The Aeon of Erudition Takes One Glance, and the Mainframe Overloads

The harsh, piercing wail sounded like a rusted hacksaw dragging back and forth across everyone's eardrums.

Su Chen stopped the movement in his hands.

He let go of those two fluffy ears that had been kneaded into a complete mess.

Pom-Pom slumped on the sofa cushion like a sack of rags, lacking even the strength to take a deep breath.

Su Chen tilted his head.

His pale-blue eyes beneath the sunglasses looked toward the Data Bank doors.

The light leaking through the crack was not the usual cold, ghost-blue.

Instead, it was a blinding, scorching dark gold.

The color in Welt's face drained away completely in half a second.

He failed to even set his glass of water down steadily, smashing it onto the bar counter with a loud clatter.

Water splashed, spilling across the wooden countertop.

Welt snatched up the black cane leaning against the edge of the bar.

His leather shoe kicked off hard against the carpet, and his entire body surged toward the Data Bank in long strides as if his tail had been set on fire.

Dan Heng was faster than him.

Vidyo-Dhara instincts made his perception of crisis razor-sharp to the extreme.

He took a direct stride forward, his shoulder slamming heavily into the thick metal door panels.

The latches emitted an unbearable screech as they slid violently apart to both sides.

A torrent of violent golden light instantly poured out, illuminating the corridor like a furnace.

A wave of heat rushed right at them.

The temperature inside the Data Bank room was absurdly high.

The air was permeated with a pungent ozone smell, mixed with the acrid stench of burning insulation rubber.

A full two rows of black metal server racks were vibrating frantically.

The cooling fans fixed to the racks emitted a roar resembling a beast on the verge of death.

Their rotational speed far exceeded the design limits.

The fan blades sliced through the air, even kicking up sharp sonic booms.

Dan Heng's gaze pierced through the dense smoke, landing on the central main screen.

The interface that originally displayed star charts and Express data was completely gone.

Replacing it were countless complex, ancient golden array runes writhing like living things.

These lines intertwined and knotted frantically on the screen.

The path trajectory of Erudition?

Welt rushed in right behind him.

He only glanced at the screen before a dry roar escaped his throat.

This was no ordinary system malfunction.

This was an Aeon.

Nous the Erudition.

That supreme existence sitting high in the depths of the starry sea, analyzing the entire universe through sheer computational power.

Its gaze, through some unknown medium, had forcibly projected itself onto the Astral Express's Data Bank.

The target was precisely that white-haired loli sitting on the sofa outside eating candy.

Nous was attempting an analysis.

Analyzing that spatial anomaly even Herta could not comprehend.

Analyzing that Hollow Technique: Purple that had erased the Antimatter Legion.

The coolant pipes at the base of the server racks began to swell violently.

The blue cryogenic liquid boiled.

The bubbling sound of "gurgle, gurgle" transmitted through the thick alloy pipe walls, making one's scalp tingle.

High-pressure steam jetted from the joints, scorching a layer of paint right off the wall.

"The computing core is overloading by three thousand percent!"

Dan Heng roared.

The sound barely left his mouth before it was torn to shreds by the fan noise.

He pushed forward against the heat wave, his fingers reaching for the red physical power-cutoff switch on the side of the rack.

The veins on the back of his hand bulged one by one, his blood seeming to flow with molten lava.

"Don't touch it!"

Welt's cane slammed heavily onto the floor.

A circle of purple simulated gravitational waves rippled outward, forcibly dragging Dan Heng back two steps.

"That's not electrical current! Those are the logical chains of an Aeon!"

Welt's voice completely cracked, carrying a profound sense of despair.

"Physical power-cutoffs are useless. Forcibly severing it will cause the entire train car to be blown flat by the energy of collapsing logic!"

The golden array runes on the screen spun faster and faster.

They even spilled over the edges of the screen, twisting in midair like a holographic projection.

Yet the Data Bank's computing power could not keep up.

Nous's deduction had run into an insurmountable wall.

Zeno's Paradox.

Space was infinitely divided, and distances approached infinity.

To analyze this power, one needed to calculate the end of "infinity."

An Aeon's computing power might be infinite.

However, the hardware of the Astral Express's Data Bank had limits.

The physical medium bearing the Aeon's gaze was heading toward collapse.

"Crack!"

The first crisp sound exploded on the left side of the room.

A hard drive array box burned completely through right on the spot.

Orange-yellow flames leaped half a meter high.

Hot metal fragments struck Dan Heng's cheek, burning a charred, bloody streak.

Dan Heng didn't even knit a brow, staring fixedly at that ball of fire.

Sparks scattered everywhere in the room like an out-of-control torrential rain.

The securing bolts of the rack began to loosen.

"Clang, clang, clang!"

The snapped bolts ricocheted off the ceiling, hammering out dent after dent.

The heavy metal server racks tilted outward, on the verge of disassembling.

Welt clenched his teeth, stepping forward.

His suit jacket billowed in the heat wave.

He gripped the handle of his black cane with both hands, pressing down fiercely.

The output of the Star Eden was squeezed to its absolute limit by him.

The purple gravity field pressed down like an invisible giant hand, pinning those two rows of server racks that were about to explode.

The tilting rack emitted a harsh screech of grinding steel, being forcibly shoved back into its original position.

Welt's legs were trembling.

His knees bent inch by inch, his leather shoes scraping two shallow slide marks into the metal floor.

The sweat on his forehead had barely emerged before it was vaporized into white steam by the high temperature.

He bit down hard on his teeth, the blood oozing from his gums flowing down the corners of his mouth.

His chin was covered in red bloodstains.

His bones emitted an unbearable cracking sound.

He was not fighting an Aeon.

He was merely using human strength to forcibly maintain the physical structure of this scrap iron destined to be burned away by an Aeon's computing power.

Himeko stood outside the Data Bank doors.

She did not rush in.

Her hands grabbed tightly onto the door frame, her fingernails digging into the metal seams, snapping two of them off.

The piercing pain straight to her heart, however, could not surpass the chill in her chest at this moment.

She watched those twisted golden array runes.

She watched the miserable sight of Welt coughing up blood while desperately keeping the server racks from falling apart.

The fear that had perpetually circled in her mind finally settled into reality.

An Aeon.

That was an unviewable truth within the universe.

Right now, this Aeon representing ultimate wisdom had merely "looked" from afar at that white-haired girl.

Because it failed to parse the other's defensive mechanism, it had directly fried the train's mainframe.

Just a single Seventh Seat.

Just a passive defensive technique.

It had plunged the logic chains of the Erudition Aeon into an infinite loop.

Himeko felt that even her breathing carried a bloody tang.

She turned her head, looking stiffly toward the main hall.

Su Chen was still sitting on that leather sofa.

He reached out and pushed the sunglasses that had slipped down his nose back to their original position.

A newly peeled peppermint candy was held in his mouth, his cheek bulging out into a small lump.

His little hand patted the dust off his clothes.

His pale-blue eyes reflected the violent golden light inside the Data Bank.

He curled his lip, his voice not loud, yet it clearly traveled into Himeko's ears.

"Peeping at people at random..."

The little loli complained in a crisp, childlike tone.

"How rude."

He had no intention of interfering.

The Shock Points jumping on the system panel had already numbed him.

This kind of free character-building special effect was too good not to use.

Since it was a Limitless passive trigger anyway, if the Aeon wanted to calculate, he would let it calculate to its heart's content.

Inside the Data Bank room, the temperature had already reached the flash point.

Several paper document folders spontaneously combusted right then, turning into a ball of fire.

Welt's waist bent forward, his cane nearly snapped in half.

"Mr. Welt!"

Dan Heng let out a low roar, stepping forward and using his shoulder to firmly prop up Welt's back, helping him share the backlash of the gravity field.

Both of their clothes were completely soaked through with sweat.

The golden array runes on the screen finally expanded to their limit.

Those lines representing logic began to snap one by one.

The fractured array runes turned into blinding spots of light, colliding wildly across the room.

"Bang!"

The largest main screen exploded right from the center.

Fragments of the black LCD panel sprayed outward in a radial pattern.

Shards of glass struck the walls, emitting a crisp sound like falling raindrops.

The alarm siren abruptly ceased amid a pungent, scorching burnt odor.

All the golden radiance vanished in an instant.

The screen went completely black, leaving only a charred, broken hole.

The fans inside the racks stopped spinning.

Only coolant leaking onto the red-hot metal plates remained, emitting a harsh hissing sound.

Thick black smoke rolled upward, surging toward the exhaust vent on the ceiling.

Welt's legs went soft, and he collapsed onto one knee on the floor, breathing heavily in great gulps of bloody air.

Dan Heng stood before the smoking server racks.

The scorching steam reddened his eyes.

He jerked his head around, piercing through the wide-open door of the Data Bank.

His gaze locked relentlessly onto the white-haired loli outside.

His right hand instinctively tightened its grip around the Cloud-Piercer spear.