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The square area suddenly turned into chaos.

"Damn it, it’s over, do we have enough food in our stronghold?"

"The water purifier isn’t even fixed yet, how can a room hold a week’s worth of water?"

At this moment, the voice of Station Manager Du came over the broadcast, "Everyone, don’t panic. Our subway station is modified to nuclear strike specifications. As long as you stay in your room, safety can be assured. Our stronghold’s food and water reserves are also quite sufficient to support more than half a month in case of a supply cut-off. You don’t have to worry about food and drink issues. If special circumstances arise, we may also consider providing interest-free credit point loans and distributing relief food."

"Panic is the greatest enemy of survival. When hasn’t a past disaster been more severe than this? Jiang City is so large, the probability of a building collapsing directly above our stronghold is very small. If it falls somewhere else, at most it will just shake a bit. As long as we unite, we will surely get through this crisis unscathed!"

These words calmed the public’s panic quite a bit.

Just as Du Pingzhang said, unless the Binjiang Garden Subway Station gets hit directly, hiding underground is relatively safe.

It’s the first time everyone encountered such an event, so they were a bit panicked.

Honestly, this was also where Chen Xuan’s doubts lay.

He had seen the Celestial Patrol twice—it was huge, but its movement speed was unbelievably fast. Often, it was a kilometer away one second and right in front of him the next. Calculating by its stride, it wouldn’t take much time to cross the entire Jiang City.

Now, to send a warhead requires 11 hours to land, how does the Dimensional Limit Mechanism ensure this strike will hit the Celestial Patrol?

Suddenly, the hall shook violently!

The fluorescent lights flickered, emitting a sizzling electrical sound, and a large amount of dust fell from the ceiling, choking people into coughing.

The earlier calm was quickly shattered by waves of screams.

"Wasn’t it supposed to be more than a dozen hours!?"

"Oh no, it’s an earthquake!"

"Let’s go back to the surface, it’s more open above!"

"Don’t rush, we still don’t know what’s going on."

Underground constructions do have excellent resistance to external impacts, but an earthquake is another matter. After all, walls are closely connected to the ground, and take the most impact from seismic energy. If the structure collapses, everyone would end up buried alive.

Just as people were feeling uncertain, there was a second intense tremor inside the subway station.

This time, the tremor was even more pronounced, so much so that people had to crouch down to avoid falling. The continuous tremors made the entire hall creak, and noticeable cracks appeared on the walls.

"Please immediately return to your accommodations, temporary passersby stay near the walls, do not move around freely—" The station manager was still guiding everyone to avoid danger over the broadcast, but the crowd had already made the most instinctive choice: to flee to the surface.

Because this emergency evacuation was only for notification, and the predicted impact time had not yet arrived, the subway station had not hurriedly closed its doors. This accidentally avoided pushing and trampling.

Chen Xuan chose to move along with the crowd at this moment.

His senses were much keener than ordinary people; he could detect that these tremors were not continuous, and the shaking above was stronger than below, as if the source of the quake was above ground.

Rather than staying underground, it was better to go out and see what was happening.

Just coming up the entrance stairs, Chen Xuan immediately felt something was wrong—the sky had noticeably darkened, somewhat like an early sunset. While Jiang City was usually cloaked in dust storms, making it less bright, there was no reason for it to be dark at two or three o’clock in the afternoon.

Raising his head, he felt a chill down his spine.

"Chen Xuan, this is..." Lin Qing, following behind, was equally incredulous.

A vast inverted shadow appeared in the sky.

The shadow almost covered the entire Jiang City, and the once perpetual swirling sandstorm was being constantly pushed downwards by this shadow, the lowest point even pressing to within several tens of meters off the ground, and the howling wind pressed people down.

What terrified the residents of the stronghold was that the long legs of the Celestial Patrol were not just four.

They were multiplying using "four" as a base!

These long legs stamped down from the sandstorm, with each landing akin to a small earthquake. From a distance, one could see the dust it kicked up and the buildings that collapsed under its reach.

The nearest leg landed only two or three hundred meters from the Binjiang Garden Subway Station.

It landed on the banks of the Sha River, crushing a large section of the waterfront landscape.

The violent shaking earlier was clearly caused by this leg.

In a stroke of luck, they did not move quickly as usual. Instead, they remained motionless upon landing, like they had taken root. Otherwise, the subway station would have been doomed.

"What is going on?" Huang Gou was dumbfounded, "Are there multiple Celestial Patrols?"

"No..." Chen Xuan shook his head, "We always took for granted that the upper part of the Celestial Patrol wouldn’t extend beyond its four legs’ range, at least not by much... perhaps we were all wrong."

Ji looked up, face showing fear, "You don’t mean to say... this is the true form of the Celestial Patrol?"

No one replied.

Everyone was intently staring at the shadow, waiting for the answer to be unveiled.

The shadow was visibly expanding.

At the same time... it was pressing lower and lower.

Chen Xuan noticed these two changes happened simultaneously, with its edges appearing as if manifesting from the void, continuously extending outward; its steadily descending height tore through the sandstorm vortex, creating a distinct pointed cone in the center of the shadow.

More and more people poured out of the subway station, staring at the sky in astonishment, standing still as if awaiting their fate.

About ten minutes later, something finally broke through the cover of the sandstorm, "drilling" out from the sky.

It looked like a building.

Soon... a second appeared.

"Oh my god..." someone murmured in disbelief.

The crowd saw a "city" suspended upside down in the sky.

Its buildings undulated like mountain ranges, converging into a "peak" at the center of the shadow. As the distance closed, the city’s details became clearer: it too was filled with high-rises, with streets and bridges, but the form and material of these structures differed utterly from the reinforced concrete jungle on the ground—they resembled towers or polyhedral blocks, covered by a uniform metallic sheen, more like they were cast entirely from refined iron.

This also matched the "Sky Pillars" made from steel plates and iron frames.

"Well... truly, in Jiang City, if you can survive, you can see every bizarre thing." Huang Gou forced a smile, looking even more pained than crying, "Who would have thought the Celestial Patrol’s body was a sky city!"

If it were an empty city, that would be one thing.

But Chen Xuan saw the towering conical high-rises and low rectangular houses subtly showed specks of light. If those were window openings on the buildings, who lived inside?

Now he knew why the Dimensional Limit Mechanism wasn’t afraid of missing with its lunar strike.

The Celestial Patrol is essentially Jiang City suspended in the air.

Those legs weren’t devices for moving the Celestial Patrol but more like mechanical arms and support frames.

That’s why it couldn’t leave the territory of Jiang City.

A shell traveling 360,000 kilometers from the moon would surely hit it.