77: The entire building lost power! He took control of the city in the darkness.

"Tinnitus."

The intense ringing in his ears made Golden Tooth feel like his brains were boiling.

After the six-thousand-rounds-per-minute metal storm ceased, the silence left behind was more soul-crushing than the gunfire.

The smell of blood, so thick it felt sticky, mixed with the acrid scent of burnt gunpowder, drifted into his nostrils, causing his stomach to convulse violently.

Trembling, he touched his face and then his chest.

No bullet holes, no pain.

"Ha... ha..."

Golden Tooth gasped for air, and the initial blank stare in his eyes gradually regained a glint of cunning.

He realized the other party hadn't killed him immediately surely because they hadn't gotten that Sea Chart yet.

This was his chance.

He lay prone on the ground.

His body curled into a ball from extreme fear and the coldness of his recent incontinence.

He looked like a fat pig that had completely given up resistance.

But under the cover of his loose silk dressing gown, his pudgy right hand was quietly inching toward a hidden compartment at the bottom of the coffee table.

There was a red mechanical button there.

It was a hard-wired alarm, independent of the Cloudtop network.

As long as it was pressed, the Level 3 Combat Alarm for the entire Floating City would sound.

Three thousand Mutual Aid Society thugs stationed on the lower floors,

along with the attack helicopters on the helipad, would surround this place so tightly that not even a drop of water could leak out within five minutes.

"Good hacking skills... but that's all."

Keeping his head down, Golden Tooth cast a vicious sidelong glance at the young man who was wiping a black box.

You can indeed hack these few autocannons, but can you hack thousands of assault rifles? Can you fight an army?

Once the alarm sounds, even if it's with a mountain of corpses, we'll bury you here!

His fingertips finally touched the cold red button.

At that moment, the fear on Golden Tooth's face turned into a hideous ecstasy.

"Go to hell, you bastard!"

He roared in his heart and pressed down with all his might.

*Click.*

It was the crisp sound of the microswitch being pressed all the way down.

Golden Tooth's face turned beet red, the veins on his neck bulging.

He stared intently at the hidden compartment under the coffee table, waiting for the ear-piercing shriek of the alarm.

Waiting for the red signal light that represented a vast army to turn on.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three seconds.

Dead silence.

No alarm, no flashing red lights—not even the feedback light on the button itself lit up as it should have.

It was as if he hadn't pressed a switch connected to the entire city's defense network, but rather a piece of dead wood.

"This... how is this possible..."

Disbelieving, Golden Tooth let go and then frantically pressed it several more times.

The "click-click" sound seemed exceptionally harsh and comical in the silent hall.

"Don't bother."

Jiang Ran's voice sounded flatly; there was no mockery, just the statement of a physical fact.

He remained standing where he was, not even moving a finger to stop Golden Tooth's actions.

But deep within his originally pitch-black eyes...

...a circle of extremely subtle, high-frequency flickering, ghostly blue data rings was spinning madly.

[System Module Loading Complete]

[Mechanical Resonance: Full-Scale Expansion]

In Jiang Ran's vision, the world had changed.

The luxurious Cloudtop Palace vanished, replaced by countless crisscrossing lines and glowing nodes.

The walls became translucent grids, and the heavy floor turned into a void of data.

He saw clearly.

Within the red copper-core wire connected beneath the button, a faint current was attempting to rush out of the room to activate a relay downstairs.

But the moment that current rushed out of the room, it was directly "swallowed" by the more domineering blue data torrent that was omnipresent in the air.

That wasn't a hack; it was a deeper level of physical takeover.

At this moment, this hundred-story skyscraper was no longer an inanimate object of steel and concrete in Jiang Ran's eyes.

Though it had no life, it now had a "breath" in Jiang Ran's mind.

He heard the rustle of electron flow in every cable within the walls and sensed the hum of every servo motor on standby.

He even saw the complex energy transmission network of the entire building, resembling a system of blood vessels.

Wherever current flowed was an extension of his nerve.

Any domain of mechanical operation was his absolute home field.

Jiang Ran tilted his head slightly, and through those blue-glowing "God's Eyes," he looked at the massive and complex circuit diagram of the entire city beneath his feet.

A cold arc curved at the corner of his mouth.

"Since you like playing with switches so much..."

Jiang Ran looked at Golden Tooth's hand, which was frozen on the button, with an indifference akin to teaching a child:

"Then let me teach you how to turn things off a bit more thoroughly."

He raised his slender right hand and snapped his fingers again in the dead silence.

*Snap.*

This crisp sound wasn't loud, yet it was like an invisible pair of sharp shears, instantly severing the main artery of this steel behemoth.

“Zzz—hum...”

It was the characteristic, heart-palpitating long hum of high-voltage current being cut off.

The next second, a visual spectacle arrived.

The priceless giant crystal chandelier overhead didn't even retain a trace of afterglow, extinguishing instantly.

Simultaneously, the wall lamps in the corridors, the indicator lights in the elevator shafts, the green lights of the security system... darkness, like a burst dam, poured down frantically from the Cloudtop Palace.

L99... L80... L50... L10... If one were to look from outside the Floating City, they would see a hair-raising sight:

The skyscraper that towered over the water, usually brightly lit like a lighthouse...

...was as if its throat had been instantly throttled by an invisible giant hand.

In just two short seconds.

All ninety-nine floors and tens of thousands of lighting fixtures went out at once.

The "Cloudtop," which had just been magnificent and god-like, was instantly swallowed by boundless darkness.

Even the roar of the central air conditioning and the spinning of the ventilation fans came to a dead halt at this moment.

The massive steel jungle turned into a silent black tombstone.

Just like that, it stood silently amidst the neon-lit wasteland night.

In the darkness, only Golden Tooth's heavy breathing, born of extreme fear, could be heard.

It echoed in the enclosed space, sounding exceptionally wretched.

In that absolute darkness that seemed capable of devouring everything, Golden Tooth could see nothing.

He could only feel his heart pounding violently in his chest, each beat accompanied by a surge of cold sweat.

He had become blind.

But this darkness did not last long.

"Hum—"

From above, that hair-raising sound of servo motors operating came once more.

Immediately after, six crimson beams of light lit up in the pitch-black space.

Those weren't lights. They were the laser fire-control sights of the six Scorpion autocannons.

They were the only light source in this darkness, like six red eyes from hell.

They interlaced and cut through the air, tracing lethal geometric paths. Finally, all six red lines converged on a single point.

Golden Tooth's face.

Between his eyebrows, his left eye, throat, heart, lower abdomen... his expensive silk dressing gown was covered in red spots representing death.

In the darkness, he was like a specimen imprisoned by red light, not daring to move.

"Still want to call for backup?"

Jiang Ran's voice rang out in the darkness.

With all background noise gone, his voice sounded ethereal and cold, with a texture like metal rubbing together.

It produced a slight echo in the empty hall.

Golden Tooth rolled his eyes in terror, trying to find the source of the sound, but behind the crisscrossing red laser net, there was only endless black.

"The communication base stations for the entire building have been fused, the backup power is cut, and even the electronic gates in the ventilation ducts are locked tight."

Footsteps slowly approached.

Those eyes, flashing with ghostly blue data, flickered in and out of sight in the darkness like a predator cruising in the deep sea.

"Forget your army of thugs; right now, not even an electronic fly can get into this building."

Jiang Ran stopped in front of Golden Tooth, looking down at the fat man covered in red light.

His tone was as calm as if he were pronouncing a law of physics: "I said, for now... these hunks of iron listen to me."

All lingering hope was completely shattered in this absolute darkness and by the six red lasers that refused to let him go.

Golden Tooth was also someone who had climbed up from the bottom; he had seen countless ruthless people and killed countless opponents.

But he had never seen an existence like this... one that simply could not be explained by common sense.

Seizing fire control with a word, paralyzing an entire skyscraper with a snap of his fingers. This was simply not something a human could do.

In this wasteland ruled by metal and current, the young man before him was a walking deity.

"I... I'll open it... don't kill me... please..."

Golden Tooth looked as if his spine had been removed, not even bothering to wipe the shameful wet stain on his crotch.

He scrambled on all fours like a literal fat dog.

Under the glare of those red lights, he crawled tremblingly toward the massive mahogany bookshelf in the corner of the hall.

With trembling hands, he pushed aside the bookshelf, revealing the cold titanium alloy wall behind it.

There was a complex biometric panel there.

"Beep... Fingerprint error."

Because his hands were shaking so badly, he pressed it incorrectly twice in a row.

Feeling the tangible killing intent behind him intensify, Golden Tooth was scared out of his wits.

He slapped himself hard, forcing his hand to steady.

He pressed his sweat-slicked thumb onto it and then leaned in for an iris scan.

"Click—hiss—"

Accompanied by the heavy sound of the airtight valve releasing pressure, the half-meter-thick circular alloy vault door slowly rotated open.

A stale scent, a mix of paper and oxidized metal, wafted out.

By the light of the vault's independent emergency lighting,

one could see it was filled with the "family fortune" Golden Tooth had frantically scavenged over the past twenty years.

Cases of pre-war gold, rare isotope batteries in sealed tubes, antique calligraphy and paintings, and various precision prototype components rarely seen even on the Ark... Golden Tooth slumped at the vault's entrance, looking back with a sweat-drenched face. He gazed with eyes full of near-supplication at the figure standing in the darkness:

"It's all here... everything... is all here..."

Jiang Ran stepped forward, his gaze sweeping over the priceless treasures as if he were inspecting his own warehouse. His tone was flat:

"Since it's all here, let's not let it go to waste."

"Dr. Su, prepare to move."