63: Chapter 63 Rusty Anchor and the Scales of Lies

The gates of Sector-7 stood two hundred meters away, resembling the flayed ribs of a giant beast. Dark red rust seeped from the weld seams, glowing with the color of blood scabs under the faint light of the terminator line. Lin Yuan stood behind a weathered concrete bunker, his fingers unconsciously stroking the power cell slot of his laser pistol, the nick on the metal edge grazing his fingertip.

Directly in front of the gate, the Anvil Legion's array spread out in a fan shape. There were no shouts, no roar of engines, only the crunching sound of heavy tracks crushing aggregate. Three modified titan walkers stood in a triangular formation; the one in the center had a massive hydraulic hammer welded to its shoulder, with dried remnants of some biological tissue still stuck to the hammerhead.

"They aren't just putting on a show." Chen Duo's voice entered Lin Yuan's auditory cortex directly through the Blood Covenant, carrying the spatial awareness unique to the blind. "The one on the left, the hydraulic line in its third joint is leaking. They're warming up."

Lin Yuan did not turn his head. The structured anchoring of the Blood Covenant made Chen Duo's field of view his second layer of vision, with high-definition data streams floating at the edges of his retina. He "saw" the details Chen Duo described—the black oil stains on the titan walker's knee pooling into small round spots on the sand.

At the front of the array, a figure stepped out of the shadows. Camilla Anvil, the Legion Commander, had a matte black coating on her left cybernetic arm, with a serial number branded on the elbow joint: THR-09-Ω. Her stride carried the relaxed confidence typical of a wasteland warlord, her right hand resting on the Chainsword at her waist, her fingers rhythmically tapping the hilt's guard.

"Seventy-two hours." Camilla stopped thirty meters away, her voice projecting through a loudspeaker with the crackle of static. "You have seventy-two hours left on your key. Once time is up, Sector-7's automatic defenses will burn everything within a five-hundred-meter radius into glass."

Lin Yuan took a step forward, the concrete bunker casting a long shadow behind him. He deliberately left his left hand exposed, silver patterns spreading from his cuff to his knuckles, pulsing slightly like a living thing in the dim light.

"So you need me to open the gate within these seventy-two hours," Lin Yuan said steadily. "And you need me to go inside and retrieve something."

Camilla's mechanical knuckles stopped tapping. This subtle pause was captured by Chen Duo through the Blood Covenant's sensory sharing and transmitted to Lin Yuan as a neural signal. Chen Duo was ten meters behind the bunker, a monomolecular blade resting across his knees, the mark on the back of his neck faintly burning.

"Smart man." Camilla curled her lips, but the smile didn't reach her eyes. "The Cleansing Force is offering three clean-water chips for your head. But I'm more interested in the Farm mark on your body."

Her gaze fell on the silver patterns on Lin Yuan's neck, as if she were looking at a piece of merchandise waiting to be appraised.

"My pilot," Camilla suddenly lowered her voice, turning off the loudspeaker; her direct human voice had the coarseness of sandpaper. "He has three days. The corruption is climbing from his spine to his brainstem. The Farm's standard treatment takes two weeks, but he doesn't have two weeks."

Lin Yuan's pupils constricted slightly. On the other end of the Blood Covenant, Chen Duo's neural signal sent a subtle tremor, a reminder for him to pay attention to the left.

It was coming.

A fragment of memory that didn't belong to him suddenly stabbed into his consciousness: Camilla in a late-night communications room, whispering the coordinates of the Anvil Legion into an encrypted channel; the insignia of the Cleansing Force flashing on the sole of her boot; the serial number on her left arm was actually an implant mark from the Cleansing Force.

"She's a mole." The false memory, carrying the characteristic viscous texture of The Twelfth, spread across the surface of Lin Yuan's cognition. "Seize her, use her as a hostage to break through."

Lin Yuan's finger moved toward the trigger. A 0.3-second delay.

The Blood Covenant suddenly vibrated. Chen Duo's correction signal stabbed into his neural nodes like a red-hot needle: "Left side, eleven o'clock, the sniper's breathing frequency is normal. If she were a mole, the sniper should have withdrawn already. The memory has gaps."

Lin Yuan's index finger paused on the trigger. He "saw" the visual data shared by Chen Duo through the Blood Covenant: in the ruins to the left, the reflection from the sniper scope was indeed steady; the crosshairs weren't even lingering on Camilla, but were locked onto the center of Lin Yuan's own forehead.

A false memory. The Twelfth was injecting cognitive interference through the pollution synchronization mechanism.

"Your pilot," Lin Yuan slowly released the trigger, his voice half a degree lower than before, "is he a blood relative?"

The muscle groups in Camilla's mechanical left arm tensed for a split second. This reaction was more real than any answer.

"Brother," she spat out the word like a piece of broken glass. "Half-brother. He's sitting in that hammer-head Titan, and in sixty hours, he'll become the walking dead."

Lin Yuan took three steps forward, completely exposing himself in the open ground. Chen Duo sent a strong warning signal through the Blood Covenant, but he suppressed it. This was a gamble—betting that Camilla's concern for her brother outweighed her greed for Farm technology.

"I can buy him time." Lin Yuan raised his left hand, and the silver patterns brightened. "Not a cure, but a freeze. The Farm's biotechnology emergency freezing protocol can pause the corruption process for thirty days."

Camilla's Chainsword unsheathed half an inch, the screech of friction piercing the air. "Prove it to me."

"Have your sniper lower his gun," Lin Yuan said. "Then, look into my eyes."

The Blood Covenant's structured anchoring was fully opened at this moment. Lin Yuan didn't explain the principles; instead, he directly projected Chen Duo's vision—that ultra-high-definition neural data stream—through the anchoring protocol. This wasn't language; it was direct sensory sharing.

Camilla's body stiffened. The pupil of her left eye contracted violently, and the cybernetic prosthetic of her right eye emitted a faint servo motor sound. In that instant, she "saw" what Lin Yuan saw: her own left arm serial number, THR-09-Ω, was magnified in her vision, every scratch clearly discernible; she saw Chen Duo's exact position in the bunker behind Lin Yuan, and even saw the fingerprint wear on Chen Duo's monomolecular blade.

More importantly, she saw the system interface at the edge of Lin Yuan's vision—the blue light screen that didn't belong to wasteland technology—and a fleeting permission tag: Sub-administrator.

"This is impossible." Camilla's voice lost control for the first time. "How do you have—"

"The internal map of Sector-7," Lin Yuan interrupted her, "the location of the first-generation THRONE maintenance pods, and the neural coolant your brother needs are all inside. I can give them to you, but you have to let me in."

Camilla's mechanical fingers were trembling. Lin Yuan knew she recognized the style of that permission tag; it was a rank for core Farm technical personnel, more sophisticated than any forgery she had seen on the black market.

Just then, an abnormal burst of electrical noise came through the Blood Covenant. It wasn't Chen Duo's signal, but came from the THRONE-01 terminal they were carrying.

Chen Duo jerked his head up behind the bunker. He was blind, but the Blood Covenant allowed him to "perceive" the data stream. The core processor of THRONE-01 was emitting a frequency he had never heard before, one carrying waves of fear; and when Camilla's left arm serial number, THR-09-Ω, entered the sensory range again, that wave turned into a sharp wail.

Chen Duo's fingers tightened around the monomolecular blade. He sent an encrypted neural signal to Lin Yuan through the Blood Covenant, but the content of the signal was temporarily rewritten by him, bypassing the THRONE-01 communication protocol and using the Blood Covenant's primitive channel instead.

"The machine spirit is lying." Chen Duo's signal had a cold quality. "It recognizes that serial number. It's afraid."

Lin Yuan's expression didn't change, but his response to Chen Duo through the Blood Covenant was: "I know. Say nothing."

The negotiation had entered its most dangerous stage. Camilla was still processing the shock brought by the permission tag, and Lin Yuan had to complete the deal before THRONE-01's concealment was completely exposed.

"Thirty days," Camilla finally spoke, her voice raspy. "Within thirty days, you freeze my brother's corruption, and I'll cover your entry into Sector-7. But you have to help me retrieve something."

"What is it?"

"A Corruption Amplifier." Camilla's mechanical eye flickered. "A core component of the first-generation THRONE. Not a Purification Protocol, but an amplifier. I want to use it to reverse my brother's corruption process."

Lin Yuan's blood ran cold for a moment. The Twelfth let out a soft laugh deep within the Blood Covenant; this was the moment it had been waiting for—to create a fundamental conflict between Lin Yuan's and Camilla's goals. Lin Yuan wanted to purify; Camilla wanted to amplify.

"Deal," Lin Yuan said.

He lied. He could not possibly give her the amplifier, but now he needed that gate to open.

Camilla waved her hand, and engineers from the rear of the array stepped forward pushing thermal cutters. The main gate of Sector-7 let out a dull boom under the dual action of the biological key and the legion's engineering technology, with rust flakes falling like rain.

The moment the gate opened, a heatwave of sulfur and lava erupted. The internal passage was blocked by twisted metal frames and solidified lava, leaving only a narrow gap.

"Six hours of thermal cutting required," the engineer reported.

Camilla nodded and turned to Lin Yuan. "Now, go see my brother. Prove your skill."

Lin Yuan turned and walked toward Chen Duo. In the moment they brushed past each other, Chen Duo's hand landed on Lin Yuan's arm—not to support him, but to transmit. Through the Blood Covenant, Chen Duo sent a packet of the abnormal THRONE-01 data he had just collected. The data stream showed that when the THR-09-Ω serial number appeared, the machine spirit's self-check program had a 0.7-second delay; it was hiding something.

Lin Yuan did not respond. He looked toward that hammer-head Titan; behind the observation window of the cockpit, a blurry figure was leaning against the console, its posture no longer quite looking like a human's.

The THRONE-01 terminal at Chen Duo's waist emitted an almost inaudible electronic sound, like a sigh, or perhaps a warning.

The gate slowly rose behind them, while the cracks in their trust had already begun to spread quietly among the three.