Zhao Bai said, playing hard to get, "My restaurant recently stocked a new food item: Soviet-made 1986 salmon roe sausage, specially supplied to the space agency. It's been to space, and its shelf life lasts a full forty years."
"That sounds pretty good."
Bronya had no interest in ordinary foods like Sapporo ramen, mushroom cream soup, or meat pizza. To win her over, he needed high-end military-grade ingredients, preferably Russian-made.
"Fine."
Bronya readily agreed.
After parting ways with Bronya, Zhao Bai took a few steps toward the dormitory before abruptly stopping.
His teammate vanished into the darkness.
Instead, Zhao Bai strode back to the hazardous chemical storage room and took out his cherished kitchen utensil.
Scythe · Other Shore Gate.
In the past, any ingredient cut by this scythe would disappear. It was even especially useless for chopping chives, and Zhao Bai had never known what to use it for.
Now, Zhao Bai finally understood.
Since anything it cut would disappear, then looking at it the other way around, could it strike things that had already disappeared?
Zhao Bai didn't know. He would give it a try—after all, it didn't cost anything.
Other Shore Gate was utterly mismatched with its enormous, man-height appearance. It was as light as a feather, as if it did not exist in real space at all, a creation of the Sea of Quanta.
Holding Other Shore Gate, Zhao Bai swung it back and forth across the empty ground from earlier, as though plowing a field.
Click.
He felt a tremor and looked up. In the glow of the miner's lamp, a pale blue body slowly emerged, red light winding around it. Its surging sense of power felt as though it might explode at any moment.
A... Titan?
The enormous Titan Daddy appeared before him, and Zhao Bai went completely numb.
This was truly dangerous.
Zhao Bai simply could not treat that heap of metal as an ingredient, so Other Shore Gate naturally caused it no harm at all. It had merely knocked it out of its quantum state. Now that it had taken shape, its massive body radiated an overwhelming pressure.
It did not move at all. Even its indicator lights remained dark.
"Whew—"
Zhao Bai instinctively held his breath, his heart pounding wildly in his chest.
He did not know how long it had been, but Zhao Bai felt as though a century had passed. The Titan never activated and simply vanished beneath the lights, as if everything that had happened moments ago had been an illusion.
What was going on?
Still shaken, Zhao Bai returned to the dormitory and told Theresa everything in one breath.
"What exactly happened?"
Theresa was playing Resident Evil 7, a horror occult game disguised in the trappings of biological science.
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