Chapter 887: Chapter 887

Standing beneath the stairs amidst the dust, He Ao’s true self looked at the building before him, which was decorated with an exceptionally strong sense of design, and raised his foot to step onto the stairs in front of the building’s entrance.

The precise positioning of the Velora required He Ao to perform scene reconstruction in his mind.

That meant, for places He Ao had not visited and was unable to reconstruct, the Velora could not reach directly.

Under circumstances of having only distance and direction, the Velora could only perform an approximate positioning.

Although He Ao had visited the research facility located beneath the lava on the ground inside Jie An’s Bubble Space, that facility was the scene after destruction and might not be the same as the ’operating’ research facility in the Relics of the Bygone Days.

Moreover, He Ao was not entirely sure that the facility below was the same one beside the lava in Jie An’s Bubble Space.

And the positioning and modeling of the Velora required extreme precision; a slight deviation might result in being lost to an unknown area.

Therefore, out of caution, He Ao decided to first go and see for himself.

Phantoms moved to and fro inside the building, but none took notice of He Ao.

This place was not as open and desolate as the research facility in Volcano Park, nor was it like the Central Library, guarded by Transcendents everywhere.

The topics of discussion here were all about normal Gobi science research, as if this were an ordinary, low-level Gobi research institute.

The normalcy here even made He Ao doubt his judgement slightly, wondering if he had found the wrong place.

The research institute was not tall, only three stories, and He Ao moved quickly, searching every room of all three floors in a very short time.

But he saw no path or equipment leading underground, nor did he find any materials related to the underground research facility.

In the end, he returned to the lobby on the first floor, reconstructing in his mind all the areas he had explored, piecing together each room and area in his mind.

The whole building looked broad from the outside, with slightly thicker walls and many rooms and areas; the second and third floors were normal, but the first floor.

All the spaces on the first floor put together couldn’t fill the space enclosed by the outer walls.

He turned his gaze to the wall on the left side of the lobby, which was hung with portraits of famous people, and walked over to this wall, moving slowly toward the area near the entrance.

Then he drew the bone sword from behind his back, and without hesitation, he cleaved the wall before him.

With the scattering of bricks and rubble, a Black Shadow suddenly burst out, slashing towards him.

He raised his sword and spun it upward, cutting the onrushing Black Shadow in two, and with splattered blood, the scene behind the wall appeared before him.

Behind this wall was not another room adjacent to the lobby, but a deep stairway that stretched down into the depths of the earth.

He Ao was now standing on the side of the stairway, with a wall at the very top and a switch that seemed to control opening and closing next to it.

But this door did not lead directly outside.

According to He Ao’s mental model, this door should lead to a narrow and enclosed corridor, the corridor turned toward the back of the entire building, and there should be a real door that connected inside and out.

A very interesting design. The entire institute above seemed to be a ’decoration’ to hide this underground passage, and the entrance was not inside the building; it was essentially two structures fused together.

He Ao stepped on the splattered blood and quickly descended the stairs.

Above the stairway were bright small lights illuminating the path ahead, with the stairway itself having no turns and extending straight downward. After descending around fifteen meters.

He Ao finally reached the end of the stairway.

A narrow ’elevator lobby’ with two decidedly vintage red-painted elevators.

There was nobody in the elevator lobby. The one who had just attacked He Ao must have been the ’doorman’.

He Ao extended his hand to press the button in front of one of the larger elevators, which appeared to be for freight.

With a crisp sound, the entire elevator slowly opened.

He Ao quickly stepped into the elevator.

There was no button to select a floor inside the elevator, only a close button.

He Ao reached out and lit up the close button.

Accompanied by the ’squeak—’ ’squeak—’ of mechanical rotation, the entire elevator began to rapidly descend.

At first, He Ao could feel a significant sensation of weightlessness, which after about one or two minutes, noticeably lessened but didn’t disappear, meaning the elevator was still accelerating, just at a decreasing rate, until it finally stopped increasing.

A few minutes later, He Ao felt a rather obvious sensation of being overweight, meaning the elevator had started to decelerate.

Eventually, after about ten minutes, He Ao felt the speed of the elevator gradually returning to zero.

According to the data from the archives, this elevator was approximately twenty thousand meters from the earth’s surface, which is twenty kilometers underground; reaching the destination in ten minutes, the average speed was about one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour.

With a crisp sound, the elevator doors slowly opened, and a fierce wave of heat almost instantly slapped his face.

The first thing that caught He Ao’s eyes was a field of boiling, burning lava, and the chunks of stone standing within this lava.

He Ao looked up and gazed at the sky; clearly deep beneath the surface of the earth, he saw a sky full of stars.

This was indeed the scene from the ’Bubble Space’ in Jie An’s memory, only the lava bubbling there was even more intense than now.

The elevator did not directly connect to the underground research facilities but instead connected to a huge, circular artificial platform near the magma.

The platform was not very high, with magma erupting in flames occasionally slapping against the edge of the platform, splashing scorching sparks.

At this moment, directly ahead in He Ao’s field of view, an elderly man dressed in simple, plain-colored robes, with white-flecked beard stood at the edge of the platform, a black broad sword plunged into the platform in front of him; he stood with his back against the blazing lava, watching He Ao inside the elevator.

At the same time, He Ao was also observing the elderly man before him.

In the archives, there was supposed to be a B-level Transcendent with strength within the underground research facility, but He Ao did not sense any hint of a Transcendent’s aura from the man before him.

Instead, it was another kind of familiar strength.

"A martial artist? The last time I saw a martial artist was... that seems to have been a very, very long time ago."

The elderly man looked at He Ao, his voice distant and prolonged. He reached out slowly and gripped the handle of the black broad sword in front of him, "Come, let me see your practice."

The broad blade was suddenly drawn, emitting a sharp sword hum under the scorching starlight.

Piles of disorganized archives had accumulated into small hills.

Lin Chichi crawled out from the pile of archives, looked at the maid girl who was still rapidly flipping through archives in her hands, and passed over a file, "This is the last one with a lot of text, I can’t read these characters, not sure if it’s useful."

The maid girl took the archive from her hands, briefly flipped through it, and then set it aside.

Her gaze shifted, looking at the empty filing cabinet with only two archives remaining.

These were the only two in this pile of top-secret archives with text slightly resembling the ’Starlight’ archives.

One of the files was codenamed ’Cage’.

Although it did not mention volcanoes, judging from the description, it seemed very similar to the ’Angel’ imprisoned in Volcano Park.

And the code name of another archive was "Firmament."

In this record, there was a description of a "Floating Base," which did not seem to be a facility exclusively of the First District, but rather a collective research facility constructed by all people of the Original Federation.

It appeared that the designer of this Floating Base was also an Angel who had built the base himself and launched it into the heavens, making the floating base his place of residence as well.

The entire base housed numerous laboratories designated for research on subjects inconvenient for ground-level study, including various restricted Transcendent research.

According to the archival information, all the major regions of the Original Federation had laboratories on the Floating Base and could all apply for its use.

The Floating Base had no fixed location and followed a certain drifting route on a cruise above the Relic Planet.

The archives had no description of its specific route.

However, there were some observations from the Floating Base, detailing the sights to be seen from there at specific times.

Overall, it seemed that the Floating Base traveled from east to west and had descriptions of seeing the Crystal Tower at eight o’clock on the evenings of odd-numbered days.

The Crystal Tower was the tallest building in the First District, located near the Central Library in the city.

Hanging at the entrance of the archives was an electronic clock, which clearly displayed that the current time was 7:10 PM.

Turning her gaze away from the two archives, the maid girl made her way over the mountainous pile of records on the floor and walked toward the coffin at the entrance.

Lin Chichi staggered out from the heap of archives and followed behind the maid girl, cautiously asking, "Where do we go next?"

The maid girl stopped in front of the coffin, then turned around, looked at her, and made a hugging gesture.

Lin Chichi blinked, looked at the maid girl’s action again, and then looked at the object in front of the maid girl.

It was only then that she realized the ’place’ she had just crawled out from was the same dark and mysterious Coffin she had seen.

After a brief pause, she looked at the maid girl and cautiously asked, "You mean, you want me to hug this?"

The maid girl nodded slightly and then turned to glance at Lin Chichi. She searched around, tore off a composite metal chain from above a file cabinet, and handed it to Lin Chichi.

"Are you saying, I should tie myself to this..."

Lin Chichi glanced at the coffin next to her, "This coffin?"

The maid girl nodded gently again.

Then Lin Chichi saw the maid girl lying down inside the coffin, with the Coffin Lid slowly flying up from the ground and snapping shut over the coffin.

Subsequently, the coffin naturally rose, hovering in mid-air.

Lin Chichi blinked her eyes, walked up to the coffin, looked at the chain in her hand, and then the coffin.

She reached out, tied the chain around her waist, and wound it around the coffin, wrapping it several times to ensure her safety.

For some reason, she felt her strength had grown substantially, yet it still did not seem as incredible as when she was in that "dream."

The chain, which had appeared sturdy and heavy, now felt as light as if she were lifting a plastic rope.

But before she had time to ponder this, she felt a slight suction from beneath the coffin, drawing her to "adhere" onto the coffin.

Then, accompanied by the girl’s scream, the coffin suddenly accelerated, smashing through the door and breaking through the monsters guarding outside in an extremely short time, appearing outside the Library.

Moving through the crowd around her, Lin Chichi then felt the coffin "stand" upright.

Still reeling from the sudden acceleration, she looked up at the starry sky, moving with the coffin.

In the midst of it all, she felt as though the coffin was about to fly upwards.

This was her first time experiencing the sensation of being carried into flight by a coffin.

A sudden explosive sound burst at the site of take-off, shattering all surrounding glass in an instant as the tearing cyclone violently erupted.

Riding the coffin into the sky, Lin Chichi only felt after a series of intense vibrations that everything around her quickly quieted down. Time ticked by, second by second, and she could even hear her own gasping breaths.

The moment of acceleration was not pleasant, and the howling wind seemed very dangerous.

However, her physical fitness seemed to have been enhanced in some way, and a warm strength flowed into her body, helping her relieve the pressure, while the coffin made a deliberate tilt to shield her from the sharp blade-like currents.

At this moment, the coffin was soaring beneath the vast brilliance of the stars, with a massive cyclone spiraling behind it, while the city illuminated below retreated swiftly like floating lights.

Soon, a towering building like a huge torch appeared in the girl’s field of view.

This building pierced into the clouds, standing directly in the coffin’s flight path.

"We’re gonna crash!!!"

As the building grew closer and closer, Lin Chichi’s heart involuntarily tightened.

In the moment just before collision, the pitch-black coffin abruptly lifted, creating a conical cyclone that shot upward at nearly a right angle, accompanied by the sound of shattering glass from the building. The dark coffin, carrying the bewildered girl, soared over the top of the skyscraper, like a fish leaping out of the clouds.

The streaming clouds spread to both sides, guided by the starlight.

Beneath the cold and clear starlight, a grand, square silver megacity sustained by eight massive engines, thousands of kilometers in diameter, revealed its form among the clouds.

And almost at the instant the coffin and the girl appeared, the silver megacity seemed to have already noticed them.

One by one, silver shuttle-shaped spacecraft detached from the city’s edge, dispersing across the sky like a flock of geese in flight, spewing intense flames as they hurtled towards the coffin.

Before Lin Chichi could react to the scene straight out of a sci-fi movie, the dark coffin charged towards those shuttle-shaped ships.

We’re really going to crash this time!!!

As the closest ship rapidly approached, the girl couldn’t help but close her eyes.

In the silence of darkness, she thought she heard a series of brief and rapid explosions, which must have been caused by the coffin colliding with metal, followed by explosions. Waves of slight heat brushed past her cheeks incessantly.

Finally, unable to resist, she opened her eyes.

In front of her, there were no more shuttle-shaped spacecraft, and behind her, plumes of fire bloomed like fireworks among the stars and sea of clouds.

The girl marvelled silently at these blossoming flames.

However, the dark coffin didn’t stop, as if such a victory wasn’t even worth celebrating for it.

New shuttle-shaped craft appeared to both sides and seemed to be multiplying quickly.

The dark coffin continued to accelerate and smashed into a huge one-way transparent floor-to-ceiling window in the sky city ahead.

With a crisp sound, the thick glass shattered effortlessly.

Lin Chichi felt the suction from the coffin on her body disappear, and the alloy hinges finally collapsed under the strain.

Along with the crisp shattering noise, the girl’s figure, together with the splashing glass shards, tumbled into a grand hall lit with lights.

The girl stood up, stepping on the glass, and looked straight ahead in her field of view, as the twisted masses of monstrous flesh slowly became visible under the lights.