Chapter 47 — Artisan Nova

Above the newly tested defense line, the skylight was just revealing a touch of greyish-blue.

On the cobble beach of the grand canyon pass, before the morning mist had dissipated, the sharp wail of an alarm suddenly shrilled inside the main control cabin. On the monitoring screen, at the edge of a pile of abandoned mine carts outside the pass, an extremely weak but violently fluctuating high-energy heat source was flashing.

"Supreme Commander, something has intruded into the outer edge of the interference net!" Lyra stared intently at the screen, her fingertips rapidly tapping on the astrolabe's control panel. "It's not an Aries Legion battlecruiser scan. It's an entity, very small in volume, but... but the causality fluctuation inside her is very chaotic, like a leaking gravity capacitor!"

"I'll go take it out." Caleb pulled the bolt of his dark matter sniper rifle with a clack. His mechanical eye instantly locked onto the scarlet alarm point, emitting rapid flashes of amber cold light.

"Wait, Caleb. Take a small team and go with me to take a look first." Elias pushed down the veteran's muzzle, lifted the broken knife by his hand, and sheathed it at his waist, taking a deep breath. "If it really were a scout, the alarm would have been synchronized by the Sky-network long ago. This amplitude looks more like some kind of out-of-control physical reaction."

Five minutes later, in a scrap iron junkyard outside the grand canyon.

Red dust swirled in the morning wind, mixed with a pungent smell of burnt wiring. Elias and Caleb, leading four mortal warriors, their rifles raised, glided silently among the cold steel-bone wreckage. As they rounded a stack of abandoned hydraulic booms, a burst of coarse, high-pitched cursing pierced through the wind and sand, clearly reaching everyone's ears.

"Damn rusty nuts! I fuck your uncle's hydraulic bearings! Sooner or later, I'm going to send the artisan who designed this transmission into the recycling furnace! And that high-and-mighty Uranus... damn it, he's a god, but sooner or later I'll dismantle his temple too!"

Elias pushed aside a piece of tin plating, getting a clear view of the scene before him.

A petite girl, exuding a fierce aura from head to toe, was half-kneeling in the sand. She sported a fiery-red punk mohawk short haircut, looking like a dancing flame in the greyish-blue morning light. Her dark coveralls, stained with black machine oil, were tied loosely around her waist; her upper half wore only a grey camisole soaked in sweat and grease, with a pair of heavily scratched welding goggles hanging loosely around her neck.

The most striking thing was her right arm—a heavy mechanical prosthetic arm pieced together entirely from scrap metal and exposed gears. At this moment, the elbow joint of the prosthetic was constantly spitting out crimson short-circuit sparks, accompanied by the harsh grinding sound of gears. Meanwhile, her left hand was dead-dragging a sealed titanium alloy cylindrical container, two meters long and weighing hundreds of pounds.

"Don't move! Put your hands up!" Caleb flashed out from the shadows, the black muzzle of his gun pointing straight at the girl's forehead.

The red-haired girl was startled by the sudden voice, instinctively spitting out a metal anti-loosening screw she had been holding in her mouth. She raised her intact left hand, wiped the grease off her cheek with the back of her hand, and stared fearlessly at Caleb's muzzle with a pair of bright yellow pupils, cursing loudly: "Who are you trying to scare holding that piece of scrap iron, old man? Can't you see my transmission shaft is short-circuited? If you know what's good for you, hurry over and help me lift this iron can, otherwise when the purification field radar sweeps over later, we'll all become barbecue!"

Elias stepped forward, his lake-green eyes sweeping over the titanium alloy container engraved with the law runes of Uranus, and then looking at her frantically smoking mechanical right arm.

"Did you escape from a laboratory of the Divine Court?" Elias asked.

"Nonsense! Otherwise, who would stroll through the wasteland dragging such a heavy treasure around with nothing better to do?" The red-haired girl glared at him crossly. "My name is Nova, the boss lady of an underground workshop in the neighboring star sector. If you want to live, hurry up and take me into that shielding net of yours! Those hounds of Aries are going to track this place down any minute!"

Elias did not hesitate, gesturing to the warriors behind him: "Lift the container and take her back to camp. Caleb, use lead sand to erase the tracks and thermal residue we left."

Ten minutes later, under the lights of the camp's main control cabin.

Nova sat on a bench, while Lyra was helping her clean the melted circuits on her mechanical right arm using insulated pliers. Nova grimaced in pain while simultaneously cursing the materials science standards of the Divine Court with coarse language.

When her gaze swept across the corner of the main control cabin and landed on Orion, who was crossing his arms with an indifferent expression, this hot-tempered girl suddenly froze completely.

"O... Orion?!" Nova cried out in shock, not even reacting when Lyra's insulated pliers pinched her in pain. "The demigod of Orion? That madman wanted by the Divine Court, whose divine core was supposedly crushed in the jump channel? You're actually not dead? And you're staying in the garbage dump with these mortal ants?!"

Orion twitched the corner of his mouth, revealing a self-deprecating sneer: "Little artisan, although my divine markings are shattered, it's more than enough to crush this fake arm of yours. Don't make a fuss; I'm currently the supernumerary instructor of the Mortal Vanguard."

"Instructor? A demigod acting as an instructor for mortals?" Nova spat, patting the massive titanium alloy container lying across the stone table, the shock on her face rapidly turning into a nearly manic excitement. "Great! Looks like I didn't run to the wrong place! There really is a group of madmen here who want to pierce the heavens!"

"What's in this iron can?" Elias stepped forward, his lake-green eyes gazing at the titanium alloy cylinder.

"This is the proudest masterpiece of my life," Nova's expression grew somewhat serious, her yellow pupils flashing with extremely excited light under the lamp. "I call it the 'Reverse Star-track Interferometer'. Those high-and-mighty gods think their Star-network is flawless, but this brain of mine 'overclocked' in its sleep for a full three months, and forcibly parsed and pieced together this core algorithm from their overflowing high-dimensional radiation signals!"

She pressed her mechanical left hand heavily on the side of the titanium alloy container. Accompanied by a low sound of air pressure release, the titanium alloy outer shell of the container slid open to both sides, revealing a pale blue core inside, intricately woven from countless complex superconducting gears and star-marrow transistors. That core was currently emitting a high-frequency electromagnetic fluctuation that was cold, dry, and capable of slightly distorting the surrounding light.

"That rigid system of the divine soldiers only knows how to defend against high-dimensional energy, but they could never dream that mortals could use the crudest physical superconducting gears to forcefully interfere with their star-track baseline frequencies." Nova grinned, revealing a mouthful of white teeth, her smile filled with the wildness and pride unique to a wasteland artisan. "Originally, this crude algorithm could only create some faint electromagnetic oscillations at the compliance level, but I felt that was too petty, so I completely restructured it."

"I used heavily radiated star-marrow slag found in the wasteland to forcefully boost its overload bandwidth, turning it into an 'insulation barrier' generator. As long as we can fully release the energy of this prototype, it can briefly paralyze the divine core law circuits of divine soldiers or even demigods within a localized area. Inside that 'insulation domain', the high-and-mighty gods will instantly lose all their star-track enhancements, becoming just like us mortals, capable of having their heads blown open by a physical bullet!"

Hearing these words, the air inside the entire main control cabin instantly froze.

Caleb's breathing suddenly became incredibly heavy. His mechanical eye stared dead at that pale blue core, as if he were looking at a real guillotine capable of severing the throats of gods.

Even Vespera (Umbra), who had been observing coldly from the sidelines, slightly contracted her violet eyes hidden in the shadows at this moment.

Insulation domain...

The subversion logic of the God of Uranus, combined with the utterly irreverent, mad modifications of a mortal?

She silently looked at that fiery-red-haired, hot-tempered girl, a chill and trembling wave of pleasure surging in her heart. This wasteland blind spot forgotten by the astrolabe was frantically smelting together all sorts of lethal gunpowder and destructive fuses at an out-of-control speed.

Elias stepped forward, his fingertips gently touching that layer of cold and distorted air. He looked up at Nova, a never-before-seen wildfire igniting in his lake-green eyes: "Nova, we need to manufacture this core into a warhead that can be fired by physical artillery. We will call it—the 'Orbit-breaking Meteor Shell'."

"Deal, Supreme Commander." Nova grinned, baring her teeth. "Prepare all the waste star-marrow slag and high-temperature smelting furnaces for me. Within three days, I will build you a batch of shells that can smash the laws of the Aries battleships!"

---

At this exact same moment, in the high-dimensional heavenly realm, inside that private starry dome temple floating deep in the ice-blue light tracks.

God of Uranus, Uranus, sat idly on a long bench woven from chaotic laws. Half of his face was calm like a wise elder, while the other half was obscured by a glass mask covered in scorched textures. On his forehead, the astronomical symbol of Uranus was flashing with pale blue electric arcs, and his ice-blue eyes reflected the coordinates of the blind spot on the bottom layer of the Star-network that was currently trembling slightly.

In the void, a multi-dimensional projection composed of countless shattered astrolabes was slowly rotating. The energy signal representing the "Reverse Star-track Interferometer" was currently being injected with a pungent, violently turbulent, and highly contaminating heavy-radiation dark energy in the mortal blind spot. The originally smooth interference curve instantly warped into an extremely frantic "insulation barrier" value.

"Oh? To actually use that kind of heavy metal waste slag to overwrite my interference frequency into an insulation dead zone..."

The God of Uranus, Uranus, looked at that frantically jumping energy curve, the corners of his mouth hidden beneath the mask slowly lifting into an extremely twisted and excited smile. He extended his slender finger, clad in precision metal armor, and gently flicked the projection dust before his eyes.

"What a beautiful and coarse accident. My little runaway artisan, the inspiration I catalyzed in your mortal head through dreams has indeed not disappointed me."

He whispered low, a trace of cold-blooded pleasure flitting across his icy eyes. He did not care how long the mortal rebel army could live, nor did he care what kind of echoes that destroyed piece of dregs would bring. The only thing he cared about was what kind of gaffe would appear on God King Jupiter's face in the Inner Cabinet assembly hall after that tightly sealed star-track was smashed full of holes by mortals.

"Burn, lowly wildfire..."

The God of Uranus, Uranus, raised his hand slightly, dispersing the illusory astrolabe before his eyes, and sank his body back into the depths of his icy throne once more.

"The greater the fire, the faster this stagnant royal court will collapse."