238: Chapter 238 The Koi Fish in Pajamas Touches the Core, and a Purple-Gold Light Pillar Explodes Through the Ground!

Chen Chen stood motionless.

Jiang Yanxue stood half a step to his right, her lips curling slightly.

She merely took a casual step forward, and a tangible killing intent spread from her shoulders, carrying the lingering scent of blood from the infected she had just slaughtered, like an entire mountain crashing down out of thin air.

The young girl's knees buckled with a "crack."

Her old-fashioned Gauss rifle slipped from her hands, clattering onto the grayish-white floor and rolling twice.

She knelt in the crushed crystal sand and fungal debris, her face deathly pale, lips trembling violently.

The ferocity she had been feigning just a moment ago shattered completely, exposing the raw, primal fear of a seventeen or eighteen-year-old girl.

Chen Chen tilted his head, and Jiang Yanxue withdrew her aura, stepping back half a pace.

The girl lay on the ground, gasping for air like someone who had just been dragged out of the water after drowning.

"I'm asking you, how many living people are in this place?"

The girl raised her head, her face covered in dust and dried blood scabs, written with extreme bewilderment.

Her gaze swept over the attire of Chen Chen and his group—no protective suits, no masks, not even the most basic respiratory filters.

Visible green spore particles floated in the surrounding air.

She had lived in this place for over a decade and had seen countless people infected by the spores, their joints twisting, skin turning green, and eventually becoming the undead monsters in the corridors.

Yet, this group before her was in a highly toxic spore environment, breathing as steadily as if they were on vacation at an oxygen bar.

"You... why aren't you wearing protective suits?"

Su Xiaoqi turned around.

She was still holding a severed arm of an infected she had picked up from the ground in her left hand, examining it back and forth before tossing it hard onto the ground.

"Pah."

Her little face was scrunched up as if she had eaten three pounds of coptis.

"It's all grown green fuzz and molded; it doesn't smell fresh at all."

She squatted down and vigorously wiped her hand on her pant leg, "Brother, this whole area is scrap; there's nothing edible at all."

The girl's mouth opened, closed, then opened again.

It took her five seconds to digest this information—this short girl with twin ponytails had just crushed a three-meter-tall infected with her bare hands, and now her biggest problem was that the thing wasn't edible.

"Come back."

Chen Chen waved at Su Xiaoqi, then looked at the girl kneeling on the ground, "Get up, lead the way."

The girl scrambled up, shivering, the cracked visor of her protective suit reflecting a ghastly white light under the lamps.

"Who... who on earth are you—"

"Humans." Chen Chen walked past her, "Not from the Mechanical Holy Court. Ask too much, and you'll die."

Jiang Yanxue followed, glancing down at the girl as she passed.

The cold that seeped from her very bones made the girl's skin crawl with goosebumps.

"My name is Aya..." She chased after them, her short legs almost needing to jog to keep up with Chen Chen's pace, "This isn't an ordinary shelter."

Chen Chen's footsteps paused slightly.

Aya swallowed hard, her voice lowered.

"This is a secret strategic bunker from the Old Era, containing a... space compression core. Those green-furred spores outside were originally a biological camouflage layer used to jam high-dimensional Radar—"

"It went out of control." Chen Chen finished for her.

Aya was stunned for a moment, then nodded.

"The maintenance system has long been scrapped, and the biological camouflage mutated into something that kills. My grandmother was the last gatekeeper, and before she died, she left the password to me."

"Where is the core?"

"At the deepest point, go through the main corridor and down to the B7 level—"

Boom!!

The ground beneath their feet exploded violently.

Cracks tore open from the depths of the ruins along the main corridor, green fungal mats were sent flying, and rubble and fungal spores kicked up a thick fog.

Shen Wanxing screamed, clutching her pillow and shrinking half a body length behind Su Xiaoqi.

Aya's face instantly lost its last trace of color.

"It's here..."

"What is it?"

Before the words had even faded, the dome at the end of the corridor was burst open from the inside.

A massive mass of black-green flesh surged up from the depths of the underground, its height rivaling the dome—the entire biochemical glass dome looked short in front of it, pushed out with large spiderweb cracks.

The alloy skeleton of an ancient military mech was deeply embedded in the green flesh, its surface covered in a half-meter-thick mutated fungal carapace, with toxic green spore mist spraying from its joints.

The main control core was in the center of its chest cavity, perfectly symbiotic with the spores, emitting a fluorescent green light.

Aya's legs went weak, and she collapsed onto the ground.

"The Spore Tyrant..."

Her voice no longer sounded like it came from a human.

"It is the bunker's final defense... After it mutated, it could no longer be controlled..."

Shen Wanxing stepped back three paces, the blanket almost sliding off her shoulders.

"Chen, Chen, this one is so big..."

Su Xiaoqi tilted her head and examined it for two seconds, reaching a conclusion.

"It's greener and tastes worse than the last one."

Chen Chen was already walking.

He drew the sea-stabilizing needle from his spatial ring, held the Void-Splitting Gravity Ship-Slashing Blade in his right hand, and advanced in a straight line toward the hundred-meter giant, his military boots crunching on the rubble.

He plunged the sea-stabilizing needle into the ground.

Blue-gold patterns exploded from the rod, spreading wildly along the ground.

25x Absolute Control: Gravity Field—fully activated.

The Spore Tyrant was raising its right arm, covered in fungal carapace, preparing to crush the tiny humans before it.

But that arm stopped in mid-air.

It stopped extremely abruptly.

Immediately after, the entire arm plummeted, accompanied by the crisp sound of bones shattering in the shoulder joint.

Then the other one.

Then the torso.

Then the legs.

25x gravity poured down from the sky, and within a second, the hundred-meter-tall behemoth had its knees shattered and legs broken, its entire upper body crashing onto the ground.

Green bodily fluids gushed out from the shattered carapace, splattering everywhere.

Chen Chen had arrived.

He raised the Void-Splitting Gravity Ship-Slashing Blade, infused it with Mental Power, and the tip of the blade condensed that familiar black dot—Gravity Collapse.

He brought the blade down.

Golden blade energy tore through the fungal carapace, and a micro-black hole exploded in the chest cavity, grinding, compressing, and annihilating the main control core along with three meters of flesh and tissue surrounding it.

The Spore Tyrant's fluorescent green light extinguished instantly.

The entire massive body, as if its bones had been removed, collapsed into a pile of rotten flesh filling half the corridor.

From the moment Chen Chen stepped forward to the end of the battle.

Less than three seconds.

Aya sat on the ground, her mouth wide open, forgetting to close it.

In all her life, the strongest combat power she had ever seen was the old-style mech turret her grandmother operated, which took three shells and two minutes of aiming to take down a single infected.

The man before her had used a single blade, in three seconds, to turn the most terrifying nightmare of the entire bunker for the past thirty years into a puddle of meat paste on the floor.

"What... what level is this..."

Su Xiaoqi hopped past her, picked up a severed piece of fungal carapace, sniffed it, and tossed it away.

"Don't bother thinking about it, he's just at that strongest level."

Aya swallowed her saliva.

All the old knowledge in her head regarding "levels" and "gods" was now obsolete.

The corridor was cleared.

The group stepped on the green rotten flesh and bodily fluids, advancing into the depths.

Aya led the way in front, her legs still shaking, but she was running much faster than before.

B7 Level.

The deepest point.

A silver-white alloy door that had been sealed for who knows how many years rose after Aya entered the password.

The space behind the door was extremely clean.

Unlike the environment outside, which was full of fungi and ruins, the air here was crisp and dry, with the temperature constant at around twenty degrees.

Above the silver-white central control console in the very center, a huge regular octahedral crystal core floated in a force field, rotating slowly.

In the communication channel, Mio's projection popped out from a small terminal.

She stared at that crystal core for three seconds.

Then she let out an electronic, distorted scream.

"This—this is—!"

Her projection began to flicker at a high frequency, her speech speed so fast it was almost unintelligible.

"Ancient Space Extension Hub! This kind of thing only exists in the legendary layers of the Third Era strategic archives! Theoretically, it can break the spatial barriers of vehicles and buildings, allowing physical volume to break through limits—"

Copper Hammer's channel also exploded.

"What? Space extension? I f*cking—can I expand the furnace of the Sea Scale three times?!"

"Shut up and let me finish!" Mio screamed.

Chen Chen ignored all this.

He turned around.

At the very back of the group, Shen Wanxing was wrapped in a blanket, wearing slippers, trying to hide herself behind Su Xiaoqi.

The moment she realized Chen Chen was looking over, she gripped the blanket tighter with both hands, shrinking her neck and inching backward.

"I..."

Chen Chen walked toward her.

Shen Wanxing took two steps back, her back hitting the cold alloy wall.

"I'm here to calm my nerves."

"You said, to calm my nerves..."

"It's done."

"No, it isn't! That core looks like it's electrified! What if I touch it and it explodes—what then?"

Chen Chen reached out, his five fingers clamping directly onto her slender wrist.

Shen Wanxing pressed herself against the wall; her thin, translucent silk nightgown couldn't hide anything, and the curve of her waist and that patch of white leg peeking out from under the blanket were all exposed in the light.

"Three days of leave, deducted."

Shen Wanxing panicked.

"You can't do that!"

"If you dawdle any longer, I'll add three more days."

"..."

She was dragged toward the console, her slippers making pat-pat sounds on the smooth floor.

Su Xiaoqi held up an empty pot in the back, cheering her on.

"Sister Wanxing, you can do it! Once you're done touching it, I'll heat up some soup for you when we get back!"

"I'm not drinking that green-fuzz soup of yours!"

Chen Chen brought her directly under the regular octahedral crystal core, released her wrist, and stepped back half a pace.

"One finger."

Shen Wanxing looked up at the massive, rotating crystal core emitting an icy blue light, her lower lip bitten to the point of leaving a faint mark.

Her hand was trembling.

She closed her eyes and extended her index finger.

She poked upward.

The moment her fingertip touched the surface of the crystal core—

The golden light... it flashed for less than a tenth of a second before being completely swallowed by a purple energy wave so violent it distorted space.

A purple-gold pillar of light erupted from the center of the core, piercing directly through the B7 ceiling, the B6 level, and the B5 level—all the way up, blasting a twenty-meter-wide hole through the bio-glass of the ruins' dome.

The light shot out to the surface, forcibly carving a pillar-like channel through three thousand meters of rock strata.

System notifications flooded the screen frantically.

[Lucky Critical triggered!]

[Ultra-low probability 100x multiplier activated! Trigger rate 0.7%!]

[Ancient Space Expansion Hub quality limit jump!]

The material list that followed was so long it would take three screens to scroll through.

Chen Chen only looked at the last few lines.

[SS-Rank Blueprint: Urban Space Expansion Matrix!]

[SS-Rank Blueprint: Ancient Human Energy Dome Defense Line!]

[Special Item: Cross-Zone Jump Pass (One-time use)! Target Coordinates: God-Fall Icefield War Zone.]

Shen Wanxing was knocked back three steps by the purple-gold wave of light and landed on her bottom. The blanket slipped off completely, and her legs—so white they seemed to glow—curled up in the cold light beneath the thin nightgown.

She was completely stunned.

Mio's projection had frozen in place, and even the display had started to pixelate.

After a full five seconds, she emitted an extremely weak electronic voice.

"...I don't want to talk anymore."

Aya knelt at the doorway, gazing at the purple-gold pillar of light that pierced thousands of meters into the underground, two lines of tears streaming down through the dust on her face.

She had lived alone in these ruins for seventeen years.

For seventeen years, she had waited for a signal, but no one had ever responded.

Today, a group of people arrived.

A girl wearing a nightgown and slippers, her nose still red, had used a single index finger to turn the thing her grandmother had guarded her entire life into a treasure she couldn't have imagined even in her dreams.

Chen Chen pushed his space ring forward, and the harvesting began.

Thirty seconds.

Everything on the console that could be dismantled went into the ring.

He turned his head to look at Aya, who was still kneeling on the ground.

"Are you coming or not?"

Aya wiped the dust and tears from her face, scrambled up, and nodded vigorously.

"I'm coming!"

Inside the heavy assault vehicle, Su Xiaoqi was already seated, her pot placed by her feet.

"Big Brother, there wasn't a single thing edible on this trip; what a rip-off."

Jiang Yanxue rolled her eyes.

Shen Wanxing was shoved back into her safety seat, curled up in a ball wrapped in the blanket she had retrieved, her face clearly expressing, "From today on, I no longer believe in the words 'taking a break'."

Chen Chen sat in the driver's seat and fastened his seatbelt.

The plasma drill reversed.

The vehicle tilted its nose up and smashed vertically into the ceiling.

The rock layers melted to the sides, and scalding stone slurry flowed down the vehicle's body.

The twelve-ton steel monster plummeted back.

After two and a half hours of jolting, the drill's resistance vanished.

The vehicle burst out from the dome of the mine storage, flipped in mid-air, and crashed heavily onto the ground, which was pitted and scarred from being dug up by the mine slaves.

The shockwave kicked up crystal sand that filled the sky.

Copper Hammer was squatting nearby, changing the wheels on a mine cart; the tremor sent him face-first onto the ground, and his welding torch flew three meters away.

He scrambled up and looked up.

The vehicle's hatch was kicked open.

Chen Chen stepped out, carrying a metal matrix in one hand that emitted terrifying energy fluctuations—the SS-Rank Urban Space Expansion Matrix—and tossed it directly into Copper Hammer's arms.

The moment Copper Hammer caught it, his arms sank under the weight.

He looked down at the object in his arms.

His beard began to tremble.

Chen Chen walked past him, his military boots planting firm, steady steps on the crushed crystal sand.

He dropped a sentence behind him.

"Fire up the furnace. Twelve hours. Get the city expanded to two thousand meters for me."

Copper Hammer hugged the matrix, his lips trembling for three seconds.

Then, he let out a howl loud enough to crack the ceiling of the mine storage even further.

"All hands! Engineering team, gather for me—now!"

Before Copper Hammer's shout even faded, three circles of people had already surrounded the engineering cabin.

Mine slaves poked their heads in, holding pickaxes; technical artisans jogged over with welding torches, and even Yi Chang's internal affairs channel pinged.

"What on earth is Copper Hammer howling about?"

Copper Hammer hugged the SS-Rank Urban Space Expansion Matrix, spun around three times, and kissed it twice, almost getting his beard stuck to it.

Mio drifted over, her projected arms crossed over her chest, her electronic voice cold.

"I'll state this first: I need at least forty-eight hours for the integration protocol for this thing—"

"Twelve."

Copper Hammer had already swung his large hammer and was charging toward the star sea composite energy furnace. "The Lord said twelve hours, so it's twelve hours!"

"You're crazy! Have you even calculated the stability of a forced integration?!"

"Screw the calculations! Just weld it on first!"

Mio's projection flickered and greyed out halfway on the spot.

Chen Chen ignored the chaos behind him and pressed the city-wide broadcast.

"All mining operations are immediately switched to mandatory surrender mode. All remaining stock in the storage is to be sent to the energy furnace. Point coefficients are quadrupled."

The Lower Deck exploded.

Quadrupled.

Before the mine slaves could even put down the pickaxes in their hands, they were already charging toward the mine tunnel entrance.

The corridor was as crowded as a marketplace; even disabled artisans in wheelchairs were being pushed forward into the throng.

Iron Wall stood in front of the lift, shouting at the top of his lungs to maintain order.

"Line up! Line up, damn it! Who's going to be responsible if someone gets trampled to death?!"

No one listened. Quadruple points—enough to trade for three months' worth of ecological pod slots and nutrient paste.

The landlady reacted faster than anyone else.

A temporary sign was already hung up in the commercial district—"Mine Tunnel Acceleration Support Service: Transport, Counting, and Queueing, Reasonable Fees!"

Yi Chang passed by, raised her hand, and tore the sign down.

"Has the official approval process been completed?"

The landlady's fox ears drooped.

"...No."

"Then get back in line."

Six hours later.

Hundreds of thousands of tons of high-purity source crystal ore sand were poured into the star sea composite energy furnace.

The entire fortress's metal framework began to vibrate at a low frequency.

That frequency couldn't be heard by the ears; instead, it drilled its way up from the soles of the feet, into the knees, into the spine, and into the roots of the teeth.

Copper Hammer stood in the furnace's core cabin, his hands pressed against the newly welded expansion matrix interface, sparks from the welding torch still sizzling.

He turned and roared into the communication channel.

"Ignition!"

The triple power supply links synchronized and overloaded.

Dark golden light spread crazily from the matrix interface along the energy pipelines, faster than anyone had anticipated.

The light pierced through the decks, through the corridor walls, and through the ceiling of the Lower Deck.

Everyone saw that light at the same time.

Then, the ground beneath their feet began to grow wildly!

Steel extended, plates split and reorganized, and new structures squeezed out from the old framework, expanding, bracing, and welding together.

The entire process, accompanied by the sound of metal grinding, lasted for a full four hours.

The mine slaves in the Lower Deck huddled in their safety tethers, watching the dome above them rise bit by bit and expand outward.

The corridor, previously so crowded that shoulders brushed against shoulders, became wide enough within five minutes to run three ore carts side-by-side.

Iron Wall leaned on the high platform railing, his mouth opening and closing, opening and closing.

"Is this... growing?"