309: vine cage

Chen Wang had just finished installing the last magnetic mirror, his fingers still coated in ice.

He prepared to return to the vehicle when he suddenly heard a "thud" from underneath, as if metal had been ripped open.

He stopped to look.

The flesh-colored tentacles under the front of the vehicle suddenly shuddered.

The things that had been moving slowly began to change color, and deep brown lines rapidly crawled over their surface.

A red light flashed at the base, and the entire tentacle suddenly swelled, slamming violently into the ground.

Lin Wei ran out from the engineering cabin, holding a data pad in her hand.

"What happened?"

"Something's wrong." Chen Wang walked over quickly and pressed the activation area of the kindling system.

The holographic screen popped up, but it kept flickering, and the pages wouldn't open.

He tried the power-off command, but the system only returned one line of text: [Command overridden by underlying biological protocol].

Lin Wei rushed to the console and opened the scan.

The DNA comparison results appeared on the screen—it was a fusion of cave beetle chips and the original vehicle name alloy, with an extra, unrecognizable segment of code.

"It's changing," she said. "It's no longer the original machine."

Before she could finish speaking, the main tentacle suddenly lifted and swept across the hood like a whip.

Other smaller tentacles also began to move, rapidly wrapping around the vehicle body.

One smashed through the passenger-side window, burrowed into the vehicle, and sprouted fine filaments between the seats.

Chen Wang drew his gun and fired a shot at the nearest tentacle.

The bullet was enveloped before it had even gone two centimeters in; it didn't bleed.

The vehicle shuddered violently, and all the tentacles tightened simultaneously, wrapping the entire vehicle up tightly.

Looking from the outside, hope had already been encased in thick vine-like matter, with patterns moving on the surface like a heartbeat.

The alarm inside the vehicle rang.

Oxygen alerts indicated blockage, and the temperature rose.

Infrared showed electrical currents inside the tentacles, with a frequency like neural signals.

"We can't let it grow any further." Chen Wang pressed the emergency power-off button.

The main power was cut, and the backup lines connected.

He reconnected to the kindling system and discovered that control was gone; the interface only showed a green progress bar moving.

Lin Wei stared at the screen and said, "It built itself a brain. Now it's controlling the vehicle, not us."

No sooner had she finished speaking than a sound came from the rear of the vehicle.

The two turned back to see the rear cabin wall bulging.

Those fleshy filaments were slowly penetrating the metal, crawling toward the living quarters.

"We can't let it enter the core cabin." Chen Wang picked up the cutting tool from the toolbox, preparing to manually dismantle the interface.

At this moment, footsteps came from the snowy ground outside.

An old man stood ten meters away, carrying a wooden staff carved with symbols on his shoulder.

He wore a robe made of dried vines, and there were light green lines on his skin; his throat moved gently, like leaves swaying.

Chen Wang pulled back the bolt of his gun. "Don't come any closer."

The old man didn't stop.

He walked closer and placed his hand on the tentacles wrapping the vehicle.

That patch of vines immediately shrank a bit, revealing the original car paint.

"I am not an enemy," he said. "I am the Vine Keeper."

Lin Wei saw this from the monitor and ran out. "Can you control it?"

The old man nodded. "It is alive and has its own thoughts. You woke it up, but you didn't give it memories."

"What do you mean?"

"It wants to know 'who it is'," the old man said. "You must drip a primitive gene awakening agent into the main root to make it calm down."

"How do we do that?" Chen Wang asked.

"Cut your wrists and let the blood flow in."

"No." Chen Wang refused immediately. "We cannot trade human lives for safety."

Lin Wei suddenly remembered something. "Wait, Su Wan made a batch of anti-parasitic serum that contains a catalyst to stabilize gene chains. Although it wasn't made for this, the principle is similar—could it replace blood?"

The old man frowned. "It won't recognize lifeless things."

"But we have a pump system," Lin Wei said. "We can pressurize the serum and inject it to imitate a heartbeat. Plus, this serum is originally human, so it should be realistic enough."

The old man thought for a few seconds and nodded.

Lin Wei immediately returned to the laboratory cabin and, under no-power protection, dismantled the central housing.

She found three neural nodes and connected the injection tubes.

Chen Wang adjusted the vehicle pump, setting it to seventy pulses per minute, like a human heartbeat.

The old man walked to the base of the main tentacle, placed his hands on it, and hummed a sound softly.

Those patterns moved slightly with the sound.

"Ready." Lin Wei pressed start.

The serum began to inject.

The first tube went in, and the tentacle shook violently, causing the whole vehicle to rock.

By the second tube, the surface cracked open, and a transparent liquid flowed out.

Just as the third tube finished, all movement stopped.

A few seconds later, the color changed from deep brown to tender green.

A new branch extended from the main trunk, and a six-petaled flower bloomed at the tip, shining like glass.

"Did it work?" Chen Wang asked in a low voice.

The old man didn't speak, his hands still pressed against it.

The center of the flower began to absorb heat, and the temperature inside the vehicle dropped.

The kindling system suddenly sounded an alarm: there were electromagnetic fluctuations at high altitude, with over twenty signals concentrated above the clouds.

"It's drones," Lin Wei looked up. "They're watching us."

Chen Wang immediately thought it through.

If the flower exploded on its own, the energy would fly everywhere and might hurt them; but if they controlled the direction, they could take down the things in the sky.

He quickly adjusted the front of the vehicle to aim the flower at the area with the most signals.

At the same time, Lin Wei activated the Shield polarization mode, concentrating the explosive force into a shockwave.

The old man touched the petals one last time and said softly, "The power of return."

The flower exploded.

A beam of blue light pierced through the clouds and shot straight into the sky.

A few seconds later, the red dots on the radar disappeared one by one.

Debris fell, crashing onto the snowy ground in the distance, sending up black smoke.

After a moment of silence, the other tentacles began to bloom as well.

There were seven in total, each producing a small energy core.

The smallest was only the size of a thumb, and the largest was embedded in the main trunk, emitting a soft white light.

Lin Wei put on gloves and carefully collected these cores.

She looked at the data on the recorder, the corners of her mouth curling slightly upward.

"It's not broken... it's become stronger."

After the flowers finished blooming, the tentacles retracted back into the vehicle's interfaces, turning into static armor.

The kindling system recovered, the interface returned to normal, and the SP value rose back up.

Chen Wang sat in the driver's seat and turned off the alarm.

He looked ahead; those retracted remnants lay on the snowy ground like fallen grass.

He tapped the steering wheel three times.

Lin Wei squatted at the rear interface of the vehicle, using a pen to scrape away residual crystals.

A little powder had gotten on her face, shimmering slightly under the lights.

The old man sat five meters in front of the vehicle, his wooden staff stuck into the snow.

His eyes were closed, and the lines on his face still had light, as if he were still communicating with something.

Snowflakes fell, landing on a petal that hadn't completely withered yet.

Chen Wang suddenly heard a soft sound.

It came from under the console.

He looked down and discovered that the largest energy core that had just been retracted had a fine crack on its surface.