“This place doesn’t look like what they showed on the news.”
The rain was still pouring that day, but the spatial passage detection team had already arrived at the entrance of the spatial passage.
If anyone looked up at that moment, through the heavy curtain of rain, they might see several small hovercraft hovering in front of the dark rift, preparing to enter the pitch-black fissure one by one.
Of course, it looked dark from the outside. But once she got close to the fissure, Qin Sang realized that the passage inside didn’t match what she’d seen on the news.
On the news, these spatial passages were completely black. But now that she was here, she could see that these dark passages weren’t pure black. They had a kind of transparent darkness. Beyond these passages lay the vast cosmos.
Yes, Qin Sang didn’t understand celestial mechanics or cosmology. But the moment she leaped from the hovercraft into the entrance of the spatial passage, she felt as if she was standing on a sea of stars beneath her feet.
“It’s really beautiful!”
Xu Lin, who had jumped in behind her, couldn’t help but exclaim as well.
The first one to jump in was their old acquaintance, Captain Lin Feng. He was one of the squad leaders for this operation.
The main objective of this operation was to conduct a live reconnaissance of the interior of the spatial passage. So the team members were all official personnel or exceptionally skilled civilians.
Well, Qin Sang was one of the representatives of the civilian side.
And Xu Lin was the team’s information support specialist.
They would need to enter folded spaces for detection later, and there were concerns about signal issues inside. That’s why Xu Lin, as an information technology expert, was essential.
Two more minutes passed, and finally, the entire team had assembled.
The spatial passage they were responsible for was deliberately chosen. The energy field it emitted was enormous, and according to the Academy of Sciences’ projections, this was a relatively large spatial passage. There might be countless folded spaces inside.
Probes had been sent in to investigate before, but several folded spatial zones remained unexplored.
Their mission was to identify these unknown spaces.
The team consisted of six people in total: Lin Feng as the leader, Qin Sang and Team Member A for offensive support, Team Member B for rear guard, Xu Lin for information support, and Team Member C for medical support.
—
Stepping onto the spatial passage felt a bit like walking on a glass-bottomed bridge. It was slippery, and combat boots made noise against the surface. The entire passage was very quiet. Qin Sang remembered that in the official footage released before, there were scenes of interstellar Zerg crowding the spatial passages.
But now, it was completely silent here.
That meant the interstellar Zerg had no intention of attacking for the time being.
“Careful, the energy field here is extremely chaotic.” At that moment, Xu Lin, holding a detection device, spoke softly through the combat channel.
Everyone nodded in silence.
Qin Sang looked at Xu Lin.
He made a gesture at her, signaling that something was indeed off here.
Qin Sang felt the same way.
Because this passage was too quiet. She didn’t know how the other teams were doing, but their side was eerily silent. During drills, they had prepared for encounters with interstellar Zerg.
If they encountered a large number of Zerg, they would retreat immediately. If they ran into a few, they would engage directly. If there were no Zerg at all, then they would have to be a hundred times more vigilant.
By now, Qin Sang had already covered her eyes with energy, so she could naturally sense the chaotic energy field within the passage. She also spotted numerous folded spaces.
In her field of vision, folded spaces appeared as black spiral openings, similar to the eye of a typhoon. There was a strange pull emanating from them, making one want to explore.
At this point, Captain Lin Feng spoke up: “Let’s head to Folded Space No. 1 first.”
Everyone nodded. The operational plan had been drawn up before they arrived. They just needed to execute it as planned.
After giving the order, Lin Feng had Xu Lin locate Folded Space No. 1 and then deployed several drones into it.
Unfortunately, the drones only managed to capture footage of the initial entry before losing contact.
“Is it a network issue?”
Qin Sang spoke up at this point. The high-tech drones and probes brought this time all used energy cores as their power source. If they’d been battery-powered, they probably wouldn’t have lasted long against the chaotic energy here.
Xu Lin nodded: “There’s something inside interfering with the signal. The two batches of detectors sent in earlier barely transmitted any footage back. So, Captain Lin, should we go in?”
Lin Feng didn’t hesitate to nod: “We go in. This mission is for this very moment!”
With that, he leaped in first.
Seeing this, the others followed in the order they had practiced, jumping in one by one.
Qin Sang felt her vision go dark, and when her consciousness returned, she found herself in a scorching desert.
It was a land even more sweltering than Blue Star during its extreme heat periods, and even more desolate than the Loess Secret Realm.
The sky here was red, with neither sun nor moon. The ground was completely barren—no plants, no water.
This place was a lifeless wasteland.
Oh, that might have been a bit premature. Qin Sang watched a procession of interstellar Zerg moving in the distance and immediately retracted that thought.
So this was the kind of desolate land where the interstellar Zerg lived.
How… utterly strange.
“What do they live on?”
After finding cover, the team began observing the area. They quickly discovered the Zerg’s food source.
It was—cannibalism among their own kind.
There was no food, no energy here. The interstellar Zerg survived by devouring each other. With every consumption, the surviving Zerg grew stronger.
This meant that every feeding session was a tournament of elimination. The victor survived and became more powerful. The loser was consumed, becoming part of the victor’s strength.
A truly raw and unvarnished law of the jungle.
“No wonder the interstellar Zerg are so strong.”
Team Member A sighed. Everyone watched as a weak little Zerg in the distance completed its second evolution by devouring creatures even weaker than itself.
They also saw just how simple it was for the Zerg to produce eggs—a single brood could yield hundreds of thousands of offspring.
So this was how they cultivated high-tier Zerg—through a process akin to raising venomous creatures to fight each other.
Qin Sang had remained mostly silent throughout the journey, quietly filming everything she saw.
Everyone had come prepared to fight to the death. Now that they’d witnessed just how terrifying the Zerg’s growth method was, they were even more eager to exterminate them as soon as possible.
Perhaps their six-person team smelled too appetizing. A nearby Zerg seemed to sense something. Its antennae twitched, and it charged straight toward their hiding spot.
Everyone drew a sharp breath at the sight, but not a single person panicked. Following their training, they each pulled out a black cloak from their spatial storage, draped it over themselves from head to toe, and remained perfectly still.
The Zerg that had been rushing over stopped halfway. Why? Because it suddenly couldn’t detect the human energy field anymore.
Watching the Zerg run off, everyone let out a sigh of relief.
“This invisibility cloak really works.”
It wasn’t visual invisibility, but energy-field cloaking. The interstellar Zerg generally had poor eyesight—comparable to a thousand-degree astigmatism at best. They identified humans through their energy fields.
The black cloaks they wore—known externally as invisibility cloaks—completely masked their energy signatures. Without the energy field, as long as the humans stayed hidden behind large rocks, the Zerg couldn’t sense a thing.
After the nearby Zerg had moved far away, the team set off again, this time all wearing their cloaks.
They continued forward like that for another two hours.
They found a spot to rest and drink water. Qin Sang surveyed the land once more.
Truly, a barren wasteland with nothing at all—not even a fragment of Zerg remains on the ground.
The novels she’d read all described the Zerg as a greedy species that left nothing alive in their wake. This world before them might have been teeming with life years ago. All that vitality had now been consumed by the interstellar Zerg. That was why they had come to Blue Star, ready to repeat the same devastation.
“Let’s keep moving a bit further and take a look.” Captain Lin said, but Xu Lin shook his head: “Should we deploy the reconnaissance robots first?”
Here, Xu Lin had noticed that the outside signal was intermittent. He had brought signal boosters with him. On top of that, he’d also brought plenty of drones and ground robots.
With the situation unclear here, it was safer to let the ground robots scout ahead first.
And so they did.
Captain Lin arranged for the team to start digging a shelter for the night, while Xu Lin deployed several ground robots to begin reconnaissance.
Another two hours passed.
There was no sun or moon here, but day and night were still quite distinct.
Meanwhile, Xu Lin had made a new discovery.
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