80: Chapter 80 Empty Shell Base Attracts Attention from All Directions

He took a step forward and pressed his hand against the blast-proof glass, staring straight at the three-meter-tall humanoid in the arena that was still emitting continuous impacts, smashing the armor plates into metal fragments one by one. His lips parted, then closed again.

Finally, he turned back to look at Diana, his tone struggling to maintain the cold, aloof manner of a munitions aristocrat, but the heavy breathing from deep within his chest could no longer be suppressed.

Augustus took a step forward, staring from the observation window at the still-steaming fragments of armor plate in the arena. After several seconds of silence, he squeezed a sentence from the depths of his throat:

"12.7mm armor smashed by bare hands, whole-body bone density increased more than ten times, stretching from a normal physique to three meters in eight seconds... Diana, how many do you have?"

"Two. Two that Lord Zhang Long personally delivered."

Diana watched the tester in the arena, who was steadily entering the regression cycle with the help of the monitoring staff, then turned to face her two allies, her tone as steady as tempered steel plate,

"liquid zero can resurrect Musk, but so what if he's resurrected? We'll just tear him apart again once he's back."

"The Tech Faction gives them only a chance to live once more; what the Longevity Faction gives us is power at a crushing level that makes even their resurrection a waste of potion."

Sterling pulled his hand back from the blast-proof glass and straightened his suit cuffs, but the cold flame of excitement and suppression in his eyes did not extinguish.

Augustus slowly lowered his thick hands from his chest and rested them on the frame of the observation deck railing, saying in a hushed, strained voice: "When do we make our move?"

Diana turned to look at the half of the armor wreckage on the other side of the test field that had just been smashed by a few punches, her tone extremely calm: "Copy it first."

"As long as we can analyze even a portion of the components of these two vials, we can simultaneously deploy power augmentation and fire coverage in the next all-out assault."

"By then, no matter how much liquid zero Musk has, he won't be able to return to his base."

...

Hollywood Hills, detached villa.

Zhang Yi was curled up in an Italian leather sofa in the living room, and on the system interface in front of him, notification after notification of emotional value deposits was flashing.

The intense psychological fluctuation of Diana, from despair to ecstasy after obtaining the Behemoth Factor; the collective loss of composure of Sterling Remington and Augustus Knox in the test field as they watched that three-meter-tall giant shatter an armor plate with a single punch; the emotional shift of the elite soldiers under the three major military industrial giants, from skepticism to shock to fanaticism—all these fluctuations were like coins being poured into a piggy bank on the system interface, clinking and clattering non-stop.

The final balance settled steadily at 350,000.

Before he had time to enjoy the brief satisfaction brought by this number, another thought pressed down on his mind: there was one more big thing to take care of.

When he was assigning the task to Joshua, he had already had Joshua tell Musk personally: if you want to survive, you must find the secret base under the Hoover Dam.

Since the word had already been put out, this secret base had to exist.

If Musk went to great lengths to follow the clues to the end, only to find nothing but sand and bedrock under the dam, then the loophole in the entire script wouldn't be something that could be fixed for a few thousand emotional points.

Zhang Yi closed the system store, switched directly to the script modification interface, selected the Hoover Dam as the target coordinate, and then began to haggle with the system.

The system's initial quote was cold and cruel: 3.5 million.

The reason was sufficient: the scope of the modification involved a Level 5 reality structure, requiring the creation of a real research base out of thin air within the bedrock 150 meters underground, while also completing the entire chain of Level 1 and Level 2 evidence, including all matching architectural archives, engineering approval documents, and construction records.

Zhang Yi already had experience.

He directly cut the modification requirements for Level 3 personal memories and Level 4 collective memories; there was no need to modify anyone's memory of this base, only for the base itself to exist and for its paper records to be verifiable.

After removing these two items, the price dropped to 1 million.

But 1 million was still too expensive.

He only had 350,000 in total.

So he switched to a pragmatic approach he had practiced while haggling with market ladies, discussing it with the system: "The materials for this base don't need to be solid, no need for fine decoration, no need for any internal equipment or furnishings, clear everything out, just an empty shell."

The system was silent for a few seconds, probably the first time it had encountered a host proposing to build an alien secret base as a shoddy project, and then replied:

"If built according to the minimum structural strength standards, under the hydrostatic pressure and bedrock stress 150 meters below the Hoover Dam, the base will suffer structural collapse within six months."

Zhang Yi's response was almost instantaneous: "Half a year is enough."

Thus, the final quote was settled at 300,000.

Zhang Yi looked at the "Confirm Construction" dialog box that popped up on the system interface, his finger hovering over the confirm button for half a second.

350,000 minus 300,000 left 50,000.

Back when he had just transmigrated, he would have felt heartache for a long time if it dropped from 2,000 to 1,800, but now he understood that emotional points aren't saved; they are earned.

The wave of emotional points generated by Edward in the fishing cabin at Gold Lake was enough for him to buy ten Grey Alien eyeballs.

Once this base buried under the Hoover Dam was exposed, with all four sides clashing, that kind of overwhelming emotional fluctuation would allow him to recoup these 300,000 with interest.

His finger pressed confirm.

The system popped up the final input box: [ Please name the new script facility. ]

Zhang Yi thought for a moment and casually typed five characters: Warehouse 18.

He leaned back on the sofa, switched the system interface back to the monitoring screen, and the corners of his mouth curled up slightly.

The bait was set; now, he just had to wait for the school of fish to swim over on their own.

...

Texas, Boca Chica, Starship Base, encrypted communication room, four days later.

On the large screen in front of Musk were displayed data aggregated from five independent intelligence channels over the past 72 hours.

The leftmost column was the result of synthetic aperture radar imaging conducted by Starlink satellites at sub-orbital altitude on the area around the Hoover Dam; deep within the bedrock layer about 2,400 yards southeast of the main dam body, between the old Colorado River channel and an abandoned spillway, the radar echo showed a distinct hollow cavity with regular boundaries, roughly the size of a medium-scale industrial warehouse.

The middle column was the result of cross-verification by the SpaceX geological engineering team based on historical seismic waveform inversion data, confirming that the cavity was not a natural cave or an abandoned mine tunnel.

The rightmost column was a few incomplete documents he had extracted from the classified files left behind by Walsh; the documents repeatedly mentioned a secret base with a blacked-out number, and its location pointed almost exactly to the coordinates of the cavity.

He watched for a long time, continuously superimposing, switching, and repeatedly comparing the data sets on the screen, then leaned back in his chair, exhaled a long breath, and tapped the fingertips of his left hand on the desktop four times—a habitual action that only appeared when he confirmed that a certain engineering node had passed final verification.

"It is right there."

"The Hoover Dam has been feeding it hydroelectric power for fifty years since 1947. All the people who were silenced—Gore, Kramer, that reporter, the twelve Massachusetts Institute of Technology elites—were all because of it."

He stood up from the control chair, switched the encrypted channel to the Nevada direction, and the first sentence he spoke when dialing the contact skipped all pleasantries.

"There is indeed a secret base under the Hoover Dam."

"Starlink's synthetic aperture radar has locked onto its location; it's not directly underneath, but in the stable bedrock 150 meters underground, between the old spillway 2,400 yards southeast of the dam and the ancient Colorado River channel."

"I have already had the geological team perform repeated cross-verification using independent waveform data."

"I will encrypt these data and send them to you, but you had better sit down before opening them; the scale of this matter is much larger than what we inferred in the fishing cabin at Gold Lake."

Edward was silent on the other end for a few seconds.

Since founding the Long Live Alliance, he had never acted rashly without certainty.

But when he finished reviewing the encrypted files and weighed the gap between risks and rewards, his voice was deep and steady, without the slightest hesitation or wavering.

"I'm flying to Texas immediately."

"In this base, if we can find any clues to the next step mentioned by the Tech Faction, the Longevity Faction's pursuit of us will turn from a one-sided crushing into a predicament that can be broken."

"Elon, have people start preparing the equipment and personnel needed for the operation."

Musk nodded and gently closed the communication panel on the table.

He knew very well in his heart that this opportunity was not just about finding the secret base that Joshua spoke of to prove their strength, but also the only ticket for the Long Live Alliance to truly enter the Tech Faction's field of vision.

...

Los Angeles, Federal Bureau of Investigation Los Angeles Field Office, underground security room.

Philip Moran stood in front of the carriage monitoring screen that had been wiped repeatedly but still couldn't wash away the smell of blood, his olive-colored eyes bloodshot.

He had just received news from an undercover agent planted inside the Starship Base: there really was a secret base under the Hoover Dam; it wasn't some unfounded speculation from engineering corruption files, but a massive underground structure verified by space-grade radar and confirmed by geological data.

And Musk and Edward were gathering manpower, preparing to go down there themselves.

He read this intelligence briefly to the few remaining people beside him: Lewis Parker, Paul Rivera, and Michael Owens.

The carriage was silent for a few seconds.

Then Lewis pushed the magazine into the new service pistol in the box, and with a wry smile, said, "Besides, we're all people who have already died once."

Rivera chimed in, "Before the Deep State sends someone to make us "commit suicide with eight shots to the back," getting to see with our own eyes what alien secrets are buried down there—this life won't have been lived in vain."

Moran looked at them; he didn't applaud, nor did he give a pep talk.

He picked up a bulletproof vest from the chair to put on, stuffed magazines into his chest rig, his tone as hard as if he were giving a purely objective on-site evidence collection mission briefing: "Since we're going to die either way, let's not die on the side of the road."

"Let's go in and take a look at what that alien secret, which caused four generations of military industrial families to kill to cover it up, actually looks like."

The few stood up at the same time, each packing their own equipment.

Late that night, several unmarked vehicles drove out of the underground garage of the Los Angeles Field Office, heading toward Nevada.