The system is four years ahead of schedule, but Weird is still a cub.

Akturus's words stirred something within Shen Ge.

Titan-class warship?

He had seen this title in the top-secret files of the Special Operations Department.

That was a final weapon conceived by humanity in the old era to deal with the "world-ending catastrophe," a weapon that could be described as a mobile continent!
However, in "reality," that was merely a concept of the Special Operations Department. With contemporary technology, even the Ark could not be built, let alone a Titan-class warship.

Shen Ge never expected to see its... "heart" here.

In other words, the old era of this world had already built the "Titan"-class warships before its destruction, but even so, it still met its demise.

“I’m not interested in your history,” Shen Ge’s voice interrupted Arcturus’s almost missionary, fervent narration.

"When can my 'ride' be repaired?" Shen Ge asked.

“Anytime, my lord.” Arcturus immediately snapped out of his daze, his face once again plastered with a respectful smile.

"I have dispatched my most capable student, Hephaestus, the most outstanding 'Mechanical Sage' of the Corroded Heart, to oversee this restoration work. Rest assured, we will treat your 'holy presence' with the highest honors."

He said, clapping his hands.

On one side of the temple, a hidden door slowly slid open. A thin figure, out of place with its surroundings, stepped out.

He was a boy who looked only fifteen or sixteen years old.

He was wearing a white lab coat stained with oil, and a pair of thick goggles made of several layers of lenses.

His hair was disheveled, and his face was as pale as if he hadn't seen the sun for years. Unlike everyone else in the city, he... bore no signs of mechanical modification.

He was a pure, complete... human being.

"..." But Shen Ge's focus was on the names of these people. It can only be said that whether it was the bishop or that "mechanical sage", the names were very well chosen, and they were just short of being "deified".

"Teacher." The boy adjusted his goggles and bowed timidly to Arcturus. Then, as if drawn by a magnet, his gaze was fixed intently and obsessively on the "Ark No. 1" model projection, and he could not look away.

"This, this, this ship... its biomass engines and the energy circuits of its hull skeleton, my God... how did they do that? This, this design is simply... a miracle!!"

The boy's voice trembled with extreme excitement. He completely ignored everyone else present and just frantically studied Shen Ge's "creation" with the eyes of a scholar looking at a perfect work of art.

A fleeting, subtle glint of admiration and jealousy flashed in Arcturus's eyes. He turned to Shen Ge and smiled, "My lord, please forgive me."

“Hephaestus is a tech fanatic. But in the entire Heart of Rust, no one understands better than him... how to communicate with 'machines'.”

Shen Ge's eerie gaze silently fell upon the purely human boy named "Hephaestus." Not for any other reason than that he saw a familiar shadow in this boy.

Focused, obsessed, with an almost fanatical passion for technology, yet somewhat clumsy in navigating interpersonal relationships...

This is practically a teenage version of... Li Xiang.

In a city where everyone is obsessed with mechanical modification, a genius technician who insists on "pure physical" techniques emerges.

The whole thing is full of incongruity and drama.

“Hephaestus,” Bishop Arcturus’s voice, carrying a hint of barely perceptible authority, interrupted the boy’s reverie.

"This is a messenger who has descended from the 'Kingdom of Gods'. You will now be fully responsible for repairing the lord's 'holy carriage'. You must use all your skills and there can be no mistakes."

"Yes...yes, teacher!" Hephaestus snapped out of his daze and realized his lapse in composure.

He bowed hastily to Shen Ge, his face flushed with a sickly red, and said excitedly, "Messenger... Messenger! May I touch... no, I mean, may I examine your... masterpiece up close? Its energy conduction method has shattered all my understanding!"

In his eyes, there was no awe for the "messenger of the gods," only a scholar's pure thirst for unknown knowledge.

Shen Ge was very familiar with that look in his eyes, and also... admired it.

“Okay.” Shen Ge nodded, “but only you can do it. I don’t want any outsiders getting involved with my boat.”

This is a reasonable request that aligns with the proud status of a "divine messenger".

"Of course! Of course! Please rest assured!" Hephaestus nodded excitedly, as if he had received the most precious gift in the world.

As Arcturus watched this scene, a glint of triumphant gleam flashed in his cloudy old eyes. This was exactly the result he wanted.

Once Hephaestus gets on that ship, he has a million ways to obtain all the data he wants through the hidden surveillance device on his "student".

“Then, my lord messenger,” Arcturus turned to Shen Ge again, smiling amiably, “while your carriage is resting, I have arranged accommodations for you and your… ‘attendants.’ Please have my guards take you to ‘meditation.’”

The so-called "quiet contemplation" is naturally a form of house arrest.

Shen Ge was fully aware of this, but he did not refuse.

"Good work."

He, along with the equally silent Alai and others, followed an archbishop's guard and left the oppressive "Forge Temple".

After they left, only Bishop Arcturus remained in the temple.

The respectful smile on his face vanished instantly, replaced by an extreme gloom and greed.

“Messenger…” He slowly walked to the massive “Warspace Engine Core,” feeling the terrifying power contained within, and muttered to himself, “No matter what you are… as long as I decipher the secrets of your ship… as long as I can also achieve that ‘perfect’ symbiotic state between flesh and machine…”

“I, Arcturus, will no longer need to pray for the illusory blessings of ‘Omnesia’... I will become the new... God of Machines!”

The accommodations assigned to Shen Ge and the others were located on the top floor of a tower converted from the bridge of a battleship. The facilities here were arguably the most luxurious in the entire "Rusty Heart." If you considered the cold metal beds, the recycled fresh water that smelled of machine oil, and the steam doors controlled by gears and levers as "luxurious," then...

As soon as Alai and the others entered the prison-like room, Kyle and Roca, following Shen Ge's instructions, immediately began to vigilantly check their surroundings, looking for any possible surveillance cameras or traps.

Shen Ge walked to the huge porthole made of bulletproof glass and looked down at the massive and deformed steel city below.

“Brother, there are eyes everywhere here…” Kyle said in a low voice as he walked over. He had just discovered several miniature, wind-up listening devices in the ventilation duct in the corner of the wall.

“I saw it.” Shen Ge’s gaze did not linger on the obvious surveillance cameras.

His elusive eyes had already pierced through the walls, allowing him to clearly see all the hidden energy lines, data flows, and life signals of the "Gear Guard" secretly observing them within the tower.

They were indeed placed under house arrest.

But for Shen Ge, as long as he wasn't imprisoned in a special cage that could isolate his supernatural abilities, any form of "house arrest" was not much different from "vacation."

What he was waiting for was a person and an opportunity.

Night falls.

The entire "Heart of Rust" did not fall into darkness. Instead, it was illuminated by countless searchlights, the flames of steam furnaces, and the flashing indicator lights on the pipes, making it resemble a bizarre and never-sleeping night city.

The piercing sound of steam horns replaced the sun and moon, becoming the sole standard for measuring time in this city.

As the long whistle signaling the shift change of the "three shifts" resounded through the sky, Alai and the others, exhausted from the past few days, had already curled up on their metal beds and fallen into a deep sleep.

Only Shen Ge remained quietly standing by the window.

Just then, a very faint, almost imperceptible metallic scraping sound came from the ceiling ventilation ducts in their room.

A slow smile curved the corners of Shen Ge's lips.

The person he was waiting for came.

He walked to the bottom of the ventilation duct, without looking up, and calmly said, "You can come down now. I have temporarily disabled the bishop's monitoring devices for you."

Inside the ventilation duct, there came a flurry of sounds, like clothes rubbing together.

A few seconds later, with a clumsy thud, a thin figure emerged from the narrow ventilation shaft, covered in dust, and collapsed to the ground.

It was that genius boy, Hephaestus.

He scrambled to his feet, adjusted his heavy goggles, and looked at the "messenger" who seemed to have anticipated his arrival. His face was filled with shock, shame, and... an uncontrollable, morbid excitement.

"You...you...how did you know I was here?" The boy's voice stammered with nervousness.

"The smell of engine oil on you, and your heart beating faster than a steam piston, can be heard clearly from fifty meters away," Shen Ge casually made up.

“Speak,” he said, giving the boy no further chance for pleasantries, and went straight to the point, “risking being discovered by your teacher, you climbed up the ventilation duct to see me. What do you want from me?”

Hephaestus took a deep breath, as if gathering all his courage.

He didn't answer Shen Ge's question. Instead, in a trembling yet fervent voice, he asked, "You...you...you're not a 'messenger' of 'Omnisiah' at all, are you?"

Shen Ge's dark eyes met Hephaestus's strikingly bright eyes, hidden behind thick glasses, in the dim light.

After a long silence, Shen Ge finally spoke, her voice devoid of any emotion: "Why do you think that?"

“Because… ‘logic’!” Hephaestus’s face shone with the absolute confidence and radiance that only a scholar possesses when expounding the truth.

“I studied your ‘masterpiece’ for an entire afternoon. It…it’s too perfect! A perfect biomass engine, a perfect energy circuit, a perfect fit between flesh and machine! This is something that our technological system, which has stagnated for hundreds of years, could suddenly ‘divinely inspire’!”

He waved his hands excitedly: "Your Excellency and the others only saw a 'miracle' and attributed it to the grace of 'Omnesia'."

"But I don't believe it! In the world of mechanics and logic, nothing appears out of thin air. Any advanced technology must have its own trajectory of inheritance and evolution! The technological concepts demonstrated in your 'masterpiece' are... at least two eras ahead of us!"

“More importantly…” the boy’s voice was extremely low, his eyes filled with sharpness, “I discovered on the core keel of this ship… an extremely ancient ‘energy mark,’ long before our city was even built. The style of that mark… belongs only to a legendary era—the era of the ‘Forerunners’!”

His words stirred in Shen Ge, for the first time, a genuine, slight murderous intent within him towards the seemingly harmless boy before him.

He knows far too much.

Seemingly sensing the fleeting chill emanating from Shen Ge, Hephaestus took a step back in fright, but he did not back down.

"You...you must not misunderstand!"

He waved his hands hastily and said urgently, “I mean no harm! I, I just want to know the ‘truth’! I have no interest in that vague belief in ‘Omnisiah’. I only believe in ‘knowledge’ and ‘truth’. Your appearance has shown me… a completely new and different… path to the truth.”

His eyes blazed with renewed fervor: “'Flesh and blood are weak, machinery ascends'... This is the only creed our teacher taught us. He told us that only by completely abandoning the weakness of the flesh can we attain eternity. But... but your ship has proven to me... that flesh and blood are not weak. It... it can also be a part of power, even... the most crucial part!”

"Who...who exactly are you?" The boy looked at Shen Ge, his eyes filled with the purest thirst for knowledge. "Where did your technology come from? Did the 'Pioneers'...not actually all go extinct?"

Shen Ge fell silent.

The boy before him was practically a monster. After just one afternoon of observation, he had almost completely guessed his origins.

Such wisdom, in such a place, either makes one a powerful and ruthless figure like Arcturus, or... leads to death for knowing too much.

“I’ll answer your question,” Shen Ge finally spoke, “and then?” (End of Chapter)