305: Chapter 305 Six Hours, Is That Enough?

Lin Yuan's fingers left the glass wall of the incubator.

The blank boundary three meters away did not move. It crashed once, and again, like waves beating against an invisible dam.

The baby girl closed her eyes again. The white mist rose and fell together.

A muffled sound of metal breaking came from the direction of the outer wall. It wasn't an explosion—it was the sound of the remaining supports collapsing when an entire steel structure was erased from reality.

The observer turned away from the mechanical telescope. "The entire cold storage in Outer Circle Zone D is gone."

Su Xiaonuan didn't raise her head. The steel seal slammed down.

"Level-one lockdown for the Inner Circle gates."

"Two thousand one hundred and thirty-seven people, execute the final contraction according to the new roster."

Yu Qingyi took the copy of the roster, her pencil tip quickly making checkmarks on the paper. Twelve physical corridors, twelve messengers. Carrying no radios, no crystal core equipment, just scraps of paper and whistles.

Liu Qing stared at the only mechanical timer still turning. Her eyes behind thick lenses never left the dial.

"Outer Circle Zero Entity speed: fourteen meters per minute."

"Middle Circle gate contact time—forty-seven minutes."

Su Xiaonuan wrote the countdown at the top of the schedule. Her pen tip pressed down with a crisp snap.

"Forty-seven minutes is enough."

---

Outside the Middle Circle gates.

Twelve Titan mecha were arranged in a fan shape, their alloy bases welded dead to the prefabricated wall foundations. There was no crystal core power supply—their standing posture was maintained entirely by hydraulic Systems driven by diesel generators.

Qin Yumo stood on the shoulder armor of titan no. 1. Her twin blades had lost the brilliance of her Superpower, leaving only the true color of the alloy.

Zero Entities surged from the edge of the void Domain.

They didn't run. Step by step. The grayish-black human figures merged into a sheet, like a slowly advancing gray blanket.

The first Zero Entity raised its hand and pressed it against the left leg armor of titan no. 1.

Black ash spread.

A palm-sized depression appeared on the alloy surface.

But extremely slowly.

Tang Qiqi's voice came through the wired telephone, her words slurred with a candy stick in her mouth: "Verification successful! The zero-out consumption rate of pure physical mechanical bodies is one-seventeenth of that of the human body!"

"It eats iron slower than meat!"

Qin Yumo jumped down from the shoulder armor. With a kick, she sent that Zero Entity flying off the mecha's leg.

The Zero Entity fell to the ground. Three seconds later, it stood back up.

It didn't touch the mecha again.

It bypassed it.

More grayish-black figures began looking for gaps.

Lu Yan's voice came over the wired telephone: "Boss, they're looking for gaps. The gaps between the mecha are one point two meters, and the first batch has drilled through."

The guards in front of the gate held their guns. Bullets shattered the Zero Entities, and the black ash fell to the ground. Three seconds later, they reassembled.

Grandmaster Ling Suzhen stood at the largest gap in the mecha array.

She raised her hand.

Habitually invoking time Superpower.

There was nothing.

The True Qi within her body circulated as usual, but that layer of Superpower transcending the physical body—was wiped clean by the End.

Her hand hovered in mid-air. Nothing could be extracted from her fingertips.

The first Zero Entity squeezed in from the gap. Less than two meters away from her.

Grandmaster Ling Suzhen lowered her hand.

Took a deep breath.

Then, using the most plain side kick—the first lesson the instructors drilled into their bones in the training camp thirty years ago—she kicked the Zero Entity four meters away.

No Superpower was needed.

She had fifty years of combat instincts engraved into her muscle memory.

Zero Entities didn't fear pain and couldn't die. But they had mass and inertia.

Side kick. Elbow strike. Shoulder throw.

Every contact did not exceed zero point three seconds. The safety threshold calculated by Tang Qiqi.

Her tactic had only one word: Push.

Don't kill—repeatedly shove the Zero Entities' marching route back into the mecha-covered zone.

Lu Yan and Tank coordinated to adjust the Titans' positions. Iron Arm King dragged his bandage-wrapped arm, driving shadow protector no. 2 to block the right flank.

After twenty-seven consecutive blocks, Grandmaster Ling Suzhen retreated back to the gate line. Her breathing was heavy.

A fingernail-sized area on her left forearm had become transparent.

A layer of skin had disappeared in those zero point three seconds.

She glanced at it.

Pulled down her cuff.

And didn't make a sound.

---

Jiang Yun, piloting "feilong no. 3", appeared on the outer perimeter. The mecha's arms unfolded the preset projection racks.

There was no Green Lotus Fire.

But napalm bombs didn't need Superpowers.

Six incendiary bombs fell in a fan shape into the dense area of Zero Entities. A wall of fire rose.

The Zero Entities weren't burned to ashes—they weren't afraid of fire.

But their marching speed dropped from twelve steps per minute to four steps.

Tang Qiqi's voice was almost a roar: "The thermal barrier is effective! High temperature disrupts the particle trajectory of the black ash reassembling! We can't kill them, but we can stall them!"

Su Xiaonuan noted a line of text beside the countdown on the whiteboard.

"Fire barrier endurance: seven minutes per piece. Inventory: thirty-four pieces. Enough for four hours."

The pen tip stopped for half a second.

Four hours was not enough.

---

B1 Isolation Room.

Lin Motong hugged her little bear and sat beside the incubator. Her pupils had returned to their normal dark brown. The million-strong Zombie Horde no longer listened to her commands. She couldn't sense anything.

Outside the corridor, the footsteps of the evacuation team sounded like a tide. Some ran, some fell, and messengers blew whistles to pull people up.

Lin Motong didn't look outside.

She stared at the baby girl inside the incubator.

After a long while, she stood up and walked over to Lin Yuan.

"Dad."

Lin Yuan looked at her.

"That thing isn't killing us."

She looked back at the incubator.

"It's waiting. It will leave once it has waited enough."

"The question is—how much does it need to eat its fill?"

---

Tang Qiqi rushed into the main control room carrying a dozen photos. She didn't even notice that a piece of her candy stick had broken off and stuck between her teeth.

"Great Demon King, I've calculated it."

Two sets of curves slammed onto the desk.

Group one: The baby girl's heartbeat frequency. Group two: The advancing waveform of the void Domain at three meters.

"Her life cycle—heartbeat, breathing, blood circulation—forms a perfect destructive interference with the End's recycling pulse."

"It's not confrontation, not suppression."

"It's making the other party unable to see this area."

She poked her pencil at "three meters".

"An infant's cycle can only cover three meters. But if we can amplify this effect—"

Lin Yuan took the photos. "The method to amplify it."

"Give me six hours."

---

The wired telephone rang. The mechanical relay turned five times.

Beijing's independent line. The last pure physical copper cable.

Adam's voice was hoarser than ever before.

"Lin Yuan. One-third of Beijing has been covered."

"Fragments of the End's source code. When my SSS-rank devouring was reclaimed, a section of authority got stuck in my genes—the System didn't have time to clean it out completely."

"I will burn it out. The price is my life."

"I can buy you six hours. The End's advancement speed in Jiangcheng will drop by forty percent."

No fluctuation. No hesitation.

"Is that enough?"

Lin Yuan looked toward Tang Qiqi.

Tang Qiqi was frantically calculating against a pile of clockwork data, chewing her pencil tip to pieces.

Six hours.

"Enough."

Adam didn't say much.

"Then that's it."

The communication disconnected.

---

Su Xiaonuan wrote the "six-hour window" onto the whiteboard.

The countdown began to tick.