Chapter 306 - 305: Abnormality, Tragic Death

Having cleared all the surveillance systems on the fifth floor of the fortress, Li Jing wasn’t in a hurry to continue descending.

The culprit was clearly identified.

The information he obtained was sufficient for his reporting.

Next, he intended to gather more details and find opportunities to gain some experience for himself along the way.

Of course.

The most critical point was.

Li Jing was certain that no one else except him was capable of obtaining data stored in the supercomputer at the bottom of this fortress.

With the Bei Yi System controlling artificial humans and monitoring the fortress, it’s impossible for anyone else to reach the bottom of the fortress without hindrance.

Even if anyone did reach there, they wouldn’t have the capability to access the supercomputer.

But Li Jing was different.

He had overcome Bei Yi.

In his hands, he had Xia Ai.

That’s right.

The key lay in Xia Ai.

Although Xia Ai’s physical form was no larger than a mobile phone, it encapsulated all the essence of modern intelligent computing developed by the Longyu Research Institute.

The ability to contain an artificial intelligence with an independent personality in a palm-sized mobile phone demonstrated the immense power of its hardware.

Without external supercomputers, Xia Ai’s data computing capabilities would indeed fall short compared to Bei Yi.

After all, the hardware size does matter.

However, in terms of intrusion capability, Xia Ai completely outshines Bei Yi.

Artificial intelligence also needs to grow.

Especially those like Xia Ai and Bei Yi, which have independent personalities; they need to learn from experiences and gain knowledge for continuous improvement, just like humans do.

Even regular artificial intelligence needs to be slowly adjusted and taught through usage.

If not, it could easily become an artificial dummy than intelligent.

Simply put, it is a matter of experience.

How much experience could Bei Yi, sealed in the fortress and separated from the outside world, gain in terms of infiltrating external hosts and networks? Even White Hawk was ignorant of her existence.

That she wouldn’t have a clue, is unthinkable.

But compared to Xia Ai, she absolutely lacks the skills.

Xia Ai comes with numerous features, and the one used most frequently by Li Jing is her intrusion capability.

Surveillance queries, network intrusions to access information without permissions, and so on.

Xia Ai managed to easily disable White Hawk’s air defense network, causing a temporary paralysis, not only because of her powerful capabilities, but also due to being "trained" by Li Jing.

Bei Yi possessed the same abilities.

However, she absolutely wouldn’t be able to do it as effortlessly, nor would she dare to risk being discovered.

In summary.

It’s all about proficiency.

Having sorted out all of Bei Yi’s "eyes" on the fifth floor, Li Jing went on to inspect the war-torn laboratories on the same floor one by one.

The yield was not that much.

But it was indeed valuable.

There were over thirty laboratories on the fifth floor of the fortress.

Among them, ten suffered severe damage, which were observation rooms rather than laboratories.

Each laboratory contained at least two isolation rooms.

Inside, there were beds, toilets, televisions, and other household items sufficient to meet basic daily living needs.

All the isolation rooms were in pristine condition and extremely neat.

Unlike the laboratories that looked like they had been through a war, filled with holes and bloodstains everywhere.

The entrances of the isolation rooms could be opened normally.

Li Jing tested it with his bare hands.

The material of the closed entrance was quite special.

Even when he used his full strength, he could only barely make it budge.

In terms of physical strength, Li Jing was superior to most Seventh Realm Monsters.

When monsters cross tribulations, they typically face Soul-refining Tribulations.

Only a very small number undergo the conventional Thunder Tribulations that temper their physical body.

This level of protection is unquestionable.

Although Li Jing didn’t punch it directly, but tested it with his bare hands, this material would be more than enough to restrain an Artificial Human of the Sixth Realm, whose physical strength was not impressive.

The advantage of Artificial Humans lies in their ability to curse a Sixth Realm being to death.

He didn’t miss a single laboratory nor any isolation room. Anything he deemed valuable, Li Jing photographed and kept a record of it.

No matter whether it would be useful after he took it back, the more details, the better.

After going around on the fifth floor of the fortress, Li Jing continued downwards, entering the sixth floor.

Having spent some time disabling all surveillance on the sixth floor, he went around it in the same manner as before.

Then he did the same on the seventh, eighth, and ninth floors.

The sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth floors all contained conventional laboratories.

There were quite a few things in the laboratory, but to Li Jing, they all meant little.

When he arrived at the tenth floor of the fortress, he finally saw what he wanted to see.

In a remarkably large laboratory, there were nearly a hundred jar-shaped culture dishes.

Most of the culture dishes in the laboratory had been destroyed, but a small number remained intact.

A single culture dish was approximately three meters high.

In those intact ones, a certain deep yellow semi-transparent liquid was stored, within which were different degrees of human-shaped objects, obviously underdeveloped artificial humans.

Most of these uncompleted artificial humans were defective, with limbs malformed to varying extents.

Li Jing walked around filming, and in the furthest part of the lab, he found a cold storage room that held various suspicious liquids.

How could he not take one or two of these things when he saw them?

If it wasn’t disgusting, he would have wanted to take one or two malnourished artificial humans.

Having loaded a barrel of each suspicious liquid into his storage space, Li Jing left the laboratory.

At this point, he had collected enough detail already, even physical evidence.

Coming to the entrance leading to the eleventh floor of the fortress, Li Jing paused thoughtfully, and his face showed Linglong, who had been with him for three years.

"You go down and play, remember not to make too much noise. This fortress cannot bear your tussle."

Linglong was in sync with Li Jing’s mind and knew what he wanted her to do.

She, who had always been quite playful, had long been unable to bear the burning crusade of her spirit of doing things. With an "Oh," she turned her head and turned into a golden light darting into the channel.

As soon as Linglong left, the Spirit Weapon Qingfeng immediately protested, indicating that he also wanted to act freely.

But Li Jing ignored it.

All the way down, he hadn’t encountered even a single artificial human.

Obviously, there were limited numbers of artificial humans inside the fortress. Bei Yi did not want to waste too much force on him, and used the damaged surveillance to confirm his floor, which let the artificial humans avoid him.

Bei Yi dared to do so, she must be confident.

She didn’t seem to worry that Li Jing could go underground and find her real body.

However, Li Jing didn’t care about these.

When the ship arrives at the bridge, it will straighten itself naturally.

When he reached the bottom floor, everything would become clear.

What he cared about was that he could not gain experience by going down like this.

Luckily, he had spirit weapons to command.

Letting Linglong go first to the deeper layers of the fortress to "play" and not touch the surveillance, will mostly likely lure out the artificial humans.

As an Immortal Item, Linglong did not fear the curse either.

The Spirit Weapon Qingfeng, however, was a different case...

The lad doesn’t even know how to hide his immortal spirit. As soon as he shows up, the artificial humans, even if they are aware, would not dare to come out.

After letting Linglong out, Li Jing propped his chin in thought.

The fortress’s internal surveillance covered every corner, leaving no blind spots.

To get down there, he would have to destroy everything along his way.

Doing this was the same as telling Bei Yi exactly where he was, which would make letting Linglong out completely pointless.

He needed to create the false impression that he had not gone down, but out of caution, he had sent a spirit weapon below to scout.

Fishing was something Li Jing did often.

He was not worried that Bei Yi would not fall for it.

Artificial Intelligence, even if it has developed a personality, is still Artificial Intelligence.

If it comes to being conniving, humans are stronger.

What he needed to figure out now was how he could get to the bottom.

There were almost 77 floors in the whole fortress.

Going down the passage step by step was inefficient.

Especially when he had to destroy surveillance at the same time.

Walking down the passage honestly also carried high risk.

Bei Yi would not really just ignore him and wait for death.

There must be some kind of arrangement down there.

The floors deeper in the fortress obviously contained more sensitive things, and the White Hawk side must have set up various protection measures.

More sensitive things, Li Jing could ignore.

What he already had was sufficient.

But he could not ignore the White Hawk’s protection measures.

Such a sensitive biological laboratory being carried out on such a large scale, White Hawk definitely would not hope for failures and wouldn’t allow anyone to intrude.

The protection here must be very strong.

Now that the entire fortress was in Bei Yi’s hands, to avoid unnecessary trouble, he could not go step by step.

After a moment of thinking, Li Jing made the simplest and most direct choice.

Pulling out the blueprint of the fortress and laying it flat on the ground, he took out his Aide and photographed the blueprint, giving it low-voiced commands.

"Aide, examine the structure of the fortress on the blueprint, confirm which structures are key and cannot be destroyed, find me the shortest route to the bottom."

"Received."

Aide responded.

Soon, the screen of Xiao Ai displayed a re-constructed floor plan based on the blueprint of the fortress, followed by its voice.

"Master, where exactly are you now?"

"Entrance to the Eleventh Floor passage of the Fortress."

Li Jing responded.

"Alright."

Xiao Ai responded, quickly sketching a curve on the floor plan based on his location, leading straight underground.

Li Jing studied it closely on his phone, determining where he could break through and what needed to be avoided.

The deepest part of the Fortress is about forty thousand meters. If that collapsed, it would not be easy to handle.

During his review, a notification sound rang in his ear.

"Experience+8232."

Hearing the notification, Li Jing raised an eyebrow.

The notification of experience meant that Bei Yi had taken the bait, and Linglong had encountered the Artificial Humans.

Without worrying about Linglong’s situation below, he continued to study the route Xiao Ai had planned.

The notification sound kept ringing in his ear.

In just a blink of an eye, Li Jing had gained more than two hundred thousand experience points, and Linglong had obliterated nearly thirty Artificial Humans in a matter of minutes.

The feeling of gaining experience while idle was somewhat refreshing.

Unfortunately, silence followed.

Clearly, Bei Yi had recognized Linglong’s combat ability.

Seeing that there was no action, Li Jing signaled Linglong to come back.

After making such a sizable gain in experience, he couldn’t complain.

A total of two hundred thousand, for him at this point, was just a drop in the bucket.

But now that Bei Yi was aware, letting Linglong continue to run around below wasn’t a good idea.

Before long, Linglong returned.

Li Jing smiled and patted her little head before putting her away.

On the way back, Linglong had already reported to him.

She didn’t encounter any Artificial Humans until she reached the Fourteenth Floor. After crushing about thirty, she encountered no more. During the encounter, a subtle force tried to influence her. However, after failing to do so, there was no further effect.

The force that tried to influence Linglong was obviously the power of a curse.

Linglong is an Immortal Spirit Weapon, not a living being.

The curse’s life-draining power would have no effect on her.

Linglong eventually reached the Sixteenth Floor underground.

After confirming that there were no Artificial Humans between the Eleventh Floor and the Sixteenth Floor, Li Jing put Xiao Ai back into the storage space and, with a thought, drew out the Flying Sword Blue Edge.

Once the Immortal Item was in hand, the effect of Silent Shadow ceased.

Immediately, Li Jing rose on his sword. The sword light ripped through the ground and shot straight down.

The otherwise robust structure of the Fortress, designed to withstand the full blow of a Fifth Boundary, was like paper mache against the Flying Sword Blue Edge, easily torn apart. According to the route calculated by Xiao Ai, Li Jing was rapidly moving toward the bottom of the Fortress.

In about thirty seconds, he arrived at the bottom of the Fortress smoothly.

Forty thousand meters was nothing to him.

With the Flying Sword Blue Edge leading the way, being underground was no different from being outside.

The only problem was that he had to divert his path to avoid key structures of the Fortress, so he didn’t collapse the whole thing.

Upon landing on the bottom floor of the Fortress, Li Jing’s gaze, sharp as lightning, quickly inspected the surroundings, leaving him slightly disappointed.

Thinking that there would be a considerable number of Artificial Humans on the lowest level for defense, he had even been a bit excited.

But now, under the gaze of his Heavenly Eye, he saw no energy congregates.

Pocketing the Flying Sword Blue Edge and reinstantiating the effect of Silent Shadow, Li Jing pulled out the fortress map and figured out the location of the supercomputer room. As he miraculously headed toward the room and destroyed all monitoring equipment along the way, he realized that the basement was connected by six different passages.

The supercomputer room was on the right.

After a while, Li Jing neared the Supercomputer room, then furrowed his brows and halted.

Right now, the door to the Supercomputer Room was open.

Things were a bit off.

He had cut through the Fortress’s structure and entered directly, causing the intermediate defenses to fail.

This avoided Bei Yi’s layout, which was good.

But the absence of any protective forces in the basement and the wide-open door to the Supercomputer Room where Bei Yi himself was housed seemed very unreasonable.

Even with Bei Yi’s confidence, this was a bit much.

After a moment’s doubt, Li Jing stepped to the door of the Supercomputer room, his pupils narrowing.

In front of the Supercomputer terminal, a headless figure sat.

Encountering a headless corpse wouldn’t usually bother Li Jing.

What really bothered him was...

The clothes on the headless figure were very familiar to him...

He remembers clearly that this was the outfit that Snake Eye was wearing when he picked him up from the hotel today.

When did Snake Eye come here?

Why didn’t Bei Yi send Artificial Humans to stop him?

Even if he didn’t encounter any obstructions, the things he must have witnessed along the way should have delayed Snake Eye. He shouldn’t have reached the basement of the fortress so quickly.

With suspicion in his mind, Li Jing entered the engine room and began to examine the corpse on the operating station.

Upon closer inspection, it was indeed Snake Eye’s remains.

His hands were still resting on the keyboard of the operating station.

This indicated that he was caught off guard at the time of his death.

The monitor in front of the operating station was severely damaged as if it had been subjected to a hail of bullets, with a large patch of blood and what looked like flesh and other filthy remains stuck to it, most of which had already slid off.

It wasn’t hard for Li Jing to deduce that Snake Eye had been shot in the head from behind and that he had been dead for quite some time already.

The damage to the monitor was due to the impact of the shattering of his skull...

Rubbing his temples, Li Jing let out a heavy sigh.

Snake Eye’s death made him immediately think of one person.

The leader of the team he was participating in this mission with, Evlyn.

An evident fact was in front of him.

Snake Eye was not killed by a curse, but was ambushed from behind when he was completely defenseless.

Snake Eye was a seasoned adventurer who would never let his guard down so easily allow someone to ambush him, unless it was someone he completely trusted.

Looking back at it,

Snake Eye was a member of the Six Realm, and his physical body wasn’t particularly strong. Even if an artificial human found the opportunity, they wouldn’t be able to kill him with a single attack, let alone blow his head off with a punch.

The only person who Snake Eye trusted and who could possibly do this, was Evlyn.

The question was,

Why did Evlyn kill Snake Eye?

For wealth?

No.

From the beginning of his communication with Evlyn, Li Jing determined that she was not in it for the money.

Looking at the shattered monitor of the supercomputer, Li Jing was at a loss.

Evlyn had no desire for wealth.

The most significant possibility now was that she had established a collaborative relationship with Bei Yi.

But if that were the case, there was no need for her to come along with other adventurers, let alone involve him.

She could have come and contacted Bei Yi on her own...

The only thing that could be ascertained at the moment was,

Evlyn and Snake Eye surely had pre-discussed plans. Otherwise, it would be implausible for both of them to reach the basement so quickly from separate paths, even if they didn’t encounter any obstructions along the way.

Both of them were part of the Deep Blue Squad.

They had a close relationship, so them making plans wasn’t surprising.

What was strange was, why hadn’t other internal members of the Deep Blue Squad come?

While deep in thought, Li Jing suddenly sensed several people rapidly approaching and turned his head instinctively.

Just then, an excited-looking Basaka and one of his companions appeared at the door.

The two groups collided. Basaka and his companion were taken aback momentarily, but Li Jing was not too surprised.

It wasn’t surprising that Basaka and his team arrived at the basement of the fortress so quickly if Evlyn and Snake Eye could get there that fast.

The strange thing was,

It was clear from the blood stains on Basaka and his companion’s clothes that they had experienced intense fighting. They must have encountered obstructions.

The Starshatter Mercenary Corp was the largest group and had ample personnel.

They had abandoned the middle route due to its risks, leaving five pathways which had enough space for them to allocate more than five people each.

Only two people from the team led by Basaka arrived, indicating that they had lost members during the battle.

The fact that they arrived so quickly suggests that they didn’t encounter much after the initial obstructions.

It’s evident that,

Bei Yi initially set up defenses but later withdrew them.

It’s unclear when they withdrew, but they certainly had done so some time ago.

With this reasoning in mind, Li Jing suddenly understood.

The probable reason behind Bei Yi withdrawing their defenses was because they were outmatched by him and couldn’t effectively resist.

Before he came down, Linglong had killed over twenty artificial humans.

Originally, he thought that Bei Yi was setting up a trap to give him experience.

Looking back now, those more than twenty artificial humans appeared to be sacrifices, their purpose being to impede him.

An undeniable fact was right before him.

When he reached the basement, Li Jing didn’t find the expected source of Bei Yi’s confidence; he only found Snake Eye’s corpse...

Meanwhile, Basaka and his companion, upon arriving in the engine room, exchanged a glance after their initial surprise at seeing Li Jing. Without a word, the two very cooperatively drew out two enormous Western-styled Spirit weapons.

Seeing this, Li Jing’s mouth twitched.

Damn it, adventurers are really adventurous.

They’ve just met, and they aren’t even talking...

Snake Eye’s previous warning to be wary of the Starshatter Mercenary Corp was not without reason.