Chapter 240

The secretary's scream drew the attention of nearby employees; currently a sensitive period, Saint Song employees were especially sensitive to the word "monster."

Intelligence about Saint Song Hunters creating disqualified monsters had spread among Saint Song's upper echelons, and the sudden appearance of the Fly King impaled on Saint Song Tower made it hard not to suspect the monster in the office was an attack by Saint Song Hunters.

Some quick-reacting employees had already bolted from their desks and sprinted toward the elevators; the slower ones had all ducked beneath their desks.

In an instant, the entire floor descended into chaos.

This was the management's response speed at Saint Song Company.

Wu Chang listened to the commotion outside and said awkwardly to the guards blocking the door:

"It's a misunderstanding—this is my ability, not a disqualified monster."

He was about to deactivate his ability to reassure the guards outside, their high-energy weapons raised and nerves taut, when Mo Ke forcibly pushed through the guards and said:

"Don't cancel the ability yet!"

After speaking to Wu Chang, Mo Ke turned and waved to the crowd outside:

"This is the company's latest research technology—don't panic at everything you see. Everyone, return to your posts. This is none of your concern."

After dispersing the crowd, Mo Ke closed the office door and stared at the massive Gluttonous Ant, asking:

"It won't attack me, will it?"

Wu Chang shook his head. "No."

Mo Ke touched the Gluttonous Ant, feeling its tangible texture, his face filled with astonishment.

"Xiao En, is this the ability you gained after your Psychogenic Enhancement surgery?"

Normally, immediately after completing Psychogenic Enhancement, one must record the acquired ability and undergo testing by the Psychogenic Enhancement Department.

But this surgery was unusually special—performed by Schulz, and excessively prolonged—leaving both Schulz and Wu Chang exhausted and in urgent need of rest; the Psychogenic Enhancement Department dared not detain Wu Chang for testing.

As a result, many—including Hughes and Mo Ke—knew only that Wu Chang's Psychogenic Enhancement was unusual, but not how unusual.

Mo Ke had originally come to congratulate Wu Chang on his promotion to Level Nine Partner; now, seeing Wu Chang's ability, he was deeply captivated.

"No wonder even Hughes couldn't handle such a complex talent—it's as real as the real thing," Mo Ke marveled at Wu Chang's ability.

"Xiao En, could you explain your ability in detail?"

Wu Chang wore an innocent expression and replied bluntly:

"After the Psychogenic Enhancement surgery, I found many of my memories became exceptionally clear. The more I concentrated, the more vivid and lifelike they became—like they were truly appearing before my eyes."

"When I came to my senses, the things I imagined in my mind had actually materialized in the office. I was just testing how to use this ability, and that's when this happened."

Mo Ke seemed to realize something. "Xiao En, can you manifest anything that appears in your mind?"

Wu Chang shook his head. "Not everything—only things I've seen and have some detailed understanding of, at least as detailed as the Disqualified Monster archives."

Mo Ke continued: "Can you control what you manifest?"

Wu Chang: "Of course."

He first shrank the Gluttonous Ant's size, then made it stand upright like a human and bow slightly toward Mo Ke.

Mo Ke: "How long can it last?"

Wu Chang said: "I haven't tested it."

Mo Ke's eyes lit up—he finally posed the answer he most wanted to know: "Can you manifest me?"

As Mo Ke pressed the question, Wu Chang had already guessed his intent, but still asked in confusion: "Mr. Mo, what exactly are you planning?"

Mo Ke's expression turned solemn. "Here's the situation…"

In Mo Ke's eyes, Xiao En was a loyal insider, so he revealed without concealment that he had partnered with the Zhongqing Bureau to track down the Saint Song Hunters.

"Though the Zhongqing Bureau agents assured me the operative is trustworthy, I still harbor doubts. So I want you to manifest a duplicate of me to meet with him."

Mo Ke glanced at the Gluttonous Ant beside him and sighed: "Your manifestations are more real than reality—if the operative is a Saint Song Hunter, he'll inevitably strike at my double."

Wu Chang frowned.

"There's one problem: what I manifest can only mimic appearance, not behavior. If he's truly an agent, he'll spot the discrepancy immediately."

Mo Ke smiled. "Don't worry about that, Xiao En. Relax."

Mo Ke fastened a button on his suit. Wu Chang saw a divine force emanate from it, spreading over the Gluttonous Ant he had manifested.

Wu Chang made no move to stop the force; as it seeped into the Gluttonous Ant, the creature replicated Mo Ke's exact motion and spoke:

"Just as I suspected—your manifestations are so lifelike, they can be controlled by my ability."

Wu Chang stared at the button Mo Ke had fastened. "What is it?"

Mo Ke said: "Primordial Weapon. It amplifies my ability."

Wu Chang probed: "Can I see it?"

Mo Ke removed the button and handed it to Wu Chang.

"Item Name: Mind Resonance"

"Item Type: Dungeon Item"

"Item Rank: A"

"Skill: Aura Amplifier"

"Description: When used by a target who has undergone Psychogenic Enhancement and possesses an Aura talent, it enhances the Aura talent's effect and, depending on the strength of the Aura, imbues the manifested form with divinity."

"Skill: Mind Control"

"Description: Emits a mental attack whose intensity depends on the user's Inspiration. If the attack breaches the target's will barrier, full control is achieved."

"Note: When the target is a player, the effect of the mental attack is halved."

Judging solely by its abilities, Mind Resonance was not particularly powerful; Mind Control sounded impressive, but its binding attribute was Inspiration—most players in the Wasteland Realm invested few attribute points into Inspiration.

Combined with the halved effect against players, it was clear the item was only useful for controlling native inhabitants during dungeon runs—making it largely redundant.

The reason Mind Resonance was rated A-class likely lay in its first skill's ability to generate divinity.

Any ability tied to divinity could never be rated low.

Wu Chang played with it for a moment, then returned it to Mo Ke.

"Since Mr. Mo Ke has a solution, it's certainly worth a try."

Mo Ke looked at the Gluttony Ants Wu Chang had conjured and said, "What we need to determine now is how long it can last and how far it can stray from you. Xiao En, this concerns Song Sheng Company—I hope you'll cooperate with me."

Wu Chang nodded. "That's my duty."

After a series of tests, the two gained a certain understanding of Wu Chang's awakened ability.

The duration of Wu Chang's conjured objects was tied to his inspiration; due to his overwhelming inspiration, the objects he first formed never dissipated, so endurance was not a concern.

The number of objects he could create depended on the power allocated to them and his willpower.

Every fifty points of willpower allowed him to create one additional object, but two objects would split the upper limit of his conjuring ability.

He currently had 176 points of willpower, enough to create three objects simultaneously, but in front of Mo Ke, he claimed his upper limit was only two.

As for the distance issue Mo Ke cared about most, once created, the objects became independent entities with no distance restriction from his body—as long as he did not dispel the ability.

After confirming Wu Chang's ability, Mo Ke was highly satisfied and ordered Wu Chang to conjure a duplicate, then use mental control to manipulate it to meet Lei Mengde ahead of schedule.

Before leaving, Wu Chang asked Mo Ke how he could obtain his primal weapon. Mo Ke told him that a Level Nine partner's primal weapon was custom-made according to their ability—multiple designs had to be drafted, then raw materials screened and cultivated; even if everything went smoothly and ready materials were available, the entire process would take two or three months.

Wu Chang sighed after hearing this—he doubted he'd have time to wait for his primal weapon while staying at Song Sheng Company.

Mo Ke thought he was anxious and tried to reassure him:

"Sometimes, waiting longer isn't necessarily bad—perhaps the craftsmanship of primal weapons will upgrade again soon."

After speaking, Mo Ke left eagerly with the duplicate.

Wu Chang sat alone in his office, flipping through Mo Ke's dossier; Mo Ke had written his personal information in great detail to help Wu Chang conjure the duplicate.

Because Wu Chang had said more details aided conjuring, Mo Ke feared ordinary photos and text weren't sufficient—had Wu Chang not strongly stopped him, Mo Ke nearly took a set of nude artistic photos right then and there.

Looking at an old man's naked photos would give you nightmares.

Thanks to Mo Ke's attention to detail, his dossier was extremely thorough; Wu Chang found a surgical record within it.

The Mo family suffered from congenital heart disease, incurable by conventional means; when Song Sheng Company recruited him, their condition was to use Song Sheng's black-tech to cure his heart condition.

!

The treatment involved replacing his heart with a semi-mechanical one—its advantage was permanent, unyielding performance with no risk of future failure; its drawback was that if mechanical components within his heart malfunctioned due to any cause, he would immediately collapse, possibly risking his life.

Wu Chang tapped his fingers on the desk, thinking how to reasonably let Lei Mengde know this information.

As he pondered, his inspiration suddenly stirred—he sensed something was wrong.

He looked at the surveillance feed and noticed Fei Guang and Qian Ye were acting strangely, halting and slowly preparing something.

Had they encountered trouble—or had they tampered with the surveillance?

Either way, it was worth seeing for himself.

Of course, seeing with his own eyes—not going himself.

He activated his Conjure the Unreal into Reality talent—a faint, nearly invisible shadow appeared before him.

This shadow was the Shade he had seen during the Silent Passage dungeon; the Shade's ability was the most suitable for stealth and infiltration among all players he'd encountered.

To enhance the Shade's ability, he minimized its size and detail reproduction, allocating all upper limits to replicating the Shade's core ability.

Worried the Shade's ability might be detected, he infused his imagined Shade with traits of a spirit entity and social anxiety disorder.

Thus, a nearly transparent, shadow-integrating blur appeared before Wu Chang.

He directed the shadow toward the area where Fei Guang and others were located in the surveillance—it was the Anquan Force's information center.

The Shade's spirit entity trait allowed it not only to move swiftly through shadows but also to pass directly through walls.

With both abilities enhanced, the shadow quickly reached the area shown in the surveillance.

In reality, Fei Guang and Qian Ye had vanished from this location—but in the surveillance, they were still plotting.

They had indeed tampered with the surveillance.

Wu Chang switched to several nearby cameras and found no anomalies; he could now confirm Fei Guang and Qian Ye hadn't gone far—they were nearby.

He maneuvered the shadow in a circle and indeed found an anomaly: a section of floor within the camera's range had been cut open by a special device and loosely covered back in place.

The shadow passed through the floor into a server room, where Wu Chang saw Fei Guang and Qian Ye.

Wu Chang frowned—were they trying to hack into Song Sheng Company's servers to directly retrieve information?

In the Song Sheng Company dimension, Song Sheng's network security was second to none—no one dared claim first. As a leading-edge arms dealer, if their network security were even slightly weak, hackers would have long since breached it and stolen all secrets.

The Administration's free intelligence on Song Sheng Company noted that its network security was the best in the Wasteland Realm, employing some black-tech encryption capable of not only preventing intrusion but also rapidly pinpointing the hacker's exact location.

Several players specializing in hacking had been defeated in Song Sheng Company's dungeon.

Neither Fei Guang nor Qian Ye looked like hackers—were they here just to get themselves eliminated?

Wu Chang's doubt didn't last long—he soon saw what Fei Guang and Qian Ye were truly relying on.

After setting up their preparations, they connected a special computer to the server, then pulled out a contract.

Summon!

As the contract activated, the prepared computer came alive—lines of code rapidly scrolled without any human input.

Wu Chang could tell the revived computer carried divinity.

A hacker who had activated divinity had descended onto this computer.

Shit—before even seeing a boss, Fei Guang's group had already summoned twice; the organization behind Iron Armor Squad had clearly invested heavily.

Song Sheng Company's black-tech network security likely resembled Disqualified Monsters and primal weapons—containing faint divinity.

Faint artificial divinity confronting true divinity? The outcome was obvious.

How to break through the Wasteland Realm's strongest network firewall? Just bring in a hacker from the Li Realm.

Within two minutes, the revived computer breached the server, accessed the management backend system, and displayed a permission level of Level Nine!

Through the Level Nine permission system, the computer quickly locked onto a target—a navigation window popped up on the screen, guiding Fei Guang and Qian Ye along its path.

With the computer's aid, Fei Guang and Qian Ye seemed to have activated optical camouflage—Wu Chang could no longer detect their presence in the surveillance system, nor sense any anomaly through his inspiration.

If he hadn't been following them with his shadow the whole time, he would have truly thought the two of them had vanished into thin air.

Guided by the computer, they first took the elevator and went all the way up to the 90th floor of Anthem Tower.

The computer used its access privileges to swipe open a hidden room at the end of the 90th floor, bringing the two of them inside, while Wu Chang controlled his shadow to follow behind them.

Inside the hidden room sat a massive computer, and on the screen in front of it, employee information scrolled in real time.

Under the computer's control, Wu Chang discovered that the computer in the hidden room had recorded information on every Anthem Company employee in the entire world — information starting from elementary school, exhaustive in every detail, including replies posted on forums, websites logged into, and even the duration and highlights of every webpage browsed.

All this information was aggregated together, and based on their recent performance at Anthem Company, a real-time moral assessment was carried out, classifying their moral tendencies as either virtue or sin.

The computer in the hidden room would, based on the results of the moral assessment, screen out employees requiring special attention, then through the database match them with suitable assignments, overtime intensity, and the work they should do, in order to extremize the chosen target's virtue or sin.

Once the moral assessment became extreme enough and reached a certain score, the specially flagged employee would enter the next step.

In the virtue resource database, Wu Chang saw the Zou brothers' file — their virtues were diligence and tenacity, with a composite virtue score of 90.

At the same time, among the specially flagged employees he also saw Farrell, whose tendency was sin, with a score of 285, whereas when Farrell had first joined Anthem Company, his sin value had been 68.

Looking at this computer, Wu Chang suddenly felt a wave of suffocation.

When he had first entered Farrell's grudge back then, he had seen that as Farrell's age increased, the evil on him kept growing, especially after joining Anthem Company, as if Anthem Company were stimulating the growth of the evil within him.

The scene before his eyes confirmed his earlier guess.

All the employees within Anthem Company — their concepts of good and evil, their emotional states — were in fact being manipulated by a hidden, massive hand.

No matter what they saw, heard, or experienced, whether their mood was excited or low, whether life went smoothly or terribly — you think the choices are your own, but in reality someone long ago has already predetermined your future, pushing you toward the outcome they want.

At the same time, the computer in Fei Guang's hand reacted again.

(End of this chapter)