Qin Yu, draped in a black trench coat, pushed open the metal hatch of the main control room.
With a newly lit cigar clenched between his teeth, his gaze was as sharp as a blade amidst the swirling smoke.
The atmosphere inside the control room hadn't relaxed despite their narrow escape; instead, it was solemn to the point of suffocation.
"What's going on?" Qin Yu pulled out the captain's chair and sat down, his eyes sweeping across the large screen.
Old K was drenched in sweat, his hands gripping the edge of the control console so hard his knuckles had turned white.
"Boss... see the radar for yourself."
Qin Yu looked up.
On the holographic star map, there were no red dots representing marauders, nor were there any yellow warnings for meteors.
In their place was a dead, grayish-white void.
Three thousand kilometers directly ahead of the ship, the entire radar interface looked as though its signal had been forcibly severed, displaying a bizarre "static screen" state.
"System interference?" Qin Yu exhaled a ring of smoke, his eyes darkening.
"It's not interference!" Su Tian snapped her head up, her eyes bloodshot, her voice shrill and bordering on a break. "Boss, something is wrong with Space itself!"
Su Tian switched the external monitoring feed directly to the main screen.
The moment he saw the image, the fingers Qin Yu used to hold his cigar twitched slightly.
The starry sky outside the viewport was originally a deep dark purple.
But now, the entire stretch of the universe directly ahead looked like an old television screen, covered in massive patches of "mosaics"!
Countless once-brilliant stars, the moment they touched that pixelated area, were instantly transformed into square pixels.
There was no explosion, no energy fluctuation.
It was an extremely abrupt, silent process where three-dimensional reality was forcibly flattened into two-dimensional blocks of color!
"What the hell is that?" Old K swallowed hard, his voice trembling.
[Ding! System Red Maximum Level Warning!]
[Detected natural disaster ahead: Rule Formatting Storm!]
[Disaster Rating: Unknown (Instant death upon contact)]
[Cause: Fragmentation of the district has led to a conflict in the underlying logic. The System is automatically 'cleaning' the corrupted code area!]
The system prompt in his mind caused Qin Yu's expression to turn completely cold.
"Formatting Storm..."
Qin Yu gave a cold laugh. "Bai Ze and those other Administrators cheated and broke the server, and now the System is starting its automatic antivirus scan."
"And we are currently sitting in the System's 'Recycle Bin'."
Su Tian hammered at the keyboard frantically, error pop-ups appearing one after another on the screen.
"Boss! The storm's expansion speed is too fast! It's swallowing hundreds of kilometers every second!"
"Our Jump Engine is still cooling down. Conventional cruising speed won't outrun it!"
"In three minutes at most, the storm will pull us in!"
Desperate cries and screams from the scavengers were already coming through the communication channel from the lower deck.
This was a suffocation more terrifying than facing a thousand-strong army.
Against an enemy, one could fight to the death.
But against a system disaster that could directly erase even the laws of physics, one didn't even have the right to resist.
"Hard to port! Can we turn around!?" Old K roared at the top of his lungs.
"No! All the spatial coordinates around us are locked!" Su Tian was so anxious she was tearing up, her hands leaving bloody prints on the keyboard. "The moment we change course, the ship will be sucked into the gravitational turbulence. We'll die even faster!"
A dead end.
A true situation with zero chance of survival.
The Kiss of Death was still in its 72-hour dormant period; its absolute firepower could not be used.
Qin Yu stood up abruptly and crushed his half-burned cigar onto the console.
"Old K."
"Here!"
"Go to the lower deck and manually weld all the energy gates shut! Cut off all backup power to the life support systems!"
Qin Yu's voice carried no warmth, sounding like a precision-engineered killing machine. "Pour every bit of it into the main thrusters!"
Old K's eyes widened. "Boss! If we cut life support, those five thousand people in the lower deck will suffocate!"
"Oxygen deprivation takes fifteen minutes to kill." Qin Yu grabbed Old K by the collar and hauled him close, his eyes vicious. "If that thing hits us, it won't even take a microsecond before every single one of us is turned into goddamn pixels! Go execute the order!"
"Yes!" Old K scrambled out of the control room.
Qin Yu turned back, staring intently at the approaching gray mosaic storm on the screen.
"Su Tian, disable the captain's chair's insulation layer."
"Connect the ship's main control circuits directly into my body!"
Su Tian froze, staring blankly at Qin Yu. "Boss... what did you say?"
"Connecting a power grid of millions of volts into a human body? You'll be turned to ash instantly!"
Qin Yu ripped off his black trench coat, revealing his muscled upper body.
"I told you to connect it, so connect it!"
"Inside my body is the anchor point of this world!" Qin Yu pointed to his chest, a nearly frenzied red light erupting in his eyes. "Since the System wants to clean up corrupted code, I'll use the World Heart's source rules to wrap this ship in a layer of bypass code!"
Su Tian gritted her teeth, tears streaming down her face. She didn't waste any more words and yanked out three thick, deep-blue high-voltage energy cables from beneath the console.
"Boss, if you can't take it, tell me to stop!"
"Plug them in!" Qin Yu roared.
Pshhh!
Su Tian used all her strength to thrust the energy lines, tipped with alloy probes, deep into the muscles of Qin Yu's chest, shoulders, and back!
"Agh——!!"
A violent surge of ship-borne current instantly coursed through Qin Yu's entire body.
Countless bloody gashes split open across his skin. Before the blood could even flow out, it was evaporated into a bloody mist by the high temperature.
But immediately following that, a dull boom, like a heartbeat, thundered from deep within Qin Yu's chest.
Thump!
A pure, ethereal blue light suddenly erupted from Qin Yu's chest.
The World Heart had been forcibly activated by this massive surge of external energy!
[Ding! Absolute Order energy detected!]
[Performing underlying logic link with the vehicle 'Black Rhino-class Transport Ship'!]
[Link successful!]
Qin Yu's eyes were completely filled with blue light. He gripped the control console with both hands like an enraged beast.
"Order Domain, open!"
Vrrr—!!
A layer of semi-transparent, ethereal blue light barrier followed the energy lines in Qin Yu's body and instantly spread across the entire exterior armor of the ship!
Just as the light barrier closed...
Boom!
The grayish-white Formatting Storm, filled with reality-destroying mosaic corruption, slammed hard into the Black Rhino-class Transport Ship!
There was no world-shaking explosion.
Only a scalp-numbing "zzzt" sound.
It sounded like a rat frantically gnawing on electric wires.
Outside the viewport, a section of alloy armor plating on the port side was instantly caught by the Formatting Storm. That armor, capable of withstanding high-energy cannon fire, was like a piece of paper thrown into a shredder, instantly turning into a cloud of square pixels and vanishing into the void.
"Warning! Portside armor damage at thirty percent!"
Su Tian frantically pushed the flight stick. "The storm's suction is too strong! The ship is deviating from course!"
Qin Yu gritted his teeth, his muscles convulsing violently from the extreme agony.
Though the rules of the World Heart were powerful, he had collected too few fragments; it wasn't enough to fully counteract a system-level disaster.
"Thrust! Give me maximum thrust!" Qin Yu roared, blood leaking from his throat, his voice hoarse.
Vroom—!
The plasma thrusters at the ship's rear erupted with a blinding pillar of fire over a thousand meters long.
The Black Rhino-class Transport Ship, shielded by the ethereal blue Order Domain, was like a lone boat sailing against a tempestuous sea. With every collision against the mosaic storm, Qin Yu's body shuddered violently, his wounds tearing deeper.
"Boss! Obstacle ahead!" Su Tian suddenly screamed.
On the holographic screen, deep within the grayish-white storm, a massive shadow suddenly surged forth.
It was the ten-thousand-meter-long carcass of a star-void behemoth!
The lower half of the carcass had already been formatted into mosaic blocks, but the upper half still retained its rock-hard skeletal structure. It was being swept along by the storm's turbulence like a rampaging mountain range, heading straight for the ship!
"We can't dodge! The relative speed is too high!" Su Tian closed her eyes in despair.
Qin Yu looked up, a brutal, blood-stained grin appearing on his face.
"Who the fuck said we were dodging?"
Qin Yu took one hand off the console and snapped out the tactical alloy combat knife at his waist.
"We're using it as an umbrella!"
Qin Yu endured the agonizing current flowing through him, slammed the throttle to the floor, and simultaneously hammered the fire button for the secondary cannons.
"All secondary cannons, aim at that beast's belly and fire!"
Bang bang bang bang!
The eight plasma secondary cannons on both sides of the ship roared in unison.
The searing beams slammed into the soft underbelly of the behemoth's remains, instantly blasting a massive hole hundreds of meters wide.
"Charge in!" Qin Yu roared.
Su Tian snapped her eyes open, instantly understanding.
The ship performed an extreme barrel roll and, following the hole blasted by the cannons, stabbed like a needle into the behemoth's carcass!
Rumble—!!
The exterior of the behemoth's carcass bore the brunt of the Formatting Storm's lethal erosion. The sky-filling mosaic corruption devoured the beast's flesh and bone.
Inside the beast, the Black Rhino-class Transport Ship used this brief physical cover to squeeze every last bit of thrust out of its engines!
Crrrk— Crrrk—
The behemoth's carcass was rapidly shrinking. The walls of flesh around them were constantly turning into pixel blocks and peeling away.
"It can't hold! It'll be completely formatted in ten seconds!" Su Tian shouted.
"Ten seconds is enough!"
Qin Yu reached out and yanked the energy lines from his chest.
Splurt!
Blood sprayed everywhere.
The moment the energy supply was lost, the World Heart inside Qin Yu released one final, powerful pulse of Rule energy!
"Break for me!"
Vrrr—!!
The blue pulse ring shattered what remained of the behemoth's skeleton. Using the violent recoil, the Black Rhino-class Transport Ship shot out like a cannonball, forcibly breaching the edge of the Formatting Storm's barrier!
Shing—
The grayish-white surroundings vanished instantly.
In its place was the quiet, deep, normal starry sky.
The ship had broken through.
Thud.
Qin Yu slumped heavily into the captain's chair, gasping for air.
His combat uniform was completely soaked in blood, but a cold, victorious smirk hung on the corner of his mouth.
"System... if you want my life, you're not worthy yet."
The main control room was deathly silent.
Su Tian collapsed in her chair, looking at the intact starscape, and burst into tears while covering her face.
"We lived... we actually survived a System disaster..."
Old K stumbled in through the door, his head covered in bruises. "Boss! The lower deck's oxygen can last another three minutes. The hull is forty percent damaged, but the core is untouched!"
"Good work." Qin Yu spat out a glob of blood and grabbed a coat to throw over himself. "Reconnect the life support. Tell those useless bastards in the lower deck that if they aren't dead, they better get up and fix the ship."
Qin Yu's gaze swept over the console, fixing on the radar screen.
"Su Tian, dry your tears and get to work."
"How far are Yao Xue's coordinates from us now?"
Su Tian immediately wiped her eyes, her hands flying across the keyboard. The green coordinate point on the screen lit up again, flashing intensely.
"Boss, the storm's thrust pushed us across most of the distance!" Su Tian's voice carried an irrepressible excitement. "We're only five hundred kilometers away from Miss Yao Xue's coordinates!"
"But..." Su Tian's expression suddenly changed.
"Speak," Qin Yu said, his eyes like knives.
"The coordinates show that the area Miss Yao Xue is in isn't a normal sea fragment."
Su Tian pulled up an optical magnification image.
In the center of the large screen, a massive ruin floating in space appeared. It was an enormous artificial space station, its external armor painted with a glaring blood-red skull emblem.
Hundreds of marauder warships of various classes were moored all around it.
"It's the starport headquarters of the Blood Blade Alliance!" Old K sucked in a breath of cold air.
"Blood Blade Alliance?"
Qin Yu's narrow eyes squeezed slightly. He remembered the bald man he had erased with Void Grasp earlier. Before he died, that man had mentioned this name.
"Interesting."
Qin Yu pulled a roll of medical bandages from his Storage Space and expressionlessly wrapped his bleeding arm.
"I haven't gone looking for them yet, and they've already dragged Xue'er into their nest."
Old K swallowed hard, his face pale. "Boss, the Blood Blade Alliance is the largest marauder group in this sector! They have tens of thousands of armed thugs and three A-grade Heavy Cruisers! Our Kiss of Death is still dormant, and the ship is a wreck. If we force our way in..."
Qin Yu ignored Old K's warning. He pulled the bandage into a tight knot and slowly stood up.
A suffocating, terrifying killing intent erupted from Qin Yu, instantly sweeping through the entire control room.
"Old K, what did I teach you?"
Qin Yu strode to the holographic star map and pressed his finger directly onto the blood-red starport icon.
"In the Wasteland, if you want resources, you rob and you kill."
"If you want your woman back, you take the people who grabbed her and chop them up, skin and bone, to feed the dogs."
Qin Yu turned his head and issued his final command, one word at a time.
"Charge the main cannon."
"Shields to full."
"Ram them head-on."
"Today, I'm going to make this so-called Blood Blade Alliance disappear from the system district forever!"