Seizing the Hub, The Ghost Ship's New Master!

The passage leading to the upper deck opened before Lin Xuan.

He walked in without hesitation.

The moment he stepped inside, the alloy wall behind him silently descended, completely separating him from the cargo hold containing hundreds of children.

At that moment, dense red lights lit up across the walls, ceiling, and floor of the entire passageway, weaving into a net with no blind spots.

A high-energy particle sensor array.

Any unauthorized lifeform that touched even a single beam would trigger the hundreds of high-explosive bombs planted throughout the passage.

Compressed within this narrow hundred-meter corridor.

This was the Ghost Ship's strongest defensive measure aside from its main cannon.

Faced with such a death trap, Lin Xuan did not pause, nor did he slow down.

His figure moved through the dense web of red light.

His body twisted and folded in ways that defied common sense, even seeming to turn somewhat translucent at times.

Know Cause Upon Thought allowed him to see through this deadly web thirty seconds in advance.

The scanning path of every beam and the trigger logic of every bomb appeared clearly in his mind.

Every time he shifted sideways or lifted his foot, he stepped precisely into the safe gaps before every killing mechanism activated.

To the Ghost Ship's intelligent central system, there was nothing in this corridor.

Every alarm remained silent.

Lin Xuan walked through this corridor of death as if taking a stroll and reached the end.

An alloy door even thicker than the cargo hold's gate blocked his path.

There were no switches on the door, only a red-glowing authentication scanner at its center.

It was a genetic lock, one that could only be opened using the captain's own genetic sequence.

Lin Xuan stopped and raised his hand.

He did not touch the scanner, nor did he use soul power to break it.

He merely extended one finger and lightly tapped the ten-meter-thick alloy door.

"Buzz—"

A faint vibration, almost too quiet to hear.

Centered on Lin Xuan's fingertip, ripples spread across the solid alloy door like a stone dropped into water.

The atomic structure of the metal was directly dismantled at its very foundation by an incomprehensible force.

There was no explosion, nor was there any melting.

The massive alloy door simply turned into a cloud of ash and vanished before him.

As if it had never existed at all.

The Ghost Ship's bridge appeared before Lin Xuan.

Beyond the enormous observation window at the front of the spacious semicircular chamber was churning thick fog.

Countless holographic screens flashing with data floated in the air, giving the entire bridge a distinctly technological feel.

And seated in the captain's chair at the very center of the bridge, the symbol of authority, was a man.

A half-human, half-machine cyborg.

He was the captain of this ship.

A cyborg with a combat power of roughly fifty points.

He was far stronger than the cannon fodder Lin Xuan had dealt with in the cargo hold. The exposed metal skeleton beneath his flesh was thicker, and golden high-purity energy fluid flowed through his energy conduits.

His left arm was an entire multi-barreled rotating energy cannon.

His only remaining right eye glowed with electronic red light, locking firmly onto Lin Xuan as he entered through the doorway.

"Intruder..."

The captain's voice sounded like metal grinding together, hoarse and piercing.

He slowly rose from his seat, his towering body radiating intense pressure.

"To make it this far, you do have some skill. Unfortunately, this is as far as you go."

He did not waste words or call for reinforcements.

As the sole king of this ship, he had confidence in himself.

The instant his words fell, he moved.

The alloy floor beneath his feet groaned as his body became a black shadow, crossing dozens of meters in an instant and charging before Lin Xuan.

White light gathered at the muzzle of his energy-cannon left arm in an instant. It aimed at Lin Xuan's chest, ready to fire point-blank.

At the same time, his remaining metal right hand came together like a blade and slashed fiercely toward Lin Xuan's neck with a piercing shriek.

Speed, strength, timing—he had pushed them all to the absolute limit a modified human with fifty points of combat power could achieve.

Yet in Lin Xuan's eyes, all of it was laughably slow.

Every movement the captain made, every flex of his muscles, every flow of energy was riddled with flaws in Lin Xuan's perception.

Lin Xuan did not even move his feet.

Facing the energy cannon capable of blasting through battleship armor and the hand blade capable of cutting diamond, he merely raised a single finger casually.

His index finger.

That fair, slender finger looked utterly powerless as it lightly touched the muzzle of the energy cannon.

"Boom!"

A dull explosion thundered through the bridge.

The violent torrent of energy poured out in full.

Yet strangely, the expected explosion never came.

The energy, enough to vaporize steel, struck Lin Xuan's fingertip as though it had hit an invisible wall. All its power was instantly compressed into nothing, without even a trace leaking out.

The captain's metal hand blade also struck Lin Xuan squarely on the neck.

"Clang—"

A crisp ring sounded.

The captain felt as though he had not struck a human body of flesh and blood, but an incomparably hard neutron star.

A tremendous recoil surged wildly back along his arm.

"Crack! Crack-crack!"

A series of shattering sounds rang out.

His arm, forged from ultra-high-strength alloy, began breaking inch by inch from the fingertips, twisting and deforming until it instantly became a lump of scrap metal.

For the first time, horror appeared in the captain's electronic eyes.

How was this possible?!

His full-force attack, the one he had always been so proud of, could not even make this man take half a step back?

Before he could recover from his shock, Lin Xuan lightly flicked the index finger resting on the cannon's muzzle.

"Bang!"

A massive force struck the captain's chest through the energy cannon.

His burly modified body was like a castle gate struck head-on by a battering ram. The alloy armor on his chest instantly caved inward into a huge dent, and he flew backward like a cannonball, crashing through several control consoles behind him before hitting the floor amid a shower of electrical sparks. He went completely still.

Instant kill.

From beginning to end, Lin Xuan had used only one finger.

He did not spare the pile of scrap metal on the ground a glance, as though he had merely swatted a fly to death.

He straightened his clothes, walked to the captain's seat, and calmly sat down.

"Authorization failed. You are not the captain. Operation unavailable."

A mechanical synthesized voice sounded from the console.

The corners of Lin Xuan's lips curved upward.

He extended a hand and gently pressed it against the main control screen.

"From this moment on, I am the captain."

An invisible force of divine consciousness instantly flooded into the ship's intelligent core.

text
[Warning! Unknown psychic intrusion detected!]

[Firewall protocol activated... failed!]

[Core code has been altered...]

[Highest authority is being forcibly transferred...]

[Transfer complete...]

One second later.

All the red warning lights on the bridge went out.

A new synthesized voice sounded.

"Ship systems have been reset. Highest authority confirmed. Welcome, new captain."

Lin Xuan casually swiped his fingers across the holographic screen and brought up the navigation chart.

A set of coordinates long forgotten by others surfaced from the depths of his memory.

He entered a new destination for the route.

"The route has been changed. Destination: Forgotten Island. Estimated travel time: seventy-two hours."

Having done all that, Lin Xuan leaned back in the spacious captain's chair and closed his eyes.

From this moment on, the Ghost Ship had a new master.

Meanwhile.

Inside a secret base within an active volcano.

An old man in a white lab coat, gaunt in build and wild-eyed, stared fixedly at the massive central monitoring screen before him.

On the screen, the light representing the Ghost Ship suddenly veered off its preset course and turned toward a completely unfamiliar sea region.

"What's going on?"

Doctor's brows drew tightly together as he immediately tried to connect to the ship's communications.

"Ghost Ship, report your status immediately! Captain, answer me!"

The only response was the dead silence of a busy signal.

A sense of foreboding rose within Doctor. He abruptly pulled up the crew's vital-sign monitoring interface.

The next second, his pupils constricted sharply.

On the screen, nearly a hundred green life signals representing the captain and all the modified-human guards flickered at the same moment, then all turned gray.

"E-Everyone's gone offline?!"

A chill shot from Doctor's feet straight to the top of his head.

He suddenly realized that something terrifying had infiltrated his ship.

That intruder had not only silently crippled every defense he was so proud of, but even the modified-human captain—the strongest fighter aboard—had failed to send back even the slightest distress signal!

After the fear came boundless fury.

"Whoever you are... if you dare touch what's mine... you'll pay the price!"

A savage expression appeared on Doctor's face. He turned and slammed his hand down on a red emergency button protected by a glass cover.

"Activate the purge plan! Target coordinates: Ghost Ship! Wipe it—and everything on board—completely from this world!"