What Do You Mean an Intercontinental Missile Exploded in United States Airspace? (Please Keep Reading)

During descent, the return capsule traveled blunt end first, with its heat shield on the bottom and its windows on the sides, offering only an oblique view upward. But since the capsule was descending at an angle, whoever occupied the lower seat could see the vast land below.

Jim was sitting in that seat.

He clearly saw a slender, brilliant column of fire rising vertically from a spot of light. From this altitude, the projectile itself looked tiny, but the milky exhaust trail beneath it, shredded and stretched by high-altitude winds, was perfectly clear.

"What's that?" Jim asked, pointing out the window.

The others fought the crushing deceleration forces to turn toward Jim's window. Robert narrowed his eyes, studying it for a moment with his trained pilot's gaze before asking uncertainly, "A missile?"

"What?"

"A missile. An intercontinental ballistic missile. A Minuteman III or something similar."

Robert added, "The angle of that smoke trail, that speed... it was launched from Wyoming or western Texas. Probably a military exercise. Are they testing the reliability of intercontinental missiles after losing the satellites? Trying to deter them?"

It was a perfectly reasonable guess.

During a geomagnetic storm, launching an intercontinental ballistic missile would deter hostile nations by showing them that the United States still had nuclear capabilities.

President Vance certainly knew how to play the game.

Ron offered his own analysis. "The geomagnetic storm destroyed all the satellites. It makes sense for the military to take this opportunity to test its backup guidance systems. We just happen to be passing over the exercise area. They couldn't have guessed we'd make it back alive."

The other three found that explanation reasonable. Jim even relaxed, but as he continued watching, something began to feel wrong.

Why was that intercontinental missile getting bigger and bigger?

Gao Jian noticed the missile too, and his spiritual intuition suddenly screamed a warning.

The intercontinental missile began correcting its attitude.

Its nose tipped slightly, its trajectory eerily aligning with a fast-moving target. That target had entered the atmosphere at Mach 33 and had now slowed to Mach 12, with friction continuing to reduce its speed.

The target happened to lie within the missile's trajectory envelope.

Jim screamed in terror, "No! It's coming for us!"

Gao Jian reacted first, making the best possible decision in an instant. Once again, he transformed into Escape Light and flew out.

The Savior had left.

Before the four astronauts' despairing eyes, the outline of the missile's nose cone emerged from the white smoke like an approaching reaper. Just then, however, tremendous thrust struck the top of the spacecraft, sending the brief g-load soaring past a terrifying eight Gs.

All four astronauts were slammed into their seats.

The descending capsule, which atmospheric friction had been steadily slowing, abruptly accelerated.

In a way certain living creatures would struggle to comprehend, the return capsule underwent midcourse acceleration!

Outside was a plasma flow heated to 2,800 degrees. When Gao Jian appeared above the Command Module, the heat charred his clothes within a fraction of a second. Yet even under these extreme conditions, he slammed both hands against the capsule's surface.

Searing pain engulfed him, but he ignored it, unleashing hundreds of palm strikes in succession. Each strike gave the Command Module at least another 0.02 G of acceleration.

They were only thirty-odd kilometers above the ground. He could have escaped unharmed.

Under that immense acceleration, the four people inside wore grotesquely contorted expressions.

That extreme burst of acceleration carried the return capsule beyond the Minuteman III Intercontinental Missile's effective interception envelope. But before Gao Jian could breathe a sigh of relief, he spotted another brilliant exhaust flare on the other side.

Inside, Allen also noticed the window on the opposite side lighting up.

A second intercontinental ballistic missile!

The astronauts felt as though the world had gone insane.

It burst from the sea to the southeast, faster than the Minuteman and climbing along a steeper trajectory. Its smoke trail gleamed pale gold in the morning sun. It had launched from far away-Jim estimated somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico, or even farther out toward the Caribbean Sea-but it traveled so much faster than the Minuteman that, visually, the two missiles appeared on opposite sides of the Command Module almost simultaneously.

One on the left, one on the right.

They seemed to see Julang.

Like two symmetrical paintbrushes, the missiles traced nearly perfect arcs across the sky as dawn broke through. The Command Module lay precisely where those arcs intersected.

But Gao Jian was too strong.

Neither Julang nor the Minuteman could hit a return capsule whose momentary acceleration had shot up to eight Gs. Gao Jian initially thought the second Intercontinental Missile was the enemy's finishing blow, but when he swept both missiles with his Divine Sense, he froze.

Julang did not seem to be heading for the Command Module.

The thinking speed of a Foundation Establishment cultivator reached its peak. He calculated both missiles' trajectories in an instant and quickly arrived at the correct conclusion:

Julang was heading for the Minuteman, and the Command Module would miss the intersection of their trajectories.

The exhaust flames of both missiles reflected in his pupils. At this point, even he could only pray for one thing.

That neither carried a nuclear warhead.

Otherwise, never mind Gao Jian-even an old Nascent Soul monster might meet his end here.

The two missiles, one white and one gold, collided head-on behind the Command Module at a combined relative speed exceeding Mach 40. The sympathetic detonation of their remaining fuel and high explosives still released an enormous fireball.

The fireball blossomed high above a point ten kilometers southeast of Houston.

The shock wave expanded outward at supersonic speed. The instant the explosion occurred, all of Houston was bathed in brilliant yellow light. Below, Counselor Wang of the Houston General Consulate stood holding his phone, staring in stunned disbelief. Even the cars on Houston's roads were tinted golden orange.

What did they mean, two intercontinental missiles had collided over United States soil?

From that dazzling ball of fire, an almost burned-through Command Module burst out and plunged toward the Gulf of Mexico.

The blast wave actually caught up with the spacecraft, striking its walls with a muffled roar. The temperature of the Command Module's shell surged from 2,800 to 3,400 degrees. The outermost ablative layer of the heat shield broke apart and scattered like dry leaves.

Beyond the windows, everything was blazing white.

"Well, I certainly haven't wasted this life..." Allen remarked inside the capsule.

Jim forced out a smile uglier than tears. "Yeah. Definitely haven't wasted it."

Robert said slowly, "If we survive, everyone needs to keep this classified, no matter what interrogates us." Then he continued huddling in his seat like a block of wood.

Ron, meanwhile, estimated the spacecraft's current speed.

The Command Module's altimeter was a purely mechanical backup barometric instrument. It showed them hurtling through the troposphere: fifteen kilometers, twelve kilometers, ten kilometers...

This speed seemed... a little too fast.

Just then, another streak of sword light slashed across the upper compartment, severing its explosive bolts. The conical cover atop the Command Module flew off, exposing the drogue parachute compartment.

A conical drogue parachute roughly three meters in diameter deployed and snapped open in the airflow.

The Command Module jerked briefly. Then the intense heat burned the drogue away, leaving only a few high-strength suspension lines fluttering in the turbulent wind.

They were simply moving too fast. The drogue could not slow them down.

Normally, atmospheric friction would have reduced the return capsule's speed to around Mach 3 or 4. Now, however, it was still traveling at nearly Mach 10. The moment the nylon fabric touched the lingering superheated plasma, the drogue became a sheet of thin paper thrown into a furnace.

Before its canopy could fully open, it was torn into countless fragments within half a second and scattered across the sky.

Ten kilometers, eight kilometers...

Gao Jian gritted his teeth and braced himself beneath the Command Module, bearing it on his back as he tried to haul it upward.

Like an enormous hammer, the Command Module drove him relentlessly toward the sea.

Six kilometers, four kilometers...

Gritting his teeth, Gao Jian forced the main parachutes to deploy.

Three main parachutes sprang out together, a glimmer of spiritual light entwining them to provide a negligible increase in strength. Each canopy measured over thirty meters across. In a normal splashdown, they were enough to bring the nine-ton Command Module down onto the sea as gently as a feather.

But the Command Module was still traveling at nearly Mach 8.

The instant the first main parachute opened, the airflow billowed its canopy into a full circle. Then, under tension far beyond its design limits, the nylon fabric ripped apart. The thirty-meter canopy disintegrated outward from its center like a white flower that bloomed and withered in the same instant.

The second main parachute's lines snapped at their roots. The entire parachute detached from the Command Module and tumbled away into the distance.

The third. The last one.

Gao Jian lunged toward it.

His right hand clamped onto the third parachute's main line while his left gripped the capsule's rim. He turned his own body into the link between the parachute lines and the Command Module, letting his frail cultivator's body tear under the strain. Nearly every last thread of his spiritual power went into securing the lines and the main parachute.

A sharp deceleration!

The main parachute burned behind him.

The heat generated by air friction ignited the canopy's edges. Flames spread through the nylon fabric, and the burning canopy rapidly shrank, drastically reducing its effective load-bearing area.

The main parachute soon burned away.

Scraps of nylon drifted through the air.

Altitude: two kilometers.

Speed: Mach 3.5.

At that speed, hitting the water would be like hitting a steel plate. The astronauts inside would instantly be smashed into pulp. But he had already gone this far to save them. If he failed at the last hurdle, he would not rest easy even in death.

Using both hands and feet, Gao Jian clambered onto the side of the Command Module and straddled it. Watching the rapidly approaching sea, he interlaced his hands.

Clusters of pale blue spiritual power rose in his palms.

Water-Drawing Art!

Back when he had been grinding contribution points at Hundred Herbs Peak, he had learned the Water-Drawing Art specifically to irrigate spirit fields. It was the favorite spell of agricultural cultivators in the Immortal Cultivation World, and the essential spell mortal dynasties specifically requested when hiring cultivators to build waterworks.

The spiritual light of the Water-Drawing Art traveled ahead of the spacecraft, crossing two kilometers to strike the sea.

The sea began to spin.

At first, it was only a small whirlpool a few meters across. Then it rapidly expanded. Stirred by an invisible field of spiritual power, the seawater began rotating counterclockwise. The surface at the vortex's center rose, transforming into a blue-white waterspout in an incredibly short time.

The waterspout burst out of the sea.

A waterspout over twenty meters across rose from the ocean, its inner walls spinning at a terrifying speed as it drew tens of thousands of tons of seawater into the sky. Sunlight passed through its mist, refracting into rings of broken rainbows.

The waterspout rose higher and higher, even piercing the low morning clouds.

The Command Module had also descended to an altitude of one kilometer.

The white dragon rising from the ocean grew sharper and faster at its tip, rushing head-on toward the fiery meteor falling from the sky.

Viewed from the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, the spectacle was as magnificent as a creation myth. A column of water linking sea and sky surged upward against the flow, while a burning meteor plunged down wrapped in smoke and fire. They rushed toward each other through the sky, as if heaven and sea had agreed at that moment to share a mythical embrace.

Every officer and sailor of the United States Second Fleet stationed in the Gulf of Mexico stared at the scene in bewilderment.

The waterspout collided with the Command Module.

At the instant of impact, the seawater at the waterspout's tip became countless walls of water shooting in from every direction. Because the waterspout itself was rotating and flowing, it greatly dissipated the Command Module's kinetic energy. The capsule passed through layer after layer of water, its speed plummeting from Mach 3.5 to Mach 2, then Mach 1, then subsonic.

The waterspout's top was pierced through.

Hundreds of tons of seawater were hurled skyward by the impact, bursting into an enormous white splash that refracted countless tiny rainbows in the morning light.

Then the waterspout began collapsing inward, disintegrating layer by layer and continually bleeding off force. Tens of thousands of tons of seawater crashed back into the sea, throwing up ring after ring of white surf.

At last, the Command Module splashed down safely on the sea.

Gao Jian floated in the water, struggling to cling to the Command Module's rim, on the verge of passing out.

Before he lost consciousness, he saw an Arleigh Burke-class Destroyer heading toward them. Farther away, more ships were approaching at full speed.

American flags unfurled in the morning breeze.

The roar of helicopter rotors converged from every direction... The military already knew about the intercontinental missile explosion over Houston and had already been searching for the foreign ballistic missile submarine.

What they had not expected was for that deep-running, heavily built nuclear submarine to surface voluntarily in the Gulf of Mexico and raise a vast, bright red flag, drawing the attention of every United States warship within moments.

Taking advantage of that opportunity, Gao Jian recovered a tiny bit of spiritual power and plunged beneath the water in one go.