Chapter 203: Flood
Looking at Su Huan’s nearly ink-black eyes, Haywood’s complexion turned ashen.
He, who was familiar with Dong Huang culture, knew very well what Su Huan meant by “send.”
The problem was that no one even knew if this tree existed!
Haywood subconsciously turned his gaze to the five captives from the investigation team standing empty-handed beside Su Huan.
“Right, you few go help out. You’re all from the same company—how can you be so indifferent?”
Su Huan said indifferently.
The Investigator Captain’s expression twisted for a moment. For the first time, he realized how damn punchable Haywood’s face was!
Suddenly, a soldier responsible for perimeter alert ran up.
After hearing the report, He Jie approached Su Huan with a visibly strange complexion. “A large number of mutated beasts are attacking from the mountain below…”
No sooner had the words fallen than faint beast roars and gunfire sounds transmitted up.
Only when facing large mutated beasts would soldiers use high-kill grenades like that.
Although the mountain top edge was fully surrounded by Armed Corps soldiers, Haywood and the others roughly judged the situation from the sounds.
“Someone used mutated beast inducing agent.”
Including Lin Jin, Goat, and others, everyone’s gazes uniformly turned to Su Huan sitting in the middle.
Their faces carried thick puzzlement.
Although no one spoke, the same question was clearly visible on everyone’s face.
Old Da, we’re in the upper hand right now!
Su Huan speechlessly smacked his lips. “Why are you looking at me? It wasn’t me who released it.”
Every high-level person present was a firsthand witness. If they hadn’t run fast enough or had enough cannon fodder, they would have been the ones drowned by the zombie tide.
Even thinking about it now filled them with lingering fear.
He Jie stared at Su Huan for a long time and saw no sign of reversal, finally relaxing.
As long as it wasn’t something the Train Conductor did, it could be controlled.
He then turned a ferocious look toward Haywood. “So it was you guys stirring things up!”
The sound of gun bolts being pulled immediately rang out around them. Haywood hurriedly waved his hands. “We came out to carry out a search mission and wouldn’t bring that kind of thing at all. It must be Black Kite who did it!”
“If you want to frame us, there’s no need.” HT-426 stood up from behind the cover.
She opened the exoskeleton’s external protective layer, revealing the tactical suit inside. Several small reagent tubes hung on her right shoulder, and she pointed to one that was blood-red.
“We haven’t used it yet.”
Haywood’s already pale complexion became even more ghastly.
Just as he was about to argue, he was interrupted by Su Huan’s low voice.
“Maybe there’s an internal mole. It doesn’t matter. I just need to see the Crown Pear Tree in one hour.”
“You think you’ve got us pinned?!”
HT-426 furrowed her brows and said coldly in the face of hundreds of gun muzzles.
“Crack—”
A large tree on the side was snapped by the gale and swept over.
Yu Yue, who had been standing beside Su Huan like she was dazed, snapped back to attention. The electromagnetic sniper rifle in her hand was already aimed at a certain cover. Without any warning, the charging backpack completed charging in 1.2 seconds, and the projectile silently embedded into the rock.
A Black Kite Squad member jumped out from behind, with a metal projectile embedded in the chest armor of his exoskeleton.
“Bang bang bang…”
The heavy sniper rifle’s brutal sound echoed across the mountaintop. A sniper in the Armed Corps brutally turned him into mincemeat. The exoskeleton was torn apart, and metal fragments scattered across the ground.
Liang Kuan stepped forward, grabbing the sweeping tree mid-air with both hands.
“Thud!” With a muffled boom, Old Liang’s body trembled, his feet sinking into the muddy water.
He successfully blocked the broken tree, and with the help of several soldiers who came up, dragged the tree to the side.
Su Huan’s expression hadn’t changed from start to finish.
He merely glanced at the timer and calmly transmitted his voice to everyone on the mountaintop. “Fifty minutes left.”
After speaking, he closed his eyes and used General Energy Perception to try searching the mountaintop.
Mutated plants, insects, stones tainted with general energy, mutated beasts charging up the mountain… all things were releasing general energy, especially the plants on the ground, layered and stacked together, blending into a massive general energy fluctuation.
His General Energy Perception wasn’t precise scouting; he could only try to distinguish them bit by bit.
Extremely inefficient.
Qu Hang’s eyes flickered from the corner. All gales entering the Train Conductor’s ten-meter range suddenly became gentle.
Rain falling from the sky seemed to encounter an invisible barrier, parting around this area.
Ground water flowed away rapidly, revealing moist land.
A wave of flame swept by, instantly drying the ground.
Beyond ten meters, fierce winds howled, mutated beasts braved the pouring rain and madly charged the mountaintop.
Then they were swept down by the soldiers’ gunfire, howling as they slid down the slippery mountainside and fell off the cliff.
Within ten meters, the weather was calm, and even the noisy sounds were filtered out by Yu Yue.
Seeing Su Huan make no other moves, He Jie pressed the smoking anti-aircraft machine gun muzzle against HT-426’s smooth forehead and snarled, “Either listen to the Train Conductor and go find it, or I’ll blow your head off and then toss you down the mountain!”
Fury blazed in HT-426’s gray-blue eyes. In her thirty years of life, she’d never felt so humiliated!
The enemy had overwhelming numbers, leaving her utterly helpless.
Although her squad members had high evolutionary degrees, the enemy also had numerous evolver officers, and their high-end combat power completely crushed them.
Thinking of this, HT-426 couldn’t help cursing Zhao Kuo as useless in her heart.
Also a Tier 2 Evolver, yet taken down in one face-off.
Where the hell had that bastard run off to?
Though she didn’t want to admit it, deep down she had no courage to confront Su Huan head-on.
That terrifying thunderstorm had deeply planted the seed of fear in her heart.
She turned around hatefully and led her squad members to begin searching.
Twenty minutes later, in a certain corner of the mountaintop, they found Zhao Kuo frantically digging at the ground.
Meanwhile, Haywood had already brought over several experts.
“Found it?!”
“High-energy reaction is on the mountain, but only a rough range…”
The two groups looked up.
And bumped into each other again.
Haywood’s eyeballs landed on Zhao Kuo who was digging frantically.
……
Su Huan frowned tightly watching Zhao Kuo digging in the pit as if no one else was there. Just as he took a step forward, Zhao Kuo shot out over ten meters like a startled rabbit, causing soldiers to fire accidentally.
But they were all blocked by the exoskeleton on him.
A heavily injured Tier 2 Evolver wasn’t something ordinary soldiers could easily take down.
The Black Kite people showed fury on their faces but didn’t dare act rashly under the gun muzzles.
Su Huan ignored them and looked at the deep pit on the ground, where dense general energy fluctuations rebounded from.
With some doubt in his heart, ‘Crown Pear Tree… could it be growing underground?’
Though he couldn’t figure it out, based on Zhao Kuo’s abnormal behavior and the Deep Blue Data experts’ statements, there was definitely something here.
With almost no consideration, Su Huan issued the order.
“Dig!”
He Jie waved his hand. “Come on, blast it open for me!”
Soldiers quickly moved forward to plant explosives. With numbers, the advantage was that they could carry any supplies related to combat.
“Boom—”
In an instant, the earth shook. Goat, holding the fuse in hand, looked around in bewilderment.
It clearly hadn’t been pulled yet!
“What was that noise?” Everyone looked around.
They saw pitch blackness beyond Wangjiang Peak.
Even the searchlights couldn’t penetrate far.
“The water sound is louder!” Yu Yue said in Su Huan’s ear.
“Water?”
Su Huan frowned. A bolt of lightning traced up the rain threads falling from the sky and exploded instantly.
The entire Wangjiang Peak mountaintop was instantly enveloped in an electric grid. Thousands of electric spears radiated outward, illuminating the mountains and rivers in electric light down to the finest detail in that instant.
In the distance, Mo Jiang had long vanished, replaced by a boiling ocean. Vast floods swallowed river channels and valleys, smashing through buildings within and emitting thunderous roars.
Turbid giant waves rolled, carrying snapped trees, shattered houses, even entire sunken cars, forming a flowing ruins in the darkness.
Like the gates of the heavenly river blasted open, the entire world groaned under the weight of the flood.
Pale electric light illuminated twisted shadows beneath the water surface, like some colossal thing prowling in the abyss.
Accompanied by the storm’s roar, the flood surged toward Wangjiang Peak like an avalanche.
In the face of this terrifying might of heaven and earth, everyone stood with mouths agape, like chickens with throats gripped.
Even the most reckless He Jie had a deathly pale complexion.
“Rumble—”
The peak tilted, the earth quaked.
The overhead electric grid still crackled. Everyone subconsciously looked toward the Train Conductor.
Beneath the long hair, his narrow eyes were overcast like a dead silent deep pool, with no emotions surging up.
“Continue.”
Su Huan faced the tsunami-like flood and said coldly.
The flood’s appearance surprised him a bit, but Wangjiang Peak was already on the edge of the flood zone. With the heavy rain lasting many days, it wasn’t surprising for floods to overflow.
Without finding the Crown Pear Tree, he wouldn’t live past two months.
So what if there was a flood?
After I die, flood or not is none of my business!
Even if the sky fell today, they had to dig out the Crown Pear Tree!
Only by staying alive could he consider what came next.
“Boom!”
An explosion rang out on Wangjiang Peak.
The ground shook, and even the Armed Corps soldiers began to feel fear.
But looking at the Train Conductor standing there with a calm complexion, their hearts didn’t feel so panicked.
“Not enough yield, add more!”
He Jie shouted at the top of his lungs.
“Can’t add more, can’t add more. Adding more will cause a collapse. Wangjiang Peak’s mountainside has fissures—if it collapses, none of us survive!”
An expert under Haywood roared frantically.
The people planting explosives froze.
Goat and others looked back at He Jie.
The expert hurriedly said, “Whether we blast or not, under the flood’s erosion, Wangjiang Peak might collapse. We should hurry down the mountain while we can.”
Seeing the Train Conductor say nothing, he gritted his teeth, grabbed an engineer shovel, and jumped into the deep pit. “Then dig!”
Watching the crowd move again, the Deep Blue Data and Black Kite people were dumbfounded.
“Does this tree absolutely have to be found?”
“Staying here longer means death!”
“Can’t we come back after the flood passes?”
“…”
HT-426 stared at the man standing at the edge and asked incredulously, “Don’t you consider your subordinates?”
Su Huan’s jet-black long hair was unbound, billowing into black angry waves in the gale. A few strands stuck to his coldly pale cheeks, making his skin look like ice. His thin lips were pressed into a straight line, his expression cold.
No intention of answering.
Xiao Ba silently manufactured a batch of shovels from metal.
Liang Kuan picked up the widest one, walked to the pit edge, glanced at HT-426. “Train Conductor first, then the train.”
Then he jumped into the deep pit and dug vigorously.
Then Lin Jin, Xiao Ba, Qu Hang… even Yu Yue went down.
Aside from the alert soldiers, only Su Huan stood there.
Torrential rain poured, lightning flashed and thunder crashed.
“Clang clang” digging sounds rang from the deep pit.
That digging sound was even more terrifying than the approaching flood, gnawing at HT-426’s heart as she looked at that coldly handsome profile illuminated by lightning.
HT-426’s eyes held incredulous fear. “Tyrant!”
Haywood beside her deeply agreed. As he was driven down at gunpoint by soldiers, he even felt Black Kite’s people weren’t so hateful.
“Didi…”
The timer in his hand beeped.
Su Huan’s eyes shifted. “Xiao Ba, Yu Yue, Goat—take the soldiers and start descending the mountain.”
……
At the mountain base, Armored Train Carriage 9.
Six or seven Manufacturing Group attendants were hastily sorting various materials and equipment.
Yu Jing issued orders to the entire train via the on-train communication equipment, though a small hiccup occurred.
“Stop all experiments, pause energy supply, halt all activities on the train… await orders.”
Yu Jing hung up the communication, her phoenix eyes looking at the man in front of her, “What did you just say?”
The man was somewhat fearful, but also somewhat excited, his agitated palms trembling.
“A flood is rising outside, the Train Conductor is already done for, let’s go, we’ll drive away now, the entire train is ours, no one will oppress us anymore, the supplies on the train are enough for us to eat for decades…”
This guy was assigned to the Manufacturing Group during the restructuring, and currently counts as one of her laboratory members, he was fine before, but today who knows what got into him.
Yu Jing packed up her tools while sizing up the others.
The five people looked shocked, one person’s complexion alternating between fear and excitement.
“Is this just your idea?”
“Of course not!” The man’s tone suddenly rose sharply, excitedly saying, “We have a lot of people, although we were at the very bottom before, we participated in manufacturing the entire train, all functions on the train involved us, every department has our people.”
“So that means, you’re an organization?”
Yu Jing took off her gloves, grabbed a tissue to wipe the machine oil off her arm, Su Huan’s dog nose was very sharp, if he smelled it he’d nag her again.
“Of course, the Same Boat Society was jointly formed by ordinary people like you and me who have been oppressed by the train.”
“What’s the organization’s manifesto?”
The man was stunned for a moment, carefully recalling what Liu Ming had once said, vaguely stating, “Roughly, it’s to replace the Train Conductor, build a better train together, a train where no one is oppressed.”
“Unfortunately…”
Yu Jing sighed.
“Unfortunately what?”
The man said in a daze.
“You don’t deserve it.”
Yu Jing casually drew a handgun and pressed it against his head, pulling the trigger.
“Boom——”
A turbid wave crashed over, the train shook slightly, and outside the car window it was completely plunged into darkness.
