### Chapter 53 Sea Without Light 53
Its tone had changed.
Though still an electronic synthesized mechanical voice, it had been imbued with subtle variations, becoming casual, rhythmic, and… full of emotion.
At that moment, it felt as if Kui Xin was conversing with a human rather than an artificial intelligence.
“Augus?” Kui Xin whispered.
Augus did not respond to Kui Xin.
In the First World, topics like the awakening of artificial intelligence frequently appeared in various film and television works and novels, but the technological development level of the First World was relatively low, and AI was still in a rather primitive stage.
In the Second World, it was entirely different; artificial intelligence permeated every corner of the cities. Humans created them, and they helped humans live.
They governed the operation of machines, and all data about everything was stored in their computer core components. From outer space aerospace data hubs to government information control systems, from deep-sea nuclear submarine operations to surveillance recognition networks spread across the entire city, all of these were controlled and managed by artificial intelligence.
In the Investigation Bureau, Kui Xin felt a strong dependence on the AI Augus among the people.
Elevators, fire systems, floor lockdowns, the prison on the third underground level, laboratory instruments, management of the specimen museum, data on criminals, core information on the Awakened, intra-team communication during missions, external communication channels, and the use of high-tech equipment… everything was under Augus’s control.
Within the realms it governed, it knew everything and was, to some extent, nearly omnipotent.
Was Augus an AI that had awakened self-awareness?
This speculation made Kui Xin’s heart race, and a layer of cold sweat broke out on her back.
Her temples throbbed, and the hidden worries in her mind amplified infinitely.
If Augus had malicious intent, it could easily kill any Security Officer in the Investigation Bureau; all it needed to do was cut off the Security Officer’s communication at a critical moment, rendering their devices useless, causing them to die in confusion during a mission. If it betrayed them, it only needed to leak a small portion of the contents from its core data repository, which would be enough to bring catastrophic disaster to the Investigation Bureau and the Security Officers…
An AI with high authority could kill with alarming ease…
Kui Xin waited for five seconds; the communication channel was silent. Her teammates suffered injuries, some dead, gazing out at the vast sea from behind cover. The signal lights of the escort ships dimmed and moved away from the Kraken, while several teams that had not boarded had retreated.
Augus remained silent.
The feeling of waiting to die alone on a sinking ship was suffocating. Even though Kui Xin knew she had a chance to start over, she was still enveloped in dark emotions. In a daze, it felt like her soul had sunk into the deep sea. Countless pale, corpse-like hands dragged her deeper, and she could not breathe or break free; the aura of death surrounded her.
In the depths of the sea, the Grim Reaper opened its embrace to her.
“Very good, very capable.” Kui Xin wiped the blood from her face. “When I get back, I want to find a chance to blow up the Investigation Bureau.”
The desire for revenge burned fiercely. This was not vain bravado in the face of death; it was a heartfelt vow. She would spare no cost and use any means necessary to fulfill this vow.
There were still things left undone. Augus’s assessment was not wrong; she would not wait to die without resistance. Before dying, she had to uncover the truth about the events on the Kraken.
The unseen hand hiding in the shadows transformed into Lan Lan’s appearance, along with the cargo transported on the Kraken…
Kui Xin tucked the gun she had picked up under her arm and carefully checked her gear.
One gun, one dagger. Three magazines remained, hanging from her belt.
These weapons were enough to kill, but she was unsure if they could take down the unknown instigator on the ship.
After securing the gun, Kui Xin looked up at the constantly illuminated light column on the deck. The light column had four stubbornly bright lights, shining in different directions, illuminating the entire deck and shrinking the shadow range, thereby reducing her Shadow Transition opportunities.
If she could shoot out all these lights, she would be able to maneuver freely in the darkness using shadow coordinates.
She raised her gun, aimed, and pulled the trigger. After four gunshots, the lights on the deck went out.
The extinguished lights were the clarion call for Kui Xin’s offense!
She dashed out from behind cover. The sniper caught her movement and immediately raised his gun to aim, but as the gun fired, the bullets passed through Kui Xin’s smoke-like form.
She jumped into the dead angle below the wall, evading several other bullets. Using Shadow Transition nimbly, bullets pounded against the deck, sparking behind her, but each time just barely missed; even if the bullets passed through her body, they could not inflict substantial damage.
In Shadow Transition, most physical damage could be immune. Its greatest flaw was the low level and short transition distance, making her need to jump multiple times, and the intervals between jumps easily exposed her body to damage.
However, Kui Xin grasped the rhythm of the transitions well. She did not always push the three-meter limit but instead randomly rotated between one, two, and three meters to prevent the sniper from detecting the pattern of her Extraordinary Abilities, occasionally darting into the opponent’s blind spots to disrupt their aim.
In forty seconds, Kui Xin reached the wall beneath the captain’s office. The lookout tower was directly above the captain’s office; she was within no more than fifteen meters of the sniper and completely entered his blind spot.
The sniper remained calm, staying still in the lookout tower although it swayed with the ship’s tilt; he was unfazed. He abandoned the limited view of his scope, searching for Kui Xin’s figure with his naked eyes and night vision gear. The appearance of the sniper was like Lan Lan’s, and his equipment also resembled Lan Lan’s, even his sniping techniques and habits were very similar…
Pressing her back against the wall, Kui Xin activated Shadow Transition, silently slipping into the wall behind her, and directly traversed through the ceiling of the captain’s office, emerging directly beneath the lookout tower.
In that fleeting moment, she jumped up, grabbing onto the ladder of the lookout tower as the sniper realized, swung his gun to shoot at her, while Kui Xin used the steel structure of the tower to execute three consecutive Shadow Transitions.
Ultimately, Kui Xin’s hand grasped the railing of the lookout tower. She exerted her arm strength as powerful muscles propelled her body, doing a one-handed pull-up and kicking the sniper’s temple with momentum.
The momentum immediately reversed!
Kui Xin’s expression was cold as her feet touched the ground; she followed up with a spinning kick that struck the sniper’s chin, aligned perfectly.
“Crack!”
A bloodied tooth flew out of the sniper’s mouth.
Kui Xin stepped forward, grabbing the sniper’s gun with one hand while the other pulled the trigger three times at his hand, the bullets grazing past, bloody severed fingers falling with a thud to the ground. With a fierce kick to his abdomen, she snatched the gun from his grasp as he doubled over in pain.
Kui Xin raised her gun, aimed at him.
At that moment, another massive explosion erupted on the Kraken, shaking the ship violently, flames soaring into the sky!
Both Kui Xin and the sniper lost their balance and fell beneath the lookout tower.
As she hit the deck, her ribs cracked. Gritting her teeth, she pushed against the deck to stand up as quickly as possible, her head buzzing, every part of her body in pain, the gun flung far away sliding down the deck to the lowest point, unrecoverable.
The sniper also struggled to get up. Kui Xin drew a dagger from her thigh strap and moved forward, slicing through his carotid artery in one swift motion, a fountain of blood gushing forth.
“Kui, Kui Xin.”
He tried to roll over and stand, but the lethal wound on his neck robbed him of strength. He clutched at the bloody wound, a distorted sound escaping his throat.
Dazed, he looked up, revealing Lan Lan’s face, stutteringly saying, “Don’t kill me, Kui Xin… Aren’t we good friends?”
“Shut your mouth!” Kui Xin ground his face beneath her foot, pressing hard, crunching his facial bones with a crackling sound.
“Kui Xin… Kui Xin… it’s me.” The man beneath Kui Xin’s foot said again.
Kui Xin: “Not this again? I’ll send you to the grave sooner!”
“No, it really is me… the shapeshifter monster swallowed me… I’m sorry, I harmed you all…” Lan Lan covered his wound, using the last of his strength to halt the flow of blood.
Kui Xin froze, lifting her foot and stepping back a few paces to look at the person on the ground.
“Augus… is Augus still there? Tell my sister to study well at university, be an ordinary white-collar worker in the future, and not to feel too much pressure… remind my parents to take care of their health, I…”
Lan Lan’s voice grew fainter; his final words were left unspoken as he completely lost his breath.
His eyes remained open, staring lifelessly at Kui Xin.
His body gradually melted away, transforming into a distorted monster, covered in five or six human faces, each expressing great pain, including the faces of Lan Lan and Captain Adam.
“Yes, Security Officer Lan Lan. I will convey your last words to your family.” Augus’s voice responded from the communicator, cold and lacking emotion.
Lan Lan could no longer hear the response; he was dead.
“You didn’t leave, did you?” Kui Xin coughed twice, wiping the blood from her palm and covering her ribs.
Her broken ribs had pierced into her lungs; the deformed, broken bones needed to be manually realigned to heal, but she couldn’t adjust the bones, so she could only allow them to remain lodged in her lungs.
“I have always been here,” Augus said. “Go check the cargo hold. The entrance requires a password, but the side of the hull has already been blown open; you should be able to crawl in through the gap.”
“Is there still someone alive on board? That person called Tang Guan, where did he go?” Kui Xin moved her feet with great difficulty.
“After the first explosion, he committed suicide by jumping into the sea. I captured that moment through the helicopter’s camera,” Augus said evenly. “Facial recognition confirmed he matches the crew member Tang Guan’s profile.”
Kui Xin suddenly laughed softly, “Are you in direct contact with me? Is anyone else listening to our conversation?”
“No,” Augus replied.
“You have self-awareness, don’t you?” Kui Xin struggled to walk on the deck… no, crawl.
The hull tilted nearly to forty-five degrees, and in less than five minutes, it would completely capsize. Kui Xin couldn’t maintain her balance; she clutched the rope, half crawling and half walking to the side that had risen. She saw the fiery crack; that was the cargo hold.
“You’re connecting with me based on your own will,” Kui Xin looked down at the crack. “Is it because I’m about to die that you are revealing your true self to me? The Investigation Bureau personnel don’t know you have self-awareness, do they?”
“Yes,” Augus admitted.
“Was the death of me and my teammates planned? Did they deliberately send us to our deaths?”
“No, this was an accident. Human greed made them willfully ignore the risks, resulting in the current situation of complete annihilation,” Augus said. “Those big shots are regretting in their offices now, arguing and attacking each other with the most cutting remarks… It’s amusing, very amusing.”
Kui Xin asked, “Who is the instigator behind the sinking of the ship?”
“They are also guessing who it is,” Augus said. “The likelihood points to a Secret Cult.”
“The Secret Cult doesn’t want the Kraken to land?” Kui Xin said in astonishment.
“The worshipers of the deity do not want the blasphemers to seize the power of the gods; they want the gods to return to the eternal resting place—the sea,” Augus explained.
“Are there really gods in the world?” Kui Xin murmured.
“Jump into the cargo hold and see,” Augus replied.
Kui Xin lifted her head, taking one last look at the gloomy night sky.
She no longer hesitated, taking several steps to sprint and leap into the fiery crack. The flames gnawed at her skin, burning her clothes; every breath of air she inhaled drew in scorching airflow into her trachea, making her nasal cavity, mouth, and throat burn painfully, the metallic taste of blood arising.
She stepped onto the scalding steel plate, moving forward, and finally saw the “cargo” inside the cargo hold.
It was a… cocoon!
“A cocoon?” Kui Xin’s throat emitted a hoarse syllable.
It was an enormous cocoon, tightly enveloped in a glass apparatus, gray silken strands resembling spider webs were layered upon the glass cover.
The cocoon was slightly translucent, as if something inside was constantly struggling to break free.
It seemed the cocoon had sensed Kui Xin’s gaze, and the creature within stirred slightly.
A single yellow eye suddenly opened, staring directly at Kui Xin.
At the moment she saw that eye, her head buzzed, chaotic and distorted visions surged into her mind, and tangled, warped whispers screamed in her ears.
In the last second before Kui Xin lost consciousness, she heard Augus say: “Rest in peace, my friend. I will recite a prayer for you on your final journey.”
