Chapter 16: What is the Giant Sun That Fell From the Sky?

Although the factory building had collapsed, she still remembered the basic layout clearly; Factory Building No. 3 was just over two hundred meters away, and even if he didn't point the way, Liu Mu would have gone to search it tomorrow anyway.

Approaching it, she saw the hole that was still steaming; its diameter was no more than two meters, and aside from some radial cracks on the outside, it didn't seem to have any other differences.

During the approach, Liu Mu kept having the system scan it, and finding no danger, she went straight to the mouth of the hole, though the big man on the dog's back had warned her twice that there might be danger.

Crawling to the edge of the hole to look down, it was a somewhat slanted deep pit; it was too dark below, and she could only faintly see a bit of red light, drifting and flickering like some kind of mist, impossible to distinguish what it actually was.

Liu Mu shone her High-Intensity Flashlight inside, but the light seemed to fall into darkness, disappearing after only a few meters.

"Ma'am, when it's unclear what the situation is, shouldn't you avoid going in lightly?"

Regarding things that fall from the sky, humans instinctively feel fear, but Liu Mu was not an ordinary human. "You stay here, I'm going down. Don't worry, if there's danger, I'll pull the rope, and Niu Boyi will pull me up."

Seeing that opposition was useless, Li Gang didn't continue; after all, the two were not familiar at all, and they didn't even know each other's names. He was set down ten meters away, watching the person and the dog busy themselves for a while, and then that girl really did climb down the pit.

How to put it—either she was bold enough, or she was courting death.

Li Gang even started thinking about how he should leave this place if Liu Mu died down there. He hadn't felt it while in Factory Building No. 2, but now that he had walked out, he realized that not only was the entire Steel Rolling Mill gone, but the dormitory buildings in the distance and the town further away seemed to have met with disaster as well.

Could it be that the "end of the world" this girl spoke of was true? Otherwise, even if there were a disaster, it shouldn't be that not a single person could be seen.

As for Liu Mu, after confirming that the young man couldn't stand and couldn't possibly come over to cut her rope, she still cautiously gave Niu Boyi a final instruction: "If that person tries to harm me, bite him to death! Be careful, even if you kill him, pay attention to your own safety."

Niu Boyi nodded vigorously, agreeing to Master's plan, and watched longingly as she went down.

As for what exactly the thing that fell from the sky was, she had heard some rumors before; besides bringing disaster, it was said that the subsequent animal Mutation and human Awakening of abilities were all very likely related to it.

And Liu Mu was also eyeing this point; if it really had such a great effect, wouldn't she strike it rich by picking this up?

The angle of the hole's slope was a bit steep, and the internal surface had produced quite a bit of quartz due to the rapid high temperature; illuminated by the light of the Flashlight, it was shiny and extended all the way inside.

Fortunately, Liu Mu was wearing protective clothing that was sturdy to begin with, but the surface coating was still cut in several places, and she had to be even more careful. Although she knew that if there were poison or other radiation inside, this clothing wouldn't be of much use.

What she found strange was that she had expected the temperature to get higher the further down she went, but the temperature she felt was actually dropping. "Xiao A, current temperature?"

【The current ambient temperature is 23°C, and the minimum temperature below is estimated to be 4°C. Please do not stay in the low-temperature environment for too long.】

"Alright, remind me every ten minutes, and start body monitoring at the same time," Liu Mu grew solemn, and the speed of her hands became faster.

The gloves from the labor protection supply protected her hands, and soon she saw the source of the red color; it was a gas so thick it was almost substantial, flowing around that stone in the depths.

And that stone looked even more hair-raising; never mind the pitted surface, there was a red dot in the center of every pit, looking just like the red-pupiled ghost eyes in horror movies. Liu Mu suspected that these red gases were emerging from inside it.

Heitao A scanned it once, but only gave an "unknown" answer; it neither knew what the substance was, nor was it certain if it was harmful to the human body.

【Your system permissions are not high enough; currently, you can only analyze part of the substance. Host, the system suggests you do not make contact lightly.】

Of course, Liu Mu wouldn't be stubborn enough to pick it up directly; if she ended up causing a Mutation to herself, how would that be any different from dying?

"Can it be put into the Recovery Space?" Liu Mu wasn't sure; after all, did this thing count as scrap?

【It can be recovered, but it cannot be decomposed. It is recommended to place it in isolation. You need 100 units of steel to purchase an isolation storage box.】

"100? That much?" Liu Mu felt a bit of heartache; that was fifty thousand kilograms, which converted to fifty tons. "Just for a broken box?"

【Host, the isolation storage box is not broken. One isolation storage box has a total of 100 cubic meters of space and can be divided into multiple relatively independent spaces, just like the storage lockers in your supermarkets.】

If it's 100 cubic meters, that's equivalent to... buying one cubic meter per unit; this is ten times more expensive than the original Recovery Space.

Could it be that the system saw she had collected a lot of steel and wanted to take the opportunity to extort her?

Although Liu Mu was unwilling, if she wanted this Black Stone of unknown origin, she had to buy it.

Sigh, what can one do in a seller's market?

"Exchange, exchange it. After the exchange is done, put this broken stone inside," Liu Mu said, and at Heitao A's prompt, she saw that Black Stone tremble and then slowly rise.

Floating in front of her, she could clearly see it was just a basketball-sized object, and those red mists moved along with the stone, seemingly inseparable.

Liu Mu watched nervously; the stone was actually resisting the system's recovery, trembling in the air for several seconds, releasing a lot of red mist in the process, before disappearing from where it was.

When she checked the system, she saw that in the 10*10*1 isolation storage wall, a strange spherical stone had appeared in the first compartment.

The stone was not behaving in the space, colliding with the four walls, and then the four walls suddenly deformed and shrank, suppressing it into a narrow spherical space, and the red mist was also compressed close to the stone's surface.

Liu Mu was just about to see if the stone would spray out more mist when her throat suddenly itched, and she began to cough.

Coming to her senses, she discovered in horror that after the recovery, a small amount of red mist was still drifting around; she didn't know if the mist sensed the stone had entered the space inside her body, but it actually approached her Filter Mask and was inhaled before she even realized it.

"Damn it!" Liu Mu discovered in horror that her Filter Mask couldn't stop this kind of mist at all; soon, a fishy sweetness surged into her mouth, and her tongue gradually went numb.

Fearing she would die down here, she immediately crawled up using her hands and feet. "Niu Boyi, pull me up!"

Niu Boyi had sensitive hearing; he could not only hear the urgency in Liu Mu's tone but could even hear her heavy breathing and rapidly accelerating heartbeat.

"Are you okay?" The dog had one end of the rope tied to him and immediately ran frantically, almost pulling Liu Mu out flying.

Liu Mu landed heavily on the ground; this time, her clothes were truly torn by the quartz in the hole, and she had added a few more cuts.

Strangely, she didn't feel pain the moment she landed; a very strange feeling arose in her body, as if someone were pulling her tendons—it wasn't very painful, but every muscle and every bone was twisting randomly, with some parts tightening and others relaxing, making her unable to move autonomously.