Chapter 417: Machine Factory

"Can I move around freely?" John asked, his voice echoing in the vast, hollow basement. He still had both hands pressed firmly against the metallic platform, his palms sweating against the cold alloy. "Or will the handshake be severed the moment I break physical contact?"

[Ding! Pay 1k Mental Points and you can maintain a remote connection. Caution: Do not move beyond the maximum range of your Wireframe Sight at any time, or the synchronisation will be severed!]

"Hehehe, I’ll stick to the platforms like glue then. Let’s do it!" John didn’t hesitate to authorise the payment. The moment the remote link stabilised, he felt a ghostly tether connecting his consciousness to the floor. He pulled his hands away and stood up, feeling like he was walking on a living organism.

He moved at once, beginning a slow, methodical circle of the entire metallic structure in the basement.

Previously, he had let his friends lay down the defences using the disparate weapons they had gathered from various trials and loots. But if the Machine Factory was capable of producing superior versions of those very same weapons, then the current layout was obsolete. He needed to replace almost everything.

He began the laborious process of deconstructing the current defensive perimeter. He took back every wall, every tower, and every cannon his friends had carefully placed. To get the most out of the Factory, he needed to provide it with a variety of different quality samples.

He reached into his inventory and began pulling out the gold standard of his collection. He laid out the highest-grade walls and towers he had obtained from the evolved Hivemind primary base, structures that were already terrifying in their own right. Next to them, he placed the heavy weaponry he had salvaged from the elite machines he had destroyed in the twelfth zone. He took out the traps, the sophisticated aerial sensors, and even the heavy-duty energy cells and generators he had been hoarding for a rainy day.

He didn’t stop there. He pulled out the items he had gained from his encounters with the Demons and the Dragons. These were items of a fundamentally different nature. He had never attempted to enhance them before now, largely because he didn’t have what it took for him to evolve them like usual.

"If I’m going to make a great factory, I need to provide it with variations of everything," John’s eyes gleamed with excitement.

He started with the three types of Draconic aerial carriages he had acquired: the Claws, the Scales, and the Wings.

These were beautiful, sleek vessels that looked more like living creatures than machines. Without hesitation, John placed ten of each next to one another in neat rows. He then retrieved several of the blue Mana Gemstones from the massive harvest he had collected during his last visit to his personal zone.

Standing before the Draconic vessels, he activated his Shell ability, opening the translucent command window that allowed him to peer into the underlying code structure of the objects. John had never tried to do this on items that didn’t originate from Earth’s technological sphere, but he’d had a nagging suspicion for a long time that the system treated everything the same regardless of their origin.

As the code lines began to scroll across the Shell window, his suspicion was confirmed, and he began to grin.

"These things operate using very simple lines of code," he noted. This was the best sign he could have asked for. He had feared that Draconic or Demonic items would be protected by layers of encrypted or magical jargon that would take more than his shell ability to deal with. Instead, he saw clean, elegant logic, something he could easily work with.

Seeing how easily the aerial carriages were decoded, John moved through his collection, performing the same trick with everything else. The pattern was consistent: every structure, no matter how complex it appeared on the surface, was governed by a few core code lines that described its most basic functions.

He touched one of the high-grade Hivemind towers and watched the data populate his Shell window. "The main code lines in these are for the Energy Source, Targeting Logic, Attack Cadence, and the IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) Registry..."

The code lines were fundamental, yet they covered the essential operational reality of the towers. John’s smile widened. He began to experiment with the editing process. Instead of working on one unit at a time, he decided to batch the process.

He gathered ten identical units together and began to weave their code lines into a unified cluster. He knew that for an item to truly benefit from the Machine Factory’s cores and reach its full potential, it had to belong to him.

In the past, he would use cores to enhance every item individually before attempting to combine them. Now, he was flipping the script. He edited and grouped ten base items together first, creating a meta-structure in the code. Only once the group was established did he attempt to initiate the enhancement.

He was intensely curious to see the result of this reverse-engineering approach. However, there was one variable that remained a puzzle: the Mana Gemstones. The system’s description mentioned they were necessary for the upgrade, but there was no indicator in the code about the specific quantity or quality required for a batch of ten.

Left with no choice but to test the waters through trial and error, he decided to start small. He reached for his stash of white Mana Gemstones, the lowest tier, to see if they could act as a sufficient catalyst for the Hivemind towers.

"Let’s see if ten white stones can bridge the gap," John muttered. He finished the final grouped code lines for the towers, retreated a safe distance, and waited.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then, a blinding flash of white light erupted, completely enveloping the ten towers.

John shielded his eyes, expecting to see a transformed structure when the light faded. But the light didn’t fade. It became stagnant, hanging in the air like a thick, glowing fog. It felt like the transformation was stuck in a bottleneck, with some unseen force holding it back from finalising the merge.