203: Chapter 204 Biological Ship

Accompanied by the rolling of the clouds,

a behemoth reflecting blinding golden light under the star's rays slowly descended.

Lin Li stood in the snow, his neck craned, staring blankly.

The overall shape of this massive spaceship resembled a perfect spindle.

At the very front of the ship, there was even a pair of massive bony mandibles resembling those of a stag beetle.

Just looking at this flashy, golden exterior, one couldn't see even a trace of the disgusting, slimy, purplish-black genetic markers of the Tyranids.

As the ship descended, it hovered a hundred meters above the ground.

Lin Li was finally able to see more details on its surface.

On the sides of the thick golden carapace, protruding secondary gun carapaces shaped like the weeping faces of the Ecclesiarchy were neatly arranged.

At the bottom and front of the ship, there were also very obvious, massive closed seams.

Lin Li rubbed his chin. "This thing... why does it look a bit like an oversized scarab beetle from Earth?"

*Hiss—*

A wide ramp made of biological muscle fibers and alloy lowered from the bottom of the ship.

Makabazi led several core players of the Bear Ridge Legion down the ramp, their faces filled with pride.

"My Lord!"

Makabazi excitedly rubbed his hooves together and reported loudly,

"Allow me to proudly introduce the first living flagship vessel built by the pooled funds and life savings of our Bear Ridge Legion—the golden armor!"

Lin Li walked around the ramp, clicking his tongue in wonder.

Makabazi looked extremely excited as he rambled on about the ship's origins:

"The underlying cellular genes of this ship do indeed come from that captured Tyranid frigate. However, for the external deconstruction and armored skeleton, we asked Big Sister Stone Man Hong for help and directly performed underlying genetic recombination and editing!"

"We referenced the active armor design of heavy-carapace insects on Earth and induced genetic mutations in its epidermal cells, causing it to grow a specific golden bulletproof cuticle and those weeping face patterns. The final result is what you see now! Cool, right?"

Lin Li nodded, having to admit that these players had incredibly wild imaginations.

"Exactly how big is this thing?" Lin Li asked.

Makabazi held up four fingers:

"The overall length is exactly four kilometers! It's as big as the Tyranids' Vanguard Hive Ship!"

Lin Li was taken aback. "Four kilometers? Holy crap, where is there an incubation sac big enough to fit it?"

Makabazi smirked smugly and chuckled:

"Hehe, that brings us to our legion's pioneering larval growth tactical design!"

"Simply put, those incubation sacs initially hatch only a very small ship embryo. Once the embryo takes shape, we drag it to the surface. Then, like a normal insect, we let it continuously consume massive amounts of nutrient solution and organic matter, causing it to grow and expand wildly outside the sac!"

Speaking of this, Makabazi looked relieved.

"Fortunately, our Shelter's technology is advanced, and we've developed that industrial technology for synthesizing starch from air. Otherwise, just to feed this four-kilometer ship to its full size, the daily consumption would have driven our entire legion into bankruptcy! Uh, I'm getting off track."

"In short, once the ship's larva eats enough to grow large enough, it begins to undergo metamorphosis, growing this golden hard shell and finally transforming into an adult living warship like this!"

After hearing this process,

Lin Li couldn't help but marvel in his heart:

"That is so freaking awesome! They actually developed a gameplay style of raising larvae like raising insects!"

But marveling aside, Lin Li immediately raised a very practical technical question:

"Even though this thing is biological, with such a massive deadweight, how on earth does it fly off the ground? I looked at its tail for a long time just now and didn't see any thruster nozzles for a nuclear fusion propulsion engine."

Just then,

Stone Man Hong also arrived on the surface.

Her expressionless silver eyes looked up at the golden armor in the sky as she calmly resolved Lin Li's doubts:

"Creator, allow me to answer this question for you."

Hong stepped forward, holding a datapad in her hand.

"Simply put, we discovered and extracted a special biological organ from the Tyranids' original gene pool. This organ possesses a levitation effect similar to an anti-gravity engine."

"However, its working principle is not like our Golden Age technology, which generates thrust by expelling high-temperature electromagnetic working fluids backward."

Hong paused for a moment, seemingly organizing her words.

"This biological organ directly utilizes the gravitational web of other large celestial bodies around it by altering its own mass field to perform a very bizarre gravitational traction flight!

As for the specific physical principles of how it alters its mass field, my current equipment is temporarily unable to fully analyze it."

Lin Li only half-understood, but he was deeply shocked.

"Whether it's a white cat or a black cat, as long as it can fly, it's a good cat!"

Lin Li waved his hand, no longer dwelling on those profound laws of physics.

He turned back to Makabazi and asked, "So what is the weapon configuration of this biological ship? It can't be that with such a huge body, it only relies on that pair of mandibles in the front to do melee rams, right?"

"How could that be! Boss, just watch! Let me show you!"

Makabazi raised the PV device on his wrist and shouted loudly to the operators inside the ship:

"Everyone, to your stations! Deploy all of the golden armor's external weapon systems immediately!"

Along with the order,

the thick carapace on the surface of the massive golden ship in the sky began to writhe violently!

On both sides of the ship, the four rows of square outer armor engraved with weeping faces slowly flipped outward and opened, like gun ports on a castle wall.

Inside, hundreds of massive biomass cannons with shocking calibers, currently secreting highly corrosive acid, were exposed!

Immediately after,

the smooth golden carapace at the bottom of the ship also peeled open to both sides,

revealing a vast array of deep, dense holes resembling a hornet's nest.

Clearly, these holes were specifically designed to deploy individual drop pods to the ground, or to launch those reckless kamikaze assault ships!

And that wasn't all.

At the very front of the ship, in the middle of that pair of massive bony mandibles, accompanied by the writhing of muscle groups,

a main-cannon-grade giant maw with an intimidating caliber, glowing with an eerie green light, was slowly pushed out!

In addition, over a dozen tube ports specifically used to launch high-explosive biological torpedoes popped out of the ship's back.

Looking at the behemoth in the sky that had instantly turned into a porcupine, Lin Li couldn't help but gasp.

"Holy cow, this is a freaking flying fortress! Armed to the teeth, literally."

Makabazi became even more proud, patting his chest as he said:

"Not only is the firepower fierce, but Boss, the outermost layer of this ship's golden carapace alone has a physical thickness of dozens of meters! Its internal structure also mimics the composite armor design of ceramite, mixing bone, muscle, aerogel, and various other composite materials! Its durability is absolutely top-tier!"

"Of course..."

Makabazi cleared his throat twice and revealed the ship's only shortcoming:

"The only drawback is that this thing flies way too slowly. At full speed, it's even slower than those obsolete defense boats of the Imperial Navy."

Lin Li nodded, expressing his complete understanding.

"That's only normal."

Lin Li patted the old ox's shoulder.

"The laws of physics are fair. It's impossible to create a perfect all-rounder. High HP, high defense, fierce melee and ranged firepower, and fast movement? There's no such free lunch in the world. I'm already very satisfied that you guys could mold it to this level."

"With this living warship, we'll have an ultimate meat shield with an incredibly deep health pool in future space battles!"

After inspecting Gouxiongling's golden armor,

Lin Li then took a detour to visit the open-air shipyard established by the Scourge Legion.

The entire shipyard was filled with soaring flames.

Countless heavy robotic arms were busy welding and assembling ship parts produced by the Matter Constructors.

It could be said that with the addition of the World Forger,

the players' space warship assembly line had basically taken shape.

Various heavily modified destroyers and cruisers were being launched in rapid succession.

Lin Li didn't bother to inspect those cookie-cutter steel ships one by one.

He boarded sea breeze no. 9 directly and returned to the main base's Shelter control room, where he began reviewing the development reports submitted on the forums by various legions over this period.

Since the newly added five hundred thousand newbie slots had been continuously coming online during this time,

the total number of players in the entire Spark Alliance had now skyrocketed to an astounding six hundred thousand plus!

With the expansion of the population base, legions and guilds in the game had also sprung up like mushrooms after rain.

Many veteran players who were originally subordinates in large legions had now grown their wings, leaving with groups of like-minded brothers to establish their own small and medium-sized legions.

However, looking at the overall strength data panel in the backend,

those deep-rooted, first-tier launch legions still firmly held the dominant positions.

[Scourge Legion], [Galactic Empire Stormtroopers], [Brotherhood of Steel], [Baby Bus], [Hand of God], [Hellfire], [Wings of Freedom], and [Bear Ridge], which had made its fortune through Flesh Mecha.

These eight top-tier legions not only far surpassed the second-tier legions in terms of registered players,

but were also in an absolute, overwhelming lead in heavy industrial productivity, the number of affiliated natives, territory defense levels, and average individual combat power!

They had already become the core backbone of the Spark Alliance's sweep across the star system.

...

While the players were working themselves to the bone building ships and mechas using the surface factories,

the underground Shelter, serving as the headquarters, hadn't been idle either.

Because Lin Li had packed up and moved all the conventional weapon and ammunition production lines originally located in the shallow underground to the surface, or directly sold and contracted them out to other player guilds,

Shelter headquarters had now completely shut down the low-end production capacity of those ordinary gunpowder weapons.

Lin Li focused the work of all high-grade mechanical Men of Iron in Shelter entirely on a massive project—building an armed orbital defense platform!

Unlike the Empire's ordinary defense platforms that were fixed in planetary orbits as sitting ducks,

this giant platform commissioned by Lin Li had an ultra-large nuclear fusion propulsion engine installed at its bottom!

This gave it a certain degree of short-range mobility within the star system.

On this ten-kilometer-long steel platform, no autocannons were installed to deal with small spaceships.

Instead, the platform was equipped exclusively with two extreme types of weapons:

One was an ultra-high-frequency heavy laser matrix array specifically designed to establish close-in space air defense networks.

The other was a full dozen or so [Mass-Energy Conversion Cannons], perfectly replicated by the World Forger!

Once these dozen-plus giant cannons fired simultaneously, their terrifying power of absolute annihilation was precisely the trump card Lin Li had specially prepared to deal with the future sky-blotting swarm forces, which could be dozens of times larger than the vanguard fleet!

In Shelter control room,

Lin Li leaned back in his chair, preparing to pull up the data to inspect the manufacturing progress of Iron Man 73's armed orbital defense platform.

73 actively patched into the communication channel.

"Creator. A three-man clone squad has successfully warped and landed on the ancient battlefield wreckage through the deep space detection beacons we deployed earlier. They are currently exploring."

A rare trace of emotional fluctuation could be heard in 73's electronic voice.

"Well... they have discovered some very interesting things up there."

"Oh?"

Lin Li raised an eyebrow, instantly intrigued. "Connect their individual first-person view feeds immediately."

"Connecting now,"

73 reported while operating.

"Creator, the area surrounding those ancient ruins is filled with some strange force field. Conventional electromagnetic signals cannot get out at all. If not for the unique nature of the clones, we wouldn't be able to receive this information at all."

That ancient battlefield wreckage was precisely the place that Iron Man U-999 had mentioned before and strongly recommended exploring.

It was suspected to be the ancient ruins of the War in Heaven that swept across the galaxy during ancient times, fought among the Old Ones, Eldar, Necrons, C'tan, and ancient Orks!

Compared to that ancient divine war that shattered the laws of physics and tore the sea of stars apart,

the various scale wars among the Imperium, Orks, and T'au in the Galaxy today were practically no different from children playing in a mud pit.

During the War in Heaven, countless causality-defying weapons were freely deployed on the battlefield.

Countless worlds and living beings were completely erased.

It was also because too many died in this divine war, generating an immense amount of emotion, that the peaceful Warp—then known as the Sea of Souls—began to fluctuate violently, ultimately laying the foundation for it to become a playground for the Chaos Gods.

At this moment,

on the dead and dim ancient battlefield wreckage,

three players wearing Power Armor—[Nobi Dahniao], [Da Heibi], and [Dragon Strike]—were slowly landing on the surface of the wreckage as if in slow motion.

In their line of sight,

there was no soil, no vegetation.

All the rock surfaces exhibited a bizarre glassy crystallization formed after being completely melted by incomprehensible high temperatures and then cooled.

In the feed, Nobi Dahniao leaped lightly, flying directly over a dozen meters high.

"Holy shit!"

Nobi Dahniao complained in the team channel,

"What kind of crappy ancient battlefield wreckage is this? Is there no gravity on it? A casual hop and I'm floating in the sky."

"Isn't that normal?"

Da Heibi kept his gun raised, scanning the surroundings.

"This is a fragment of an ancient battlefield drifting in space, not a complete ancient planet. Where would gravity come from? Besides, there's some kind of electromagnetic interference here. Otherwise, we could just deploy a satellite to scan the whole map, and we wouldn't have to measure the map with our feet."

"Hey, count your blessings!"

Nobi Dahniao curled his lip.

"At least the system prompted that this is a legendary-tier ancient mega-dungeon. If we pick up any piece of scrap metal here and bring it back, it'll probably fetch tens of thousands of points. Why would they make it easy for you to comfortably scan and loot the map?"

While the two were bickering,

Dragon Strike, who was walking at the front, suddenly stopped in his tracks and gasped.

"Shh! Quiet, everyone!"