“Those blood flowers are the core raw materials they went to retrieve,” Shen Tan explained softly, following Bai Ci's gaze.
“Without the juice of these flowers, the fetus cannot complete its final maturation process. That is also why they have delayed taking action.”
Qu Ling frowned and looked around. “We must leave here immediately. We absolutely cannot wait for them to return.”
“Even if we want to go back the way we came, we have to be able to climb up. How can a human climb seven or eight meters out of thin air?”
Getting in was easy, but getting out was hard. With such a sheer vertical drop and no handholds, it was simply impossible for a human to escape empty-handed.
As the saying goes, you only regret your lack of knowledge when you need to use it.
Now that the moment had come, Qu Ling felt more than ever that she had prepared too few items. At a critical juncture like this, she couldn't produce anything useful.
Bai Ci's hands, hanging at her sides, quietly clenched as she took out [Oblivion] once again.
Stagnant time flowed once more. This time, it took much longer to search for a solution.
Interstellar mechanical principles, emergency fault procedures, emergency escape mechanisms... countless obscure and complex pieces of information filtered and flashed through her mind.
At the very last second, she barely managed to piece together a viable plan to break the deadlock.
“If we destroy the structure here, will this item undergo some changes due to an emergency? Since things are already like this, they can't get any worse anyway,” Bai Ci suggested.
While speaking in a calm tone, she quietly wiped the cold sweat from her palms onto her clothes, trying to calm her racing heartbeat.
It really was a race against time.
Shen Jiayi nodded upon hearing this. “Then let's treat a dead horse as if it were alive. We don't have any other choice anyway. How do we destroy this thing?”
Qu Ling wanted to object and advise these two NPCs not to be too radical, but she couldn't come up with any better ideas either, so she could only pin her hopes on luck.
After all, she had already followed these two NPCs inside purely on luck. Maybe they really could rely on luck to get out?
“Using something you've never seen before is hard, but breaking it? That's simple.”
Bai Ci said this, but in her heart, it was a completely different story.
In truth, precisely breaking something was also very difficult.
She had just raced against time to absorb the knowledge from the driver's license, her hands dripping with cold sweat, but fortunately, it had finally borne fruit.
It wasn't about destroying it, but starting it.
Without further explanation, Bai Ci stepped forward. Facing the console with the large screen in the cultivation chamber, she began tapping away rapidly, seemingly at random.
But only she knew that every single keypress and sequence corresponded to the core startup commands of the spaceship.
The moment her finger fell on the final key, the pitch-black control screen suddenly lit up with a blinding red light.
Buzz—
A mechanical roar suddenly echoed throughout the entire spaceship. The ground shook violently, the lights inside the cabin flickered, and alarms beeped rapidly.
Caught off guard, Shen Jiayi and Qu Ling swayed, nearly losing their footing, and hurriedly grabbed the nearby cultivation equipment to steady themselves.
The former also reached out to pull Shen Tan, who was about to fall, preventing the pregnant woman from tumbling to the ground and suffering any accidents.
The spaceship was forcibly started.
But in the next second, mechanical error sounds rang out one after another, harsh and urgent.
The entire spaceship had barely broken through the underground bunker when it lost power due to depleted energy and mode conflicts, crashing heavily back to the ground.
Half of the hull was wedged back into the underground groove, while the other half remained on the surface, leaving it tilted.
At the same time, the ship's body shuddered violently, and countless error codes flooded the screen.
After a brief period of chaos, the tremors gradually subsided, the alarms weakened, and the image on the giant screen automatically switched, revealing a 3D holographic map of the entire spaceship.
On the map, two locations were particularly eye-catching, glowing with bright green door-frame icons. These were the emergency escape exits automatically unlocked by the system after the spaceship's malfunction.
“It's a map! And there are two escape exits!” Qu Ling's eyes lit up, and she reacted instantly.
“It seems so. Maybe after the spaceship malfunctioned, it triggered the escape mode?” Bai Ci spoke in an uncertain tone, but her hands were quick as she pulled out her phone.
She quickly took a photo of the complete map with her phone, noting the precise locations of the two exits.
Just then, Shen Tan spoke up to warn them, “We have to go, quickly!”
“I can smell them. The people retrieving the raw materials are back, and there's also the heavy, fishy stench of numerous vines. They're coming too.”
“Which direction are they coming from?” Bai Ci asked.
Shen Tan pointed in two directions without hesitation.
Without time for hesitation, Bai Ci grabbed Shen Tan beside her and turned to sprint toward the green exit furthest from the approaching threat.
Shen Tan, burdened by her heavy white dress and with her vision obscured by the veil, stumbled slightly as she tried to keep up with Bai Ci's pace.
Bai Ci reached out and cleanly flipped off the veil covering her face. The light, gauzy fabric drifted to the floor, revealing Shen Tan's delicate but pale features.
As for Shen Jiayi and Qu Ling...
There was no need to worry too much about them, because the moment Bai Ci started running, they followed suit. No one fell behind.
If anything, because Shen Tan slowed Bai Ci down, Bai Ci went from being at the very front to falling to the very back.
But since she was a key NPC, Bai Ci had no reason to abandon her.
Behind them, a dense mass of vines resembling Boston ivy surged frantically into the corridor, countless branches twisting and turning as they pursued them.
Interspersed among the branches were a few elderly villagers. Though they had an imposing, relentless aura, they lacked the physical strength and endurance to keep up.
Everyone sprinted with all their might.
Guided by the map, and because the emergency escape passage was designed for rapid evacuation in the first place, they reached the vicinity of the escape exit in just a few minutes.
The exit, which was originally a vertical drop of several meters, had formed a slanted ramp due to the tilted angle of the crashed spaceship.
Perfect terrain!
The group scrambled up the slope and tumbled out of the underground spaceship.
Under the influence of gravity, their speed far exceeded that of the pursuing vines.
The moment they escaped, Bai Ci reached back and slammed the close button next to the exit.
The heavy alloy hatch instantly closed and locked, sealing the passage with a loud bang. The villagers and vines chasing right behind them were shut inside the spaceship.
The operational knowledge Bai Ci had acquired told her that under this mode, it would take the aliens inside quite some time to unlock the closed hatch.
Bai Ci knew this, but the others did not.
Not knowing how long the door could hold them off, they naturally didn't dare to linger. Under the cover of night, they sprinted all the way through the flower fields and dense woods.
Only after they were far away from the back mountain did they hide in the deep woods, bending over to catch their breath.
Shen Jiayi straightened up, looking in the direction of the village. “We definitely can't outrun them. Everyone in the village is in cahoots with those old geezers. We'll be caught sooner or later.”
“Let's go take the wedding planning team's car and force our way out of the village. Once we leave their territory, they won't be able to pursue us so openly.”
Rate on N.U.
