The dismissal bell rang.
Once the balding math teacher left the classroom, Chen Ling hurried off to the restroom.
A gust of wind happened to blow in through the window, refreshing the air in the classroom. Nora breathed a sigh of relief. Turning around to see Yu Xian with his eyes closed, she closed her own as well and began cultivating the Sunflower Sunward Divine Art.
Though Yu Xian kept his eyes shut, he knew Nora wanted to talk to him. At the moment, however, his attention was entirely focused on a large waste-treatment plant in the north of the city.
For this, he had Chen Ling's stinky fart to thank.
If not for Chen Ling's foul fart, Yu Xian wouldn't have filtered out various unpleasant odors, and wouldn't have noticed something amiss with this waste plant.
After filtering out the stench, numerous blank spaces appeared in the mental model of the city in his brain, especially around the city's four waste-treatment plants, where the blank areas were quite substantial.
Silver City had four large waste-treatment plants in total, along with many small recycling stations.
With so many blank models for reference, even though those places had numerous voids, he could still deduce what lay within the heaps of trash.
Yet at this large waste plant in the north of the city, filtering out household garbage revealed an abnormal outline.
At other treatment plants, the contours of the trash piles were chaotic and utterly irregular. At this plant, however, once the filtered parts were eliminated, a faint, regular outline emerged—resembling a massive, sealed rectangular chamber.
Seizing the moment before the final class began, Yu Xian left a clone behind and teleported into the sky above the waste-treatment plant.
He looked down at the trash heaps. Massive mounds of garbage formed small mountains, along the edges of which workers were sorting and processing waste into different categories.
On the surface, the entire waste-treatment plant appeared flawless.
Yet the more seamless it seemed, the more suspicious it looked to Yu Xian. With a flick of his finger, a bubble flew out, rapidly taking the form of a giant palm that descended below. The trash surrounding the garbage mound was instantly swept aside, and ripples immediately stirred across an invisible barrier.
"Not good!"
Several workers in protective suits and face masks realized the base had been exposed.
They spun around to flee, but before they could get far, Yu Xian laid them out one by one with a punch. Meanwhile, the plant manager had just stepped outside when Yu Xian struck him in a vital spot; eyes wide with defiance, he collapsed to the ground.
Notably, all of them had been dealt with by palm-shaped bubbles without catching even a glimpse of Yu Xian himself.
Yu Xian took out his phone and dialed Xiao Cheng. Once Xiao Cheng answered, he said, "Minister, I've discovered a secret base in Silver City suspected of manufacturing perfect creatures. I'm requesting backup."
The base was shielded by an extremely high-level barrier that rendered his Super Smell completely ineffective. Although he possessed the Dragon Shield and feared no danger, if the base harbored large numbers of perfect creatures, he certainly wouldn't be able to hold them all back.
If even a single one escaped from the base, it would spell catastrophe for Silver City.
Ten minutes later.
Yu Lie and the others teleported to the waste-treatment plant one after another.
"This kind of barrier is neither fully Eastern nor Western; it feels rather like the style of the Island Nation," Yu Lie remarked, stepping up to the barrier and resting his hand against it. The Heavenly Eye at the center of his forehead opened, sweeping over their surroundings.
A beam of golden light shot from his Heavenly Eye, slowly carving a window-sized breach in the barrier.
Inside, an entirely different world revealed itself. The space was astonishingly vast, far exceeding the scale of the garbage mound. Surrounding a factory-like building, squad after squad of guards clad in combat gear and armed with firearms patrolled vigilantly.
The moment the breach appeared, the guards opened fire toward it in unison.
Yu Lie gave a faint smile. In the next instant, his body morphed into a peregrine falcon that flew through the opening. Effortlessly dodging the bullets, he shifted back into human form as he neared the guards. With a sweep of golden light from the Heavenly Eye between his brows, the surrounding guards were all sliced in two.
"Let's go!" Xiao Cheng said to Yu Xian.
The two slipped through the breach and advanced swiftly toward the building.
Upon entering, a model of the interior formed rapidly in Yu Xian's mind. Frowning slightly, he glanced at the ground and said, "Minister, there's a huge space underground. Not good—a suspect who might be Pengzu is trying to flee!!"
He grabbed Xiao Cheng at once, and the two of them teleported together into a room hundreds of meters below ground, right behind a teleportation array.
Ahead, an elderly man in a suit and several researchers froze in their tracks, staring at the two who had appeared out of thin air.
"Should I address you as... Pengzu?" Xiao Cheng asked with a smile upon seeing the old man, immediately grasping the situation, though his hands were already prepared to strike at any moment.
The old man sighed and tossed aside his walking stick. "Actually, ever since Perfect Creature No. 001 escaped, I knew this day would come. I just didn't expect it so soon."
"Minister, be careful! He's a clone and wants to self-destruct!" Yu Xian's lips moved slightly, sending his voice directly into Xiao Cheng's ears through a bubble.
Without another word, Xiao Cheng hurled the gray energy in his hand. In an instant, Pengzu and the others were enveloped by the Days-Pass-Like-Years Domain, their bodies frozen in place.
Far elsewhere, however, Pengzu's true body sensed the clone's predicament. Pulling out a pen-shaped remote controller, he flipped open the cap and lightly pressed the button.
He had originally planned to press it after the clone and several key researchers escaped. But since they couldn't get away now, destroying everything together was the only option left.
Boom!
Inside the factory, before many researchers could even react, their bodies were engulfed by explosive flames.
Right beneath the teleportation array where Yu Xian and Xiao Cheng stood, a tremendously powerful bomb detonated with a deafening roar. In the instant of the blast, Yu Xian teleported away with Xiao Cheng.
"What happened?" Yu Lie had just stepped into the factory when Yu Xian and Xiao Cheng appeared beside him. Narrowing the Heavenly Eye between his brows, he immediately asked.
Xiao Cheng looked at Yu Xian, who answered, "We found Pengzu, but it was only a clone. After we restrained him, someone remotely detonated pre-planted explosives."
He was certain the detonator hadn't been triggered by anyone inside.
After all, he had been monitoring the entire factory; every movement of everyone here was clearly within his grasp.
"Here they come!"
Yu Xian turned his gaze deeper into the factory, his expression turning solemn.
In the next second, a monster covered in burns charged out from the flames of the explosion. Spotting Yu Xian and the others blocking its path, it let out a roar and lunged into an attack.
A perfect creature?
Yu Lie frowned slightly. The Heavenly Eye on his forehead shot a ray of golden light that cleaved the monster in two in an instant, after which it was swallowed by the flames.
Weaker than expected!
Yu Xian spoke up, "Minister, don't let your guard down. That was an unfinished prototype. There are even more perfect creatures awakening below. The explosion destroyed the cages holding them, and some... bizarre test subjects are breaking out of the cultivation tanks."
Within his olfactory perception, though some of the perfect creatures had been killed by the blast, even more had broken free of their cages because of it and were now scrambling toward the surface.
Anyone who had ever kept caged animals would know that in an enclosed space, when danger struck, most creatures instinctively fled upward.
The perfect creatures were not intelligent, but they possessed the primal instinct to survive.
Chapter 112