Not far away.
The anomalies occurring aboard those invaded warships had not escaped the fleet Commander's notice.
The God of Refined Gold's Mechanical Activation ability was certainly formidable, but it ultimately had limitations of its own.
For example, when facing an enemy that was on guard, they might not be able to completely activate the relevant machinery.
Many times,
hampered by all kinds of interference, they could only activate part of the target.
Take those affected warships, for instance.
Some had indeed been fully activated and thoroughly turned into lackeys under the God of Refined Gold.
However, quite a few warships were also embroiled in internal struggles over authority.
The activated machinery was fiercely contending with the warships' own intelligent AIs in a form invisible to the naked eye, each side fighting to seize Control Authority over the whole.
As for that kind of war waged in the form of data, ordinary lifeforms, aside from helplessly watching,
generally had only two ways to interfere.
First, use force to interfere. Destroy the portion of the warship's body controlled by either side, establish an advantage through physical means—commonly known as One Force Breaks All Laws. Just smash it and be done with it!
Second, increase one side's computing power. For intelligent AIs, so-called computing power was equivalent to cultivation in a certain sense. It had an extremely obvious effect on their strength and could greatly enhance them.
Of course,
besides those two relatively conventional methods,
you could also write code on the spot, breach the enemy's firewall system with absolute technical prowess, and secure the fruits of victory for your own side.
If you truly could defeat mechanical intelligence in data programming, then you certainly could do that...
But at the very least, the vast majority of Flesh and Blood Life did