Players, Please Board the Train

Everyone in the vehicle, including the players, shouted at them to hurry and run. Teacher Ai hesitated, then glanced at Xu Huo, who was staring straight ahead the entire time. Gritting his teeth, he accelerated and charged straight toward the sandstorm!

The manually operated off-road vehicle truly lived up to its reputation as a desert-crossing marvel. Even against such powerful resistance, it continued forward steadily. Of course, that was partly because they were still some distance from the explosion.

The Little Mushroom Cloud had an explosion radius of one thousand meters. To be safe, Xu Huo had gone a little farther away. Judging by the force of the shock wave after the explosion, the vehicle was absolutely safe here. Even at full speed, they would have no problem.

The swirling sandstorm would not die down anytime soon. After driving faster for a while, Teacher Ai went around the area near the blast site. Forget traps and items, even the desert had been blasted into a huge pit. A giant mushroom cloud could be seen faintly floating there, and for a brief moment it was not swallowed up by the sand rushing back in!

They were traveling along the edge of a sand dune. Looking out the window, they were directly facing the mushroom cloud. Below them, the desert looked as though a small, dried-up lake had appeared.

“Man, this item would be great for making lakes and reshaping coastlines,” Shangguan Xi said, staring at the pit. “And it doesn’t cause any radiation pollution.”

After saying that, he got excited all over again. “With an item like this, we could just blow our way there!”

“Use your head. An item like that must have a pretty long cooldown,” Ding Wei said, watching Xu Huo. “How could we blow our way there the whole way?”

Xu Huo was unfazed by her probing and nodded. “It does have a cooldown, but we’ll reach W19 Base City in a day and a half. That’s not too long.”

Shangguan Xi turned to look at her. “We’re all in this together. You’re not expecting Brother Xu to handle everything by himself, are you?”

Ding Wei tugged at her lips but said nothing.

Unexpectedly, nothing else happened for a while. They encountered neither people nor Mutants.

“Maybe the earlier explosion scared them off,” Teacher Ai said.

But just as they were preparing to find somewhere to spend the night, they unexpectedly came across an area marked by signs of battle. Two wrecked off-road vehicles lay overturned in the sand. Nearby were the corpses of several large Mutants and people, along with small animals that had been drawn there to feed on the carrion.

Xu Huo and the others got out to inspect the area. The vehicles were so badly damaged they were unusable, and every person there was dead. Still, they had left behind some energy blocks and food.

“This must have been an expedition team from another base city,” Teacher Ai said, glancing at the things they had brought back. “They came out to look for resources.”

Xu Huo noticed that, besides ore, there were some crop seeds in the pockets. He asked, “Can’t crops from other Districts be grown at W37 Base Station?”

With players available to transport them, why go to all that trouble?

“It’s not that they can’t, but if you want to grow crops on a large scale, you need plants that can take root in this soil.” Teacher Ai pinched a few seeds and rubbed them between his fingers before putting them back. Then he turned to Gao Chunfeng. “Take these things to W37 Base City tomorrow.”

Xu Huo and the others were headed for W19 Base City, while Gao Chunfeng and his group did not need to make another detour, so they would get off along the way.

Gao Chunfeng naturally had no objections. “It’s not like they have Identification anyway.”

Early the next morning, they were about to part ways. Before leaving, Gao Chunfeng thanked Xu Huo. Gao Xiayang was a little more outgoing and went up to him of his own accord. “Big Brother Xu, you’re a good person. I’ll remember you.”

Xu Huo patted his head.

Once the vehicle got moving again, the two people in the back kept sneaking glances at Xu Huo. They seemed unwilling to believe he had saved those people without wanting anything in return, and also wondered whether he had made a deal with Gao Chunfeng behind their backs.

Xu Huo took out the map. They would soon be through the desert area, and ahead lay the Gobi where an energy mine had once been. The map marked quite a few deep pits, which were probably traces left by mining.

Beyond the Gobi was a transitional area, and beyond that was W19 Base City.

The base city had three gates. The south gate faced W37 Base, so it was sure to be the most popular exit for players. They definitely could not go that way. Xu Huo planned to circle around to the area behind the north gate, hide the vehicle, and then enter the base city.

Teacher Ai followed his plan without question. He also mentioned that there were underground works outside the south gate of Base 19.

“They originally planned to build an underground city here, but after digging down, they discovered a nest belonging to a mutated Ant Colony. Even after the colony was burned out, the site couldn’t be used again. Filling it all in would have taken too much time and effort, so they put bridge panels over it.”

“How large an area did it cover?” Xu Huo asked.

“Half the width of the city, including the south gate, a little to the right. It was over two hundred meters long, and fifty or sixty meters deep,” Teacher Ai said, knowing the figures by heart.

Seeing that Xu Huo was interested in the area, he warned him, “W19 Base City is badly damaged. We might not find energy blocks there, let alone another manually operated off-road vehicle. If we take this one in, it’ll definitely become every other player’s first target.”

They couldn’t put the living specimens in the luggage compartment, so they needed a means of transporting them.

Xu Huo looked at the map and stayed silent for two seconds before speaking. “We’ll decide when we get there. The three specimens might not even still be in W19 City.”

The vehicle entered the Gobi Area without trouble. Everywhere they looked, they saw traces of mining. Some of the mining equipment had even been left behind, though it could not operate without power.

“What kind of energy was here originally?” Shangguan Xi asked with interest. “Some energy ores can be used to make items. Even if they can’t, good-quality ore can still sell for a lot!”

“Surely they mined it all out. Otherwise, why would the people from the base city abandon it?” Zhao Jiahuai said.

After a while, Xu Huo told Teacher Ai to stop. He got out and picked up some stones discarded near a mining shaft.

Shangguan Xi had to stay close to protect Teacher Ai, so he could not go far. Standing by the vehicle, he asked, “Brother Xu, why are you picking up these useless rocks?”

Xu Huo was holding a stone and examining it.

From the Nüwa Stone to He Pu’s Sub-Class Stone, along with the Origin Stone he might or might not have seen, and all the many other kinds of ore, he had learned about more than two hundred varieties of stone. In the past, a stone had just been a stone to him. After his Secondary Evolution, however, even these stones had undergone subtle changes.

Take the Nüwa Stone, for example. Before, he could not be sure whether it was a special Origin Stone like the “Beginning of Time,” capable of giving ordinary ore unique properties. But now, comparing it with He Pu’s Sub-Class Stone, he could see the difference. The Sub-Class Stone He Pu had left him must be ore containing special properties, because the spatial lines grew extremely dense when passing through it, almost merging into a single rope. The Nüwa Stone, by contrast, was little different from ordinary ore. The ore that had been kept beside it for a long time had not changed much either. That meant the Nüwa Stone was not an Origin Stone like the “Beginning of Time.”

But the ordinary ore in his hand now was slightly different from other ore in the way its spatial lines appeared. He relaxed his grip and looked into the distance. Could the energy ore here have originated from an Origin Stone?