Chapter 176 Building Roads Under the Ice

Chapter 176 Building Roads Under the Ice



Morrison pressed the communicator against his ear, frozen in the hallway, unable to move.

The white-haired doctor stood up, walked over to Morrison, and lowered his voice to say something the others couldn't hear.

"If the patch is still active, then Wayne's brain hasn't stopped functioning."

Morrison's head snapped up immediately. "Say that again."

"The patch doesn't have its own power source. It runs on the bioelectric signals from Wayne's nervous system. Once those signals stop, the patch becomes nothing but scrap metal."

The white-haired doctor flipped over the monitor in his hand and pointed at the data readout.

"But right now, it's still providing Jenny with a stable gene-lock maintenance waveform."

How stable?

"More stable than when Wayne was manually holding the button in the hospital room."

Morrison gripped the communicator so tightly his fingers turned bone-white.

"He's under three thousand meters of ice. The entire structure collapsed. How could a human brain still be functioning?"

The white-haired doctor didn't answer, because he himself had no answer to give.

When Isaac spoke through the communicator, his pace had returned to normal, but every word carried a crushing weight, as if something had been compressed to its breaking point.

"I've run another scan of all the nodes in the global Abyss Network. I've detected an extremely faint life-signal source beneath the ice in the North Arctic collapse zone."

Morrison pressed the communicator to his ear. "Coordinates."

Can't pinpoint it exactly. Signal strength is only three ten-thousandths, but the frequency signature matches the E-7 chip perfectly.

Rivera had just finished a call and came hurrying down the corridor from the other end, his footsteps leaving a trail of urgent, heavy thuds.

"Morrison, the Arctic monitoring station just reported that the temperature at the collapse center is rising."

"By how much?"

"From negative seventy-three Celsius to negative sixty-eight Celsius, and it's still climbing."

The white-haired doctor jumped in immediately. "If core body temperature still exists, that means metabolism hasn't completely stopped."

Morrison turned to Rivera. "Has the rescue team arrived?"

The first airborne unit will touch down in forty minutes, but the collapse zone is massive, the ice structure is unstable, and heavy equipment can't reach the center.

Morrison slammed his fist into the wall, as if he wanted to tear through the ice with his bare hands.

Rivera said, "Three thousand meters of ice. Without equipment, there's no way up."

The hospital room door swung open.

Emily stood in the doorway, holding the edge of a monitoring wire attached to the patch on Jenny's chest.

She was gripping it so tightly her nails had broken the skin of her palm, but her voice remained steady.

"The patch just lit up."

The white-haired doctor's first response: "What color was the flash?"

"White light. Exactly the same as when Wayne pressed the patch on Jenny's chest before."

Morrison and the white-haired doctor locked eyes. The doctor grabbed his monitor and ran into the room, placing the probe against the marked spot on Jenny's chest.

Three seconds later, he stopped all movement.

"The waveform changed."

Morrison asked again, "Better or worse?"

"Stronger. Output power increased by twelve percent." The white-haired doctor set the device on the bedside and turned around.

"A dying man's brain doesn't send out increasingly stronger signals."

When Jenny rolled over in bed, she pulled Emily's hand with her, murmuring, "Daddy, it's warmer."

Emily went still. Jenny was gripping her hand, trembling all over, but she wasn't crying.

Morrison stepped out of the room and spoke into the communicator. "Isaac, use whatever means necessary to lock down that signal source."

"Running triangulation now, but I need at least two ground relay stations to coordinate. Fastest estimate is ninety minutes."

"Ninety minutes is too long."

Isaac was silent for two seconds. "I can use the sonar array deep in the Russian Arctic research station, but I'll need Rivera's authorization."

Rivera made the call.

After forty-seven minutes of flight time, the first wave of rescue personnel dropped from the sky fifteen kilometers outside the collapse zone.

Isaac used the borrowed sonar array to scan the ice surface, continuously transmitting data back to his terminal.

Morrison didn't sit down. Throughout the entire rescue operation, he stayed glued to the communicator.

"First sonar echo detected," Isaac said. "There's a spherical cavity at the collapse center, approximately twelve meters in diameter, twenty-eight hundred meters beneath the ice."

"What's inside the cavity?"

"Sonar can only detect the shape of objects, not internal structure."

"But thermal imaging satellites picked up an anomalous heat signature in that area. Temperature reading: thirty-four degrees Celsius."

Morrison's breath caught. "Body temperature."

Two degrees below normal, but still holding.

The white-haired doctor came out of the room just as this was happening, and the data Isaac sent appeared on the tablet in his hand.

Thirty-four degrees indicates deep sleep—metabolism at minimum levels—but the body's major organs haven't stopped functioning.

Morrison grabbed the doctor's sleeve. "How long can he last?"

If this were an ordinary person at thirty-four degrees Celsius under three thousand meters of ice, they'd already be dead. The white-haired doctor turned the tablet around so Morrison could see.

"But he's not human. The E-7 chip activates self-preservation mode under extreme conditions."

"What mechanism?"

Shuts down all non-essential functions, maintaining only the brain, heart, and other basic life-support systems.

The white-haired doctor drew a curve on the screen. "It's like hibernation. Life activity drops to bare minimum, but consciousness hasn't completely faded."

How long can it last?

"No precedent to reference, but judging by the patch's increasing output power, his condition is actually improving." The white-haired doctor looked up at Morrison.

The communicator crackled again.

Isaac's voice came faster than before. "Rescue team reports the ice outside the collapse zone has stopped collapsing, and the ice inside the zone has started refreezing."

"What do you mean, refreezing?"

"The shattered ice from the collapse is regrouping and forming new ice-layer structures. And these new layers are converging inward toward the cavity."

Morrison frowned. "Is this a natural phenomenon?"

Isaac's answer was immediate. "No. The consolidation rate is four hundred times faster than normal freezing, and the ice crystals are arranging themselves in perfect order."

The white-haired doctor jumped in. "Ordered arrangement—that's the hallmark of anti-resonance protocol controlling molecular structure."

Morrison's hand dropped from the wall. "He's using whatever power he has left to make the glacier close back up."

The white-haired doctor corrected him. "Not closing. Building."

"Building what?"