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After the business with AF1 was dealt with, Cillin and White Night immediately departed towards their destination. Cillin hadn’t informed Genya about this because the latter definitely would have involved the Gen Family. Right now, he had no idea who was involved, or how many high level officials were in on this matter. Just how many were working for the empire’s greatest underground faction?
It was like squeezing a drop of ink into a pool of water. The water itself might look just the same as before, but there definitely was a drop of ink inside the pool.
Although the star chart that was left behind in Guan Feng’s living room was irreplicable, and the projector itself had self destructed, the group had a good enough memory to recreate the star chart from scratch.
“Does this place really exists?” Inside a spaceplane’s control room, Sediya asked Cillin sitting next to him while examining the local projection of the star shart.
“It should. Even if those planets were fake, there must be other planets in that area.” Cillin said.
“That’s true. I had never noticed this until now, but to think that the old charts I have didn’t mention such a place at all. What a mystery.” Sediya poked at the marked location. “I wonder what’s waiting for us there.”
Chi Lafang spun his sun hat with fingers while saying, “It’s got to be trouble, whatever it is. Oh right, I heard that Black Viper has a lot of robots? I wonder if they’ve upgraded themselves since our last meeting. I would be terribly disappointed if they’re still as useless as before.”
Nikki stopped playing her game for a second to shoot him a glance, “The useless trash you’re talking about can still turn you into walking sieve if a thousand of them fired a gun at you at once, not to mention that we’re flying into their headquarters right now. I would suggest you to write up a will and give up all your possessions while you still have the chance.”
Chi Lafang stopped twirling his hat before chuckling, “It sure doesn’t sound worth it to toss away my life before I got a chance to spend all of my remaining possessions.”
“Then get serious, and don’t fuck up or grow careless when the time comes. It’s bad enough we have to rely on someone who falls asleep during shooting classes, and don’t think I don’t know that Armadillo was the one who did most of the work during the last mission.”
“Shooting classes are so boring that I can’t imagine how not to fall asleep, and also, you can’t say that I haven’t put it any effort! I’ve fought some robots, you know!”
Nikki ignored Chi Lafang’s nonsense, looked down and went back to her game. Beside her, Armadillo swayed its tail once. It wasn’t the first time Chi Lafang had fallen asleep in battle.
“Hey, where did those two go?” Chi Lanfang kicked Armadillo once.
The latter pointed at the entrance with its tail and replied, “They went away to patrol their territory.”
Since the moment they got onto the spaceplane, the two territorial animals — Wheeze and Rubu — had immediately started snatching up territories of their own. Since the spaceplane wouldn’t allow them to dump excrement as they pleased, Wheeze had decided to rub its scent onto choice objects like usual. The snow wolf Rubu was the same. The duo had nearly gotten in a fight over this, and in the end Wheeze was the winner with slightly more territory than Rubu.
Rubu was afraid that Wheeze would play dirty, so it would go out on a patrol of its own every time Wheeze went away to patrol its territory. It was to prevent Wheeze from taking over his territory while he wasn’t looking.
Wheeze chose this exact moment to stride proudly back into the control room, followed by a somewhat annoyed looking Rubu.
“Yo, you guys done with the patrolling?” Armadillo greeted them both.
Rubu’s expression immediately took a turn for the worse when he heard this. “I would’ve bitten this cat to death if it wasn’t a temporary member of our squad!”
Wheeze had jumped up to Cillin’s shoulders and was licking its paws when Rubu had made the statement. It pointed a paw at Rubu and said disdainfully, “Do you have any idea how many of you I’ve eaten when I was just a kitten?”
Cillin smiled at this because he had recalled the first time he encountered Wheeze; it was undeniable that the cat had eaten plenty of wolves in the past. He flicked Wheeze on the ear and said, “Alright, stop arguing. We’re all comrades in his mission.”
Wheeze let out a hmph before saying, “Scarlet Wind is a canine too, but he’s so much better than this loathsome wolf.”
Rubu bared its teeth at Wheeze. It would take a ear off this cat’s head if it said another word!
Wheeze was going to chip in a couple more words, but it was interrupted by a blare of alarms.
“What’s wrong?” The sleepy Chi Lafang abruptly snapped out of his short nap.
“Everything’s fine, we just received a transmission.” Nikki put down her game console and started decoding the encrypted message she had received into readable characters. A while later, the message read: Come here first before you seek out Black Viper, or you’ll regret it.
The people inside the control room fell silent as they stared at the mysterious message.
Nikki continued to work on the message. A simplified star chart was attached to the message, pointing them towards a certain planet. The planet wasn’t exactly close to their target destination, but just like their target destination it existed in a forgotten corner of the galaxy. It was a planet no one would pay attention to even if they could find it in the star charts they possessed, and that there were barely any data about it at all. There was a simple answer behind all this: the planet was very, very poor.
After a while, Cillin turned to White Night and asked, “Does anyone else know about this mission?”
White Night shook his head, “We are the only ones who know where we’re going.”
If this wasn’t Black Viper, and no one had said anything to anyone, then who on earth had sent them this encrypted message?
There was no doubt that the message sender was well aware of their group’s objective and whereabouts, but none of them had a clue regarding the person’s identity.
“So, what do we do? Should we head there, or?” Sediya looked around at everyone.
“Same rule. Let’s decide this with a vote.” Nikki moved a finger and caused a light screen to appear in front of everyone. There were three choices to choose from on the light screen, and they were “Go”, “Don’t Go”, and “Abstain”.
In the end, everyone voted “Go” on this matter.
“It looks like everyone here is of the same mind. That’s great.” Sediya smiled.
After the decision had been made, the spaceplane changed course and flew towards the new planet. On the way, everyone tried to search for information regarding the planet, but to their surprise all searches had returned with the same meager result. This only made them more and more suspicious because they were no ordinary people. Not only did they fail to find anything substantial about the planet, they couldn’t even confirm the authenticity of the information they had gathered.
“Even if we assume it’s a planet that’s so poor that it cannot manage itself, it still should’ve left a record or two in the database. But the result of our combined efforts is so meager that it’s almost as if someone had wiped out all relevant information beforehand.” Nikki said heavily. Her expression matched her youthful face very poorly, and had Cillin not known that she was around thirty years old instead of eight like her appearance would suggest, he would’ve thought that she was a person with a special background like Tang Qiuqiu.
“Whatever it is, we better be careful.”
“Bring the gear.”
The group including Rubu and Armadillo gathered around to discuss strategy. Out of everyone in the control room, Wheeze was the most relaxed one. The cat didn’t care if the planet was odd or not because it was all the same hunting game as far as it was concerned. Not only was it not nervous in the slightest, it was very much looking forward to the trip. If there was fresh food on that planet that could quell the hunger in its stomach then all the better. Lately it was starving because it had gobbled up all the sea beast eggs Cillin had collected some time ago.
The group soon arrived at their destination planet using the coordinates they were given on the message. The planet turned out as small and poorly maintained as advertised. It was survivable for humans, but definitely not livable.
The scan readings came back with the same results. The planet wasn’t just resource-poor, it lacked even surveillance satellites or a planetary defense network. Development was extremely poor and backward worldwide.
“How’s the planet?” Armadillo asked.
“It’s poor. It’s so poor you can see the end of the bowl*. The city areas have higher metal content as you’d expect from a city, but that’s about it. The soil of this planet is gray, and it’s lacking a lot of important elements. There are very few plants that can survive on a soil like this, and the number of plant types that managed to adapt to this environment is less than a hundred. Still, those that survived are extremely tenacious; survival of the fittest and all that.” Nikki explained.
*Chinese idiom. Means that you can hear your chopsticks making noise inside a bowl because there’s no rice (food) in it.
From space, parts of the planet looked completely dull gray. It was a gloomy and lifeless color.
The surveillance monitors continued to capture what was going on on the planet. The reason almost all of the planet’s metal had been gathered at the city was because the cities themselves were practically made of metal. In fact, calling them cities would be an inaccurate description; they were closer to giant fortresses built for the specific purpose of keeping something away.
A while later, they finally saw the things the creatures that prompted the cities’ design.
There were a lot of black figures moving at high speed not far away from the cities, and they were the animals that had adapted to the planet’s poor environment. They were about three meters tall, and they had very long, sharp claws. The weapon allowed them to bury underground to hunt for small animals, or strike down a human. Humans were clearly part of their diet.
These black monsters were everywhere on the planet.
“Say, why do you think that mysterious sender had summoned us to this planet? He can’t possibly want us to clean up those monsters, right?” Chi Lafang asked while staring at the display screen and lying on a chair with his arms across his chest.
White Night didn’t answer his question. Instead, he turned to Nikki and asked, “Was there anything else besides that message and that star chart?”
Nikki shook her head, “There was nothing else. It’s what’s puzzling me right now.”
They received another message right after she said this. Nikki quickly decoded it to reveal a single word: “Welcome.”
Sediya read out the message after Nikki was done decoding. He then looked at her in puzzlement before asking, “Is that all?”
“That is all.” Nikki was feeling just as helpless as he was. Was this mysterious sender making a fool out of them or what?
Nikki scratched her ears — it was something she did whenever she got irritated — and said, “Logically speaking, this planet shouldn’t be this poor considering the sender’s level of technology.”
“That’s true, this planet is so backward it can’t even compare to our mysterious sender.”
“Can’t you track down the source of the message?” White Night asked.
“No, our mysterious sender is extremely cunning. There are signal traces coming from nearly every city on the planet.”
“I see, an expert. Are we absolutely sure they’re not part of Black Viper?” Chi Lafang rubbed his chin as his eyes narrowed into slits. It was impossible to tell what kind of emotion he was harboring behind his eyes.
No one said anything. No was one calling any moves such as landing on the planet or staying in orbit either.
Cillin turned to look at the gray cat lying on his shoulders. Although Wheeze was doing its best to appear serious and nonchalant, Cillin knew from the frequency of its trembling whiskers and the angle of its tail alone that it was feeling extremely pleased with itself for some reason. There was only one answer.
“You know where the message came from?” Cillin gave Wheeze’s ear a pinch. The latter batted his hand away but didn’t say anything. It was practically an admission at that point, but it became an absolute certainty when the cat lost its composure and started grinning like mad when everyone in the control room turned to look at it.
“How is that possible?” Rubu couldn’t bring himself to believe it.
White Night opened up a scanned map of the planet and placed it in front of Wheeze, “You know where they are?”
Wheeze proudly pointed a paw at a particular city and declared, “They’re hiding in this city, I don’t know their specific location yet, but if they dare send us even one more message I’ll be able to track this ‘rat’ down immediately.”
White Night turned to look at Cillin, and the latter nodded in a show of support.
“Let’s head to this city.” White Night told Nikki.
“Alright.” Nikki started piloting the spaceplane towards their new destination.
Rubu opened his eyes wide at the decision. Seriously? They’re trusting this cat so easily?!
The city’s airspace was covered in a layer of electrical net, and there were watchers keeping watch as well. It was to prevent some deadly birds from making an entry.
From time to time, some simplistic-looking flying cars would fly in and out of the net. They looked very heavy and unwieldy, but all things considered it was a practical design. They weren’t mobile, but they were tough enough to take a couple of attacks from the birds.
Occasionally, groups of people would move out of the city in tanks to hunt for game. Meat wasn’t a bountiful resource in this city. In this scenario, the food chain worked both ways for both beast and man. Both sides were making food out of the other.
In general, everyone living in the metal city was stronger than normal. There was also a kind of killing intent in a man, woman, or even child’s eyes. There was a saying that the environment makes a man, and on this planet it definitely had an influence on their personalities.
Tang Qiuqiu was a prime example of this. These children knew how to wield a gun and a blade, and were taught how to fight monsters by their elders. To them, it was a compulsory course they must go through to survive on this land.
The group had no wish to appear high profile as it was unwise to reveal themselves too much before they had figured out the situation. However, there was a problem. The citizens of these metal cities were extremely averse to outsiders.
In the end, the group decided to land at a nearby place and get a feel of the planet first before entering the city. After all, they wouldn’t want to walk straight into a death trap.
When nighttime arrived, the spaceplane landed stealthily at the designated location where a couple of hills acted as cover. No one had discovered them because their spaceplanes had gone into stealth mode prior to their entry, but the same couldn’t be said about the monsters in the area.
“Those fellows showed up rather quickly.” Sediya said while looking at the outside scenery from the screen. It would seem that these monsters have extraordinary senses.
“I’m heading out for a meal!” Wheeze jumped down from Cillin’s shoulders and ran outside.
“I’m heading out too.” Not wanting to fall behind the gray cat, Rubu quickly followed behind it.
“Um, I guess I’m hungry too.” Armadillo said and went out after the two animals were gone.