67: Chapter 67 Thunder Appears, Hundreds Fall

Musk remained silent for a long time after listening to these three reports.

He told Link, Strauss, and Irene to stay in the experimental area to continue their work, while he pushed open the airtight door of the experimental area and walked along the corridor toward the encrypted communication room at the end of the second basement level.

The door closed behind him, leaving the room with only the screen array, a dedicated encrypted headset, and the meeting room in the east wing of an old brick building at Spring Mountain Manor in Nevada, which was projected onto the data screen on the front wall, where Edward Warren was sitting alone.

Musk slowly recounted to the screen the origin of liquid zero, the results of the limb regeneration, and the entire process of him personally cutting off his own left hand, before adding one final sentence:

"The Deep State has the complete corpse of a Grey Alien."

"The dose I tried myself was nothing more than scraps they extracted from an eyeball."

"Just imagine, what else have they obtained from organs like the heart, liver, spleen, lungs, and kidneys?"

Edward remained silent on the other side of the screen for a moment.

Then, a faint ripple of emotion, not quite fear but close to it, emerged from the silence on his face, which was usually as steady as a slab of stone.

"What we can obtain now, the Deep State has been researching for nearly a hundred years since the 1947 Roswell Incident; they have more of it, and their research goes deeper than ours."

He said, pushing a stack of magnetic markers on the desktop to the side, resting his elbows on the table, and leaning forward to send his voice through the encrypted fiber optics from Spring Mountain Manor,

"Now that we have obtained the eyeball, we are already considered targets that must be eliminated."

"Since it's death either way, we might as well die with a bang and play our hand of liquid zero as an open card."

"Let them know that what they have, we have too."

Musk's brow twitched slightly, and he crossed his hands in front of him, as if he were using his usual engineering deduction logic to quickly run through all the potential branches of this suggestion.

"How do we play it?" he asked.

"Hold a press conference at the Starship Base and announce that you have developed a drug," Edward said,

"Don't say anything about limb regeneration; just call it eternal youth, anti-aging, something that can turn back the body's biological clock."

"They will know what it is once they hear it."

Musk dragged his chair forward half a foot, leaned forward, and asked with a hint of confusion in his tone:

"How many days have we been researching this? The Deep State has been at it since 1947."

"Their technology is superior to ours; that's what you said."

"If we jump out now and shout 'We also have liquid zero,' isn't that a declaration of war? They will come to silence us."

"Before we have the green reagent, they will certainly come to silence us." Edward picked up the water glass on the table, took a sip, then looked into the camera and continued, unhurriedly,

"But now that we have liquid zero and the ability for limb regeneration, they won't come to silence us; they will come to negotiate."

The wrinkles on Musk's brow did not smooth out, but he did not interrupt.

"What is it that those people fear the most?"

"The birth of a new world, the emergence of a brand-new social system, will sweep all the old vested interests into the dustbin of history."

"And this tube of liquid zero in our hands is the key to unlocking that new world."

"As long as this liquid preparation is in our hands, those people won't dare to push us into a corner."

"Because if they push us too far, we just have to make the information public, and they will go down with us."

"The social order they control beneath the surface simply cannot withstand the shock of the secret of immortality being completely exposed."

"So now, they have no choice but to sit down and talk."

"We don't have many cards in our hand, but with this one, it's enough."

Musk turned his newly grown left hand over and placed it on his knee, palm up, fingers slightly spread, and then looked up again.

"I understand what you're saying now; the press conference itself is not the goal; it is merely a signal trigger point set off in advance."

"But since we have already decided to use the 'eternal youth' narrative, why not use something more aggressive?"

"Limb regeneration is showing our cards directly, letting them know exactly what we have obtained."

Edward shook his head slightly.

"Because since their strength is greater than ours, it is better not to tear off the mask of civility before the negotiation."

"Claiming limb regeneration is a direct slap in their face, equivalent to telling the whole world that the Deep State has been hiding longevity technology for nearly a hundred years, and now we have it too."

"Their secret is no longer a secret, and this forces them to play a zero-sum game with you."

"But saying 'eternal youth' is different; it is merely a hint, not an outright revelation."

"Since it hasn't been spelled out, the exit ramp remains there."

"As long as the exit ramp is there, they will climb down it to negotiate."

Musk was silent for a dozen seconds, then slowly pressed his newly grown left hand onto his knee, closing his knuckles one by one.

He stood up and nodded slightly to Edward on the screen.

...

Inside the tent, Zhang Yi stared at the image on the system interface.

Musk and Edward's remote video call had just ended, and Edward's impassive face still lingered on the screen of the encrypted communication room.

He froze the image and then remained silent for a moment.

Logically speaking, Edward's calculation was extremely precise.

If the Deep State really existed, before they intended to make liquid zero public, the Deep State would certainly send people to their door to silence them.

And Zhang Yi's trouble was:

The Deep State did not exist, but he had to make the Deep State exist.

In other words, he had to spend money again.

He had just burned over thirty thousand emotional points at the Arizona manor to subdue Diana, and before he could even catch his breath, Musk was urging him to fill in the next act.

It would be strange if he were in a good mood.

However, he thought about it again,

The emotional points generated after Musk and Edward were shocked by this wave of operations could also help him recover, so it wasn't a total loss.

Moreover, last time at Casablanca Manor, the scene was laid out on a large scale,

A spaceship, two Grey Aliens, two Men in Black, plus Zhang Long—the full five-piece set was deployed to completely subdue Diana.

But this time, facing Musk, the situation was different.

Musk was a science fanatic, not a military-industrial tycoon; talking about grandeur with him was not as effective as talking about logic.

A lightning strike, one person, a one-on-one deep conversation—this was more effective than a grand scene.

Therefore, the investment in props this time could be precisely reduced.

He spent 2,500 emotional points to buy a high-spec nano-bionic construction unit,

Molded a blond, blue-eyed young man with a handsome face and sharp, restrained eyes, and named him "Joshua."

Then he spent another 2,500 points to rent an "Ion Suppression Glove" for an hour, and 2,500 points to rent a "Directional Traction Glove" for an hour.

A total of 10,000 points, controlled to save two-thirds compared to the last scene with Diana.

He locked the deployment coordinates of Joshua to the second basement level of the Texas Starship Base, right in the center of the encrypted communication room, and then clicked confirm.

...

Texas, Boca Chica, Starship Base, second basement level encrypted communication room.

Musk had just taken the encrypted headset off his head, Edward's image disappeared from the screen, and only the low cooling hum of the server units remained in the communication room.

He leaned back against the back of the swivel chair, turned his newly grown left hand over to look at the palm, and was just about to get up to arrange the workflow for the liquid zero press conference,

Then thunder came from above.

A dull, crushing roll of thunder, not coming from any direction on the ground, but directly penetrating the dozens of feet of reinforced concrete and rock layers overhead,

In the enclosed space of the second basement level, it made the panels of the server cabinets buzz.

The second basement level! This was the second basement level!

Musk's hand stiffened on the armrest of the swivel chair for a moment, then he immediately pressed the red emergency button on the wall.

Before the alarm could sound, the lightning arrived first.

A blue-white thunderbolt, from the very center of the communication room ceiling, penetrated the reinforced concrete without any obstruction, leaving a scorching smell of ozone in the air,

And then, less than three meters in front of Musk, it condensed into a young blond, blue-eyed man wearing a dark suit.

He wore a black glove on his left hand and a blue glove on his right hand.

The residual light of the thunderbolt wandered on the surface of the gloves for half a second before dissipating, as if it had never existed.

And on the ceiling, the cross-section of concrete penetrated by the lightning had edges as smooth as if cut by a laser, without even a single crack spreading out.

Musk stood up from the swivel chair, his movements not slow, but when he stood up, his left knee bumped against the edge of the table.

It was not that he lacked composure, but the visual effect of a living person turning into a thunderbolt and striking down from the ceiling exceeded any physical phenomenon he had dealt with in his decades-long engineering career.

He looked at the young man in front of him,

His brain, in less than a second, rapidly scanned all the cutting-edge technology prototypes he had ever seen:

Magnetic levitation, low-temperature superconductivity, directed energy and particle beams...

None of them were sufficient to explain the action that had just occurred.

Then he withdrew his hand from the edge of the table, his voice a notch lower than usual, but unbroken.

"You are a person who can walk out of a thunderbolt."

"You are not any kind of technological product on Earth..."

"You... you are from the Deep State!"

At this moment, the emergency response system activated by his pressing of the red button had already started.

Hundreds of fully armed tactical personnel flooded into the second basement level from three entrances,

The muzzles of M4 carbines and XM7 assault rifles pointed simultaneously at the center of the communication room.

Their captain, a former SEAL Team Six non-commissioned officer named Brick, crouched at the front with his weapon raised and issued the first tactical warning to Joshua.

"Hands on your head, get on the ground, now!"

However, Joshua did not even turn his head.

His gaze remained fixed on Musk, his eyes so indifferent that it was as if only the two of them were in the room.

When he spoke, his tone was unhurried, carrying a hint of undisguised sarcasm:

"Elon Musk, do you think that with the liquid zero you've obtained, you are qualified to sit down and negotiate with the Deep State?"