Without Inside or Outside—a multitude of indistinguishable layers of spacetime—lay beyond anything ordinary people could imagine. Most human actions still had to play out in the Real World.
The problem was that some difficulties confined to the Real World had no solution.
For example, however the airship had gotten into the Second Underground Cave, hauling that massive intercontinental vessel back out intact was an impossible task.
And even in the cave's Outer Experience Zone, the ever-present dusty mist was highly corrosive. The airship was bound to erode into scrap before long and could explode at any moment.
So, once they had established the time, the location, and what had happened inside and outside the game, their most urgent task was to evacuate the people aboard as quickly as possible, along with whatever equipment they could move, and keep their losses to a minimum.
Frankly, it was a massive undertaking.
Even evacuating only the passengers would take a great deal of time just to coordinate.
For one thing, how were they supposed to calm the cursing Mountain Lord so he would not grow too irritable over the disruption to his cave research? And how could they convince the authorities in Lake City that the airship which had quietly left the city last night was now lodged deep inside a cave on Three Peaks, roughly a hundred kilometers from Lake City Airport—when the entrance was less than five meters across?
Fortunately, Deng Chun had little to do with any of that.
At first, he was still restrained, and his mental state was not exactly "stable." Later, several guests aboard the airship whose identities were rather sensitive drew attention from multiple parties.
Bai Xinyan and her medical team were easy enough to explain; they had been aboard all along. But the way Yuchuan