The apartment in the dead of night was so quiet that only the low-frequency hum of the refrigerator remained.
Mio sat at her desk, fingertips pressing against the cold tabletop, her sea-blue eyes devoid of any sleepiness.
In her twenty-plus years of life in her previous existence, she had never perceived her own “existence” as clearly as she did in this moment—not as the Commander behind a screen, not as the cautious international student Mio, but as the vessel for Antikythera’s highest observation sequence, as Second Observer Zero with full authority.
For the past week, she had kept herself trapped within the cognitive framework of “Navigator TB.” It was like holding a top-tier supercomputer but only using it for basic arithmetic; she had only dared to utilize the most superficial electronic manipulation capabilities, and even the unlocking of the Fire Control Radar had been an accident; she had never dared to delve deep into the data streams at the foundation of this body.
Now, she understood what it meant to be herself, and she finally dared to lift the veil of this body to see where its true limits really lay.
Mio closed her eyes, and her consciousness, like sinking into the deep sea, slowly descended into the galaxy of code at the foundation.
Unlike the consciousness space she had been passively dragged into before, this time, she was the active controller.
Countless pale blue 0s and 1s flowed through her consciousness like a tide, and the previously obscure and difficult-to-understand Siren code now became as familiar as her native language.
She could clearly “see” every detail of this body: from the biomimetic structure at the cellular level to the embedded wisdom cube core, to the core modules locked away by layers of highest-level encryption.
The “TB capabilities” she had previously assumed were merely the most basic, underlying functions of this body that didn’t even require permission verification.
It was just like a phone’s flashlight function, which could be activated without even entering the main system.
Her consciousness probed downward along the code flow, touching that core encryption barrier.
The barrier shimmered with Antikythera’s highest sequence identifier, a lock that could only be opened by the consciousness of Observer Zero.
Mio did not hesitate in the slightest, pressing her consciousness imprint against it—that was the imprint belonging to the “Commander,” as well as the variable imprint recognized by Zero, belonging to Second Observer Zero.
The barrier melted silently, like ice meeting the sun.
Countless streams of data, vast beyond imagination, surged into her consciousness in an instant.
Mio’s breath hitched; even though she had mentally prepared herself, she was stunned by what unfolded before her.
It was not fragmented functional modules, nor a single weapon system, but a complete core model of the rigging belonging to Antikythera’s highest observer.
Within her consciousness, the complete form of the rigging slowly unfolded: the main body was a giant, translucent, jellyfish-like core glowing with a faint blue halo, resembling a deep-sea flower suspended in the void.
Stamped on its cap was the cross logo of Antikythera, and countless blue-glowing tentacles hung from the cap.
Each tentacle was an independent quantum communication link capable of simultaneously accessing electronic systems in any corner of the globe, and even interfering with spatial fluctuations within a short range.
On both sides of the jellyfish core were symmetrical, black-armored multi-barrel main gun batteries, their muzzles swirling with pale blue energy halos—that was the Siren’s exclusive annihilation energy main gun, a magnitude incomparable to conventional gunpowder weapons.
What shocked her even more was that the core of the entire rigging was not a weapon platform at all, but a mobile, high-spec Siren host tower.