Laboratory (Part 1)

By the time Luo Yuan's suggestion was put into action, everyone still alive by Saltwater Lake had climbed into the off-road vehicle on the shore and raced toward the beacon emitting a column of colored smoke.

The atmosphere inside the vehicle was exceedingly strange.

The off-road vehicle itself was Gardner's "legacy." That burly man suspected of being a military spy—even if he had still been clinging to life when the True God descended, after Saltwater Lake had been sifted through seven or eight times, he was now thoroughly dead.

Without its original owner, the vehicle's permissions had nearly become a problem. Fortunately, Luo Yuan carried a supposedly next-generation Machine Core product intended for internal testing. Aside from being implantable in the human body, it seemed to be the nemesis of intelligent systems. Luo Yuan used it to hack the off-road vehicle's control system. Though some functions involving military remote-control permissions remained restricted, basic driving was no problem.

Luo Yuan naturally took the driver's seat.

The front passenger seat went to the largest-built "Fei Long." Three people were crammed into the back: Jing Xin, who was pretending to be mute; the one-armed Horned Demon; and Hua Dian, who had survived by sheer luck.

Jing Xin's "chatterbox" nature had vanished into thin air the instant the True God's Will descended. Now he was nothing but an obedient little dog, going wherever he was pointed and complying without protest.

Horned Demon's condition was more complicated. He had found a medical kit in the off-road vehicle and was bandaging his severed arm, but his movements were absent-minded and intermittent. No one knew where his thoughts had drifted, and the light in his eyes kept shifting.

As for Hua Dian, as a commercial hireling, he had no obvious allegiance. When Fei Long and the others'