Chapter2

When the glaring light of the interrogation room hit my face, I was closing my eyes, silently counting the ticks of the digital clock on the wall. "Stop your hacker tricks, Arthur." General Wilson's finger pressed against the trigger, his knuckles turning white from the tension. The temperature in the Defense Bureau's underground interrogation room was constantly kept at sixteen degrees Celsius. The chill of the metal chair seeped into my bones through my tactical suit. I was already used to it—in my previous life, I was locked up here for forty-seven days. By the time they finally believed the doomsday prophecy, three coastal provinces had already been lost, and seven million people had been turned into shredded meat inside the abyssal rifts.

The giant digital clock ticked silently on the wall. 00:00:03. "You hacked the early warning system and fabricated data." Wilson stepped forward, pressing the gun barrel harder against me. "I can shoot you right now. Who do you think your tricks will fool? Our tech team is tracing your intrusion path. Ten minutes tops, they will lock onto the fake logs you planted." I didn't look at him. My gaze went over his shoulder, staring at the giant screen above the main console. The screen was playing the last satellite footage before Platform One lost contact—the deep black seawater was churning like boiling magma, and in the tumbling bubbles, a massive dark-green silhouette was breaching the surface. "That is not fabricated data, Wilson. Before your technicians tear open my hard drive—"

00:00:01. "Pull the trigger," I smirked slightly. "If you don't want to see what comes next." 00:00:00.

Red strobe lights replaced the glare of the incandescent bulbs. The air raid siren blared for the second time, sharper than the last—because it came directly from the Defense Bureau's own strategic warning system. The entire underground base shook violently, the metal walls humming with resonance. The radar interface on the main screen crashed. After a flash of static, it forcibly cut to the top-secret surveillance footage of Drilling Platform One.

A dark-green osseous exoskeleton covered the entire massive body, over thirty meters in length. Three pairs of compound eyes refracted a cold light under the searchlights. When the Tier-3 Xenocore Beast leaped out of the water, the water column it dragged up surged fifty meters into the air. The entire drilling platform tilted violently like a toy gripped by a giant hand. In the surveillance footage, the Defense Bureau's heavy tactical squad gathered on the deck. The tracer bullets spewing from heavy machine guns wove a dense net in the night sky. The bullets hit the exoskeleton, sparking a series of faint flashes. The Xenocore Beast's giant claw swept across—three special ops soldiers in heavy body armor were snapped in half at the waist. Blood instantly splattered across the camera lens. Screams exploded from the audio channel: short, shrill, and abruptly silenced.

Wilson's service pistol slipped from his trembling hand. The crisp sound of metal hitting the floor was exceptionally clear in the dead-silent interrogation room. He stumbled backward, knocking over the metal chair behind him, and fell to the ground, his eyes still glued to the monster tearing at the deck on the screen. "Cut the feed! Cut it now!" he roared. The operator's hands pounded frantically on the keyboard, but the screen did not respond. Cold sweat dripped down the operator's temples. "I locked the channel," I stood up, the alloy handcuffs on my wrists clinking sharply. "Until you finish watching, no one can turn it off. Wilson, do you believe me now?"

Elena took a deep breath and strode up to me. She took out the keys, her hands trembling uncontrollably. The metal clinked three times in the interrogation room before she finally inserted the right key into the keyhole. With a click, the handcuffs fell to the floor. I rolled my aching wrists and walked straight to Wilson. I grabbed him by the collar of his uniform, roughly dragged him aside, and strode toward the supreme master console. My fingers rapidly typed a thirteen-character override code on the encrypted keyboard. I had spent three months in my past life reverse-engineering this sequence from the data wreckage of the ruined Defense Bureau. The cost was the lives of twenty-seven technicians and two trucks of ammunition. Now, it granted me seventy percent access to the entire national strategic defense system within thirty seconds.

The blood-stained drilling platform footage disappeared, replaced by a highly detailed national topographic map. New red dots were constantly lighting up along the coastal areas on the map—potential eruption points of abyssal rifts, marked through a cross-verification of my past-life memories and current satellite data. Twenty-two of them. Seven more than in my previous timeline.

"See this?" I turned around, leaning both hands on the console, my gaze sweeping over everyone present. Wilson, Elena, three staff officers, two tech supervisors, and a deathly pale communications officer. "Twenty-two abyssal rifts. Five of them will erupt within three days. The exoskeleton of a Tier-3 Xenocore Beast is six times harder than titanium alloy. Its movement speed is one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour. A single one can slaughter a standard battalion. And this is just the appetizer." I pulled up a set of data bought with rivers of blood by the military in my past life. The screen switched from the Tier-3 Xenocore Beast to Tier-4 and Tier-5. Their sizes doubled, the bony barbs were denser, and the energy cores in their chest cavities looked like miniature suns on the satellite thermal scans. "In thirty days, two hundred million of these monsters will surge from the rifts in the major oceans. Two hundred million. Twenty-five percent of the global population. And our current military arsenal could not stop even a ten-thousandth of them."

Gasps echoed in the briefing room. "If you want to live, initiate the Scorched Earth Plan immediately." I swiped heavily across the screen, circling all coastal and plain cities into a deep red zone. "Abandon these areas and cut off all outer supply lines. Concentrate resources in the central region and use the entire nation's power to build the Gravity Barrier." Wilson finally scrambled up from the floor, his voice as hoarse as sandpaper scraping against iron: "Gravity Barrier? That is just model data from the theoretical physics lab. We do not even have a prototype—" "You do." I opened a hidden folder and pulled up an encrypted blueprint. "Underground Research Facility 3, Project Titan. Initiated twelve years ago by the Defense Science Academy, costing forty-seven billion, frozen due to energy consumption issues. Unfreeze it now. Use the coastal nuclear power plant cluster as the power source. They will be submerged in thirty days anyway."

Wilson leaned closer to the screen, his pupils shrinking sharply. He recognized that blueprint—twelve years ago, he was one of the mid-level review officers for that project. "But I need one person," I continued. "Herman Wade, Chief Engineer of the Third Tech Division. He has a patch for the core algorithm. Without it, the barrier's energy shield will have a 1.7 percent fluctuation window. Marcus has already made a preemptive move and controls him." "Marcus? Your partner?" "Yes. He has built an armed fortress in the West District Blackstone Prison, thinking he can play king with that ragtag militia and his past-life memories. Let him keep dreaming."

Elena frowned: "What about the civilians on the coast?" "No time to worry about them." I interlaced my fingers, cracking my knuckles. "Execute the order immediately. Anyone who stands in the way will be shot on sight for treason." The room fell silent for three seconds. Wilson slowly stood up, straightening his back. "I will sign," he said. "But I need you to promise me that the barrier will hold." "It will hold the first wave." I looked straight into his eyes. "I am still figuring out a way for the second wave. But at least we survive the first one, Wilson." He picked up the pen from the desk and signed the combat zone mobilization order. The sound of the ink bleeding into the paper was one of the most melodious sounds I had ever heard.