Chapter 176: Atop the Tower of Babel

Chapter 176: Atop the Tower of Babel

"Professor Grant said this experiment needs you to work with me." Zack's voice was dry and flat, like reading out a diagnosis that had nothing to do with him.

Jack looked up at him, his deep pupils reflecting that pale but determined face. The silence stretched for a second.

"Not working with me," Jack lowered his voice, each word pressing into the air like heavy iron. "Together."

Grant's muffled, hoarse voice suddenly crackled through the speaker, breaking the dead silence: "You'll each enter the chambers on either side. I'll activate low-pressure overclocking stimulation, locked at exactly one-third of standard intensity. The focus is to observe whether the 'critical state' in a dual synchronous field will trigger genetic resonance and mutual activation."

After a half-second pause, Grant added heavily: "If the data shows that Zack's collapse sequence is forcibly brought into sync by your critical state, it could greatly widen his nearly locked genetic stability window. But that's just theoretical—more likely, nothing will happen."

Jack pushed open the frost-covered chamber door on the left and settled into the cold hydraulic seat.

At the right chamber door, Zack's movement lagged half a beat, but without any hesitation, he stepped in, turned, and closed the door behind him.

Hiss—!

Both sealed hatches slammed down simultaneously. The rubber seals made a low, piercing inflation sound under extreme pressure, completely isolating the two men in narrow, confined metal coffins.

"Begin." Grant's voice came through the sealed headphones.

The pressure wasn't a violent impact but like a deep-sea current at high tide, silently pouring out from gaps in the steel plates on all sides, swallowing up skin inch by inch.

Jack closed his eyes, lowering his breathing rate to freezing point, letting every taut muscle in his body completely relax.

He could feel it—the amber-gold energy inside him that once surged like a mighty river was now flowing along the newly constructed stable framework, tamed and precise, through his blood vessels and nerve endings.

Then, in the boundless void, he sensed Zack.

It was an extremely weak echo, like a dying sound from a distant frozen plain. In the direction of the right chamber, the genetic chains in Zack's body, already barely holding on, were trembling violently at an extremely dangerous frequency, like a lonely boat on raging waves unable to find an anchor, blindly and desperately broadcasting distress signals in all directions.

Jack didn't hesitate for a second.

He slowly released the stable control inside his body, letting that steady energy from his "critical state" spread through his limbs, then toward the right chamber wall, he sent out a synchronization pulse with extreme precision and gentleness.

"It's happening! Mutual activation effect!" At the control console, Grant's voice suddenly changed pitch, his eyes bloodshot. "Zack's genetic collapse curve has been forcibly flattened! Jack's energy output... my God, he's actively lowering his own frequency to match Zack's gaps!"

Aaron pressed himself against the blast-proof glass, his eyeballs nearly bursting through the lenses: "This isn't one-way radiation infection... he's using his own physiology to build a shared field! They're breathing at the same frequency!"

Five minutes later, the inflation valve roared, high-pressure gas sprayed out, and both hatches retracted simultaneously to either side.

Jack stepped out of the chamber, flexing his slightly numb wrists. The sensation hadn't drained his energy—instead, it felt like a previously blocked underground river had been completely opened, making his entire body function more precisely and coldly.

When Zack walked out of his chamber, his steps were noticeably heavier.

He stood under the cold light, dazed, looking down at his own hands—those once grotesquely crisscrossed pale pink scars were being smoothed and crushed at their edges at a visible rate, reconstructing into normal skin texture.

He suddenly looked up, staring hard at Jack: "What did you do to me?"

"I don't know." Jack's voice held no ripple. "I just felt... you had to stand with me."

Grant clutched the freshly printed report, walking down from the control console step by step. His expression was extremely complex—the shock of witnessing a miracle mixed with the weight of glimpsing fate's heavy shackles.

"Your critical state energy... has driven an 'anchor' deep into Zack's genes." Grant's voice was heavy enough to drip water. "This isn't healing, it's forced suppression. The core chromosomes in him that were accelerating toward death are now locked in their collapse process by your field. But this lock isn't permanent—it requires you to continuously provide close-range field resonance."

He snapped the report shut, his gaze sweeping back and forth between Zack and Jack: "This means... as long as you're alive, he can't die. However long you live, that's how long he can hold on."

The air completely froze in that instant.

Zack slowly raised his head. In those eyes that had been covered with death ash and resolve, for the first time appeared a trace of extremely pure, even somewhat relieved light.

"That's good then." Zack spoke softly, the corner of his mouth pulling into an extremely faint arc. "At least I don't have to wake up every day worrying about when I'll suddenly crumble into a puddle of mush."

Jack stepped forward, stopping heavily in front of him.

"You can go to the Arctic with me now." Jack stared into his eyes.

Zack didn't answer. Only the low-frequency whoosh of airflow in the ventilation ducts remained in the air.

"But you have to promise me," Jack's voice dropped extremely low, each word like a knife stabbing into the frozen plain, "come back alive. Not barely holding on until the last second—come back with me completely intact."

Zack's jaw tightened, the corner of his mouth lifting into a blood-tinged arc.

"This life of mine," Zack said hoarsely, "already belonged to you years ago."

He slowly raised his right hand, palm up, suspended in the cold air between them.

Without any hesitation, Jack extended his broad, calloused palm, fingers spread, then closed heavily, pressing his palm against Zack's palm.

Warmth merged between the cold skin. The instant Zack pulled his hand back, his fingers unconsciously curled slightly, trying to hold onto that remaining trace of heat.

Then without another word, he turned and walked toward the depths of the corridor. Heavy boot sounds gradually faded in the empty hallway.

Jack stood in place, looking down at his own palm. There still remained a trace of warmth—Zack's living heartbeat and body heat.

Grant leaned against the control console, saying in a low voice: "His collapse rate has been slowed by at least 40%. But this is just borrowing your lifespan and energy to forcibly prolong the inevitable..."

"I know." Jack cut him off.

He turned and walked out of the experimental chamber, his steps steady as iron.

In the dim corridor, two sets of footsteps, one ahead and one behind, like two parallel lines destined to converge on the frozen plain, briefly collided at the corner, then each extended toward the pitch-black unknown.

That night, after lights-out at Mojave Base.

Jack sat on the edge of his bed, the cold phone screen projecting a ghostly green square in the pitch-black room.

A message from an unknown ID but with Eli's old-style encryption verification code sat quietly in the inbox, just one cold line:

"I'm ready. Are you?—T.M."

Jack stared hard at those three letters, his fingertip hovering on the screen for a long time.

He didn't reply, just slowly shut down the terminal, tossed the phone on the table, and lay down in the deep darkness.

Four days later, early morning.

Eli's workshop was suffocatingly oppressive. To completely minimize interference from external electromagnetic waves, he had cut all non-essential power. The entire room had only one main display screen emitting a ghostly glow in the semi-darkness.

In the center of the screen, an extremely primitive, weak low-frequency signal monitoring channel was wriggling with an extremely gentle waveform—this was the last umbilical cord remaining between him and Tomb in this world.

Since the six military core server rooms were completely cut off from power, Tomb's signal frequency had dropped to the valley floor near death.

But that link hadn't broken. It was like a thread hidden in the void, tightly tied at both ends.

Eli had been staring at it in the same position for a full forty-eight hours. His eyeballs were bloodshot, dry as if cut by knives.

He was waiting for a moment that would inevitably come.

3:17 AM.

That previously dead waveform suddenly jumped violently!

Green dots traced a familiar rhythm on the dark screen: short, short, long, short.

But the packet size that immediately followed made Eli's pupils instantly contract to pinpoints—1.98 GB.

This wasn't an ordinary command or text fragment—this was a behemoth capable of detonating the entire network!

Eli's fingers, almost driven by muscle memory, hammered the keyboard frantically. Building a one-way mirror channel, confirming source IP—still that abandoned backup server that had long been marked as "completely offline" in Kane Corp's system.

Download, cut link, force format cache, overwrite with random code.

The entire perfect escape sequence took less than twelve seconds.

When the screen completely fell silent, Eli slumped heavily against the chair back like someone drained of strength, his back drenched in bone-chilling cold sweat in an instant.

It wasn't because of the tension from twelve seconds of rapid operations.

It was because in the instant the data stream broke through the firewall, he clearly saw the shell structure of that data packet.

It was a brand new, extremely complex forbidden encryption algorithm.

But he would never mistake that underlying logic—it was the ultimate lockdown format that, years ago when he first intercepted Tomb's signal at the Black Gold Base, he had spent three months and even used military-grade computing power without being able to crack even a fraction of it.

And now, Tomb had personally inserted the key into the lock and completely opened it.