Chapter 190: Alarm
In that brief moment that seemed to last an eternity, Ji Jue experienced the kind of brain overload that left him completely blank. He’d never felt this way before.
It was like one day, he had been minding his own business, sitting there eating a train and riding hotpot[1], only to get robbed by a company! He had no idea whether trains were edible, but one thing was certain: the damn company had really sent him a dog.
All he could do was stare.
With great difficulty, he lowered his head and examined the emblem on his wristwatch. Then he raised his hand and compared it to President’s dog tag. Unfortunately, no matter how many times he looked, his vision, cognition, and reason all told him that these two things were exactly the same!
Deep down, however, Ji Jue felt that this was the moment when he should stand up, throw his head back and laugh, while declaring in a clear voice, “Hahaha, this is an illusion! What exactly are you trying to hide?!”
Unfortunately, this wouldn’t really help him in this situation. In the end, only one sentence resonated in his mind. I’m so screwed!
He had been freeloading off Skyrail every day, and now Skyrail had come looking for him in the form of a dog! No, maybe this was a warning. If he still didn’t report to work, he would end up like this dog!
At that thought, Ji Jue broke out in a cold sweat. He forced out a stiff smile, carefully adjusted the dog’s head, leaned in close, and examined it closely, trying to find a camera.
“Hello?” He tentatively called into the dog’s mouth, “Is anyone there?”
The sheepdog tilted its head in confusion and stared at him. It had absolutely no idea what was wrong with this human. Soon, its gaze seemed to fill with sympathy and pity. It affectionately licked Ji Jue’s hand. It’s okay. Dogs are man’s best friends. Even if you’re mentally challenged, I still like you!
After a long, long while, Ji Jue gulped and finally let out a breath of relief. No one’s there?
He rubbed his chin, crouching in front of the dog as the two of them stared at each other. “So you’re... President?”
When the sheepdog heard that, it stuck out its tongue. It licked Ji Jue’s hand and nodded.
“You... came to find me?” Ji Jue asked.
President nodded again, its eyes glimmering.
Ji Jue looked around. After confirming that they were alone, he took a deep breath. His thoughts inevitably slid into a dangerous direction. Since no one’s around, and no one will ever know, and the only vehicle here is mine anyway, why not...
But when he lowered his head and looked into the sheepdog’s bright, sparkling eyes, he felt an unprecedented pressure, as if his conscience itself were interrogating him.
President leaned forward. Its long doggy nose nudged his hand up and placed it on its own head, signaling for him to pet it. It was as if his conscience were asking him, Are you really going to do something that cruel?
“Woof!” President suddenly barked, raising its head to look behind him.
Ji Jue turned around, but there was nothing behind him.
President lowered its head, bit onto his pant leg, and started tugging him toward the Recycling and Processing Department. It wagged its tail as if urging him to hurry. Ji Jue thought for a moment, analyzed the situation calmly, and considered it carefully. He felt like the dog was telling him to hurry up and get back to work.
Ji Jue glared. “We only just met, and you’re already rushing me back on shift, huh?! I knew it. You executives are all the freaking same! Even after turning into a dog, you still want to ride on the backs of us wage slaves and throw your weight around.”
Ji Jue’s fists clenched. It’s an evil capitalist by nature. I swear I’m about to—
A deafening blast erupted behind him.
Ji Jue spun around in shock, only to see thick smoke rising from the Recycling Department workshop. Wisps of black spread through the air, followed by the piercing scream of an alarm.
It’s an aberration leak. There’s severe contamination!
“Woof!” President began circling around him, tail wagging furiously. “Woof, woof!”
It was as if it were hoping he would go do something. Finally, President gave his leg one last nudge with its head with seemingly all the strength it had.
Then, its figure began flickering like an image on a broken screen. Even its barks became faint and distorted. Little by little, it faded away. Ji Jue was left standing there alone, completely baffled.
A dog named President had suddenly appeared out of nowhere, wearing a Skyrail Corporation dog tag. It was almost as if the real president had suddenly remembered he still owned a shitty company and had personally come to inspect his beloved employee, just to make sure he was actually working instead of slacking off. It urged him to hurry up and go handle the emergency, then disappeared for no reason.
What the hell is this?! What’s wrong with this company? Can they please be normal for once?
But Ji Jue had no time to care about all that nonsense. He broke into a sprint, waved his hand, and leapt onto Horsey’s footboard. The armored vehicle whipped around in a sharp tailspin, then charged with a rumble toward the workshop.
***
As chaos broke out, the soot-covered apprentices staggered out of the workshop and collapsed onto the ground. Drenched in sweat, they stared at the smoke rising from the workshop and listened to the waves of alarm blaring out.
The supervisor’s face was deathly pale, as if he had just seen his parents’ graves catch fire. “It’s over. It’s all over. There’s a leak!”
Once aberrant contamination leaked and spread, if it fully took shape, there was no telling what kind of hellish thing it could catalyze. The entire temporary workshop was at risk of being blown sky-high.
The supervisor paced around in a daze, furiously shouting at the crowd wailing around him. “What happened? What the hell happened?! How did such a major accident happen?”
Everyone looked up at the person standing at the very front.
The apprentice who had taken the full brunt of the explosion stood there in a daze, half his body covered in blood. Panicked and completely at a loss, he said, “I followed the procedures. I did everything by the book... I don’t know either! A perfectly fine storage area just exploded out of nowhere...”
The more he tried to explain, the more helpless he sounded. His face was paper-white, with not a trace of blood left in it.
No matter what the cause was, the accident had happened under his watch. He was finished. He was under the pressure of the Security Bureau’s interrogation, the Association’s investigation, and the workshop’s fury. Selling ten of him would still not be enough to pay for the losses.
And it would not just be him; everyone on the entire production line would probably be held responsible too. Thinking of the consequences, everyone’s faces turned pale with despair.
As its engine roared, Horsey smashed through the courtyard wall and charged straight in. Ji Jue jumped down from the vehicle and looked around. He took in the situation at a glance, but froze when he counted the number of people present. “Where’s Lou?”
The last apprentice to escape was on the verge of tears. “He’s... he’s still inside, I think. I tried to talk him out of it. I really did. But he wouldn’t leave.”
“All right, I know. It’s not your fault.” Ji Jue let out an irritated sigh, but he couldn’t help gritting his teeth.
Why is he still trying to show off at a time like this? Why is he still being stubborn? Does he really have to compete with me at the scene of an accident? What good would beating me even do? Fine, you win, but you’ll die, and my future is still bright. What the hell is the point?!
Boom!
Thick smoke billowed, caused by another explosion. A sharp screech could be heard faintly from within.
Even without anyone controlling it, the temporary workshop’s isolation and lockdown measures were still operating. Ji Jue reached out and pointed at a camera outside. In an instant, the scene inside the workshop appeared in his mind.
The workshop’s pollutant storage area was a complete mess. Giant tanks several meters tall stood in rows, but something had torn holes through them. Large amounts of solution, which had absorbed massive amounts of aberrant pollution during the replacement reaction, gushed out like fountains and flooded the floor. From the center of the storage area, another piercing screech rang out.
Within the thick black sludge, countless streams of liquid gathered around a broken piece of containment equipment. It stood there like a shattered steel pillar, having only been dismantled halfway. Beneath the parts that had been removed, what flowed out was a scarlet liquid that looked disturbingly like blood. It kept gushing out.
And behind the peeling rust, numerous bizarre eyeballs slowly emerged from the steel. Thick scarlet strands, similar to living flesh, stretched from its shell, greedily absorbing the corruption contamination in the surrounding solution.
It looked exactly like a vessel of disaster.
Right before Ji Jue’s eyes, it was rapidly taking shape, growing more complete with every passing second. The sight made his skin crawl.
This really wasn’t a problem caused by an operational mistake. Rather, the contaminated containment equipment had been completely corroded and transformed before it was recovered, and it had formed a seed of aberration inside. The recovery team had failed to notice and carried it straight back into the workshop.
And so, inside the Recycling Department’s heavily polluted environment, it took root and rapidly sprouted. Fortunately, the workshop’s lockdown was still in place, so it could not break out for the time being.
But inside...
Boom!
Spirit spears, each covered in circuits, descended from the sky and pierced into the spreading, twitching scarlet limbs. Like nails, they pinned the aberrant thing firmly to the ground. It was still resisting, struggling fiercely against Lou Feng’s suppression.
On the operating platform in midair, Lou Feng could be seen standing, his face ashen. Once more, he consumed too much spirit matter. Ignoring the corrosion of the surrounding aberrant corruption, he created spears through Exquisite Work. Soon, another spirit spear covered in Origin circuits drove down.
Crack!
Screeching, a tentacle reached out from the activated aberrant equipment, grabbing the spirit spear in midair and crushing it to pieces!
The rumbling went on and on.
“Fuck!” Lou Feng’s vision darkened in waves. At this point, he no longer cared about appearances. There was no one around anyway, so if he wanted to curse, he would curse as he pleased.
But immediately after that, he sensed the ground shaking beneath him. Someone had rammed a huge hole through the workshop’s final barrier from the outside!
A violent wind howled in. The aberrant let out a shrill scream, as if wild with joy. It struggled wildly, lunging toward the opening.
“What idiot did that?”
Lou Feng flew into a rage and turned back, glaring toward the widening hole. All he saw was a flash of silver radiance.
Horsey had reversed straight into the workshop. Its cargo compartment opened, and heavy barrels rolled out. Shining mercury tore through the lids, surged outward, and gathered into a furious wave that rolled toward the struggling aberrant with the crushing weight of Mount Tai[2]!
Cracking sounds rang out nonstop. At Ji Jue’s whistle, hundreds of kilograms of mercury flowed. They hardened, coiled, and wrapped around the aberrant, driving into the floor and burying the entire thing beneath it in an instant.
As Ji Jue waved his hand and stepped forward, Pacifier manifested over both his hands. Spirit circuits spread from his fingertips, flowing through the mercury and extending forward like chains, enveloping the aberrant equipment in multiple layers. Under the double pressure of material reinforcement and Fluid Alchemy, the aberrant was suppressed and sealed inside.
Muffled screeches and violent tremors continued to come from the center of the hardened mercury. The backlash was so intense that even the ground kept shaking.
Who knew how much corruption contamination it had absorbed to grow this terrifying? As it struggled, cracks appeared across the hardened mercury. Soon, once Ji Jue freed up his hands and pushed Pacifier further, layers of crystalline light surfaced from the mercury. With the blessing of Iron Essence, it turned into shackles. The mercury held fast, becoming as steady as a mountain.
In the dead silence, only the exposed piece of equipment at the center remained. Its blood-red eyes opened and closed madly, trembling as they reflected the figure walking slowly toward it and the hand he extended.
“Of all the things you could have turned into, why did you have to become something like this?” Ji Jue sighed. His index finger pressed against one of the trembling red eyes, sending forth a wave of spirit matter with tremendous power.
Dissociation Technique!
1. This isn’t a mistake on my end. The author literally wrote 坐着火锅，吃着火车 here, which means to “ride a hotpot and eat a train.” I think it was written like this intentionally to reflect the fact that his mind is going haywire lol, so I didn’t correct it. ☜
2. 泰山压顶 is a Chinese idiom that literally means "Mount Tai pressing down on one's head." In actual usage, it describes someone being struck by an overwhelming force or burden, one so immense that it feels suffocating and impossible to bear. It is often used to convey crushing pressure, devastating impact, or an oppressive weight that leaves a person feeling completely overwhelmed. ☜