In that instant, Feng Xue felt like a complete dumb [beep—]! In fact, it wasn’t just the Demonic Sword. Because when his golden finger created a character’s head, it only had requirements for perception, and his main body in the safe zone could connect to the network at any time. Since most battlefields came down to combat power, none of his characters had brain-computer interfaces!
But now, after finally making it into the server room, he had no brain-computer interface, and could only enter a mountain of treasure…
“Wait!”
Feng Xue’s eyes suddenly lit up. He immediately opened his golden finger from the Demonic Sword’s side and brought up the manufacturing page. The page opened, yes—but Feng Xue’s expression froze once more.
The Hajichikov on the Demonic Sword had already been insured, damn it!
“So this insurance affix was never meant for cybernetics at all—it was for whipping up hard drives after getting inside!”
Feng Xue was filled with regret, but things had already come to this, and he had no intention of wallowing in his own garbage play. In three strides, he arrived before the main console, his nimble hands instantly dancing into a blur.
“I’ll memorize as much as I can!”
Feng Xue gritted his teeth and pulled up the production process. At the same time, his main body directly activated the “thought-to-image” function in his eyes. For the eyeballs transformed from this pair of four-star cybernetic eyes, 【Ya Zi】, this was undoubtedly just a bonus feature akin to the AI built into a pair of headphones, probably meant for snipers to quickly input target data. Yet at this moment, it unexpectedly prevented Feng Xue from leaving empty-handed—fine, with the affixes of three robots and his comprehension of how to apply flesh-and-blood source energy to robots, it wasn’t really empty-handed anyway.
Generally speaking, the blueprints for complex technological equipment like cybernetics were enormous—so enormous that if recorded on paper, several rooms wouldn’t be enough to hold them. Fortunately, this was a production site. All those complicated theories had been discarded, and content that would originally have taken up long, rambling treatises had been broken down into individual production processes convenient for machining.
If someone from a design background saw these blueprints, they would probably go mad, but this was exactly the form frontline production workers loved most.
Feng Xue didn’t even need to distinguish carefully. One glance at the end products of different assembly lines was enough for him to judge the value of that portion of the blueprints. Then, through the density and precision of the process, he could confirm which segment of that assembly line held the most substance.
Right now, Feng Xue was entirely aiming for various core technologies and material formulas. Once he got those, he could even design cybernetics himself.
Don’t think that’s absurd. It was the same as how if you couldn’t make seamless steel pipes, you couldn’t make a good gun; but if seamless steel pipes were provided, any fitter who had ever operated a machine tool could DIY a gun.
What Feng Xue lacked was the technology for four-star cybernetics. As for software, he had Old Jiang’s legacy, which could even handle five-star chips, so he wasn’t lacking there. But on the hardware side—whether chip design, special alloy formulas, or special functional expansions—every single one was knowledge he desperately craved.
The first thing to look at was the chips. Other materials could, at worst, be piled up from high-grade materials recycled out of the junk heap, but chips were truly hard to find in usable form. Feng Xue, who had already taken over the recycling business, could now understand the meaning behind Old Jiang’s original words: “What a damn waste.”
A complete high-grade chip suited to one’s needs was even rarer than legal braindance in the junk district, I tell you!
“There are actually seven kinds of chips… Too complicated. No time to interpret them. Record them first! Good thing my Ya Zi cybernetic eyes have a high frame rate!”
Feng Xue rapidly dragged through the pages, letting all kinds of information flash past his eyes like flowing water, even more exaggerated than the so-called quantum speed reading boasted about in his previous life. But the reflex speed provided by the Phantom Dragon Soul Type III allowed him to clearly see every word that flashed by, while the performance of the Ya Zi also ensured that the relevant content could be extracted from those fleeting thoughts and output into documents.
With the seven chips done, Feng Xue continued searching. Test data, structural designs, and the like were all skipped. Assembly procedures and corresponding parameters were of little use to a wild-road operator taught by Old Jiang like him. Automation plans, mold maintenance, precision quality control—core technologies that could be called the very foundation of a cybernetics factory—were even less necessary for someone with a cheat like him. Skipping all the way through, he directly turned into the formula section.
However, the several kinds of cybernetics produced here did not seem to be any special varieties. The special materials used consisted of only one F25 biomimetic silicone and three metal formulas numbered between 19 and 24. Aside from that silicone, which had reached the cutting edge, the rest were merely aerospace-grade materials from his previous life. But considering that what was produced here was, after all, only four-star cybernetics, having one material numbered 25 was already quite fortunate.
Compared to chip design diagrams, metallurgical formulas took up far more space, so Feng Xue’s recording speed slowed down. By the time he finally managed to record the formulas, he then turned to look at the special function components.
Compared to the previous two sections, the amount of data here was even more enormous. If chips and materials ensured the lower limit of a cybernetic body, then these functional components were the soul that distinguished one cybernetic body from another.
Ten minutes had already passed since Feng Xue was discovered, and the corporation’s security personnel could arrive at any moment. Fortunately, the biggest difference between production blueprints and design blueprints lay in the fact that the machining, assembly, testing, standing, and other procedures for each block were all listed independently. As long as he found content he was interested in, recording straight through would all be useful. There would be no trouble where he had to skip a section after recording a few passages, nor did he have to worry about long unbroken shots containing a large amount of useless footage. And even if he only read half of it, that still meant half the harvest.
Tactile-reflex independent macro-programming, joint self-locking insurance, muscle-coordination feedback plug-in…
Strings of text flashed through the Demonic Sword’s eyes, then were extracted by the cybernetic-eye function of his main body, packaged into files, and written into his brain drive. A joy of harvest spread through his heart.
But this ultimately could not last.
Although neither the Demonic Sword nor Feng Xue’s main body had found the slightest abnormality, Feng Xue’s intuition, which had grown increasingly sharp alongside his practice of the Sword of Hell, was issuing him a warning—
Something was approaching!
Although he very much wanted to read a little more, his reason told him that even if he were given a few more seconds, he still wouldn’t be able to finish this entire section. His gains were already considerable. Rather than reading a few more lines of processing procedures, it would be better to see whether he could make some affixes drop from this new enemy!
However, he did not strike immediately. He merely circulated the Sword of Hell in secret. Then, at the very instant he felt his vigilance soar to its limit, a long sword gleaming with cold light stabbed out from the back of his neck!
“Hell Sword in the Neck!”
“Clang!”
Sparks from the collision of metal flashed in the darkness. An almost completely transparent human silhouette appeared for an instant under the attack, then quickly faded away again.
Optical camouflage. And high-grade goods at that—not merely visual concealment, but even heat signatures and movement trajectories could be partially masked.
In fact, even when he opened the door and entered, there had not been the slightest flaw!