112: Chapter 112 Is the white-robed man waiting for Chen Chen to come to him?

Chen Chen took the three pieces of alloy from her hand.

Memory Damping Alloy, one of the key materials for manufacturing A-grade nuclear reactors.

He had obtained a batch from an All-Seeing Eye blind box before, but it was far from enough; these three pieces directly filled a large portion of the gap.

“My luck is really something today.” Chen Chen stuffed the alloy into his silver-grade storage ring.

Shen Wanxing was still sitting on the ground, her light amber pupils sparkling, her face wearing an expression of excitement that she herself could hardly believe.

“Um... is it because your luck increased?”

Chen Chen pulled her up from the ground.

From the 4 points of luck feedback obtained through Forbidden Domain Dual Cultivation to Shen Wanxing's increasingly high critical hit frequency—there was some kind of resonance mechanism between them that he hadn't fully figured out yet.

But now was not the time for research.

“Keep searching the rest.”

Shen Wanxing obediently squatted back down and began touching the scrap metal in the parts pile one by one.

Over the next five minutes, two more minor critical hits were triggered.

One was a triple multiplier, the other a double.

They yielded a set of military-grade fiber optic cables and several recyclable high-carbon steel ingots, respectively.

Not top-tier loot, but better than nothing.

After finishing the inventory of the spoils, Chen Chen clapped his hands.

“Let's go. Further down.”

Su Xiaoqi was the first to hop out of the transfer station, her twin tails whipping loudly.

Jiang Yanxue followed, with Blood Rose bringing up the rear.

Shen Wanxing jogged back to the carriage, continuing her role as the post-battle corpse-looter.

The passage extended downwards.

The slope grew steeper, and the air grew colder.

The ground changed from iron plates to concrete, and then from concrete to semi-exposed rock layers.

The pipelines on the walls became fewer and fewer, replaced by military-standard emergency lights—all of which, naturally, were dead.

The only light source was the pale gold energy halo on Su Xiaoqi's body and the purple patterns that occasionally flickered on the void-rending ship-slaying blade.

Shen Wanbing's voice reached them again.

“You have descended to negative eighty meters. You are twenty meters away from the second-level activity zone.”

“How many?”

“Heat source count—”

Shen Wanbing paused for a beat.

She paused for too long.

Chen Chen didn't slow his pace, but his right hand tightened around the hilt of his blade.

“Sister Bing?”

Shen Wanbing's hurried breathing came through the communicator.

“Something's wrong.”

Her speaking speed suddenly increased. “A large number of heat sources have appeared ahead, extremely high density. And—the arrangement is wrong; it's not a random distribution.”

“What do you mean?”

“A matrix.”

When this word popped out of Shen Wanbing's mouth, even the Bluetooth audio of the communicator vibrated.

“A regular matrix arrangement, evenly spaced, with a contracting formation. This isn't the behavior of wild mutants—it's a militarized formation.”

Chen Chen stopped walking.

Behind him, Jiang Yanxue stopped as well.

Her dark red pupils constricted slightly, and the muscles in her arm holding the blade tensed.

Blood Rose's smile vanished.

“Did someone set a trap in advance?” Jiang Yanxue lowered her voice.

Chen Chen didn't answer.

That white-robed figure.

That thing on the streets of the abandoned city, holding a sign with his real name, its entire body composed of liquid metal neural cords.

“Mr. Chen Chen, I am waiting for you underground.”

“Keep going.”

Negative one hundred meters.

The end of the passage was an open underground space.

The ceiling was over ten meters high, with four thick load-bearing pillars supporting the dome.

The floor was a single piece of poured industrial concrete, its surface covered in hairline cracks.

The moment Chen Chen stepped out of the passage, dozens of pairs of icy blue light points lit up in the darkness.

Six rows and eight columns—a total of forty-eight pairs of icy blue mechanical pupils—formed a perfect matrix formation in the darkness.

Shen Wanbing's voice exploded from the communicator: “Forty-eight of them! All of them are semi-mechanical cyborgs! Small build—they're Hound-types! They have small electromagnetic pulse cannons mounted on their backs!”

As soon as she finished speaking, forty-eight mechanical hounds let out a low electronic roar simultaneously.

The mutant dogs' bodies had been mostly replaced with metal skeletons, silver hydraulic rods were exposed at their joints, and a dish-shaped small electromagnetic pulse cannon was welded above their spines.

The muzzles pointed forward, and blue charging light rings were spinning rapidly.

Electromagnetic pulse.

This thing was specifically designed to counter electronic equipment and mechanical systems.

That semi-biochemical leader from Wild Sand Camp had used a similar method—releasing electromagnetic waves to destroy all precision instruments.

That time, it had fried all the lighting and communication equipment in the entire underground space.

If these forty-eight small pulse cannons fired together, the communicators, Radar, and even the miniature gravity modules of the void-rending ship-slaying blade could be affected.

That white-robed thing was targeting his equipment.

Chen Chen's reaction took only half a second.

“Back off.”

He threw those two words to the three people behind him and suddenly pressed his left hand downward.

Mental Power poured into the space.

Absolute Control: Gravity Field.

Twenty times.

Full power.

An invisible force field centered on Chen Chen's left palm instantly spread within a twenty-meter radius.

The mechanical hounds in the front row had just finished charging, the blue light rings on their muzzles at their brightest—they hadn't even had time to fire.

Twenty times gravity crashed down.

The ground dented two centimeters with a dull boom.

The limbs of the forty-eight hounds snapped simultaneously, hydraulic rods exploded under their own weight, metal skeletons twisted and deformed, and the pulse cannons on their spines were crushed directly into the mutant dogs' torsos.

The first three rows, eighteen in total, were instantly crushed into flat metal-and-flesh pancakes.

The mechanical cores inside them were squeezed out, rolling across the floor.

The middle two rows held out for a fraction of a second.

Their damping alloy skeletons were forty times harder than ordinary steel, but under twenty times gravity combined with Mental Power, they only lasted one more breath.

The alloy skeletons emitted a dense sound of snapping, and the mutant dogs' bodies were compressed into irregular metal blocks by their own weight.

The last two rows tried to turn and flee.

Their AI chips calculated that the probability of survival in a direct confrontation was zero; their four mechanical legs scrambled frantically, trying to run out of the gravity field's radius.

It was useless.

The gravity field driven by eighty-one points of Mental Power was stable and continuous, its coverage precise to the centimeter.

The maximum speed of these hounds under normal gravity was fifteen meters per second; under twenty times gravity—they were just a pile of scrap metal skidding on the floor.

Chen Chen withdrew his hand.

The gravity field vanished.

The underground space fell silent for three seconds.

Forty-eight mechanical hounds, all scrapped.

Strictly speaking, they had all been 'flattened'.

The ground was littered with flat metal wreckage, ruptured cores, broken hydraulic lines, and leaking coolant.

Jiang Yanxue had raised her Shadow Instant-Kill Blade halfway only to find she didn't even have a chance to strike.

“...You could have at least left a couple for me.”

Blood Rose, with a dagger in her mouth, scanned the forty-eight piles of scrap metal.

“These things are all electronic brains, no biological nerves. My poison is useless against them too.”

She sheathed her dagger and shrugged. “But looking at this setup, the person who laid this out is quite focused on you.”

Chen Chen knelt down and pulled an intact spinal pulse cannon component from the nearest pile of wreckage.

He flipped it over to check the base—no serial number, no nameplate, the welding was crude but the materials were excellent.

It looked like it was made by that white-robed liquid metal alien itself.

Forty-eight semi-mechanical hounds, directionally equipped with electromagnetic pulse weapons, specifically targeting his vehicle and equipment.

Set up in advance on the path he had to take.

How long had this thing been waiting underground? A day?

Two days? Had it been here since before he even arrived at the abandoned city?

How did the White Robe know in advance that he would come to the underground factory?

He had only accepted the Proprietress's request yesterday.

The transit pass from the Yi Chang was only negotiated this morning.

Unless—the White Robe had been monitoring the movements of the abandoned city from the very beginning.

Or more accurately, it had been waiting for the 'heretic' to deliver himself to the door from the very start.