AllSpark (Begging for Recommendations, Follows, and Tips)

Black Canyon near Nevada and Arizona was neither particularly large nor particularly small.

Before coming, Sun Cheng had investigated it. Black Canyon covered several hundred square kilometers, but most of the surrounding area was dry desert, making it easy to rule out the barren stretches.

After arriving at Black Canyon and wandering around for half a day, Sun Cheng found that all leads had been completely cut off. Left with no choice, he turned his attention to the most famous landmark here: Hoover Dam.

"Since I'm here, I might as well take a look. It's not like it'll cost me anything!"

Although he suspected that the Black Canyon mentioned by Professor Brewster, who had once worked at the University of Arizona, was this place, he had not given Hoover Dam much thought.

According to the clues he had gathered, the mysterious meteorite discovered in Baglin Meteor Crater had been transported away around 1913, while construction on Hoover Dam had only begun during the American economic crisis two decades later. Nearly twenty years separated the two events. No matter how wildly he let his imagination run, he could not connect them.

"Could I have been wrong? Was the Black Canyon Professor Brewster mentioned not this place at all?"

Using the cover of the pitch-black night, Sun Cheng quietly approached Hoover Dam, though doubts kept rising in his heart.

Over the past few hours, relying on the extraordinary mobility of his new body, he had searched every place nearby that he had suspected. Yet he had found nothing unusual, leaving him rather disappointed.

He had only just entered within two kilometers of Hoover Dam under cover of darkness when he suddenly sensed his Spy Template detecting surveillance equipment. Cautious by nature, he immediately stopped.

After hesitating for a moment, Sun Cheng released two groups of insect scouts and sent them flying toward Hoover Dam.

Now, even Onslaught's base, which he had originally thought he could temporarily use as half a supply station, was no longer somewhere he could visit casually.

Having lost his supply point, aside from bullets—which he could still sneak into the weapon stores scattered all over the United States to obtain—his other major reliance, the insect scouts, became one less for every one he used. These things were disposable. Their capabilities were powerful, but their range was only ten kilometers and their endurance was far too short. There was practically no chance of recovering them.

The two groups of insect scouts dutifully approached Hoover Dam bit by bit, transmitting back every image they captured.

"Huh, there are so many surveillance devices installed around Hoover Dam..."

Not far from Hoover Dam, atop a steep cliff on one side of the canyon, Sun Cheng carefully surveyed Hoover Dam through the insect scouts he had deployed. He began to hesitate over whether he should conduct a nighttime reconnaissance of the dam.

After reviewing the data received by the insect scouts, he was astonished to discover that within two kilometers of Hoover Dam, they had detected two to three hundred sets of surveillance equipment. The density was even greater than at Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, which he had infiltrated before.

Hoover Dam truly deserved its status as a vital water-control hub on the Colorado River. Besides the dense surveillance network, the insect scouts also found more than a hundred security personnel stationed around the dam.

Judging from the images captured by the insect scouts, the security personnel near the dam were equipped not only with large quantities of light and heavy weapons, but even anti-aircraft missiles had been spotted.

"As expected of an important water-control hub in the United States!"

Such defenses were fitting for Hoover Dam. Seeing that the energy of the two groups of insect scouts he had released was about to run out, Sun Cheng thought it over. Since they were already here, he might as well make the most of them. He ordered them to continue scouting and had them enter the dam through elevator shafts and ventilation ducts.

Like most countries, Hoover Dam allowed tourists to visit. He had heard that the tickets were cheap and that it was open to the public seven days a week.

But looking the way he did now, anyone who saw him would probably start screaming for his head.

"Not of our kind—capture it and dissect it." That was probably the common reaction of every country on Earth upon seeing a lone extraterrestrial life-form, especially one that was a robot.

One group of insect scouts descended through an elevator into the dam's interior, but it did not discover much. The scenes it captured inside the dam could basically all be found online, and Sun Cheng had seen most of them already.

He intended to direct it into some areas forbidden to tourists, but its energy ran out before it could do so. He had no idea which corner it fell into.

The other group of insect scouts, however, entered a restricted area inside the dam through a ventilation duct and transmitted back quite a number of images.

What Sun Cheng had not expected was that, before its energy was exhausted, it sent back one final set of images that startled him.

"...Wait, there are several hidden passages inside the mountains beside Hoover Dam?"

The insect scouts' discovery immediately shocked Sun Cheng. According to his investigation, the mountains around Hoover Dam consisted mostly of hard andesite and breccia. Carving passages through such terrain was no simple task. Some were large and some small. The smaller ones were clearly for humans to enter and work in, but several of the enormous passages had rails laid inside them, obviously for transporting heavy machinery. This discovery immediately piqued his interest.

"Strange. Are these facilities really necessary for a waterworks project? No matter how I look at them, they resemble a large military base more... Could it be..."

Suddenly realizing that he might have picked up the trail again, Sun Cheng suppressed the excitement in his heart. Quietly evading one surveillance device after another, he made his way down from the sheer cliffs and soon arrived at a spillway beneath the dam.

The spillway could lead into Hoover Dam, but three sluice gates controlled the route, preventing water from flooding back into the dam during discharge.

However, this was no obstacle for Sun Cheng. April and May were the flood season for the Colorado River, and Hoover Dam conducted small-scale water discharges almost every night. That gave him an opening to quietly infiltrate through the spillway.

He acted immediately. Although the torrent blasting out from the spillway made his scalp tingle, he used his core to calculate the force of impact. Only after determining that he would not be swept away if he charged at full strength did he leap into the spillway.

Smack!

Because he had been insufficiently prepared the first time, the oncoming torrent blasted him straight out of the spillway and sent him falling below.

After climbing back out, having learned his lesson, he quickly shifted into beast form. Once he had picked the right spot, he jumped in again. The instant he entered the spillway, he viciously drove his foreclaws into the wall.

Boom...

The rushing water slammed into him head-on, making his body sway violently. But Sun Cheng had prepared thoroughly this time, and he was not blasted back out again.

He immediately braced himself and forced his way forward inch by inch. The spillway was only a little over a hundred meters long, yet it consumed three or four points of his energy before he finally reached the end.

Splash...

After passing through the spillway and crossing the first sluice gate, Sun Cheng entered an enormous water tank. This was the dam's intermediate water-storage area. Though tightly sealed, it still had several pipes leading out.

After judging the direction of the water flow for a while, Sun Cheng entered one of the pipes. He crawled forward for several thousand meters, enduring more than a dozen ascents, descents, and turns before entering a much smaller storage tank. After feeling around for a while, he quickly forced open the locked exit above it and finally entered the dam's interior.

The next instant, a strange energy fluctuation coming from afar caused his Core to pulse violently.

"This feeling... it can't be wrong. This feeling, as though both life and soul have been elevated... It's here. It's the AllSpark..."