38: Chapter 38: Does the "RV and Beauty" entry supersede the game code?

The headlights were turned to their maximum setting.

Four beams of intense halogen light pierced the wasteland highway ahead.

The light beams extended less than five meters before being abruptly cut off by a thickness of darkness that was unnaturally dense.

Chen Chen stepped on the accelerator.

He had been driving in the dark for over a dozen hours, and his optic nerves had long since adapted to the wasteland's standard darkness.

But this patch of black was entirely different.

When the light beams hit it, there was no scattering, no reflection; they were completely swallowed.

The boundary five meters away was clearly demarcated.

In the light was the grayish-white road and flying dust; in the dark was absolute nothingness.

A viscous crawling sound spread from deep within the darkness.

Countless limbs were moving against the ground.

The sound of suckers forcibly tearing away from the asphalt surface was dense and wet, their positions shifting between near and far, making it impossible to lock onto the source.

In the center of the cockpit's dashboard, a line of red values he had never seen before suddenly popped up.

[Sanity: 98/100 (-1)]

The numbers ticked.

[Sanity: 97/100 (-1)]

Chen Chen tilted his head.

In the passenger seat, Shen Wanbing also saw that line of red text.

She closed her eyes. A golden glow had barely surfaced beneath her eyelids for less than half a second when she snapped them open, her fingers gripping the leather armrest.

"The signal is all static," she said rapidly, her chest rising and falling with increasing frequency. "I can't scan a single thing."

In the back row, Jiang Yanxue cut off the sensory network of Aberration Domination.

She reached out and pressed her hand against the Shadow Instant-Kill Blade on her tactical strap.

"Don't project your mental power out there."

Her tone was tense. "I just tried to probe outward and touched the edge of that darkness. My head is full of static; it sounds like dozens of people talking in my ear at once, but I can't make out a word."

[Sanity: 96/100 (-1)]

The value dropped at a constant rate.

Staring at this polar night for a long time without any defense would cause one's Sanity to be continuously drained.

A slightly cool hand grabbed the strap of Chen Chen's tactical vest.

Shen Wanxing crawled over from the mattress in the back row.

She squatted in the metal aisle between the driver and passenger seats, her newly changed Stealth Walker Boots stepping on the anti-slip patterns.

Her small face was pale, and her fingers gripped the strap with great force.

"It's too dark outside. We won't even see what kind of monster we hit. Can we stop first?"

Chen Chen kept his foot pressed on the gas pedal for two seconds. Then he let go.

The visibility in this polar night environment was less than five meters.

If the thirteen-and-a-half-ton heavy-duty RV pushed forward at full speed and hit some kind of Rule-level construct that ignored physical defense, even two thousand points of armor would be scrapped on the spot.

Sanity was still dropping at a steady pace.

If it fell below the critical point and triggered the penalty mechanism, everyone in this vehicle would be finished.

Slow down.

The terrain scanning module of the radar warning system was still functional.

A terrain map within an eight-kilometer range refreshed on the screen.

One kilometer away to the front-left, there was a wind-eroded hollow surrounded by walls on three sides.

Chen Chen turned the steering wheel with both hands.

He turned forty-five degrees to the left.

The RV veered off the highway.

The B-grade all-terrain self-healing tires crushed over a stretch of gravel-strewn slope and plunged directly into the depths of the hollow.

He stepped on the brakes and cut the engine.

Chen Chen unzipped his thirty-six-slot storage backpack.

He pulled out a matte black disc.

A mental shielding device.

He pressed the start button, and the pale purple crystal in the center of the disc suddenly lit up.

The shielding device floated to the roof of the car, and a purple force field silently expanded outward, enveloping the entire cabin.

The red text on the dashboard stopped ticking.

[Sanity consumption paused. Current Sanity: 93/100]

That low-frequency noise that had been sticking to his eardrums vanished instantly.

Absolute silence returned to the cabin.

Only the faint sound of the life-support system's airflow and the breathing of the four people remained.

Chen Chen glanced at the backpack grid.

"Only three shielding devices left," he said, zipping the bag shut. "Use them sparingly."

He took off his tactical goggles and tossed them casually onto the wide dashboard.

He leaned back into the leather seat.

Outside the window, a small safety zone had been carved out of the polar night by the purple force field.

Beyond the edge of the force field, it was still opaque, pure black.

Wait for dawn, or wait for this polar night region to move away as the black mist shifts.

That was the optimal solution for the current stage.

Time passed.

Midnight.

The mechanical system voice chimed punctually in the depths of Chen Chen's mind.

A series of dense popping sounds echoed from within his bones.

Muscle fibers underwent visible contraction and reorganization beneath his skin, and a sense of blood congestion swept through his entire body.

The God-tier talent [Physical Overlimit] had finished its settlement.

[Constitution: 60 (+10)]

[Agility: 31 (+5)]

Sixty points of Constitution—exactly six times the human baseline.

Chen Chen flexed his fingers. As his palms opened and closed, his joints and bones made a faint crisp sound from the friction.

The grip strength in his hands had reached a terrifying level.

There was no fundamental difference between crushing a mud brick and snapping a cookie.

At the same second.

Above Chen Chen's open right palm, a metal square box emitting a dark-gold flowing light condensed out of thin air.

The box was only about the width of a palm.

Its material was neither metal nor stone.

The flowing light patterns on the surface were completely different from the resource light orbs dropped by the system.

Those resource orbs possessed cold, rule-based attributes, while this dark-gold box was warm to the touch, and the shifting patterns exuded some kind of living quality.

The Daily Supply Blind Box from the Hongyan System.

An output from a unique affix after Shen Wanbing's bond progress had increased.

In the passenger seat, Shen Wanbing opened her eyes.

She stared at the dark-gold box in Chen Chen's palm and straightened her back.

She was extremely sensitive to capturing energy frequencies.

The energy fluctuations of this box were starkly different from the materials, cores, and blueprints they had obtained over the past three days.

They weren't on the same frequency band. Their origins were different.

"What is that?" Shen Wanbing asked.

"A blind box." Chen Chen offered no further explanation, weighing the box in his hand.

Hurried and light footsteps came from the back row.

Shen Wanxing scurried over in her tactical flat boots.

She leaned in close to the driver's seat, her eyes shining as she reached her fair, tender hands toward Chen Chen.

"Me! Let me open this!" she said enthusiastically. "Maybe a critical hit can double it!"

She had blind confidence in her God-tier talent.

Chen Chen flipped his wrist and didn't stop her, exposing the dark-gold box to her touch.

Shen Wanxing's palm pressed directly against the surface of the box.

The golden halo of [Lucky Critical] had just begun to surface.

*Ding.*

An extremely cold and bone-chilling system notification rang out in the cabin.

[Product of a non-homologous plane; rules crushed; intervention impossible.]

The newly condensed golden halo shattered instantly.

Shen Wanxing's hand was immediately repelled by a gentle but absolutely exclusionary energy.

Shen Wanxing froze in place, her hands suspended in mid-air.

She bit her lip, quickly withdrew her hands, and crossed them over her chest.

She shrank back beside Chen Chen's seat, saying nothing.

For the first time, the national idol had suffered a setback in "looting a box."

Chen Chen raised his left hand and rested it on her head.

Applying a little pressure with his fingers, he ruffled her already messy long hair even more.

"This blind box is a special benefit dropped from your sister. You're not part of the same system, so it's normal that you can't trigger a critical hit."

While offering superficial comfort, Chen Chen's brain was conducting another level of strategic deduction.

The resource blind boxes from the Hongyan System could not be interfered with by the rules of the Wasteland Survival Game.

Product of a non-homologous plane. Rules crushed.

The amount of information revealed by these two phrases was immense.

In terms of underlying logic, the Hongyan System's rank completely overrode this apocalyptic game of global flight.

There was a rank disparity.

Three women, three affixes.

As long as their favorability and bonds continued to deepen and the affixes continued to evolve, this system could directly ignore the wasteland's rules and forcibly interfere with reality.