Zhang Heng felt the ground below him shake without good reason. Despite having recently finished vomiting and had yet to fully recover from the radiation poisoning, he immediately placed his ear close to the ground from which he heard rumbling noises.
He narrowed his gaze and looked up in the direction where the noise came from. He was only able to see the dark horizon far away and nothing else. However, the visual tracking function of the security suit went to work immediately and zoomed in on the scene from afar to see several massive creatures the size of hills in the distance.
Thermal imaging was useless for detecting the xenomorphs in the dark due to their thick silicate exoskeletal shells being able to prevent heat from escaping their bodies. As such, only infrared vision would be of any use for detecting their presence. What Zhang Heng saw then were tens of xenomorphs, all of which were of the sizes of tall buildings.
All of those creatures were crawling on the ground on all fours, charging at the city ruins at a speed of 100 meters every seven seconds. Due to the influence from the genes of their hosts, those creatures had completely given up on nimbleness and concealment in exchange for overwhelming power and a tremendous defensive capacity that enabled them to shrug off RPG rounds.
These xenomorphs had elephants and rhinoceroses serving as hosts.
Zhang Heng felt his throat drying and cracking. He picked up his backpack from the floor without a second thought and went for the deeper reaches in the ruins. While the high radiation levels of the city were able to prevent any average xenomorph types from venturing inside the ruins, however, the radiation levels did nothing to harm those massive ones. Those massive xenomorphs were more than able to ram into tall buildings and tear them down without a care before crawling out from the rubble while remaining totally unscathed.
However, regardless of how far and how fast he ran, the dozen or so xenomorphs flying above him kept a close eye on him. There was simply no way he could outrun a bunch of flying creatures watching him so closely. He had no choice but to find a manhole cover in the ruins that had yet to be buried under the dirt, pry the cover open, and jump down into the sewers without a second thought.
Then again, he quickly found that he had made a very grave mistake by leaping into the sewers the very moment he landed inside. The sewers in the US, which had been so spacious in the past that they might as well be called subway tunnels, had long been covered by wet and tough secretions from the xenomorph creatures underground. Countless tiny xenomorphs the size of rats that only had only two legs were found tightly packed in a nest that was about tens of cubic meters in size. All of those tiny creatures rushed at him as soon as they found him lurking around.
"Hell, you're telling me that even the rats got infected?" That was the only thought that came to his mind before losing consciousness.
Zhang Heng jolted from his chair and stood around for a bit. A cold sweat broke out all over his brow. That shocking feeling of being overwhelmed by countless vicious creatures just a moment ago had been so unbearably intense that it took him quite a while to calm himself.
"Commander, you've survived for three hours and five minutes in the simulated Alien plane. Do you wish to continue?" Corona's voice was heard in his mind.
"Let me take me a break." Zhang Heng rubbed his temple and struggled to walk to his bed before slumping down and lit a cigarette and watched the ceiling with blank eyes.
That was the first time he thought about what he would do if humanity was rendered extinct back in the simulated Alien plane. He once thought that if humans were beyond saving, he would take his family with him and leave his home plane behind, making his way to some other low difficulty level plane like the Resident Evil plane, and eking out a living for the rest of their days. It was only back in the Alien plane that he realized how naïve he had been.
If the world as he knew it were to come to an end, the resulting psychological pressure would be more than the likes of his parents and sister could handle, due to them being regular people. They would be more dependent on the world than he would be. If such a day were to come, the endless days of loneliness would definitely drive all three of them insane.
Zhang Heng felt that the pressure deep down had just gotten heavier. His responsibility was far greater than what he had imagined it to be.
However, one way or another, he had no intentions of letting the government authorities know of the Dimensional Star's existence, for doing so would complicate matters even further. If the government authorities were to find out about the Dimensional Star's existence, they would not let him live and the fate that awaited him and the rest of humanity would be worse than death.
It was not only the government that he had to keep a secret from, but he couldn't even tell his parents, his sister, or his possible future wife and children. That was a secret that was a heavy burden that he had to shoulder alone.
…
Time passed and the three-month duration was finally over, and it was again time for the Dimensional Star to issue him the next mission.
Zhang Heng received a package on that day at the same time. The package was a bronze sculpture about the size of a fully-grown person. There was a soaring eagle carved on it and one could easily tell from how intricate the piece was that it was a work from some master craftsman.
He looked at the sender's address and found the spot to be blank, but he didn't find that to be surprising in the least. He simply moved the sculpture into the warehouse, that he hadn't been visiting for quite a while, without thinking much about it. The warehouse was completely emptied again, due to the supercomputer Corona and the other peripheral equipment was moved to the secret laboratory base that was currently under construction.
He lightly knocked on a certain part of the sculpture as soon as he returned to the warehouse and a seam too thin to be detected on the eagle's claw was found. He grabbed hold of the eagle's claw and twisted lightly. The seemingly seamless part of the eagle's chest opened and revealed a 30 centimeters wide hole right away.
The complexity and intricacy of the contraption was utterly baffling, yet he proceeded with a deadpan expression on his face and reached his hand into the cavity. 10 Type 56 triangular bayonets were stuffed in the hollowed insides of the eagle, as well as two silver Desert Eagle handguns. There were six magazines strapped to the side of the guns and hundreds of rounds packed elsewhere.
He randomly picked out a bayonet and traced his hands on the pitch-black anti-corrosion coating on the weapon as well as the extremely sharp yet matted edge of the blade. He flipped the weapon about and suddenly stabbed it at the wall of the warehouse.
"Pfft!"
A very tiny noise was heard and the entire blade of the Type 56 bayonet was plunged into the wall with only its handle being left outside.
Zhang Heng nodded and pulled the weapon out and checked it, and found it to remain completely unscathed without any scuff marks on the coating, he nodded with a look of satisfaction on his face.
The bayonet looked fine and next he pulled out a Desert Eagle, peering into the barrel and found the rifling inside to be shiny and new, without a single scratch on them. There was also the faint scent of machine oil on the gun—a testament that it was fresh out of the mill and had never seen used before.
Zhang Heng spent a lot of money to smuggle those weapons out from foreign arms dealers into the country. He had spent nearly a million US dollars throughout the whole process just to get the smuggling route cleared.
However, that was but a temporary strategy for the time being. He planned to build his own secret weapons factory after bringing more tech back from other planes.
He put on the Earth Government Security Suit and strapped each of the two triangular bayonets to the side of his thighs before putting the Desert Eagles and hundreds of rounds of ammunition into his backpack and stuffing several compressed ration biscuits and bottles of mineral water in it. Zhang Heng took a deep breath and said, "Yurianne, the time is near. If you're not gonna appear, then you can forget about sending me to the mission."
"Haha, so it's time for the mission again?" A slow Japanese anime tune was heard in his mind as soon as he finished speaking. Yurianne's thin, childlike voice was heard at the same time. She was wearing black tights and put up an alluring pose. Despite the pose looking very awkward for a super-deformed animated image, she nonetheless pulled that pose off all the same.
Zhang Heng almost spit all the water he had in his mouth and quickly coughed for a bit to cover up his bafflement. "Cough, cough, well, Yurianne, you don't really appear much these days, do you?"
"Well, the Dimensional Star's magnetic field doesn't work so well with that of Corona of yours. If both of us were to contact you with our respective mental fields, your brain would probably be fried." Yurianne pouted. "Host dude, could you imagine what would happen if you were to run both the Kingsoft Antivirus and the 360 Safeguard on a rundown computer at the same time?"
"Hey, I'm just asking, alright?" Zhang Heng put up his hands. Yurianne's simulated persona felt more like a living character than Corona. While the Dimensional Star, who didn't suffer from energy supply problems and was able to traverse dimensions as it fancied, was far more advanced than Corona in terms of overall functionalities, yet Corona's ability to control the mental states of humans and unparalleled ability in hacking the internet was just as useful to him. It could be said that Zhang Heng needed both to do what he needed to do.
"Well, time seems to be about right. In that case, let's begin the third mission." Yurianne put up an okay gesture and a mechanical female voice was heard again. "Main quest is about to begin. Mission Objective: Acquire pieces of valuable technological resources in nearby planes. Begin searching nearby planes… Search complete. There is a total of four planes with valuable technological resources that are nearby the host."
"Plane A: Resident Evil plane. (option unavailable)"
"Plane B: Dead Space plane. (option unavailable)"
"Plane C: Alien plane. Danger Level: ★★★"
"Plane D: Prototype plane. Danger Level: ★★★★"
Zhang Heng took note when he checked out the last two planes. "Difficulty would decrease after I've gotten stronger. I remember the last time when I went to the Resident Evil plane, that the Alien plane had a difficulty level of four stars. By the time I got to the Dead Space plane, the difficulty was further knocked down by half a star. Now, it's only three stars…"
He lowered his head and continued mumbling, seemingly recalled something suddenly, and asked Yurianne, "There is something I find puzzling. How does the Dimensional Star's system come up with the difficulty rating of the planes? If the xenomorphs were able to get up to space, shouldn't the plane be a lot more dangerous than the Prototype plane?"
"System restriction, unable to answer your question," Yurianne interjected before Zhang Heng was able to finish. "You need to figure out all of those questions on your own, host dude. I am just an AI support program of the Dimensional Star, and I know nothing of those core questions."
"Well, I'm just asking anyway and it's not like I expect I'd get the answer from you." Zhang Heng nodded and took a deep breath. "I'll select the Alien plane this time."
"Acknowledged." The soothing background music that was previously heard in his mind changed as soon as he made his choice, becoming somewhat hot-blooded again.
Yurianne changed her attire at the same time and became an MC wearing a tuxedo and sunglasses. She raised her simplified hand and pointed at the sky as the stage lighting shone on her before she chanted in a gung-ho manner.
"The host dude has made a crucial choice in his life once again! Fight, young man! You'll discover one day that your power is limitless! One day, you shall discover that you could create miracles! The beautiful angels are calling for you from afar. Out you go, oh brave man, to create miracles!"