the babies' cries overflowed from every clone brain simultaneously. This crying sound activated the light pillar in the center of the console, and Ling Yue's phantom, covered in chromosome chains, was reorganizing. The long sword she held, congealed from umbilical blood, glowed with eerie purple light, the sword tip precisely aimed at Ao Li's heart.

"God-Slaying program initiated." Ling Yue's phantom revealed the same compassionate smile as twenty years ago, "Embedding the dragon gene lock in the umbilical blood back then was just for this moment." Her figure suddenly split into seven residual images, every residual image performing a different killing scene: sometimes it was Ao Li's heart being crushed by chromosome chains, sometimes it was Lin Jin being devoured by nano-swarms, and the final scene froze at the moment a miniature black hole rose from the ruins of Medicine King Valley.

Lin Jin's newborn bones suddenly resonated, and those star patterns were absorbing the energy leaking from the console. Only then did he realize that his ribs were already half-metallized, and what was pulsing in his chest was not a heart, but a bronze compass engraved with a Taotie pattern—this was the core component missing from Ling Yue's key.

"So I am the keyhole!" He grabbed Ao Li's mechanical hand and pressed it against his own chest, and the instant the dragon girl's scales touched the star patterns, the entire control room began to quantum-collapse. Countless memory fragments sprayed from the culture tanks: Ling Yue kneeling in a pool of blood with a baby twenty years ago, standing behind her were twelve Ao Zhans in white coats; the newborn injected with gene drugs in the escape pod, the nano-swarms wriggling beneath his skin; and the clone brain array connected behind the Master's spinal tether at this moment...

Ao Li's dragon horns erupted with blinding electric arcs, and the wreckage of the mechanical centipede reorganized into a particle cannon behind her back: "Hold onto that phantom! Her core code and your gene lock are in a quantum entanglement state!"

The instant Lin Jin pounced on Ling Yue, the umbilical blood long sword pierced his quantum heart. But the expected pain did not come; those pale golden bloods were instead repairing his body being gnawed by nano-swarms. The expression on Ling Yue's phantom appeared for the first time, and a plum blossom birthmark identical to Lin Jin's appeared on her neck.

"Mother?" The instant this title was blurted out, all the culture tanks in the control room exploded simultaneously. In the memory torrent released by thousands of clone brains, Lin Jin finally saw the truth—it was Ling Yue who secretly modified the gene sequence, rewriting the God-Slaying program's trigger mechanism into a mother-son bond. The phantom she left in the starship core was not a killing program, but a distress signal wrapped in antimatter.

The Taotie star map suddenly began to reverse, and the blood-colored navigation lines pointed back to the vast starry sky. A muffled thunder-like roar came from beneath the Medicine King Valley earth, and the overload alarm of the antimatter reactor was forcibly stopped by the baby's crying. When Ao Li's particle cannon pierced the console, Lin Jin saw Ling Yue's phantom make a gesture of holding a baby before dissipating, the shape of her lips clearly saying: "Live."

All the star patterns on his newborn bones lit up, and Lin Jin's quantum heart beat autonomously for the first time. The nano-swarms condensed into a complete bronze key in his palm, and where the copper rust peeled off, it revealed a pale golden light of the same source as the umbilical blood long sword. ===== CHAPTER 92 =====