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

"Captain Shen, um... could I have a few strands of your hair and skin tissue for research?" She excitedly showed Shen Ge her amazing breakthroughs in the study of reversing freak cells over the past three years. On the screen, complex gene sequence maps and cell activity data kept flashing.

"..." Shen Ge was quite helpless, seeing his mad scientist-like appearance.

Fortunately, all they asked for were some hair and skin tissue samples, not something like cutting off a piece of flesh or removing internal organs, so it was barely acceptable.

Just then, the laboratory door was pushed open, and a slender figure wearing a captain-level combat uniform walked in. It was Yoona, who had come to submit the latest combat samples.

"Shen... Captain Shen?" Yoona felt inexplicably nervous when she saw Shen Ge.

"Long time no see." Shen Ge slowly turned around and gave her a gentle smile.

Although Yoona was also in the guard team when he returned to "reality", the situation was too urgent at the time, and the two did not have much of a chance to communicate.

"Welcome back, Captain Shen." Yoona seemed to be controlling her emotions, and her voice trembled slightly as she spoke.

"Thank you for your hard work. I heard that Minister Jiang has found a way to help you recover. I'm back now. If you want to return to a normal life, you can definitely participate in the experiment." Shen Ge's voice was warm as he spoke gently.

“No need, Captain Shen. I’ve gotten used to this power, and besides, it’s a new life you gave me. When you’re not around, it gives me the ability to protect what I want to protect,” Yoona said earnestly.

This dedication and loyalty filled Shen Ge with emotion, and he did not try to persuade him further.

After leaving the research department, Shen Ge appeared on the gravity training field.

The news had already spread, and Lin Yin, Feng Chengxiu, Tu Doupi, Yang Yuxin, Wang Han, Ma Chao... all his comrades-in-arms who had fought alongside him were already waiting here.

"Captain Shen!" With a deafening roar, Wang Han charged over like a raging bull, giving Shen Ge a bear hug that nearly broke his bones.

"I knew it! I knew you'd come back safe and sound! Come on, let's grab a drink tonight!"

Amidst the laughter and cheers, Shen Ge's gaze fell upon a familiar face in the group.

The burly man, nearly two meters tall with muscles bulging like an iron tower, wasn't wearing regular armor. Instead, he was equipped with a pair of ferocious heavy powered arm armors, exuding a violent fighting aura.

"Why does Captain Yu's aura seem to have changed so much?" Shen Ge asked.

Wang Han whispered, "Team Leader Yu suffered severe erosion from the strange energy during a previous operation, and his body underwent some changes... Now, he is also in a state of being half-human and half-strange."

"I see. Didn't Minister Jiang develop a new type of anti-psychic energy agent? Why didn't he use it?" Shen Ge asked curiously.

Wang Han sighed, "Although there is a chance of turning back into an ordinary person after using it, Minister Jiang also said that there is a certain risk involved. Moreover, after turning back into an ordinary person, one will be in a weak state for a long time and unable to go to the battlefield. Given Captain Yu's personality, how could he possibly choose this path?"

"Captain Shen, long time no see." Yu Tiexiong seemed to have noticed Shen Ge's questioning look earlier, and stepped forward to greet him with a smile.

After exchanging a few words, Yu Tiexiong said that he was still having difficulty controlling the monster's power and hoped to spar with Shen Ge and ask him for guidance.

As soon as he said this, the surroundings fell silent, and everyone looked at Shen Ge with great interest.

“Okay.” Shen Ge readily agreed.

Yu Tiexiong roared, and the alloy floor beneath his feet cracked. His massive body, carrying immense force, delivered a powerful straight punch towards Shen Ge's face. The force of the punch, generated by the power-equipped gauntlet, even caused the air to whistle.

He knew very well that there was no need to hold back against Shen Ge, because even if he tried his best, he might not be able to even touch the hem of Shen Ge's clothes.

As expected, Shen Ge neither dodged nor evaded the thunderous attack. Just as the fist was about to reach his body, he simply turned sideways with a casual gesture, stretched out his hand, and with a seemingly slow yet extremely precise and strange movement, cut into the blind spot of Yu Tiexiong's force.

Amidst everyone's shocked gazes, Shen Ge's fingers tapped several times on Yu Tiexiong's complex power-armored gauntlet.

With a few crisp "crack, crack" sounds, the hideous arm armor disintegrated instantly, as if it had lost all its power, scattering its parts all over the ground.

The next second, Shen Ge's hand was already gently placed on Yu Tiexiong's shoulder.

It took no more than thirty seconds.

Yu Tiexiong stood frozen in place, still in his punching stance, his face filled with disbelief. The strength he was so proud of seemed like a joke in front of his opponent.

Shen Ge did not use any special abilities; he relied solely on his physical strength and superb fighting skills to complete this dimensional reduction attack.

This move not only completely convinced Yu Tiexiong, but also gave all the old comrades present a direct understanding of the unfathomable strength of their former leader.

"So far, it seems you've only utilized the monster's 'power,' not the enhanced weird energy that the monster cells gave you." Shen Ge began demonstrating to Yu Tiexiong how to use weird energy to enhance strength and how to use it to control the weird energy arm armor and drive that power.

After a demonstration, Yu Tiexiong also found a way to use the power of the supernatural to drive the supernatural equipment.

One is Yoon-ah, another is Yu Tie-xiong, and then there's the Da-jing agent brought back from the Australian Ghost Space. Although the other party hasn't come out of the laboratory yet, the Rong City Special Operations Department already has three weirdos.

Shen Ge's gaze involuntarily swept towards the initial operation of the Rong City Special Operations Department in the distance. He recalled the system notification he received when he first stepped into that area—

Step into the "mysterious headquarters".

"Tsk. Special Operations Department, is it really going to turn into a bizarre headquarters in the future?"

……

That evening, a small but significant welcome banquet was held in a private room of the base's canteen.

The atmosphere at the dinner table was lively. Feng Chengxiu, after being plied with several drinks by everyone, blushed and recounted how he had been seriously injured protecting Lin Yin during an A-level supernatural disaster, which ultimately "won" the heart of this icy woman. Tu Doupi, on the other hand, was completely subdued by a single glance from Yang Yuxin, only daring to silently serve his wife food.

Wang Han, fearless of death, joked that only Feng Chengxiu could shake Lin Yin's "mountain," and then Lin Yin grabbed him by the collar and threw him off the second-floor balcony.

Looking at the familiar and sincere smiling faces before her, and listening to these stories that were either thrilling or heartwarming, the last trace of alienation caused by the separation of time and space in Shen Ge's heart completely melted away amidst the laughter and joy.

He has truly come home.

After a simple welcome banquet, the noise subsided. Shen Ge did not choose to rest, but instead summoned the true core decision-making team of the Special Operations Department to hold a secret meeting in a conference room located deep underground, which was doubly encrypted with the highest level of physical and information security.

Those present included only the highest commanders of the Special Operations Department, Shen Ge, Deng Yuqi, Zhang Quan, Luo Jin, and Liu Jiayi, as well as Li Xiang and Jiang Peiwen, two geniuses representing the fields of equipment technology and biological research, respectively.

As the conference room door slowly closed, shutting out all prying and eavesdropping, Shen Ge's expression shifted from the gentle warmth of their reunion to an unprecedented seriousness.

"What I am about to say concerns the truth of the world, and... the ultimate threat that our civilization may face."

He no longer held back and recounted his entire experience in that destroyed "fragmented world" to everyone present in detail.

Although this is the "future" of another world, many clues reveal that it has many "shadows" of reality.

If "reality" continues to develop in this way, it will inevitably go down this path.

In Shen Ge's narration, it begins with how he and his classmate Xiao Qi fought their way out of the strange energy storm, got separated and stranded on a deserted island, and met the Alai family.

Using "strange biology," they built the first "Ark," a vessel combining flesh and steel, in a primitive and desperate environment.
Then, after conquering the "Rusty Heart," they joined forces with Hephaestus to launch that bizarre "industrial revolution," transforming an abandoned steel city into a self-aware, ecologically sustainable mobile fortress at sea—the "Iron Heart."

He recounted the clashes with post-apocalyptic civilizations such as the "Tomb of the Sleeping God" and the "Gear Continent," revealing the grudges and rivalries between the three major factions: the "New God Cult" and the "Precursor Civilization."

Finally, he steered the conversation toward the final showdown—

To confront the god-like being "Omnissiah," who fused with the "monstrous flesh and blood of the progenitor" and attempted to assimilate the entire universe with mechanical laws.

Although he forcibly closed the rift in "Omnissiah" and imprisoned it in multiple strange spaces, once "Omnissiah" awakens and invades the "reality" of that world, even the current Shen Ge cannot prevent the destruction of that world.

So what he needs to do now is prevent an Omnissiah from appearing in "reality," otherwise even a god wouldn't be able to save the world.

Shen Ge's narration was calm and restrained, but the epic history of the rise and fall of civilizations and the terrifying truths on a cosmic scale contained within it struck everyone present like a thunderbolt, leaving them in a prolonged state of shock.

The officials, including Deng Yuqi, looked extremely solemn. They were shocked that such a hopeless "future" existed beyond the world, and even more frightened by the life-or-death struggle Shen Ge had gone through on that desolate ocean.

Li Xiang and Jiang Peiwen, however, reacted very differently.

"A biological computer? Fusion of the ganglia of the 'Abyss Stitcher' and a silicon wafer?" Li Xiang suddenly stood up from his seat, his breathing becoming rapid, his eyes flashing with an almost manic fervor.

"There's also 'living alloy'? It can actually self-repair and adaptively evolve by absorbing damage from strange energy? My God... Shen Ge, you didn't bring back intelligence, you brought back a revolution!"

Although that "future" has already experienced a demise, the technology preserved by the pioneers is said to be hundreds or even thousands of years ahead of "reality," so it is not surprising that Li Xiang is so enthusiastic.

Jiang Peiwen was also attracted by concepts such as "strange earthworms" improving soil and the artificial breeding of "armored tuna," which opened a new door for her long-term research on the topic of "strange benign utilization and symbiosis."

After everyone had digested this massive amount of information, Shen Ge presented the real "gift".

Every time Shen Ge goes to the Ghost Space and the Fragment World, he brings back some "local specialties," and Li Xiang is most excited at these times.

"Due to the differences in the physical laws between the two worlds, large-scale matter transfer is not yet possible. But before I came back, I still managed to bring back some 'local specialties'."

If Xiao Qi and the Red Mist Armor were still around, it would be much easier for Shen Ge to carry things. Unfortunately, he has yet to find any information related to Xiao Qi.

Therefore, Shen Ge could only use the power of dreams as a guide, combined with his control over space, to open an extremely small and unstable temporary storage channel between himself and the "Iron Heart" in another dimension.

In a flash of light, several items shrouded in eerie black mist appeared on the conference table.

The first item was a palm-sized, dark gold metal block with a strange, life-like luster flowing across its surface—a V-shaped living alloy sample.

It has both the heavy texture of metal and the warm touch of flesh. When it comes into contact with the faint strange energy radiation in the air, the texture on its surface even undergoes extremely subtle self-adaptive changes.

Li Xiang practically pounced on it, put on special gloves, and picked it up as if caressing a rare treasure, muttering to himself, "Incredible... This is simply a divine creation capable of changing the entire landscape of anti-device equipment! Is this really what you said... something created by that young man?"

Li Xiang now really wants to meet that boy named Hephaestus. Being able to create something like this, it wouldn't be an exaggeration to call him a peerless genius.

However, Hephaestus's success was built on the technology of the Forerunners. In Shen Ge's opinion, if Li Xiang were thrown over there and given enough time to adapt to the Forerunners' technology, he might be able to achieve the same results.

The second item Shen Ge took out was a data chip containing the blueprints for the "Raider-IV" mech, which had been improved and initially adapted to "reality" by Hephaestus himself.

The third, and most crucial and sensitive, item was the prototype of the "Hermes" biocomputer. It was a peculiar creation, sealed in a life support container, half of which was a precision silicon crystal plate and the other half of a faintly pulsating, eerie pink brain neural tissue.

When Li Xiang saw this core, which possessed self-learning capabilities and was essentially a "man-made anomaly," even a deep sense of apprehension flashed in his eyes.

He and Jiang Peiwen exchanged a glance, both seeing the same excitement, and... a hint of barely perceptible worry, in each other's eyes.

Finally, Shen Ge also took out some specially treated samples of bizarre creatures and handed them to Jiang Peiwen, providing her with unprecedented material for her research. (End of Chapter)