After heightening his vigilance, Hao Ren dragged Lily down toward the lower levels of the temple. The thick black shadow, resembling a mass of clouds and mist, gradually filled their entire field of vision.
The black mist churned slowly, as if a pot of boiling soup lay beneath it. Yet no strange aura came from within. Hao Ren casually grabbed a probe flying past, and after reading the parameters it had recorded, confirmed that they had reached the very bottom of the structure—the point where it had been sliced in half.
By rights, passing through this black mist should lead directly into outer space.
"Landlord... what is this?" Lily felt a little creeped out, and her tail grew even fluffier. "Why do I feel kind of scared?"
Hao Ren instinctively reached into his pocket for the Data Terminal to scan the thing before them, but his hand came up empty. Only then did he remember that the PDA was, as usual, lodged in the console of the Giant Turtle Rock Platform. Although the ship's central intelligence was now Nolan, the Data Terminal couldn't gain any permissions by forcibly linking to the console. Still, that PDA with its defective thought core continued to wedge itself into the slot every time they set out, as if doing so gave it immense psychological comfort.
Hao Ren shook his head and tossed the probe he had just grabbed to the edge of the black mist. Although its computing power was inferior to the terminal's, it was more than sufficient as a detector. It could also upload its data to the Giant Turtle Rock Platform's analysis computer for processing. With the mother ship providing support, it was actually no worse than the Data Terminal.
The analysis results soon came through the data link. The analysis