Chapter 288: Large Intestine

The interior of the GOC armored transport was quite spacious; even with a group of people sitting inside, it didn't feel cramped.

"Tea or coffee?"

Hui Yu pulled instant coffee, cups, and a thermos from the passenger-side drawer, casually brewed a few cups, and handed them to Yang Hua and the others in the back row. Tina, still wearing her gas mask, merely held the plastic cup and swallowed some saliva without drinking—probably afraid of being poisoned.

Sitting inside the solid, dependable armored vehicle, with a cup of hot coffee down the hatch, the fear, hunger, and exhaustion of the past three days seemed to vanish like smoke.

Yang Hua, Xue Luomeng, and the others finally let down their guard and hugged each other, crying softly.

Hui Yu widened her eyes in disbelief, stared fixedly at her own palm, then suddenly whipped her head toward Li Cheng and said, "A casual brew and it's good enough to make people cry. Old Shi, I'm actually a Coffee Immortal!"

?

Li Cheng's eye twitched—they weren't crying because the coffee was good, and you call that a Coffee Immortal? At the very least, when you pop the lid open, it has to glow with golden light.

And why does the "pào" in "casual brew" use the first tone instead of the fourth tone?!

To demonstrate his professionalism, Li Cheng didn't voice the complaints, cleared his throat, and asked Tina for more intel.

According to Tina, that Dr. Noah was a super-scientist on the level of Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell—combining theory with engineering practice, single-handedly driving the world's technological development in nuclear engineering, bioengineering, electrical engineering, aerospace engineering, and other fields.

Back in the early twenty-first century, he'd already come up with vacuum-tube high-speed rail, high-fidelity robots, brain-computer interfaces, a permanent lunar base, and even a space-jump engine packed with black-tech elements.

When the apocalypse event occurred, he was at the Portland Laboratory he had personally established, not yet forty years old.

Li Cheng squinted, his thoughts racing—surely there were prodigies in the world, but as human civilization's technology advanced, the sciences actually became more and more subdivided.

Even a genius, to master one cutting-edge science, would need to spend twenty or thirty years.

And yet, as described, casually spanning multiple fields, reaching the top in each, even surpassing the era—

Either it has something to do with the Killzone,

Or he's awakened some kind of Reborn-Academic-Overlord-Military-Industry-Research-Academician-God-Tier-Grinder-Slack-Off-Black-Tech-System.

Thinking of this, Li Cheng glanced through the rearview mirror at the people in the cabin.

Theoretically, Xue Luomeng and the others should be in soul form, yet they still had heartbeats, pulses, body temperature, mass. This kind of "abnormality" was almost certainly inseparable from the apocalypse—and from Dr. Noah, who very likely triggered it.

The question was, how to find that Noah.

"On a physical level, it's impossible to get to the Portland Laboratory."

Tina held her coffee cup and said hoarsely, "This world has been collapsing the whole time; the concept of direction doesn't exist."

Hui Yu asked, puzzled, "Collapsing? What do you mean?"

Tina set down her coffee cup, took off the backpack on her back, pulled out a map full of creases from it, and with a ripping sound tore off a corner.

"Just like this."

Her expression darkened as she said, "【Collapse】 is a phenomenon. First there's a mild earthquake, and as the earthquake's magnitude grows higher and higher, the entire region ultimately vanishes into thin air, as if a piece were torn off the map.

My parents once took me to see the edge of a collapsed area. The ground there became a cliff with a drop of who knows how many meters. If you threw a stone off the cliff, you couldn't hear the stone's sound at all."

Hui Yu raised an eyebrow. "Nonsense, you throw a stone, and a stone can't make a sound on its own. At the very least you should've thrown something alive."

Li Cheng didn't pay attention to Hui Yu's clowning and asked back, "In these four years, has it ever rained?"

Tina was startled by the question. "It rained the first year, but in the three years after, not a single rain. These past few years, my parents and I survived entirely on canned water we found."

Understood.

Li Cheng rubbed his chin. This matched up with the wasteland being unable to grow a blade of grass—the otherworld's atmospheric water cycle was probably already wrecked to hell by the 【Collapse】 phenomenon.

Boom!

A muffled sound suddenly came from above the roof of the vehicle, startling Tina and the others.

Boom boom boom—

The sounds were dense and rapid, like hail. At the same time, the armored vehicle's tires somehow slipped, nearly causing it to roll over.

Yang Hua instinctively wanted to look out the window, but Tina suddenly reached out and pressed down on her shoulder.

The latter's face was pale as she said in a low voice, "Don't look, don't poke your head out!"

Li Cheng had already seen it.

Through the drone's video feed, he clearly saw a hundred meters above the ground, a large number of black balloons drifting over.

Their size was similar to common weather balloons, drifting in a stable posture. When the wind blew, all the black balloons turned in unison.

Those weren't balloons, but bloated, oversized, expressionlessly vacant inflated human heads.

Beneath the severed neck cross-section of each head-balloon hung a thin, long intestine. It was precisely these intestines that had adhered to the armored vehicle's roof, pulling the vehicle and nearly causing it to roll over.

Boom boom boom boom!

More and more head-balloons lowered their long, narrow intestines. Some adhered to the roof, some gripped the windows, and by accumulating buoyancy, they tried to lift the armored transport off the ground.

This hunting method was actually quite similar to an eagle—first carry the heavy prey up into the sky, then drop it toward the ground, relying on gravity to smash it to death, saving effort.

In a sense, helicopters and Pinochet operated the same way.

"These balloon monsters have very weak active mobility. If they fail to catch prey for a while, they'll drift away on their own."

Tina said quickly, "We have to abandon the vehicle and quickly take shelter inside a room, a basement, or under building ruins."

"Abandon the vehicle? To hell with that."

Hui Yu glared. This GOC-supplied armored transport had to be worth several million, close to ten million. How many STEAM games, e-cigarettes, snack milk teas, betel nuts, and mobile-game 648 bundles could that buy?

The thrifty, household-managing Hui Yu absolutely could not agree.

She pushed open the car door, jumped out of the vehicle, and stood in the middle of the road with hands on hips.

The head-balloons floating in the sky immediately noticed her. The lowered intestines, like venomous snakes, coiled toward Hui Yu's neck and limbs, attempting to use buoyancy to drag her toward the sky.

And then—

And then they couldn't budge her.

Tina in the cabin widened her eyes in disbelief—she had no idea that Hui Yu's factory-shipped body weight was already over eight hundred kilograms, and that she could also liquefy the metal of her soles, seep it deep into the rock layer, and grow roots like a tree to increase her grip.

"That's it?"

Hui Yu let out a cold laugh, transformed her arms into two long blades, and hacked and chopped, slicing the intestines into fragments.

The other balloon heads, seeing the situation turn bad, immediately released their grip on the armored vehicle and tried to drift away.

Gray Rain would never let them escape—he reached out, grabbed the intestines, and brutally yanked them, dragging all the heads down to the ground, shouting as he pulled, "Old Shi, help me! Don't let these things get away!"

The intestines were long, tough, and full of strength, and not a single bit of feces inside.

Whether for Taiwanese grilled sausages, spicy pork intestine soup, or braised offal, they'd make perfect ingredients."

In the rear cabin, Xue Luomeng and the others beads of sweat slowly formed on their foreheads—Gray Rain's fervor and gleeful excitement didn't seem fake; he truly meant to do it.

Compared to him, Mr. Shi still seemed somewhat normal.

Before they could wipe away their sweat, Li Cheng also jumped out of the vehicle and casually pulled from his 3D storage warehouse: a wok, salt, oil, yellow wine, vinegar, scallions, ginger, garlic, star anise, and cassia bark.

(End of Chapter)