35: Chapter 35 Advancement! Lv.2 Camp-Level Mobile City!

[Ding! Rank advancement and evolution command confirmed!]

[Warning! During the city's rank advancement and evolution, the vehicle will enter a complete lockdown state. All power systems are forced offline. Estimated duration: 180 seconds.]

[Host and all personnel within the city, please remain still!]

[Evolution beginning!]

The moment the system notification fell.

The Polaris's Primary Efficiency Boiler let out a sound Lu Chen had never heard before.

That sound was far deeper than a roar, far more primal than a howl.

It was a resonance from the depths of its steel skeleton.

The entire vehicle began to tremble.

When modifying a specific component before, it was only a local tremor.

But now, the entire vehicle was shaking violently from head to tail.

Every steel plate, every rivet, and every pipe resonated at the same frequency.

"Get down! Grab the pipes on the floor!" Lu Chen shoved Lin Wan down onto the floor.

Lin Wan's face was pale with fright, her hands tightly clutching the Brass Heating Pipe that had just been generated at her feet.

All the lights inside the carriage went out at the same time.

In the darkness, the only light source came from the furnace of the Primary Efficiency Boiler.

The originally dark red flames were changing color at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Dark red turned to orange.

Orange turned to bright white.

Bright white turned into an eerie ghostly blue.

The temperature inside the boiler was climbing at an alarming rate.

However, the Thermal Break and heating pipes locked the heat firmly within the system; the perceived temperature in the carriage didn't budge an inch.

Then, the sound came.

K-boom!

Growth.

The steel was growing.

Lying on the floor, Lin Wan heard the most shocking sound of her life.

Metal was stretching.

Steel was elongating.

The floor her face was pressed against was moving forward slowly but firmly.

No, it wasn't just the floor moving.

The entire vehicle was expanding outward!

The left wall of the carriage emitted a continuous, dense creaking sound.

Those welding points and rivet positions were dismantled one by one under the shroud of the system's blue light, then recombined at more distant positions.

The walls were receding.

The ceiling was rising.

The iron door at the rear was pulled to a distance she couldn't reach.

"City Lord! The vehicle is getting bigger!" Lin Wan's voice changed pitch.

"Don't move," Lu Chen's voice came through the darkness.

He himself was lying under the control console, watching and counting.

Every second, the length of the carriage increased.

Eight meters.

Nine meters.

Ten meters.

Twelve meters.

The originally cramped space of twenty-plus square meters was expanding at an extremely fast rate.

The ceiling, which was at a height she could touch just by reaching out before, rose to a position that required standing on tiptoes to reach.

And the commotion outside the vehicle was even more terrifying.

Even through ten centimeters of Scrap Steel Armor and double-layered asbestos insulation, Lu Chen could still hear the sound of metal cracking and reorganizing from outside.

Those Scrap Steel Armor plates originally riveted to the vehicle body were being rearranged by the system's force field.

New armor grew steadily from the modular interfaces reserved in the chassis, filling the gaps created by the expansion of the vehicle body.

The heating pipes were extending.

The Steam Hub was redistributing the pipelines.

The Fire Control Cables were automatically elongating and recalibrating.

The filtration modules of the Internal Circulation Ecological Pod were replicating and expanding.

All the Lv.1 technologies he had previously maxed out were evolving simultaneously with the growth of the vehicle body.

One hundred and twenty seconds passed.

The tremors began to weaken.

The soles of Lu Chen's feet caught a dull click from the chassis; it was the sound of the final set of expansion nodes of the Modular Chassis locking into place.

The last thirty seconds.

The ghostly blue light inside the carriage reached its brightest peak and then rapidly receded.

The boiler's flames fell back from blue to a normal orange.

All the lights turned back on.

What the lights illuminated was no longer the twenty-square-meter iron box Lu Chen was familiar with.

[Ding! City rank advancement and evolution complete!]

[Vehicle Name: Polaris]

[Mobile City Level: Lv.2 Camp-Class Mobile City!]

[City Population: 2 (Currently registered residents: Lu Chen (City Lord), Lin Wan)]

Lu Chen stood up from under the control console.

He looked around.

His mouth didn't close.

The length of the carriage had expanded from eight meters to at least twenty-odd meters.

The width had broadened from three meters to nearly eight meters.

The ceiling height had increased from the previous oppressive one-point-eight meters to over three meters.

The area had more than quintupled.

Over a hundred square meters of indoor space.

In this wasteland world where a standard Camp-Class Mobile City only had about seventy square meters, this area already exceeded the standard configuration of most Lv.2 Camp-Class Mobile Cities.

"System," Lu Chen's voice went hoarse for a moment.

"Why is it larger than a standard Lv.2?"

[Reply: Because the host maxed out all sixteen nodes across the four major branches to the Great Perfection state during the Lv.1 stage. The more complete the Lv.1 foundation, the higher the initial specifications of Lv.2. This is the reward for fully laying the foundation.]

Lu Chen was stunned for a full three seconds.

Then he laughed.

A low laugh, suppressed in his chest, surged from the depths of his throat.

"The reward for a full foundation... good, very good..."

"City Lord, City Lord, look outside..."

Lin Wan had crawled to a newly generated thickened bulletproof glass porthole on the side of the vehicle at some point.

Her voice was trembling.

Lu Chen strode over and looked out through that porthole.

The Polaris's exterior had also undergone earth-shaking changes.

The originally eight-meter-long, three-meter-wide miniature crawler vehicle was now at least one and a half times larger than the Snow Shard Gang's Lv.2 medium combat vehicle they had encountered before.

The ten centimeters of sloped Scrap Steel Armor still completely covered every inch of the vehicle's surface after expansion.

The inverted V-shaped Ice-breaking Ram at the front had become even more massive and ferocious.

The tracks had expanded from the original double-row narrow tracks into a wider and thicker heavy track assembly.

The side skirts extended to a length sufficient to cover the entire running gear.

The Harpoon Cannon turret on the roof still sat steadily at the highest point, but it now had a wider rotating base and a larger field of fire.

The Steam Spray Gun arrays at the four corners were also repositioned with the expansion of the vehicle body, their coverage area increasing multiple times over.

Now, this vehicle bore no resemblance to a crawler vehicle at all; it was truly a small mobile fortress.

"It's even bigger than those two combat vehicles from the Snow Shard Gang..." Lin Wan's voice broke into a whisper.

"At least one and a half times larger," Lu Chen corrected.