novelraw Chapter 269: Phantom on the Blueprint
Chapter 269: Phantom on the Blueprint
A symphony of destruction, composed of explosions, gunfire, and the shriek of rending metal, was playing out in the subterranean world beneath Wardenclyffe.
Hawk's unstoppable rampage had thoroughly scrambled the order of the Brotherhood of Light.
Countless armed guards, like worker ants disturbed from their nest, swarmed toward his location from all directions, attempting to extinguish this raging "wildfire."
Meanwhile, the loss of control in the core power chamber was like severing the main artery of this scientific fortress.
The electrical power supply became extremely unstable, causing a vast number of the base's internal defensive facilities to fall into paralysis or malfunction. The piercing shriek of alarms and the pops of short-circuiting equipment rose and fell in succession, adding fuel to the chaos.
It was precisely this dual chaos erupting from within and without that created a perfect window for Lin Jie and Ethan's escape.
The two men were running frantically through the narrow maintenance tunnels.
Lin Jie, supporting the dazed Ethan, relied on his memory and judgment—enhanced to the limit by the Mental Staircase—to accurately identify every fork in the road they had taken on the way in.
He could clearly hear the increasingly close, chaotic footsteps and angry shouts coming from behind them.
"Halt! Intruders!""Open fire! Lethal force authorized!"
Several energy beams crackling with dangerous arcs of electricity shot past their bodies, leaving behind several deep, terrifying bullet holes in the tunnel walls, their edges still molten.
"Left!" Lin Jie growled, shoving Ethan hard into the inconspicuous entrance of a ventilation duct.
Just as they vanished around the corner, a pursuit squad of ten elite soldiers swept past the section of tunnel they had just vacated, moving with cyclonic speed.
"Huff... huff..." Ethan leaned against the sheet metal, gasping for air. The mental impact from the death wail of that Kingdom-class UMA was still making him feel waves of dizziness and disorientation.
"Can you still walk?" Lin Jie's face was also pale. The excessive consumption of his mental energy made his temples throb as if pierced by steel needles.
"I won't die." Ethan gritted his teeth, straightening his body again. The pride belonging to the Redgrave family propped him up, keeping him from collapsing.
The two of them crouched in the shadow of the duct, struggling to steady their breathing.
"We must get out of here as soon as possible," Ethan spoke up. "If we wait any longer, they'll find us sooner or later."
Lin Jie nodded and was just about to peek out to scout a new route.
A set of footsteps, even more hurried and chaotic than before, approached from the direction of another branch tunnel, growing louder as they came.
Lin Jie and Ethan immediately held their breath, pressing themselves deeper into the shadows.
It was a patrol squad of seven or eight, also heavily armed.
But unlike the pursuers earlier, their faces held none of the hound-like vigilance and killing intent. Instead, they showed panicked fury.
They were all running. The squad leader at the front, a guard, roared angrily as he ran.
"What do you mean 'uncontrollable'?! The Archives are the central hub of the entire base! What the hell are you all doing?!"
"A fire?! You're telling me the backup fire suppression systems there have all failed due to the unstable power?!"
"All security personnel, listen up! Abandon your original patrol routes! Everyone, immediately! Right now! Go support the Central Archives! If any of the materials there are damaged, Mr. Edison will throw every single one of us into the 'battery'!"
This hurried group swept past the tunnel opening where Lin Jie and Ethan were hiding, stampeding toward the direction of the B3 level.
Their conversation, though fragmented, became the most precise intelligence, allowing Lin Jie and Ethan to piece together the full picture.
The Archives! A fire! Backup systems failing!
These three keywords stacked together could only point to one outcome.
"It's Evelyn..." Admiration flashed in Ethan's eyes. "She succeeded!"
Not only had she successfully infiltrated that heavily guarded central hub and found what they needed, she had also lit a fire there!
This piece of intelligence acted like the most potent dose of adrenaline, instantly injected into Lin Jie and Ethan's exhausted bodies.
Chaos was the perfect opportunity for them to slip through the net.
With everyone's attention drawn to the fire at the Archives, the path to the predetermined rendezvous point would become exceptionally clear!
Their objective was clear. The moment had arrived.
Lin Jie and Ethan exchanged a glance.
"Go!"
The two men shot out from the shadows and charged at top speed in the direction completely opposite to that support squad—toward the exhaust vent entrance they had originally infiltrated through.
The journey was tense but ultimately uneventful.
The base's entire command system was in disarray. The few scattered groups of guards they encountered were dealt with by the two men in the quickest and quietest manner possible.
By the time they finally reached the exhaust vent, Evelyn was already waiting there.
Her face was smudged with black soot, looking rather disheveled.
In her arms, she clutched tightly a large scroll wrapped in fireproof cloth.
At the same moment, a deafening roar of fury echoed faintly from the direction they had come, accompanied by a heart-palpitating surge of spiritual energy.
"It's Hawk," Lin Jie immediately identified the source. "He's buying us the last bit of time."
"Go!"
The three of them quickly climbed out of this scientific hell.
By the time they breathed the free air of the surface again, carrying the scent of earth, the first faint light of dawn was already coloring the horizon.
In the distance, Hawk's figure, looking like a thunder god descended to earth, burst out from the blazing base entrance, trailed by countless futilely firing energy beams.
Finally, just before the Brotherhood of Light's main forces could complete their encirclement, the five "survey team members" regrouped without major incident in the last vestiges of darkness before dawn, then vanished without a backward glance into the vast, silent fields of Long Island.
...
The next morning, as New Yorkers awoke to the aroma of coffee and opened that day's *New York Tribune*, a piece of news tucked away in a corner of the society section caught the attention of a few.
"Intense Earthquake and Fire of Unknown Cause in Shoreham, Long Island; Edison General Electric Company Experimental Facility Severely Damaged."
The report was not long, and its wording was quite cautious.
Citing statements from official geologists, the article claimed that a rare micro-earthquake of magnitude 4.5 on the Richter scale had occurred in the area, which unfortunately ignited a backup fuel storage facility near one of Edison's new wireless telegraph experiment towers, triggering a fire that lasted the entire night.
A spokesperson for the Edison General Electric Company expressed deep regret to reporters regarding the incident, claiming that while the accident had caused millions of dollars in damage, fortunately, as the facility was still in its testing phase, there had been no casualties.
The spokesperson also condemned irresponsible media speculation about an "explosion caused by experimental failure" and reiterated that Mr. Edison's experiments would surely bring light and progress to all mankind.
To the eyes of the general public, this report might have been just the latest anecdote among the many strange tales about that "Wizard of Menlo Park."
But in the eyes of the keen-scented capitalists of Wall Street, in the ears of the well-connected politicians on Capitol Hill, and within the top-floor office of I.A.R.C.'s North American branch located in the museum, the impact of this news was no less than a violent earthquake.
They knew perfectly well the immense ambition hidden behind that seemingly ordinary experiment tower.
And this accident, so lightly dismissed as a mishap, meant that a war being waged beneath the surface had just seen the first round decided.
...
Two days later, in New York City, inside the underground safe house disguised as a private detective agency.
A deep sleep lasting nearly forty-eight hours had allowed all members of the team to recover most of their physical strength and energy from that near-fatal infiltration mission.
The preliminary victory lent a somewhat relaxed, even buoyant, atmosphere to the safe house.
While they had not succeeded in completely destroying the Aether Tower as originally hoped, they had successfully sabotaged its core "biological battery" and triggered a catastrophic loss of energy control.
According to Phineas's professional assessment, that level of damage would require at least several months and a vast expenditure of resources for even the wealthy Brotherhood of Light to repair.
And these precious few months were the most critical reaction time for I.A.R.C., and indeed for all opposition organizations worldwide.
More importantly, they had brought back the greatest, and most unexpected, trophy of the entire operation—the complete design blueprint of the Aether Tower!
This enormous blueprint, drawn on special parchment, was spread out flat on the largest conference table in the center of the safe house.
Lin Jie, Ethan, Hawk, Evelyn, and Phineas sat around the table, forming an impromptu technical analysis team.
"This is... this is simply a miracle."
Phineas, wearing a pair of magnifying glasses specifically for viewing diagrams, ran his trembling hands over the complex, precise lines on the blueprint. An expression of almost religious fervor appeared on his face.
"An unbelievable structural design, energy conduction theories unheard of... Edison, no, the person who designed this, is absolutely a madman and a genius at least fifty years ahead of his time!"
As the only formally trained electrical engineering expert in the group, he took on the primary task of technical interpretation.
"Look here," Phineas pointed to the bottom of the blueprint, at the dense, ant-nest-like power transmission system. "After the energy is extracted from the biological battery, it isn't sent directly to the tower structure. Instead, it first passes through this... this 'difference engine array' composed of at least ten thousand interlocking gears and vacuum tubes!"
"Difference engine?" Ethan was unfamiliar with the term.
"Yes, an early purely mechanical computer!" Phineas explained excitedly. "Sir Charles Babbage proposed the concept decades ago, but due to manufacturing limitations, a true working model has never been built. But here, they not only built it, but... but they also..."
His voice grew halting with excitement, as if he had seen something he couldn't comprehend.
"Evelyn, look at this." He pointed to those tiny, neuron-like connecting structures within the difference engine array.
Evelyn immediately leaned in.
She began carefully comparing the structure on the blueprint with the scribbled notes in her father's research diary.
"...Found it." She quickly located the corresponding description on a certain page of the diary.
"My father mentioned in his notes that Edison was once obsessed with research on 'living circuits,'" Evelyn said, her voice laced with complex emotion. "He believed that pure machinery, while precise, lacked adaptability. He attempted to treat the neural tissues of certain low-level UMAs with special alchemical agents to preserve their vitality, and then... then integrate them with mechanical gears."
"His goal was," Evelyn took a deep breath and uttered a term that sent chills down everyone's spine, "to create a... living difference engine!"
The words exploded in everyone's mind.
A... living difference engine?
"This... this explains everything!" Phineas slammed his hand on the table, all his confusion transforming into sudden understanding. "I was wondering why the Aether Tower's energy output was so stable and controllable! So its core control system is a living brain with preliminary learning and adaptive capabilities!"
"The Deep Sea Moon God provides a continuous, raw, and savage energy, like a wild bull."
"And this living difference engine acts like the most precise and intelligent rider, expertly harnessing this energy, adjusting, filtering, and amplifying it, before finally delivering it to the transmission dome at the tower's peak at the most perfect and stable frequency!"
"Power source... controller... transmission terminal... These three parts form a perfect, self-regulating energy loop!"
Phineas's analysis gave everyone a deeper understanding of the Aether Tower's terrifying nature.
"But, there's still one problem here." Lin Jie, who had been listening in silence, finally spoke up. He pointed to the core area of the living difference engine on the blueprint. "The design of this machine... is too perfect. So perfect it doesn't seem like a first-generation prototype. Its structural redundancy, error correction mechanisms, energy buffers... everything is considered down to the last detail. This doesn't seem like Edison's style."
His words jolted the others.
Indeed, all of Edison's inventions carried a style of pragmatic utilitarianism, even bordering on crudeness.
But the design of this difference engine before them was imbued with the rigor of a mathematician and the elegance of a philosopher. The two were worlds apart.
"The person who designed this must have had an understanding of this system down to his very bones. He even... anticipated all possible malfunctions and designed solutions for them in advance."
Lin Jie's gaze grew profound. "This designer was definitely not Thomas Edison himself."
"Then who was it?" Hawk asked, breaking his usual silence.
Just as the analysis hit another bottleneck, Evelyn, who had been meticulously comparing the diary and the blueprint, suddenly let out a sharp, heavily suppressed gasp.
"Here..."
Her finger trembled as it pointed to a completely inconspicuous corner at the bottom right of the blueprint, one obscured by a mass of complex circuit diagrams and annotations.
Everyone immediately leaned in.
In that corner, beneath a table labeled "Structural Stress Parameters," there was an extremely tiny, scribbled signature drawn in pencil, almost invisible to the naked eye.
It wasn't a full name, but an abbreviation of two letters.
—"F.U."
Francis Upton.
That perpetually drunk, mentally broken engineer who looked like a complete and utter failure.
"He lied to us," Ethan said with a bitter smile.
Upton had concealed the most crucial truth from them.
He wasn't just a victim of ostracism. He was one of the true architects of this scientific fortress!