83: Chapter 83 Extraterrestrials Are Not Fiction, Illusions Create Mystery

Hollywood Hills, a detached villa.

Zhang Yi reclined on the sofa, the system interface in front of him updating with the incoming emotional value figures in real-time.

After Warehouse 18 was built by the system,

Diana, Sterling, Augustus, Musk, Edward, Moran, and Heinlein... the four major factions had each confirmed the existence of that giant cavity beneath the Hoover Dam through different channels.

Each side was busy mobilizing troops, and the emotional fluctuations generated were densely calculated in the system backend, ultimately adding 100,000 points to his account.

Added to the 50,000 remaining from before, his balance returned to 150,000.

But he was in no mood to stare at that number right now.

On the system interface, another surveillance screen held his undivided attention.

It was a real-time perspective of Solomon Crane that he had stumbled upon.

In the footage, an eighty-five-year-old white-haired man stood in the center of a laboratory with a silver alloy door embedded deep underground, in front of a transparent tempered glass container.

Inside the container, a cockroach-like Alien corpse was submerged.

Compound eyes, chitinous shell, multiple limbs, tattered wings, all floating vividly in the pale yellow low-temperature tissue preservation fluid.

Zhang Yi set his coffee cup on the coffee table, stared at the screen for nearly half a minute, then slowly leaned back against the sofa, his lips twitching several times.

Finally, he uttered a very soft sentence, unsure of what tone he should even use.

"Wait... the Roswell UFO crash I fabricated is fake."

"That was just a script setting I copied from Alien conspiracy theories to trick Edward and his staff into overthinking and self-correcting."

"How is there actually an Alien corpse buried in the Nevada desert?"

He rewound the footage on the system interface to the shot of Solomon standing in front of the glass container, paused, zoomed in, and looked carefully at the cockroach-shaped Alien's compound eyes and the adhesive pads at the ends of its limbs.

The details were too rich; it wasn't system-generated, it was real.

He closed his eyes for a few seconds, then opened them and looked at the screen again, his tone shifting from absurd self-mockery to a calm, analytical scrutiny.

"So this world has had Aliens all along."

"It wasn't something my script conjured up; it existed to begin with."

"A UFO really did crash in 1947, the Solomon Crane family really has been reverse-engineering Alien corpses, and they really have been controlling the Lighthouse Country from behind the scenes..."

"I didn't write any of this, but it has been the foundation for everything that has happened here, from start to finish."

He shook his head,

"I traveled here, picked up a Fabrication and Manifestation System, and wrote a script about a Extraterrestrial Visitor, only to find that part of this script wasn't fabricated—it actually happened."

"Those conspiracy theories I stumbled upon, that look in Link Warren's eyes in that underground garage, the trembling fingers of Edward on the armchair by Gold Lake..."

"They didn't believe because they were stupid; they believed because this world was already buried with enough evidence to make them believe."

He switched the system interface to the Crane Capital network data overview on Solomon's side:

Three thousand offshore accounts, four hundred shell companies, from peripheral Federal Reserve banks to defense contractor mergers, and infiltration lists of military budget approval committees across three different presidential terms.

Then, he compared it one by one with the text records, old photos, and shoddy base engineering projects he had manually fabricated over the past few months.

150,000 emotional points.

A few high-spec androids.

A few pairs of ion gloves and tractor gloves, plus some rented props—compared to the other side's total resources, it was truly a drop in the bucket.

"The real and the counterfeit."

"If I tried to go head-to-head with Solomon's real army with 150,000 emotional points, the counterfeit would be lucky to just get beaten into the ground by the real thing."

"But to make people afraid, you don't necessarily need to have real strength."

He started browsing the system store and finally filtered down to one item:

[Heaven and Earth Illusion, 2 million points.]

[Can create any illusion within a radius of 100 miles, all fabricated by the user's imagination.]

[Anything within the illusion can be perceived by radar, infrared, and various electronic sensors, but it is an illusion; you pass right through it if you touch it.]

He definitely couldn't afford to buy it.

He switched to the rental page, selected three hours, and it only cost 100,000 points.

Then he spent another 5,000 points to buy a high-spec nano-bionic construction unit, spent another 5,000 to buy a second one, and molded two Men in Black.

He spent another 7,500 points to rent three pairs of directional tractor gloves, and another 7,500 points to rent three pairs of ion suppression gloves, all for one hour.

After a few operations, his balance of 150,000 was whittled down to only 25,000 points,

But as he looked at the coordinate point labeled "Warehouse 18" on the system map, the corners of his mouth still curled up slightly.

He opened the illusion editing interface and swiped his fingers through the void.

Illusion coverage: 100-mile radius, enough. Duration: 3 hours, enough.

He assigned a pair of blue gloves and a pair of black gloves to Zhang Long and Joshua, respectively, and assigned a pair of gloves to each of the four Men in Black.

These six androids lined up in the system inventory, each marked with assigned weapons and illusion association permissions.

He set the deployment time, then leaned back on the sofa again, tapping his fingers lightly on the armrest.

...

Nevada, 2,400 yards southeast of the Hoover Dam, the old spillway entrance.

Before the Colorado River was diverted, this spillway was the dam's backup flood discharge channel. It had been abandoned for nearly half a century; the concrete walls were covered in cracked moss and weathered rust.

At the entrance was an arched iron gate half-buried in gravel.

The chain on the gate had long since oxidized to the point that it would break with a gentle tug,

The passage behind the gate sloped down into the ground, pitch black inside. Only the dry, cold wind blowing through the gaps in the gate carried the scent of metallic rust, something that didn't belong to natural rock strata, from deep within the tunnel.

Musk stood in front of the iron gate, holding a portable synthetic aperture radar terminal. The outline of the hollow cavity on the screen perfectly overlapped with the entrance tunnel.

He ripped off the iron chain on the gate, which had rusted into powder, glanced back at Edward, then said nothing, pushed the door open, and walked in with his tactical team.

Edward stood at the entrance for a moment, arranged the few Retainers he had brought on both sides outside the gate to stand guard, and then followed with the remaining armed personnel of the Warren Family.

The tunnel extended downward for about 300 feet with a gentle slope. The walls were poured with early concrete, and every so often there was an emergency light that had long since gone out.

Then the concrete suddenly stopped,

Replaced by a section of smooth, flat bedrock. The rock surface bore spiral wear marks left by some kind of large excavation equipment.

At the end of the passage was a huge alloy door. A rusted metal nameplate was nailed above the door frame, with a few words spray-painted on it: [Warehouse 18].

The door was not closed.

The gap between the two alloy door panels was wide enough for three people to walk in side-by-side.

Musk stood at the doorway, looked up at the nameplate, focused his breath and gaze on that combination of numbers and letters, and then whispered to himself:

"Warehouse 18... there really is such a place under the Hoover Dam."

"The hydropower that disappeared during those fifty years from 1947 to 1997 was drunk up by this place."

Edward stood beside him, his gaze sweeping over the open alloy gate into the empty darkness inside. His tone was extremely low, but unusually calm:

"The door is completely open."

"Normally, the security level of such a secret base should be automatically sealed and locked. In this situation, there is only one explanation."

He paused, tightened his jacket zipper up to his collar,

"Everyone has already left. This place has been cleared out."

Musk didn't respond.

He gestured to the tactical team behind him, and a dozen people quickly split into three groups and entered the gate from different directions.

Behind the door was a huge atrium-style space, with a ceiling height of at least thirty or forty feet.

The floor was bare industrial concrete, and above, every so often, there was a row of old-fashioned fluorescent tubes that had long since gone out.

The empty air was filled with the smell of dry construction dust that hadn't circulated for decades.

The first room they entered seemed to have been an office area.

Several rows of dense desks were overturned in crooked plastic partitions.

Drawers had all been pulled out and piled in the corner, and the floor was scattered with shredded paper and flattened metal folders.

Several tactical team members scanned the room with portable spectrum analyzers to confirm there was no hidden power source or electronic residue.

Everything of value had been cleared out.

But that kind of "moving" didn't look like a planned headquarters relocation:

Drawers weren't packed, files were stuffed haphazardly into incineration bags and then spilled all over the floor, as if someone had left in a hurry in a very short amount of time.

After pushing deeper,

One of the tactical team members found a stack of discarded, tattered papers from behind a pried-open filing cabinet.

Musk took the stack of papers, squatted down, and flipped through a few pages on the spot.

The white light of the portable tactical flashlight hit the yellowed, brittle paper. The edges of the paper were charred, but most of the content was still legible.

It was a three-page raw data form for physical property tests. The prefix of the number in the upper left corner was [18-δ/Reverse Stress Value].

The metal fatigue curves listed in the table did not follow the thermal expansion specifications of any alloy known to humans.

The handwritten notes repeatedly mentioned "Eutectic solidus anomaly" and "Composite anti-corrosion coating must be extracted from the original remains."

When mentioning "original remains," the handwriting consistently used the singular nominative case. On a narrow, long drawing next to it that had been torn and pieced back together, six initial survey points pointing to the same non-human landing gear were detailed.

Musk turned over the last photocopy, and a curved fragment, grayish-white and as thin as an eggshell, was stuck to the back.

He brought the flashlight close to take a closer look and found that this was not an eggshell, but a fragment of a skeleton model of a Grey Alien. The combined structure of the jawbone and joint socket was clearly identifiable, but the entire model had been smashed on the ground with force, leaving only a piece of the maxilla connected to half an eye socket that could barely be pieced back together.