79: Chapter 79 Nine Heavens

The stench inside the main control room was almost palpable. Zhou An suppressed his discomfort and forcibly hacked into the damaged main console database of the flagship.

Accompanied by a flickering static screen, the affiliation information of this fleet appeared.

[Vehicle Registration Information] Affiliation: Iron Crow Guild. Guild Level: Black Iron. Current Registered Members: 142.

"Iron Crow Guild?" Zhou An frowned and searched the regional channel.

This was just an obscure small guild that hadn't previously merged into any rogue guilds.

"A guild of over a hundred people, no matter how poor their strength, shouldn't have been completely mutated without any ability to fight back."

Zhou An looked at the debris covering the floor. "The speed of the contamination's spread is even faster than we imagined."

"Hehe, Boss, never mind how they died. Since we're already here, these abyssal tentacles are top-tier research materials!"

Compared to Zhou An's solemnity, Luo Ning's eyes lit up.

She expertly pulled several lead-gray sealed canisters with extremely strong insulation properties from her battle suit's storage compartment. Wielding a high-frequency cutting blade like a seasoned butcher, she began frantically harvesting the purple tentacles that were still twitching slightly.

The two of them spent a full ten minutes, and only prepared to leave when Zhou An's Last Stand duration was about to expire.

They scavenged all the most valuable mutated materials from this flagship and loaded them all into their spatial warehouse.

Before returning to the [Cloud Top Fortress], Zhou An issued an order directly over the communication channel.

"Sister Lin Qing, Luo Ning and I are preparing to board the ship now. Stay in the room on the second floor and absolutely do not come out!"

"Alright, Boss, please be careful!" Lin Qing's slightly nervous response came through the communicator.

Subsequently, in the external buffer chamber at the bottom of the fortress, Zhou An and Luo Ning used high-frequency flames and disinfectant gel to perform a comprehensive physical and chemical decontamination on themselves and their battle suits for twenty minutes. Only when the system's contamination warning dropped to zero did the two push open the hatch and walk into the first floor.

As soon as they entered, Li Muzi and Zhang Ming immediately came up to greet them, both of their faces looking somewhat pale.

"Boss, Luo Ning! What exactly happened outside? I saw on the radar that the LV4 warship looks like a ghost ship!" Li Muzi asked anxiously.

Zhou An took off his battle suit's helmet and let out a long sigh, then truthfully told the two about the shocking tentacle mutation inside the flagship and the tragic state of the entire crew losing their minds and turning into monsters.

"Entire crew mutated?! Turned into monsters?!" Zhang Ming gasped, his back instantly drenched in cold sweat.

"How is this possible... Boss, we are currently in the airspace above 10,000 meters! In everyone's impression, the 10,000 to 20,000-meter range is an absolute 'Sunshine Belt.' Don't those terrifying abyssal species only operate in the bottom layers?!"

"Conventional wisdom has been broken." Zhou An walked to the water bar, poured himself a large glass of water, and gulped it down. "Do you remember the warning the system suddenly broadcasted over a month ago about 'Unknown organisms intruding into the 10,000-20,000 airspace'?"

Li Muzi was stunned for a moment, her pupils constricting: "Boss, do you mean... those abyssal creatures that broke through the spatial barrier have already reached this airspace?"

"Besides them, I can't think of anything else that could silently wipe out an entire fleet in an instant." Zhou An looked at the two with a solemn expression.

"From today on, except when sleeping, everyone must carry the [wind spirit spirit-stabilizing special drink] and epic-grade [Special Combat Canned Food] made by Zhang Ming. Once you feel inexplicable headaches, auditory hallucinations, or see double, drink it immediately. You must not let your SAN value drop below the safety line!"

"Defense based solely on food isn't enough." At this moment, Luo Ning also removed her heavy battle suit. She pulled three injection tubes with surfaces shimmering with a faint, eerie blue light from her pocket and handed them to Li Muzi and Zhang Ming as if handing out candy.

"This is..." Muzi carefully took the injections.

"This is the [Potent Mutation Suppression Injection], a little gadget made in the lab; it can come in handy at critical moments." Luo Ning pointed to the two in Zhang Ming's hand.

"Old Zhang, take one to Sister Lin Qing. Although this thing can't completely clear mental contamination, it can protect your physical bodies from growing those disgusting tentacles at critical moments. It is also safe for pregnant women."

"Thank you!" Zhang Ming kept the injections close to his body like a precious treasure, as if he had taken a tranquilizer.

"Everyone, be on high alert." Zhou An looked at the increasingly violent thunder outside the window. That contaminated Iron Crow fleet was like an extremely ominous signal.

After settling everyone down, Zhou An returned to the captain's room on the third floor alone.

He leaned back in his chair and casually opened the regional public chat channel and the trading hall. As he expected, the chat trend, which was originally filled with complaints about the thunderstorm weather, had completely changed.

"Brothers! A ghost fleet discovered in the 15,000-meter airspace! It's all f*cking tentacles! I saw it with high-powered binoculars; the people on the entire ship turned into chunks of flesh with eyes! Don't go near coordinates (224, 891)!"

"I ran into it too! It's too eerie; that monster simply can't be killed. My co-pilot only took one look, and his SAN value plummeted; he almost shot me!"

"Help! What kind of hellish weather is this? Don't abyssal monsters not come up here?! Whoever has a sanity-restoring potion, I'll sell everything I have to buy it!"

The emotion of panic spread like a plague throughout the entire 997 District.

As the panic intensified, Zhou An keenly noticed that a large number of high-priced resale posts began to appear in the trading channel under the banners of "Life-Saving Divine Water" and "Sanity Stabilizer."

He casually clicked on an extremely popular product link, and the corner of his mouth twitched immediately.

That familiar green bottle and the system-certified attribute panel—wasn't it the [wind spirit spirit-stabilizing special drink] developed by Old Zhang and mass-produced on the assembly line?!

He looked at the price tag again. 20 units of Tier 3 materials/bottle.

"Good grief, these scalpers and middlemen really dare to ask for anything." Zhou An laughed in extreme anger.

The wholesale price he previously gave to large guilds and chambers of commerce like Sky Engine was 10 units of Tier 3 materials, which he thought was already a huge profit. As it turns out, these scalpers saw the current panic market and directly doubled the price!

And what's most outrageous is that even with the price raised to 20, the sales volume is still terrifyingly high. After all, compared to being contaminated and turning into a disgusting tentacle monster, the vast majority of people can grit their teeth and come up with 20 units of Tier 3 materials. It can also be used as an energy-restoring drink in daily life; it is an absolutely essential, life-saving supply.

"Letting scalpers earn the price difference is even more painful than me losing money." Zhou An directly connected to the channel. "Muzi, stop the supply of production materials for [Special Combat Canned Food]."

"Ah? Boss, did something happen?" Muzi was confused.

"Nothing, the market trend outside has changed. Tell EVA to lock the recipe for that 'Cornucopia' assembly line. From now on, operate at 100% full capacity and squeeze out only [wind spirit spirit-stabilizing special drink] for me!"

While giving the order, Zhou An opened his official trading shop and decisively changed the unit price of the special drink from 10 directly to 20.

"Scalpers want to hype up the price to get rich? I might as well, as the manufacturer, set the rules directly." Zhou An snorted coldly. He didn't intend to hype the price even more outrageously to suck blood; he would just stick to the limit price of 20, which everyone could accept and where scalpers couldn't make a profit, and directly flood the market with massive production capacity.

After doing all this, Zhou An glanced at the countdown in the upper right corner of the system panel. [Endless Rainy Season · Thunderstorm Period Remaining Time: 9 Days 11 Hours 24 Minutes] [Time until the Third Regional Large-Scale Survival Settlement: 9 Days 11 Hours 24 Minutes]

"Nine more days..." Zhou An exhaled a long, heavy breath.

As long as they survived these last nine days, this long and oppressive thunderstorm weather would end completely, and what would follow was the third all-district grand settlement of combat power and foundation.

Zhou An crossed his hands behind his head and watched the increasingly dense thunder outside the window.

During this rainy season, although he had made a fortune by utilizing his Hextech talent and information advantage, and his vehicle and personal strength had undergone a transformative leap, he knew very well that compared to the six major guild leaders like City Lord Zhao Tianyu, who held the foundation of tens of thousands of people, he still had a gap in absolute total volume.

"The last settlement was sixth in the district. With new large guilds this time, I'll probably be pushed to seventh place by those six leaders." Zhou An joked to himself, though he didn't feel much of a sense of disappointment.

One person's resources are ultimately difficult to compare with a large guild of tens of thousands of people.

"Nine days... I hope everything goes smoothly."