Flight Form

Though he also thought Li Wei's words were absurd and remained skeptical of the whole matter, Captain Fan Guojun agreed to make things easier for Li Wei, allowing him to leave the Dawn through a single-person hatch atop the ship.

Having obtained this little privilege, Li Wei also agreed to a small condition: they would be allowed to observe from the side when he left...

Thinking it was no big deal, he readily agreed.

The people aboard were extremely curious about the other world Li Wei had described. They asked about everything from its geography to its economy and global situation. When they learned from Li Wei that China in that other world was rising with unstoppable momentum, a sense of pride welled up naturally within them. Different worlds, the same dream.

After several hours of conversation, Li Wei finally climbed onto the top of the ship through a single-person maintenance passage in one of its cabins. Before him was a stormy sea flashing with lightning and roaring with thunder.

The bean-sized raindrops pelting him head-on made his body shudder. He instinctively hunched up, then looked around and found that the other eight ships were sailing far away, all headed in the same direction.

Standing atop the ship, Li Wei noticed that aside from the Chinese vessels, none of the other ships had spotted him.

Braving the fierce storm, he walked to the ship's curved edge and looked down at the surging waves below. He could not help swallowing.

His psychological thalassophobia flared up. Facing the deep, dark sea below, he instinctively thought of some unnameable god and colossal sea beasts.

Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh!

The sound of the waves, carrying a cool scent, filled Li Wei's senses. After mentally preparing himself to face the sea, he finally decided to test his flight form first!

"Step by step. Start with getting rained on, then take it one step at a time!" Li Wei encouraged himself inwardly. Then he brought out the flight-form model he had already designed and controlled the biomass to transform and mimic it.

Amid the ceaseless writhing of dark-red flesh tendrils, his hands gradually connected to the cross-section of his body, and a pair of dark-red flesh wings emerged.

They resembled folded bat wings. Once fully spread, they had a wingspan of six meters.

He spread the bat wings toward the storm. The head-on gale caught him off guard, its tremendous force pushing him back a step, but the suction cups beneath his feet kept him from being blown away.

Since he had never assimilated a bird and did not understand bird anatomy very well, Li Wei's first attempt at flight ended in failure.

His wings flapped desperately, and he did get off the ground, but he was still unfamiliar with controlling flight. Combined with the gas compressed by his cells, he could barely manage free flight.

But this level of performance could not be considered a complete form at all. He could not increase his speed, and after putting it into actual use, he discovered that bat wings on a human body were not only lame, but ugly as hell.

Scrapping the model, he landed back on the ship and decided to take a shortcut instead!

Finding the maintenance hatch, Li Wei knocked hard on the tightly sealed "manhole cover."

After he knocked for quite a while, the hatch opened. Li Wei grabbed its edge and called inside, "I might need an eagle, a bird of prey. Let Captain Fan know."

"Please wait!" a man's voice came from beneath the crack in the hatch. It was one of the two guards who had been following Fan Guojun earlier.

Though Blacklight was already improving the shortcomings of the bat-wing form on its own, directly copying birds was indeed much more convenient.

Li Wei sat down on the edge of the hatch, lifted his head, and let the rain soak his body as he sighed at how ferocious the downpour was.

White light flashed across the heavens, illuminating Li Wei's drenched face and his unchanged hairstyle.

Boom!

Thunder sounded less than half a second after the flash of lightning. Clearly, the lightning was not far from them.

After waiting for quite some time, the hatch opened again. The guard raised up a cardboard box, and Li Wei took the small box from him. He called out a thank-you, and the hatch then closed.

Opening the box slightly, Li Wei reached his right hand inside and grabbed the furry bird's body. With a stroke and a squeeze, his tendrils pierced its body, assimilating the bird into a part of himself.

Having obtained a reference sample, Blacklight's powerful evolutionary ability revealed itself. With only a slight mental prompt, Li Wei's body began to writhe and contract.

The cardboard box was blown away by the hurricane, while Li Wei, who had become a blood cocoon where he stood, remained completely motionless.

A moment later, Li Wei's body had transformed into something resembling his armored form. Yet compared to that heavy armor, his current body was far slimmer, every part of it a smooth, streamlined contour, with two pairs of wings added to his back.

Li Wei spread his four bat wings. They were larger and thinner than before, yet no less sturdy—in fact, they were even stronger.

He curiously flapped his wings once. Gas produced by the cells inside his body expelled along with the motion of his wings, allowing him to fly with ease directly into the storm winds.

Having gained true flight, Li Wei was overjoyed. Like a child who had just received a new toy, he floated through the curtain of rain in blissful delight.

The lightness of commanding the gale and the pleasure of defying nature made Li Wei fly tirelessly, to the point that he even forgot he still had another form to develop tonight.

After circling the nearby sea once, he became dissatisfied with that and began climbing higher, trying to fly into the clouds and soar even higher!

"This feels incredible!"

Crack!

The instant he said that, a dazzling bolt of lightning fell straight onto his head, striking the carried-away Li Wei directly.

The hundred-million-volt lightning bolt instantly shocked his entire body stiff, short-circuiting his thoughts and making every cell convulse wildly. Blown about by the wind, he tumbled downward.

He slammed into the observation window of the main control room of America's Ark Three, bounced once, then fell into the seawater below.

The sudden scare made the crew members on duty leap from their chairs.

"Damn it, what was that just now?!"

"Something just crashed down?!"

"Should we report it?"

Who am I? Where am I? I think I just did something stupid. What was it?

Uh... better choose to forget it!

The electricity still coursing through his body dispersed after being conducted and diluted by the seawater. Li Wei's short-circuited thoughts returned to his body, and his chaotic transformation reverted to human form.

Thinking of the stupid thing he had just done, he wished he could crawl into a crack in the ground. But he was already in the sea.

The terror of the deep ocean far exceeded his imagination. His specially mimicked night-vision eyes allowed him to vaguely see the seabed where he currently was.

Beneath the waters through which the Ark sailed lay a sprawling mass of dark buildings extending farther than his eyes could see. Directly beneath him was a submerged city!

The deep-blue world led into boundless darkness. His blurred vision forced him to confront the terror of the unknown directly. The raging waves above and the deathly stillness beneath seemed to belong to two different worlds, reflecting one another.

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