Chapter 170 The Hidden Pipeline

Chapter 170 The Hidden Pipeline

Eli stared at the flickering data stream on the screen, his eye twitching ever so slightly. He rotated the teacup in his hand half a circle, his fingers unconsciously rubbing against the slightly warm rough ceramic wall.

"Results?"

"System auto-restart took four point seven seconds." Marcus placed another cup of black tea at the corner of the desk, steam rising into a blurry mist under the fluorescent light. "Nearly half the time of a normal full initialization."

"Because years ago I bumped the emergency startup protocol to top priority. The goal was to let the base reorganize its defenses as fast as possible after taking tactical physical hits. Adam used the code I wrote into the base layer without any changes." Marcus paused, his eyes dark as water.

"But what if I wanted to turn it into a dead dog that could never get up again?"

The studio fell into several seconds of deathly silence.

"Then you'd need to strip the emergency startup protocol's trigger conditions from the physical layer within the same half-second as the power cut." Marcus reached out, tapping lightly at a faint holographic projection in the air. "That protocol's hardware interface is locked in a backup cabinet next to the main cooling system. That's a pure physical-layer disconnect—no digital remote control can touch it."

Eli set down his teacup, his ten fingers rapidly hammering out an extremely complex base-layer command on the mechanical keyboard.

The screen's light flickered violently as the circuit diagram of that backup cabinet was forcibly pulled up, the dense maze of neuron-like wire markings making the eyes swim.

Eli stared for a full thirty seconds, the red veins in his eyes especially fierce under the blue light:

"Where exactly is this cabinet located relative to the main cooling system?"

"East side." Marcus extended his withered palm, slicing horizontally in front of the screen. "Right against the back of the main cooling tower's high-pressure circulation pipes. If you want to physically cut it from the outside, you'd have to go through an extremely narrow base-level maintenance passage."

"How narrow?"

"A person can barely squeeze through sideways." Marcus's tone carried not a trace of warmth. "Wearing a heavy tactical vest or high-explosive equipment? Absolutely no way through."

Eli said nothing more.

His gaze slowly zoomed in and moved down the structural diagram, following the dashed-line passage hidden deep within the thick layers of walls, extending all the way down.

On the system's original blueprints, that passage was stamped with a dark red seal: Sealed · Not Recommended for Use.

If Marcus hadn't pointed it out in person, even the highest-precision base-layer AI comparing blueprints would automatically treat it as a section of dead architectural structure filled with concrete.

Eli didn't hesitate to screenshot it, heavily encrypt it, and drag it into a hidden folder.

"If I can work out the timing for this physical cut in the algorithm," Eli turned his head, his pupils condensed with piercing sharpness, "how confident are you that Adam hasn't modified that passage in these twenty years?"

Marcus set down his teacup, his gaze lingering for a long time on the dark passage marked with a red circle.

"He modified the main passage, modified the riot gates, modified the heavy encryption protocols." Marcus tugged at the collar of his tactical jacket, his voice cold as cast iron. "But he definitely hasn't touched that passage. Because in Adam's cognitive map, that passage simply doesn't exist."

Eli raised an eyebrow: "You never reported it to anyone?"

"No." Marcus stood up, pushing the empty teacup back to the corner of the desk. "That passage was a back door I prepared for myself twenty years ago during initial construction. In twenty years, I've never set foot in it once."

"What Adam sees in the blueprint database is just a block representing a sealed dead wall. But in reality, it's a mechanically sliding composite metal plate. Without the correct magnetic unlock position, it looks exactly the same as the load-bearing walls on either side."

Marcus strode toward the door, hand on the blast door handle, stopped and turned his head:

"Work out the plan. Then tell me the results."

Click.

The blast door slowly closed.

Eli sat alone in the swivel chair, the blue fluorescent light making his face look extremely stern. He stared at the lonely screenshot on the screen for a full three minutes without blinking.

A moment later, he suddenly spun around to face the main control panel, his ten fingers exploding like phantoms into an extremely dense bombardment on the keyboard!

Eighth simulation run, officially initiated.

This time, he completely overturned all previous cutoff logic—he set the physical separation time of the backup cabinet precisely at zero point five seconds before the main power cut!

Using this infinitesimal zero point five second window to forcibly format Adam's base-layer emergency response protocol!

The computer screen's calculation progress bar crawled forward like a dead gray line.

10%... 40%... 80%!

The third node warning box that had flashed blinding blood red in the seventh simulation now only shook violently for a moment, then calmed down at an extremely strange speed!

Sixty seconds later.

A prominent green bar suddenly popped up in the center of the screen: Pass.

Below it, a small line of text: No base-layer hardware anomaly detection triggered. System security response delay: 0.003 seconds.

Eli stared at that line of dead green text, his tense body seeming to lose all strength in an instant.

He slowly picked up the cup of black tea Marcus had brought, tilted his head back and took a large sip. The warm tea slid down his dry throat, forcibly pressing the bitterness and tension in his mouth into his stomach.

He set down the teacup, used top-level clearance to create a new subdirectory in the encrypted folder, and heavily typed out a line: "Passage Plan · Verified."

Eli stood up, his whole skeleton making tooth-aching cracking sounds.

Outside the window, the Mojave Desert sank into pitch darkness and deathly silence. At the end of the base corridor, orange-yellow emergency lights cast blurry and eerie halos.

He pushed open the door, walked through the silent corridor all the way to Jack's room door.

Knock, knock.

Two extremely light knocking sounds.

The blast door instantly retreated inward. Jack stood behind the door, wearing a figure-hugging dark gray tactical T-shirt, short hair messy, but those dark black pupils held not a trace of sleepiness, like a cheetah sleeping in darkness.

"New discovery." Eli got straight to the point.

Jack stepped aside, clearing a path.

Eli strode in, sat down on a heavy iron chair in the corner, directly flipped his phone screen around and pushed it in front of Jack.

On the screen was the structural diagram of that passage marked as "sealed."

"Marcus gave me a dead-angle blind spot that Adam definitely doesn't know about." Eli's voice was low but carried barely contained excitement. "It leads directly to the backup cabinet next to the main cooling system. If we can send someone to infiltrate from there and perform a physical forced cut, we can completely tear up Adam's emergency startup protocol. Then when both primary and backup power go down simultaneously, the whole system becomes a time machine waiting to die."

Jack lowered his eyelids, his cold gaze locked dead on that narrow passage line, silent for a full five seconds.

"You're certain it still exists?"

"The base's digital main database has no record of it. Marcus said it's a back door he left privately twenty years ago, should still be unexposed." Eli took back his phone. "But someone has to personally crawl into that passage and perform manual cutoff. The passage is extremely narrow, can't carry any heavy tactical load in."

Jack stood by the narrow skylight, faint moonlight outside spilling in, pulling a deathly light spot across half his face.

"Eli," Jack's voice was low and hoarse, "do you believe every word Marcus said?"

Eli's fingers trembled imperceptibly.

He was silent for a moment, then raised his head to look directly into Jack's eyes: "I believe every system parameter and technical detail he just provided. But about the man himself... I'm keeping half my guard up."

Jack gave no assessment.

He walked in front of Eli, pressed the phone face-down on the desk:

"Continue offline verification. After confirmation, list this route in the final battle's special infiltration contingency plan."

Eli stood up to leave. At the door, his steps paused and he turned back:

"One more thing. The monitoring node on Tomb's end... has had no data transmission for six full days now. I've checked repeatedly, the base-layer link is still connected, but there's no movement from his end."

Jack leaned in the shadows, eyes deep as wells:

"Either he's been completely suppressed in a dead corner by Kane's network patrol mechanism and can't move, or... he himself chose absolute silence."

Eli pressed against the doorframe, his expression somewhat complex:

"Which do you think it is?"

Jack didn't answer. Outside the window, fierce wind howled past, rolling up thousands of dust piles, obscuring the moonlight into complete chaos.

Eli let out a light sigh and pushed open the door to step out.

The corridor was empty and silent, his heavy footsteps gradually fading in the cold concrete passage, finally disappearing completely into the depths of low-frequency mechanical humming.

Only Jack remained in the room.

He slowly walked to the holographic map, looked at the dead coordinates representing the Arctic base, and heavily nailed down the location of that hidden passage with a gaze soaked in killing intent.

This hunt with no way back had finally fitted the last brutal piece of the puzzle.