“To be honest, a girl walking down the street puking and cursing is really an eyesore…”

“But if that girl is actually a ship, and everything she’s throwing up is just system waste, then the scene is somehow acceptably bizarre.”

“However, thinking about it carefully, your ship is technically a Kanmusu, a Kanmusu! This scene is still an eyesore!”

Nolan rolled her eyes, looking helplessly at her captain: “Boss, you’ve been muttering about this for ages. Can you take a break?”

Hao Ren: “…Forget it, let’s get back to business.”

Everyone’s attention refocused on the mangled remains of the corrupted monsters.

Analyzing these remains had been quite productive. Hao Ren had figured out what most of the monsters originally looked like, their power levels and special abilities after mutation, and how the Mad Lord’s power affected these creatures, as well as the general process of their mutation—each piece of information was invaluable. It was some of the most direct intelligence about the Mad Lord that Hao Ren had obtained since arriving in the Dream Plane. The last time he had acquired such precious information was during the battle against Lockmarton in the Carrouse world.

But in the end, he still couldn’t figure out why the monsters had suddenly displayed "discipline" at the last moment of the battle.

Corrupted monsters lacked discipline, acting almost entirely on instinct, except for swarming together. This was their biggest weakness, and if exploited properly, even an inferior force could fight them. However, if this weakness disappeared, the monsters’ threat would increase exponentially. They were numerous, unafraid of death or injury, possessed bizarre abilities, and constantly polluted and corrupted everything on the battlefield as the battle progressed. If such troublesome enemies also gained the skill points of being disciplined and tactically proficient, Hao Ren would rather duel with Raven 12345—at least the latter was pleasing to the eye, right?

According to the data terminal's calculations, if these monsters had displayed the same organization and discipline from the beginning of the battle as they had at the end, the difficulty for the drone swarm to win would have increased exponentially. Although relying on constantly reinforced swarms from the rear could still have achieved final victory, it would have been a pyrrhic victory, not as easy and pleasant as the previous battle.

But the analysis of the remains showed that these monsters did not have intact thinking organs. Their brains had long rotted away, making it impossible for them to make the precise coordinated attacks and breakthroughs seen on the battlefield.

Vivian tapped her fingers lightly on the armrest of her chair, while looking at Hao Ren: “Do you have something in mind?”

“I’m just thinking about something,” Hao Ren admitted. “Do you think these monsters might have been remote-controlled? They don’t have the ability to think for themselves, but they act rationally. ‘Remote control’ is the best explanation. On the battlefield, they were chaotic at first, only knowing how to blindly charge forward, but when they were about to be wiped out, they suddenly seemed to realize and organized a breakout… It feels like the opposing commander f2'd a bunch of units and A-moved them, because the fairies had no ability to resist, so the commander A-moved them and then ignored them. Then after a while, they saw their population plummeting and suddenly realized, quickly switched over to save the situation, but it was too late…”

Hao Ren’s unconventional thinking was logical and well-reasoned. Vivian thought carefully and then clapped her hands: “Because I’ve never played the game, I don’t understand anything you’re saying.”

Hao Ren: “…Then why did you look so enlightened!”

“Okay, okay, I’m just joking, I understand what you mean,” Vivian said with a grin and waved her hand. “I think what you’re saying is possible, but that possibility is entirely based on speculation. There isn’t a shred of tangible evidence at the moment, so it’s just a…”

Before she could finish speaking, the data terminal suddenly jumped out: “Wait, if we’re talking about tangible evidence, we have some now.”

Hao Ren and Vivian turned to the terminal at the same time: “What evidence?”

The data terminal flew in front of them and opened its holographic projection. The projection showed a black warship twisted by parasitic biological tissue—this black warship was obviously reconstructed using technical means, because the battlefield ravaged by the drone swarm would not have left such a complete wreck—as the image changed, the internal structure of this analysis diagram became clearly layered, and some dark red network structures and large clumps of color filled most of the ship.

“Autonomous machines have disassembled the wreckage of seventeen black warships. After piecing together the data from these wrecks, they finally reconstructed a complete enemy ship. Look at these network structures—every wreck has them, and from the structure to the principle, they are very similar. They are a mixture of metal data cables and biological nerve tissue, like a neural network that spreads throughout the ship. This unit speculates that this thing was originally the electrified control network of the ship. After the ship’s crew mutated, this control network merged with biological tissue to become like this. These dark areas are the nodes of the ‘neural network.’ These nodes are obviously the result of late-stage proliferation. They are all swollen and deformed sarcomas. Judging from the shape of the sarcomas, they should be the main bodies of those corrupted giants…”

The image showed some disgusting biological tissue. Even Hao Ren, who had seen so much, felt a little numb. The biological tissue was the swollen and deformed corpses of giants, but the corpses had melted like wax to the point where they were almost unrecognizable. Around these rotten fleshy tissues, a large number of tubular objects extended out, which were the so-called "neural networks."

“The neural network and these corrupted giants together form a control system. The former is the command transmission unit, and the latter is equivalent to an antenna. This unit has discovered that this system has the ability to receive remote commands, and also has a certain degree of autonomous control. Without external commands, it will operate the ship on its own—of course, in this case, their execution efficiency will be extremely low, just like the first half of the previous battle.”

“So it really is remote-controlled…” Hao Ren stroked his chin. “Only these ships have this structure?”

“Smaller ‘neural remote control systems’ have also been found on other wrecks, but there are significant differences from those in the black ships. This unit speculates that those smaller units may not be directly commanded by the highest level, but rather act as wingmen or escorts, controlled by the black ships—but when the black ships themselves are in autonomous combat mode, the action efficiency of these cannon fodder units is obviously not very high.”

The organizational structure of these corrupted monsters and their military operation mode were finally revealed.

“A pyramid… or a tree-like control network?” Vivian frowned. “So, when they were chaotic and disorganized before, it was automatic combat mode, and later they suddenly showed discipline because they were directly controlled by higher-level units… It seems that this ‘higher-level unit’ is a very tricky thing.”

“Judging from their performance in battle, these corrupted monsters’ higher-level units have a completely different level of intelligence than ordinary Mad Lord derivatives. They or it have a high degree of discipline and tactical thinking, and can formulate rapid and rational response strategies based on the current situation, and more importantly…”

Hao Ren didn’t finish speaking, and Vivian continued the second half of his sentence: “More importantly, they already know we’re here.”

“It’s unavoidable,” Hao Ren waved his hand. “Such a large-scale battle can’t be concealed. I’m only worried about how much the controllers behind these monsters know about our strength—they only extended their will over when the battle was about to end, so they probably didn’t see much directly. But I don’t know if there’s a ‘memory cache’ or similar mechanism in these monsters’ nervous system or command system. If the last ship that was destroyed uploaded the battlefield record or something, then we’ll expose a lot.”

Nolan’s voice came from the side: “The huge number of drone swarms is a hard advantage. We are only facing Mad Lord derivatives, not the Mad Lord or the Goddess of Annihilation herself. Therefore, as long as we can achieve absolute numerical crush, exposing some swarm data is not a problem.”

Hao Ren nodded: “You’re right. Notify the swarm’s general consciousness, and transfer all the reserves from the outer reaches of the X-cluster. The swarm nests in the X-cluster should set the production priority of armed drones to the highest. Also, don’t stop injecting troops into this area until I issue a termination order or the crisis in the X-cluster is resolved. My request is simple: after the war starts, no matter how big the enemy’s position is, my swarms must fill ninety-nine percent of the space in their field of vision.”

“Nolan understands.”

“And we must also pay attention to the local active defense and scanning,” Vivian reminded. “Our existence has been exposed, and they may send a second wave of troops.”

After arranging local defense and drone production-related matters, Hao Ren originally planned to continue observing in this “testing ground” for a while, but the intelligence from the "Nakdal Continent" (this was the new name given to the planetary fragment, after all, it had a name when it served as a fortress) forced him to return early.

The analysis of that “navigation crystal” finally yielded results.

As the navigation computer of the Nakdal planetary fortress, the mysterious giant crystal contained a huge amount of data, but the Creator Goddess's encryption of the crystal meant that most of this data could not be cracked. But this did not mean that it was completely impossible to analyze anything from it—after Vivian accidentally activated the crystal once, it changed from its original "dead" state to a semi-active standby state. Although its encryption system was still operating, Hao Ren... well, actually, the data terminal discovered that the information stored in the crystal was layered. Although a considerable amount of data was in a sealed state, it seemed that everything else besides these mysterious data could be decrypted using conventional algorithms...

So Hao Ren asked the data terminal to design a system specifically for cracking the crystal's encryption. During this period, the crystal was placed in the control center of the Nakdal Continent, constantly receiving reading and decryption.

The shallow information of the crystal was cracked, which meant that the true coordinates of the "Nexus" were within reach.