Explosion Is Art

Su Wen pressed the M key in the game and opened the built-in map.

In the coastal area near him, four hazardous points requiring adjustment had been marked with glowing dots.

Moreover, all of those locations lay within the isolated coastal border zone and offshore waters.

Ordinarily, no tourists could come here.

Even if someone did show up,

at most, it would be a few scattered Schlote Heavy Industries employees who had truly been unable to keep working and had slipped out to slack off.

So when the Spiritual Energy Tide displacement from the ruin site

caused Hurricane Ewiniar to abruptly change its course without warning,

the situation became extremely urgent.

Coupled with the storm's terrifying intensity,

the special response bureau's rescue fleet, dispatched from Coastal Port dozens of kilometers away, also took a long time to arrive.

This caused the Globetrotter to be completely wrecked and sunk in the hurricane disaster.

The BHX District quarantine zone also suffered severe damage from the hurricane.

Su Wen finished reading the more detailed background introduction for this event.

Then he opened the descriptions for the four target locations on the game list:

Hazard Node One: Lighthouse 43. Due to years of disrepair, Lighthouse 43 only maintained its lighting support for twenty minutes as a navigational point when the hurricane arrived.

Please reach Hazard Node One first: Complete repairs to Lighthouse 43's lighting system.

Right now, you should not be thinking about how to fleece Schlote, but how to reach the construction site.

Looking at that game prompt,

Su Wen smiled.

But he was not worried about being trapped to death in the recycling zone.

After all, Schlote Heavy Industries' territory was a quarantine zone. Aside from mechanical waste, there was nothing else of value.

After cleaning himself up, he returned to the workshop and switched on that outdated employee terminal.

Using it, he ordered a portable Bluetooth camera developed by Schlote.

Then he returned to the recycling zone from before.

He casually picked up the component that Schlote Heavy Industries should have installed with a camera long ago.

Configure link point—replace.

Modular Combination complete.

Camera module assembly complete.

That was right.

He modified the newly purchased camera into an old-fashioned configuration, then tossed it onto the pale-green conveyor belt leading into the precision recycling zone.

This thing cost fifteen thousand in the first-hand market.

Yet its recycling value was only two thousand.

What a complete rip-off.

As Su Wen watched the balance earned through his "hard work" rise by only two thousand, he could not help denouncing the evil and greed of capitalists.

At the same time, he connected the gimbal and began watching the video data transmitted by the camera.

The recycling conveyor belt slanted upward, passing through an open-air section that climbed toward higher ground.

It was probably designed to avoid the effects of the weak underground Cohen Radiation field.

But it also gave Su Wen a route out.

He exploited the loophole in Schlote's scanning system, whose maximum detection threshold was extremely low.

He tossed in a huge amount of combined junk all at once.

It directly flooded and clogged the exits of two scanning light paths.

Then he brazenly slipped out along the conveyor belt.

As for whether it would be discovered later,

he did not care.

After all, once he finished this job, he would be going home.

Naturally, he had to screw Schlote Heavy Industries over badly one last time.

Su Wen jumped from the conveyor belt's exit onto the coast beside the quarantine zone.

Unlike the roaring, wasteland-style Schlote Heavy Industries recycling station,

as he headed toward Hazard Point One on the game map, Lighthouse 43,

the coastline he passed had been devoid of human traffic for so long

that it instead possessed a natural atmosphere born from the layered clarity and indifference of a frontier far removed from civilization.

Perhaps

this would be a good place for an evening walk and a conversation about hopes for the future.

He decided to remember this place and bring Jiang Menghan here someday.

For the poor Su Wen,

any free attraction was worth visiting.

In the distance,

Lighthouse 43 stood alone upon the cape.

As Su Wen drew closer, he saw the sprawling aquatic moss left by waves constantly battering the lighthouse, as well as the rust-covered iron railings.

It really did look quite old.

But this was, after all, a guiding lighthouse with no shipping routes passing through and no precedent for storm warnings.

It had probably been forgotten long ago.

"It's time to give it a proper overhaul."

Su Wen looked at the various advanced components stored in his unrestricted Storage Box.

He smiled confidently.

As for how to guide shipping routes through a storm,

Su Wen already possessed the self-awareness of a wealthy gamer.

In old-fashioned lighthouses, to conserve energy and focus the light source, designers projected the beacon's light horizontally.

The light atop the tower remained level, while a rotating mechanism at the top ensured that the glow could be seen from every direction.

But Su Wen was different.

He directly took out twenty Hallestad M04 Focused Beam Ray Cannons.

These were large-scale submarine lighting systems once mounted for exploring Deep Sea Ruins and piercing through deep-water haze.

They were top-tier beam generators capable of penetrating severe turbidity.

The price of each one was:

3.7 million dollars!

He could only experience being rich in a game.

Begin combination.

Fifteen minutes later,

an outer protective layer made from deep-water anti-seepage modules was mounted atop the lighthouse.

Then,

at the center, he extravagantly brought out the Energy Core he had exchanged from Schlote at a high price.

There was no helping it.

He could find functional component parts among those battered machines.

But he truly could not find an Energy Core that had remained completely intact after an Electromagnetic Storm.

And so,

after modular linking,

a massive sphere of radiant light was suspended at the center of the transparent outer protective layer.

When the hurricane was about to arrive,

those sailors would probably see

what this meant: a newborn dawn amid the storm.

Hazard Node One: Repairs to Lighthouse 43's lighting system completed.

Current completion progress: Exceeded expectations.

Please proceed to Hazard Node Two and Hazard Node Three: Clear the submerged reefs in the shipping lane.

Because the BHX District quarantine belt has no harbor, the Globetrotter, forced off course while being guided by powerful light during the storm, was highly likely to run aground on submerged reefs and suffer damage.

The two most prominent reef clusters had also been marked with glowing dots.

Su Wen was truly speechless.

Fixing a lighthouse was one thing.

Dealing with submerged reefs was indeed asking too much.

He could not possibly build himself an Iron Man suit, could he?

Perhaps advanced modular skills could do that, but his current beginner-level skill could only create technologies already mature in human civilization.

Moreover, most submerged reefs lay on the seafloor. Running aground was merely one of the most dangerous disaster scenarios.

Underwater reefs came in countless shapes and were often accompanied by complex ridges and gullies, making the changes they caused in water flow equally difficult to predict.

He looked at those unstable defective products in his Storage Space.

A good idea immediately came to him.

Combine: Isaiah Underwater Micro Remote Control Submarine. Mount—unstable compound.

One simple self-destructing underwater remote-control submarine after another was placed into the water.

Seventy percent of the submarines broke down after submerging for only a while.

There was nothing he could do about that.

First, Su Wen was not an engineering major.

Second, without going through repeated trial runs before being launched, it was already impressive enough that he could make toys that exploded.

Still, he was not worried.

After all,

as a paying player, he needed to have confidence.

If ten boats were not enough, then use a hundred.

If a hundred were not enough, then use a thousand.

This was all about burning money and launching suicide attacks.

Su Wen sat within the waterproof barrier atop Lighthouse 43. He had transformed it into a simple central control station through Modular Combination.

Dozens of gimbal screens displayed the status of every Isaiah submarine, along with footage scanned by their front cameras.

Whenever a screen went black, he switched to the next submarine.

Target point reached.

Detonation model simulation in progress. Searching for the optimal deflection point to destroy the submerged reef.

Data model generated. Estimated detonation result matches the simulated outcome.

Detonate?

Su Wen looked at the dozens of red-marked points on the computer display.

After confirming that nearby passing pleasure boats would not be harmed,

he pressed the detonation button.

Boom!

Boom!

Boom!

A series of muffled underwater explosions rang out, blasting the submerged reefs into chunks and powder.

The shipping lane had been completely cleared.

Su Wen felt that his "postmodern art" had once again ascended to a new level.

After all,

explosions were art!