Chapter 175 The Lock of the Investiture of the Gods List
Chapter 175 The Lock of the Investiture of the Gods List
At the same time, the intelligence room at the other end of the base was like a deep-sea island swallowed by deathly silence.
Five high-resolution monitors burst with cold, ghostly blue light in the half-dark room, casting shadows across Erin's face after nearly twenty straight hours of work. Her eyes were bloodshot, yet her pupils still gleamed with the sharp intensity of a hunting dog despite extreme exhaustion.
The work desk was messily covered with over a dozen pages of handwritten notes, their edges marked in glaring yellow, red, and green highlighter.
Billy the "Merchant's" tangled black money flows, the rigid and brutal communication frequencies from the "Warden's" interrogation records, and the fragmented data captured from Tomb's backdoor system—these three seemingly unrelated dark currents slowly converged in the void, finally twisting into a chain pulled deadly tight.
Erin's fingers hovering over the keyboard suddenly froze.
Her breathing stopped for a second. She yanked out one coffee-stained note and shoved it hard under the main screen. The tablet camera emitted a crisp scanning sound, red light sweeping across, seamlessly overlaying the deduction diagram on paper with the data network on the screen.
Two seconds later, the analysis window popped up with a striking blood-red result: 98.7% match.
Erin shot to her feet. Her knee hit the table corner with a dull thud from maintaining the same position for so long, but she felt nothing.
She strode to the wall in a few steps. The entire wall was covered with dense red lines, black arrows, and pinned photos, like a massive spider web. In front of the core blank node labeled "Ghost," she pulled off the cap of a black marker.
The tip scraped across the whiteboard with a harsh scratching sound.
She lightly drew a question mark, then without hesitation smeared it with thick black ink into a heavy solid circle. Next to the circle, she carefully wrote out that name, stroke by stroke:
Tomb.
The ink gleamed darkly under the cold light. Erin stepped back, staring hard at that name.
So that's it.
"Ghost" wasn't some intangible AI at all, nor was it a specific person. It was a growing "information hub," a virtual ghost that had to be maintained around the clock by a top-level operator.
All the Apostles' money trails, bloody orders, killing assignments—they all converged here, then were precisely distributed to dark corners around the world.
And the one wielding this scepter as "Ghost" was Tomb.
Three years ago, when she first intercepted that code through the backdoor, she thought it was just Kane Corp's advanced encrypted channel. But data doesn't lie—that account wasn't just transmitting information, it was "calibrating."
The instructions sent to each Apostle—tone, punctuation, timestamps, even tiny grammatical habits—were all meticulously disguised and adjusted. He was single-handedly forcing the entire massive criminal network to maintain its integrity and stability.
Erin slammed the marker down on the desk and sat back in her chair.
Her fingers hovered above the keyboard, the air seemingly frozen.
What exactly was Tomb? He betrayed Kane Corp, feeding deadly intel to Gray and Eli; yet at the same time, he was working day and night maintaining the Apostle network, playing the role of "Ghost."
This wasn't wavering, nor was it betrayal. He was using himself as a fulcrum, maintaining some twisted balance on the cliff edge between light and darkness through extremely brutal methods.
Erin flipped open a yellowed old notebook—it was Tomb's early behavioral patterns.
His encryption habits had changed. Now, whenever he sent "real intelligence," the encryption level was absurdly high; but in "instruction-type" communications, he added what seemed like an unnecessary verification step.
That wasn't a flaw—it was a deliberately left umbilical cord.
He was silently shouting to the outside world: I'm here, come find me.
Erin's gaze grew cold, and her fingers finally pressed down heavily on the keyboard.
Tap, tap, tap.
The crisp keystroke sounds echoed like cold rifle volleys in the deathly silent intelligence room. She created a new top-secret document and typed three words dripping with killing intent in the title bar:
"封神榜" (The Kill List)
Then, in the first line of the body, she typed her cold conclusion:
"All Apostle crimes confirmed fully linked to information node 'Ghost.' Recommendation: Use Tomb 'core' as final detonation interface, full network sweep. Cost: Tomb's remaining humanity will be completely eliminated. But I suspect he's already preparing for this."
Every word cut like a knife.
After finishing the last line, Erin leaned back heavily in her chair as if all her strength was drained. She tilted her head back, the cold fluorescent tubes casting white light in her pupils.
A few seconds later, she sat up straight again and at the very bottom of the encrypted report, in the most basic text format, typed a note without any anti-tracking measures:
"Tomb, if you're watching. This game—you call it."
She hit [Send]. The command pierced through the Mojave base's layers of firewalls at light speed, heading straight for Eli's terminal.
Having done all this, Erin simply cut power to all five monitors. The dazzling blue light instantly died, and the room sank into deep darkness. She neatly stacked the handwritten notes recording forbidden secrets, bound them with a rubber band, pulled open a drawer, pushed them to the very back, and locked it with a "click."
The small coffee maker in the corner let out one last muffled gurgling sound, its indicator light went out, and it automatically powered off.
Erin walked over, tilted the pot, and poured out the last half cup of black coffee that had long gone cold and bitter.
This was a card that, once played, would instantly tear the global Apostle network to shreds—and push Tomb completely into the abyss.
She raised her hand and lightly tapped the ceramic cup rim with her slender index fingernail.
Ting—
A crisp, lonely sound rippled through the darkness.
"Fine then," Erin muttered to herself, her voice as light as a sigh, "I'll make the moves in this game. You finish it."
Three days later, early morning.
The light inside the Babel Tower experimental chamber was dimmer than usual, like the final afterglow after sunset.
Jack stood barefoot in the center of the chamber. Unlike the violent energy release three days ago, he was now calm as a bottomless dry well. That layer of amber-gold glow no longer floated on his skin's surface but had completely settled into his muscles and marrow, radiating an suffocating pressure at an extremely weak yet extremely constant frequency.
Across from him stood Zack.
Zack wore the same dark gray training uniform, his frame a full size more solid than when he was first brought back to the base. Those ugly scars that once spread like poisonous vines beneath his skin, intertwining and crossing, were still hideously visible, but the color had faded from a worsening dark brown to a fragile light pink, the tearing sensation at the edges replaced by an eerie smoothness.
But Jack wasn't looking at his scars. Jack was looking straight into Zack's eyes.
In those eyes flickered a certain light.
Jack knew that light too well. Years ago in the "Dark Blade" squad, when Captain John Miller fired the last magazine and, knowing certain death lay ahead, still chose to turn alone and ram the enemy armored vehicle—his eyes burned with exactly this kind of calm and resolute light.