“Good. Assimilation status normal.”
As the tingling itch gradually faded, Feng Xue began testing his condition. While controlling John to look for an opportunity to stage an “accident” with a new target, he took the chance to perform a minor operation on himself.
He did not make it too complicated. He merely swapped in a pair of [Abomination Gaze True Strength] eyes—the Ya Zi prosthetic eyes were four-star, so they had two skills—and then added a [Plague Hymn] frontal cortex implant and a [Human Headbutt] cerebellum expansion implant.
Aside from adding several skills and traits, strengthening his brainpower was also a key reason.
As John and the stand-in’s activities became routine, Feng Xue’s consciousness had gradually begun to feel stretched thin. It was not that the Phantom Dragon Soul Type III had reached its limit; anyone who knew computers understood that no matter how good the processor was, if the memory was insufficient, performance could not rise. The two sets of implants Feng Xue had added this time were precisely to increase that “memory,” allowing the computing power of the Phantom Dragon Soul chip to feed back into his body and brain more effectively.
With the assimilation of Source Energy completed, the effects of the modification could be said to be immediate. Although his reflexes and computational ability had not significantly improved, the previous situation where controlling four bodies at once left him flustered was gone. Feng Xue even felt that if he were to control the Demon Sword, John (Kong Wu), the stand-in, and his main body in a group fight all at the same time, there would not be the slightest confusion.
“But I still need to make a dedicated John as soon as possible and swap Kong Wu out. Otherwise, once my targets get stronger later on, it’ll be hard to keep his style under control.”
Feng Xue’s principle was that every role should have a different combat style, avoiding as much as possible any impression that certain characters came from the same school. Kong Wu and Demon Sword—one was a boxing king, one a sword saint. The stand-in was a pure cybernetic doctor. As for John, Feng Xue hoped to develop him along the marksman route.
Unfortunately, aside from the humorous Abomination entry in his possession that still required someone else to hit him before it could activate, he truly did not have a single skill suited for ranged combat.
“In the end, I still have to go here!”
Feng Xue opened his golden finger and tapped on the [Automated Factory] tab.
[The metal on the assembly line carries the scorching heat of having just come out of the furnace. This is probably the warmest moment of their existence, but don’t expect them to give you any warmth—of course, if you can take away a few of the latest-model cybernetic implants, they can indeed warm both your body and soul. But the more likely outcome of entering this place is that you will take a trip through the assembly line as “biomass raw material.”]
Looking at the introduction he had already read several times over the past few days, Feng Xue fiddled with the character selection interface and, in the end, selected Demon Sword.
It was not that he had not sent in cannon-fodder characters over the past few days, but against this map, those stripped-down characters costing a dozen or so points often had not taken more than a few steps before they were shot full of holes. Even with Combat Continuation keeping them barely alive, they had no chance to get back up. And those autonomous defense robots would not care whether you had been hit in a vital spot or not; as long as you still showed even a trace of life signs, there was no hope those bullets would stop.
With the mentality that it would slowly fall out of use even if he did not use it, Feng Xue finally chose to make the most of it.
……
Entering battlefield: Automated Factory
Preparation time: 57 seconds
Battlefield intensity: Medium
Extraction condition: Reach the extraction point (marked) and remain there for 15 seconds to successfully extract.
Extraction time limit: 8 hours
Extraction failure: Loss of synchronization
Random side objectives:
1. Public Enemy of Machines: Destroy 20 defense robots (0/20)
2. Production Assurance: Download production logs from three different assembly lines. (0/3)
3. Silent Infiltration: Reach the finished goods warehouse without alerting any robots.
……
As the scenery before his eyes abruptly changed, Feng Xue arrived outside an automated factory located who knew where. Judging from the surrounding buildings, it could basically be confirmed that this was not the same factory as the previous ones, but Feng Xue did not care. After all, the last few times, he had either wandered blindly around areas with no resources, or had been instantly killed the moment he entered.
He glanced at the map. The structure was more or less the same, basically consisting of five sections—
The front gate was the entrance to the main factory building. The moment one entered, several automated assembly lines could be seen in the distance. Why in the distance? Because a group of robots blocked the way in front, and the moment they saw you enter, they would unleash a storm of bullets.
At the very back was the raw materials area, where security was weakest. However, it was only connected to the other areas by a few feed inlets, and there was no extraction point. Unless one could learn the special alloy formula by watching the smelting furnace, or could physically withstand several hundred degrees of heat and smuggle oneself through a feed inlet, going there was just a waste of time.
There was also a loading area on the side, where products were loaded onto vehicles. There were some traces of human activity there, and the robots were relatively less strict. The farthest Feng Xue had ever pushed in had been through this route.
Judging from the map, the end of the loading area was a large warehouse filled with finished cybernetic implants. There was also an extraction point marker inside, but above it was a mark that looked like an electrical switch. Based on Feng Xue’s shallow understanding of these kinds of games, he felt that this extraction point probably required the switch to be pulled before it would activate several minutes later.
Finally, there was the smallest partition deep inside the factory, which should be where the server room was located. In a place like this, integrated from raw materials to processing and packaging, the server room would inevitably contain the complete design blueprints he wanted.
No, he might not even need the complete blueprints. As long as he could get his hands on some core processes, Feng Xue was confident he could rely on stacking materials to produce four-star cybernetic implants!
As for extraction points that did not require pulling a switch, there were some, but they were placed in an utterly beastly location—on the roof of the factory building. Needless to say, once he went up there, he would definitely alert security.
After roughly studying the map, Feng Xue ultimately decided to start with the loading area.
By the time Feng Xue entered the battlefield, it was already late at night, but the iron lumps inside the factory did not rely on daylight to catch people. Fortunately, he had gained some experience and had brought in a visual enhancer, commonly known as AR glasses.
In truth, installing prosthetic eyes directly would also work, but Demon Sword was already a cybernetic body prepared for destruction. If a pair of glasses costing a dozen or so yuan could solve the problem, there was no need to spend several hundred.
The factory’s seemingly simple outer defense line immediately showed a peculiar curtain of light within the glasses’ field of view. The embedded energy field generators made the entire wall appear a uniform blue.
“The basic architecture is more or less the same. Is it the factory standard plan? Or are they actually all factories belonging to the same company?”
Feng Xue carefully avoided the areas covered by the energy field and quickly arrived outside the loading warehouse. On either side of the large doors, a group of robots stood guard.
These robots had a troublesome set of grouped local networks. Through mixed formations of multiple groups, robots from different groups were arranged into teams. As long as one could not paralyze all the robots in an instant, then the moment any single one was missing, every robot in the factory would know.
Yet this factory happened to be physically disconnected from external networks, basically eliminating the possibility of a hacker wiping them all out at once. Feng Xue’s deepest infiltration before had ended right here.
Fortunately, it was not flawless—
Although this grouped networking strategy could guard against many methods, it also had a problem: robots in the same action team were not within the same local network. While this prevented them from being wiped out in one fell swoop, it also meant their coordination was programmed separately. When one of them made an error, the other robots could not immediately fill the gap. In other words, as long as he could, without being observed by the robots, create the tiniest deviation that was not enough to trigger an alarm, he could artificially create a blind spot that existed at a specific time!
P.S.: Additional background setting. Many people think that since four-star cybernetic implants are so expensive, there shouldn’t be many people who can afford to install them, and production volume should also be very low. There is something wrong with this idea.
Because there is a blind spot here: four-star cybernetic implants are not as durable as three-star ones.
If you don’t operate a three-star cybernetic implant beyond its limits, there is no problem using it for seven or eight years. If you take a little care of it, using it for more than ten years is not an issue. What users need to consider is instead whether to replace it when a new model comes out.
But four-star implants are different. For this kind of thing to last one or two years already counts as longevity. It is not because the manufacturers are heartless—of course, that factor cannot be ruled out, but it is not the main reason. Rather, their positioning is different.
Three-star cybernetic implants are more “daily-use cybernetic implants,” civilian models similar to air conditioners, televisions, computers, and the like at home. Durability is also part of their performance.
Four-star cybernetic implants, whether combat implants or production implants, can all be collectively called work implants. What matters most for this kind of implant is performance, not durability.
Those able to install four-star production implants are basically technical workers, programmers, doctors, and the like at the forefront of their industries. Their implants cannot be used for long before they must be upgraded. Even if they themselves want to keep using the old ones, their companies and customers will not be willing.
As for combat implants, that goes without saying even more. The people who install these things wish they could keep them overclocked forever, squeezing out as much performance as possible. Their only requirement for durability is that it lasts through one battle. Who goes onto a battlefield expecting the guns, cannons, and grenades in their hands to be usable for more than ten years?
Moreover, the biggest buyers of four-star cybernetic implants will always be official institutions and other companies making bulk purchases. Therefore, whether in terms of market or production volume, this thing is not small at all.