Chapter 173: Extreme Overclocking

Chapter 173: Extreme Overclocking



Then Wayne's left eye suddenly flared with pain.

It wasn't from the blue light—a dark shadow appeared at the edge of his vision, then vanished, like his brain had short-circuited.

Without the patch, the E-7 chip would be suppressed, and the neural load would increase accordingly.

When the fifth and sixth Evolved lunged at him together, he could still react.

After beating one half to death, he tore the other open from the waist.

But his speed was 0.03 seconds slower than before.

In normal combat, that wouldn't matter. But when enemies kept coming endlessly, 0.03 seconds meant the interval before the next attack had shrunk.

The eleventh Evolved's fist struck Wayne's ribs, causing three abrasions.

Before, that punch never would have touched him.

When Wayne's fist slammed the Evolved to the ground, its grayish-white brain matter spilled out and shattered across the ice.

On the forty-second encounter, Wayne took his first heavy hit.

A fist struck his left shoulder. His collarbone snapped—the crack echoed across the silent ice field.

Wayne didn't retreat. Instead, he drove forward, his right hand piercing through his opponent's chest, ripping out both heart and spine.

But his body tilted left—his left shoulder could no longer support him.

The ice cracks widened. More gray bodies crawled up from below, with no sign of stopping.

Wayne's breathing grew ragged. Each exhale brought traces of blood. Another shadow crossed his vision.

This one lasted 0.4 seconds.

Within those 0.4 seconds, three fists hit him simultaneously.

Two struck his abdomen, one his kidney from behind. The impact sent Wayne flying four meters back, his feet carving twin grooves in the ice.

He steadied himself and spat out a mouthful of dark blood, flecked with destroyed organ tissue.

The patch wasn't adhering to his skin. The neural signals in the E-7 chip were approaching critical threshold at 3% per second.

When it reached critical mass, every blood vessel in his brain would rupture.

But if he slowed the processing speed to survive, he couldn't keep up with the Evolved's attack rhythm.

Only two choices: keep running at full speed and burn through his brain in minutes, or slow down and get torn apart by these things.

Wayne grabbed his opponent's head with his right hand and twisted hard, splitting the skull in two.

But at that moment, his left leg buckled involuntarily.

Not from external force—there was a 0.2-second delay in the neural signals to his left leg.

When the brain bore too heavy a workload, its fine control over peripheral nerves began to fail.

Wayne braced his right hand against the ice and stood. Dark red blood streamed from his nostrils, mouth, and earlobes.

The Evolved in front of him stopped attacking.

Not from fear—they'd received new orders.

All the gray bodies stepped back five paces, forming a ten-meter clearing around Wayne.

Then a voice came from beneath the ice.

Beyond sound waves, it entered Wayne's brain directly.

"The descendant of that experiment from twenty years ago is far more interesting than I imagined."

Wayne spat dark blood onto the ice but said nothing.

"Your nerves will burn out completely in another forty seconds. After that, you'll just be a cold corpse."

A gray-blue glow appeared beneath the ice layer, and the temperature rose three degrees Celsius in the frigid environment.

"The anti-resonance protocol Griffin gave you isn't some secret. He only did it to buy time."

Wayne sat up and looked toward the sky—pitch-black polar night now, no stars or moon.

"You're standing alone on my territory now. No satellites, no missiles, none of your people."

After a brief pause, the voice continued: "Kneel. Give me the part of your brain that contains the E-7 chip and the anti-resonance protocol secrets. Let me survive to see my child."

Wayne finally spoke. "How many years have you been under the ice?"

"I asked you how many years." Wayne wiped the dark blood from his face. "How long have you been squatting on this planet?"

"Three thousand four hundred years."

Wayne nodded. "Humans three thousand four hundred years ago had never seen the sun. And now you're asking if I know what humanity is?"

Light filtered through the underground ice layer.

Wayne crouched down and picked up a broken bone fragment from one of the Evolved, weighing it in his hand.

His left eye went dark again—three times. Fresh blood ran down from behind his ear to his neck, sending a sharp pain through his collarbone.

But his body remained upright.

"You gave me two choices. Now I'll give you two."

No sound came from beneath the ice to interrupt him.

"First, you crawl out from under that ice right now and talk to me face to face."

Wayne drove the broken bone into the ice layer below, fifteen centimeters deep, leaving it standing upright.

"Or I dig down myself."

The thousands of surrounding Evolved stepped forward again, shrinking the perimeter to eight meters.

The voice returned, but the tone had changed.

"Your body's already falling apart. What are you going to dig with?"

Wayne didn't answer.

His right hand moved to the burn mark on his right side, where there was a small port containing fiber optics.

He inserted his finger inside.

The white-haired doctor would've lost his mind on the spot, because the result of doing this was—

Without any buffer, he plugged his finger directly into the E-7 chip's physical interface.

No patch intermediary—he could control it now, could pour bioelectric signals straight in.

Wayne's body shook violently, not from pain, but because after removing the patch—

All processing units lost their governor, so his brain took direct control.

His synaptic density quadrupled. Processing speed hit 100%.

His left eye was no longer blue—it had turned white.

White light blazed from his left eye socket, flooding the ice within ten meters with radiance.

The thousands of Evolved retreated three steps.

Blood poured from Wayne's nose, mouth, ears, and under his fingernails—black blood—but his stance was steadier than before.

With his brain fully unleashed, all peripheral nerve control precision returned to optimal levels.

He knew clearly this state couldn't last.

Three minutes at most. After that, his brain would burn out completely, leaving him a corpse.

Wayne pulled the bone fragment from the ice and walked forward several steps.

Tens of thousands blocked his path. But there was only one man, three minutes of time.

A third voice came from beneath the ice. Compared to the first two, this one carried a trace of urgency.

"You can't drill through three thousand meters of ice in three minutes."

Wayne didn't need to personally break through the ice to complete his mission. His goal was to force his opponent to come up.

The anti-resonance protocol Griffin had buried in his neural network years ago didn't just provide defense.

At full power, it could accomplish what the White-Robed Lord had once done.

Control molecular structures of matter.