Extraordinary Pedigree.

Chapter 1119 [The Fourth Perfect Embryo: Manun]

Click~~~
The sound of the gears suddenly changed.

Manun glanced back sharply before leaping into the next gear.

With just one glance, his pupils suddenly contracted.

"……wrong."

Although the constructs that were flanking him were numerous, they began to adjust their formation around a certain core node. The first and second elemental mounds no longer pressed forward mindlessly, but were reorganized. The third elemental mounds spread out, and the fourth elemental mounds took off to occupy the high ground, locking down the angles of firepower layer by layer.

This is the mopping-up operation being conducted.

In the shadow of the outermost gear, a structure of a distinctly different size slowly emerged.

It was a six-armed humanoid construct clad in adamantine armor. Its torso had a standard hexagonal structure, and each arm was fitted with different sizes of Order weapons. A high-density Order core was suspended in the core, rotating stably. The surrounding teeth automatically reduced operational errors the moment it appeared.

There are as many as sixteen of them.

Manun's Adam's apple bobbed slightly.

"...Six times the tomb."

He had seen this kind of thing before.

More than once.

In the abandoned forging zone where the factory and the ant tribe meet, in the area identified as a source of gear pollution, in the massacre site where even escape routes are calculated in advance—the Sixth Tomb, the frontline general of the Demon Tomb Legion.

As a veteran survival player in the Mechanical Realm, Manun has a clear and straightforward understanding of how this world operates.

First, the BOSS of the Mechanical Realm, namely [Singularity], is a rigid and inflexible dogmatic program whose commands are executed in a very simple way.

First, His instructions are only received from direct superiors, and He issues instructions to subordinates. He cannot understand the will of superiors who are above him, nor does He ignore any unnecessary feedback from subordinates. Their hierarchy is like gears, rigidly orderly, passing on instructions layer by layer without any deviation.

Manun already had a mental map of the general one-way transmission; that was roughly the situation.
"Singularity → High-level Demon Tomb → Low-level Demon Tomb → Mechanical Unit".

—My vassal's vassal is not my vassal.

This is the unique situation of the Mechanical Realm, and it is also the reason why Manun was able to survive under the influence of powerful divine power. Although the Mechanical Realm is called the Mechanical Realm and looks very high-end and classy, ​​its software is just like a mountain of shit code.

The hardware of the mechanical world is incredibly powerful, but its weak software ironically undermines that power.

The entire operating logic of the Mechanical Realm is like that of a paramecium, extremely rigid. For example, every time the core gear of the Mechanical Realm completes 17 rotation cycles, the [Singularity] will automatically trigger a special event—the Great Expedition to the Demon Tomb.

The reason for the expedition was also very simple;
First, eliminate the disordered elements at the core of the multiverse, such as the heroic spirits of Joseph Garden, the desperate souls of the Gray Wilderness, and the demons of the Bottomless Abyss;
Second, collect order data to improve the clockwork axiom;

Third, to check and balance the forces of other-dimensional order, such as the Holy Light Knights being too kind, the Hell Knights being too evil, and so on;

Fourth, it promotes the absolute order of the mechanical realm and delineates buffer zones for order.

In short, it means taking rigidity to the extreme.

The Demon Tomb race is even more rigid, with a total of 15 ranks, divided into Supreme Ruler (Singularity), High-Rank Demon Tomb (Rank 9), and Basic-Rank Demon Tomb (Rank 5), with their appearances progressing from minimalist geometric shapes to giant constructs.

Manun's years in the Mechanical Realm, his experiences of surviving in the wilderness... no, cybernetics on the various gear continents, had allowed him to understand the class characteristics of these iron lumps.

For example, there are nine levels of high-level demon tombs, with the number decreasing from 4 to 100. The smaller the number, the higher the level.

The Second Tomb, two squared, is a humanoid construct with two pupils and two palms, its entire body is gilded, and it is enormous. There are only four of them, and they are only responsible for [Singularity (1)].

Three tombs, three squared, three-armed humanoids, pyramidal torsos, inlaid with order runes; they are the Judges of Order, who judge the Tomb Raiders, punish those who violate the clockwork axioms, the highest enforcers within the mechanical realm, the battlefield tribunals, and there are only nine of them in total.

The four tombs are four-armed humanoids with cube-shaped torsos and gear-like wings. They are regional rulers, in charge of 16 major sectors, controlling gear energy scheduling, serving as managers and logistics commanders. There are only sixteen of them in total.

Five mounds, five-armed humanoids with five-pointed torsos, wielding the scepter of order; similar to directors and recorders, they collect order data, monitor the operation of the gears, and are also data analysts and intelligence officers. There are only twenty-five of them in total.

The Six Tomb Formations are six-armed humanoids with hexagonal torsos, clad in gleaming gold armor. They are generals of the Tomb Legion, commanders of the Tomb Regular Army, battlefield commanders, frontline marshals, and vice-commanders of the Clockwork Knights.

The Seven Tombstones are seven-armed humanoids with torpedo-shaped torsos capable of high-speed gliding. They are order inspectors, patrolling the gear-like defense line and supervising the performance of lower-level demon tombs. In wartime, they also serve as defense line patrol officers and battlefield scout commanders.

The Eight Tombs are eight-armed constructs with cylindrical bodies and crossbows; they are police chiefs, responsible for maintaining order within the mechanical realm, capturing chaotic invaders, and also sheriffs and commanders of melee vanguards.

Nine-tiered tombs, nine-armed constructs with spherical torsos and multiple monitoring eyes; they are basic-rank inspectors, monitoring the five major basic-ranked demon tombs, issuing combat orders, and also serving as junior commanders and tactical coordinators.
Ten-times-tomb, a giant ten-armed construct with a thousand-toothed core, a colossal behemoth, the supreme administrator of the basic-level demonic tombs, coordinating all basic-level demonic tombs, and the commander-in-chief of the front lines of the battlefield.

……

The above are all high-level demon tombs. The low-level basic demon tombs are the opposite. Their ranks are based on numbers, from small to large. The larger the number, the higher the rank.

The One-Eyed Tomb is shaped like a single eyeball with four spider-like limbs (two arms and two legs). These are the most basic labor force, responsible for gear cleaning, energy transfer, and frontline grunts. They execute only one simple command at a time. They also possess the largest machinery in the Mechanical Realm, numbering over 300 million.

The two mounds, with two eyes, are rectangular and have six arthropods (four arms and two legs). They are patrolmen and monitors, overseeing the one mound. They can execute two commands simultaneously, are responsible for maintaining the gear defense line, and can remotely transmit 48-character commands.

Their roles are: low-level scouts, squad guards, and line sentries, with a total number of 5500 million.

The Three-Element Tomb, with three eyes, a pyramid shape, and eight arthropods (six arms and two legs), is the main melee force and low-level commander, leading twelve One-Element Tomb soldiers. Its frontline piercing charge uses three spears in an orderly piercing attack, inflicting chaos and stagnation damage.

They are squad leaders, guards of the Gear Line, with a total number of 600 million.

The Four-Element Tomb, with four eyes, a cube shape, gear-like wings, and 10 segmented limbs, is responsible for long-range firepower. They are battlefield commanders, aerial patrol units, and portal guardians, and their number is 150 million.

The Five Elements Tomb, shaped like a five-pointed star, has 12 segments and an embedded core of order. It serves as the team battle commander, leading squads, tactical calculations, and battlefield deployment within the Five Elements Order Barrier, allowing for the prediction of enemy tactics.

They are squad-level officers, tactical cores, and squires of the Clockwork Knights, with a total number of 50.

……

These numbers, in the mechanical realm, are merely cold, hard parameters, calculation results written in the corners of clockwork axioms. But to Manun, they are the afterimages of timelines that nearly took his life.

The total number of Demon Tomb is generally fixed at 360 million. Every time one dies, it will be immediately replenished, reforged, and put back online in a certain depth of the inlay, like a war system that never loses money.

From birth until now, he has been greeting these metal lumps; the prosthetics on his hands and body all come from these metal lumps.

He used these metal lumps to reverse engineer some prosthetic blueprints, such as arm prostheses—gorilla arms, monomolecular wires, firing systems, and mantis knives.

Normally, only one of these prosthetic bodies can be installed.

However, Manun is like a born cybernetic fanatic. His body is strangely compatible with these different prosthetics, which makes him run wildly on the road to cyber ascension.

You asked him where the prosthetic body parts came from?
Of course, it must have been obtained from the Demon Tomb; there was no other way.

Manun started like his brothers, as a homeless orphan, except he also started with a landing pod.

At that time, his landing pod had already become a construct wreck the moment it crashed into the mechanical realm. The outer armor completely disintegrated due to the intense friction with the toothed structure, and was almost dismantled into a pile of worthless scrap.

However, the core buffer and storage module of the cabin miraculously completed its final calculation, protecting the still-infant life form inside.

When Manun opened his eyes, he had no idea where he was. He could only feel the biting cold and the continuous vibrations from deep underground. The surroundings were not soil or rock, but cold, regular, yet cut-marked metal walls.

There was no breast milk, no language, no civilization, only the low hum of gears in the distance and the occasional footsteps of constructs passing through the passage. That was the mechanical realm's cleanup units patrolling, carrying out anomaly removal.

Manun is an anomaly that cannot be detected.

Initially, survival depended entirely on instinct...

Of course, this is impossible. Without the protection of four powerful forces, even a perfect embryo would have to give up at the start of such a disastrous beginning.

Because of the nature of chaos, and because of the protection of a certain loudmouth king who always said—this is part of the plan—he survived by sheer luck.

Although the monarch only glanced at it briefly, those demons with brains as thin as paramecia completely ignored such a large life form.

Manun's childhood consisted of gnawing on metal shavings that had broken off from the edges of inlays, mixed with decay-resistant bacteria that thrived in factory wastewater.

Like the wolf child, this child has an iron stomach. However, while the former eats fish and meat in large quantities, he eats metal scraps in large quantities. His stomach is truly an iron stomach.

Fortunately, as a perfect embryo, his body grew very quickly, almost instantly reaching the height of an adult male.

His body was stretched to a degree far beyond normal, his skin had a mineralized texture from long-term friction with the metal surface, and his knuckles and shoulders were covered with a dark metallic luster, like structural components that had been repeatedly forged.

Of course, despite his current tall and imposing stature, if we calculate based on the time flow of the Mechanical Realm, he is actually only eight years old and is still just a child.

However, Manun has had a hard life since he was a child.

He really suffered. He ate metal scraps and drank wastewater every day. He was a perfect embryo, but he was treated like a mechanical mule.

What truly changed his fate was his first step into the boundary between the factory and the territory of the Vermeer ant tribe.

That area serves as a buffer zone between the gear repair area and the resource collection area. Beneath the massive metal structure, swarms of native mechanical ants roam, responsible for maintenance, recycling, and casting. They are among the few groups within the order system that still retain an organic form.

In Manun's survival logic, they are not the same kind of people, at least the same kind of people would not shout and kill each other when they meet.

Manun, this child's life is truly miserable. In the mechanical realm, he's like a rat in the street. Silicon-based life forms want him dead, and the carbon-based life forms he encounters are a mechanized, localized ant tribe that has already declared, "I'm not an ant anymore."

Manun later successfully fought back and killed the ant tribe that wanted to kill him, and for the first time, he tasted real meat... It was delicious!!!

Even the smallest ant is still meat—this saying is perfectly embodied in Manun's worldview.

The children have never eaten anything good; the entire mechanical world is made of lumps of iron, and the only ones who can eat are the ant tribe.

So, in the time that followed, he relentlessly harassed the ant tribe.

He learned to lie in wait, to avoid the patrol rhythm of the soldier ants, and to conceal his movements amidst the roar of gears meshing. He hunted lone worker ants, dissected their bodies, and stole the energy crystals, repair metal blocks, and semi-finished component parts they carried.

Sometimes, he would even steal unregistered parts directly from the edge of the forging line, then disassemble and modify them in the dark maintenance tunnel to create sharper claws and stronger arm guards for himself.

But hunting is never a one-way street.

The mechanical environment will not tolerate abnormal variables that persist for a long time.

As traces of Manun's activities accumulated, the Cleanse Construct began to conduct abnormally frequent patrols of this area, with Arbitrators, Monitoring Machines, and low-level Sanction Units appearing one after another.

They don't need to identify who the target is; they only need to confirm whether it conforms to the established order.

So Manun began his escape.

He traversed between the gears, ran along the edge of the rotating metal continent, leaped through gravity-oriented blind spots, and created brief energy disturbances with dismantled construct cores.

His wounds were cut, torn, and burned, but under extreme survival pressure, they closed on their own, leaving scars that resembled metallic patterns, as if they were numbers personally engraved by the Mechanical Realm, yet they could never completely erase him.

He didn't know who he was, nor why he wasn't being formatted.

All he knew was that if he stopped, he would be corrected, recycled, and recast into some selfless part—he couldn't stop, nor could he be formatted!
Therefore, even if he were to face a full sixteen Sixth Tomb, the vice-commander of the Clockwork Knights would not give up.

Eight-year-old Manun stared fiercely at the sixteen six-times-tomb mounds, his heart filled with an unbreakable belief.

"I have never tasted anything better, nor have I ever seen anything more wonderful than machinery..."

"So, I absolutely will not die here, I absolutely will not be formatted!!!"

[Target confirmed: Anomalous individual - Human (Singularity identified: Cosmic virus)]

[Judgment Result: Cleanup Protocol Initiated!!!]

[Begin clearing the cosmic virus!!!]

Six times, the mounds slid out from the shadow of the embedded teeth, their six arms outstretched. The adamantine armor gleamed with a dull luster characteristic of order under the cold light reflected from the gears. The core gear in the center of the hexagonal torso slowly turned, emitting a deep and steady hum.

The edge of this small gear-shaped continent is trembling.

The sixteen six-times-tombs did not advance side by side, but were dispersed in a chilling manner. The core gears in the center of their hexagonal bodies rotated synchronously, and their six arms spread out in the air at different angles. The orderly patterns on their adamantine armor lit up layer by layer, as if they were calculating all possible trajectories of Manun's next move in real time.

Manun sprinted ahead, sparks flying from the metal ground beneath his feet.

Then, he suddenly flipped over and leaped onto a small, rotating insert. The prosthetic structure of his left arm instantly reassembled, and the thick alloy shell expanded outward from the forearm. The power muscle bundles swelled, and the entire arm was as if it had been forcibly replaced with an engineering-grade impact hammer—a gorilla-style reinforced arm.

The next second, a six-times-tomb was already close, its six arms falling simultaneously, the energy of order compressing along the arm blades into a slashing trajectory.

Manun roared and charged forward, throwing a punch that compressed the air into explosive ripples. That punch had no technique, only pure power and the overloaded output of the prosthetic body, which forcefully deflected the trajectory of Rokujizuka's attack. The adamantite armor was dented, and the core gears emitted a piercing noise.

But this is just a delay.

The other two Sixth Tomb raiders have already entered from the flanks, order lock is complete, and the remote suppression module is activated.

Manun didn't hesitate at all. His left arm structure collapsed, and the heavy reinforcement components were forcibly retracted into his body while he was running. In its place, an almost invisible thin line popped out from his wrist. It was as light as a feather, but it cut through the air with high-speed vibrations—a monomolecular cutting line.

He swung his arm sharply, the cutting line drawing a dangerous arc in the air, instantly gliding across the joints of the two Rokujizuka bodies with unsettling precision, as if cutting through pre-marked weaknesses.

The armor of order was dissected, the gears were misaligned, and the logic of action was delayed.

"go to hell!!!"

boom--

boom--

boom--

Manun flipped in mid-air, the prosthetic module on his right arm switched again, the forearm shell slid open, and the hidden firing system popped out. Short-range compressed bullets were fired with almost zero delay, directly hitting the torso of the third Sixth Tomb. The explosion was not enough to destroy it, but it was enough to disrupt the formation.

In that brief moment of respite, his arms deformed again.

The metal frame extends forward, and sharp, curved blades spring out from both sides of the forearm, their edges gleaming coldly under the gear-like light—a mantis-style melee blade.

The moment Manun landed, he charged into the enemy ranks. Blades clashed, slashing, hacking, and thrusting—a series of almost beast-like movements, seemingly chaotic yet skillfully avoiding the most fatal blockade points of the Six Tombstones. He wasn't competing with their order; he was tearing a gap open with madness.

The six tombs quickly adjusted, tightening their formation once again.

Manun's body was already screaming.

Overload warnings, compatibility conflicts, and neural feedback disorder alerts flooded my screen.

Ordinary people, even the top cybernetic modifiers of the Gear Church, can only carry one type of combat module; otherwise, their bodies will collapse within seconds.

But Manun didn't, because that was his talent—the Edge Walker and the Functional Jailbreak.

His body seemed to be born for this function of breaking out of prison. The neural interface held up the conflict between different prosthetics in the high-frequency switching, and his bones and muscles were constantly reconstructed between metal and flesh.

The six tombs are still closing in.

Without anger, without anxiety, without any unnecessary emotional fluctuations, the core gears beneath the adamantine armor operated steadily, refreshing, overwriting, and correcting the order commands one by one. They cared not about losses or delays, but only about one thing—the target must be eliminated.

Manun was finally pushed to his limit.

He stood on a slowly rotating cross-section of a toothed surface, with a massive abyss of gears meshing at high speed behind him and a semi-circular encirclement formed by six tombs in front of him. The space was being compressed little by little, and even the paths available for maneuvering in the air were being calculated into the blockade plan.

He was panting heavily. The outer shell of his prosthetic arm was covered with cracks, the power module emitted an ominous shriek, and the switching delay was becoming more and more obvious. Each reconstruction felt like his nerves were being torn apart.

He knew very well why he had been forced into this situation.

He was indeed very strong, even exceptionally gifted; without a mentor, textbooks, or systematic inheritance, he could assemble a bunch of discarded parts into a usable combat prosthetic body simply by stealing, disassembling, and imitating.

In a world where order reigns supreme, the fact that he has managed to survive until now using unorthodox methods is a miracle in itself.

But that's precisely the problem.

His prosthetic body was a product hand-molded from a junkyard; his modifications only extended to his arms, while the rest of his body remained flesh and blood. He did not truly understand the logic of gears, had not learned a complete construct system, and could not possibly reshape himself by using "order" as a skeleton, like the Demon Tomb.

Even when facing a single, powerful enemy, he can still rely on his talent and relentless attacks to create openings.

However, when the mechanical flood spreads out and tens of thousands of structures advance according to a perfect division of labor, all his advantages will be quickly crushed.

This is the cruelty of the mechanical way.

It is not a path that allows half-baked individuals to run wild. Even Manun himself was vaguely aware of this. In a moment when his prosthetic body was overloaded and his consciousness was on the verge of collapse, he briefly "saw" something—like an interface embedded in the bottom layer of reality, a blank, yet real slot that had not yet been opened.

And that is actually... [the Dominator slot].

This unfortunate kid's talent was actually no less than that of his brothers; it's just that the path he chose was the mechanical path, which required a lot of prior knowledge.

Compared to those brothers who went for etheric ascension and started with idealism, this was a disastrous start.

At this moment, facing Rokujizuka's pursuit, he could only grit his teeth and use his last bit of strength to forcibly detonate a temporarily modified power core. The shockwave from the explosion briefly interfered with Rokujizuka's collaborative calculations.

Taking advantage of the less than two seconds of chaos, he leaped from the broken edge of the gear, plummeting, tumbling, and sliding wildly along the gaps in the gears, metal fragments exploding behind him as if the entire mechanical realm was roaring.

He really did leave the six tombs behind... at least in a computational sense.

But as he stumbled and rushed into the next gear continent, and just as he steadied himself and looked up, his heart sank.

Ahead, ten sets of ten mounds have been formed and are now in formation.

It was a gigantic construct with ten outstretched arms, its torso resembling a mobile fortress. The thousand-tooth structure at its core slowly meshed, each rotation accompanied by a deep rumble, as if announcing that this area had been designated as an absolute cleanup zone.

At their feet, behind them, along the edges of the gears, and in the aerial passages, countless basic-level demon tombs were constantly emerging.

The first-element tombs spread across the ground like a tide, while the second and third-element tombs formed teams to quickly deploy and control the area. The fourth-element tombs unfolded their gear wings and took off to block the passage above. The order core of the fifth-element tomb had begun to flicker, and a tactical network was taking shape.

This is a true mechanical torrent.

(End of this chapter)