Twenty minutes later...
"I didn't expect an extra bonus!" Nie Yun said as several silver Mechanical Arms withdrew from the still-unconscious Catherine and slowly sank into the bridge's metal floor.
Nie Yun had just knocked Catherine out and given her a full-body examination, confirming that the only thing controlling her was a miniature chip in her brain. For the Mechanical Insects, removing something like that was as easy as... no, it literally was eating a meal!
In the microscopic world, "small" was actually the standard by which strength was measured!
The Control Chip in Catherine's brain looked like a spider with exceptionally long legs. Several specialized nanofilaments extended from it into neural regions across her cerebral cortex, performing comprehensive, targeted monitoring of specific neural signals and brain waves to determine whether its host had betrayed her masters.
The reason Nie Yun had knocked Catherine out first was that he wasn't sure whether learning that he intended to "remove her Control Chip" would itself trigger the chip to kill her.
Knocking her unconscious was the simplest, most direct way to "shut off all five senses"!
Of course, the crude "glutton-style" removal method inevitably triggered the Control Chip's "self-destruct mode" during the operation. But an electric current strong enough to fry someone's brain and leave them in a vegetative state was merely a side dish to the Mechanical Insects.
All in all, the operation was alarming but uneventful...
After devouring the entire Control Chip and analyzing its operating principles, Nie Yun discovered that it could not only release an electric current when triggered, but also be detonated remotely. Catherine's life and death were entirely in the Kruze Family's hands.
To avoid attracting the Kruze Family's attention, Nie Yun used Mechanical Insects to replicate a Control Chip, ensuring that Catherine's "failsafe" signal remained