Translator: CinderTL
After hours of detouring north, Feng Qi finally left the city ruins and returned to the Star City Underground Shelter.
By then, Suction Cup, clinging to his chest, had fallen asleep.
Glancing at the still-open screen, he approached the control console and began searching the database for information related to Mu Qing's death.
If he could find a post-mortem photo of Mu Qing's body or irrefutable evidence of her death in the records, he could be reasonably certain that Suction Cup wasn't Mu Qing. Conversely, the likelihood of Suction Cup being Mu Qing would increase significantly.
As he sifted through the data, he discovered that while there was no record of Mu Qing's execution in the database, there was ample information confirming her death. Moreover, no one in history had ever questioned the circumstances of her death.
During his search, he found a photo of Mu Qing's corpse.
In the image, her eyes were tightly closed, and she was dressed in black, her body stained with blood and frozen within a three-meter-tall block of ice.
Seeing this photo, Feng Qi felt a pang of heartache.
But the photo could be fake. To verify its authenticity, he began searching for the location where Mu Qing's remains had been stored after her death.
After a brief search of the database, he found a document containing a passage describing the fate of Mu Qing's remains:
After Mu Qing's death, personnel from the Star City Military Department permanently froze her remains in an underground air-raid shelter, never to see the light of day again!
Realizing that Mu Qing's remains were frozen within Star City, he glanced down at Suction Cup, feeling the likelihood that she was Mu Qing had significantly increased.
However, this document alone couldn't prove that Suction Cup was Mu Qing.
To learn more, he began searching for the exact location of the underground air-raid shelter.
But the information he found next left him stunned.
According to the records, the air-raid shelter in Star City had long been demolished. Subsequent renovations and expansions had transformed it into the current Star City Shelter.
In other words, the air-raid shelter where Mu Qing's remains were stored was now part of the Star City Underground Shelter where he currently stood.
He looked around. The central plaza was filled with various mechanical instruments, while iron gates lined its perimeter, all currently sealed shut.
He had never investigated what lay behind these iron gates.
It wasn't that he lacked curiosity about their contents; rather, each time he entered the Dream Realm, his time was severely limited, leaving no room for thorough exploration.
Little black clung to him like a bone-deep infection, making him afraid to waste even a moment elsewhere.
But now, to confirm whether Suction Cup was indeed Mu Qing, he resolved to enter the rooms behind these iron gates and uncover the truth.
With time pressing, he immediately strode to the nearest iron gate.
Noticing a keypad lock embedded in the handle, he didn't hesitate. He raised his leg and kicked the gate with full force.
Fortunately, the metal used for the iron gate differed from the material of the main entrance to the passage. Under his violent assault, the gate loosened and finally crashed inward with a resounding boom.
As dust billowed out, he was met with a thick, musty odor.
For Feng Qi, who could tolerate even his own stench, a little moldy smell was nothing.
Groping around, he pressed the room's light switch, and the lights flickered on.
The room was about a hundred square meters, filled with white, black, and blue boxes stacked hundreds high.
Curious, he tried opening a white box.
Inside were dozens of smaller white cardboard boxes. When he opened one, he found three blister packs of white pills, each pack containing over ten pills.
Without any instructions, he couldn't identify the pills.
He took one out, sniffed it, and then lightly licked it.
Colorless and tasteless, it wasn't an energy pill made from special spirit plants.
Feng Qi: ...
He glanced down at the small white pill in his hand, his expression gradually turning awkward.
It wasn't hard to understand why there were so many supplies in the Star City Shelter.
The shelter had been built due to the rapid expansion of the domain, making the surface uninhabitable for humans. They had been forced to retreat underground, eking out a meager existence.
At this point, resources became particularly crucial.
Especially food resources. Even though Star City Shelter had established a complete self-sufficient food supply chain, the output remained limited.
Therefore, the population had to be kept within a certain range. Uncontrolled reproduction would collapse the shelter's resource circulation system, leading to catastrophic consequences.
To maintain the stability of the circulation system, the best approach was population control, keeping the shelter's population within a fixed number.
Since individual preferences varied, the availability of multiple options in the rooms was understandable.
Just as he was about to turn and leave, he noticed Suction Cup chewing on the blister pack of pills he had just set down.
"You can't eat that!" he exclaimed, immediately reaching out to snatch the pills from her mouth.
But Suction Cup clamped her jaws shut, refusing to release the blister pack. Her head swayed back and forth as he tugged.
Finally, with a helpless expression, Suction Cup swallowed the entire blister pack, plastic casing and all.
Mu Qing's probability +8%. This glutton will eat anything.
"I think so too," Feng Qi agreed, nodding.
After Suction Cup released the hunting device, he moved to the adjacent room and resumed his violent door-kicking.
With a series of heavy kicks, the iron door buckled inward and crashed to the floor.
Bracing himself against the cloud of dust, he stepped into the room.
Flipping the light switch, he surveyed the scene.
The room spanned five to six hundred square meters, filled with neatly arranged mechanical instruments.
This appeared to be a research laboratory, its walls plastered with numerical formulas, diagrams, and photographs.
As his gaze swept across the room, one photograph caught his eye.
The figure in the photo was unmistakably little black, a face he knew all too well.
(End of the Chapter)
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