Chapter 304: Infiltration
After ending his communication with Ai Lin, Yu Sheng stopped resting and continued moving along the "outer wall" of this tower.
Now that he was no longer carrying that big tail in his arms, moving became much easier. The only inconvenience was that he had to be constantly careful, planning each step's handhold in advance, and he couldn't use too much force while moving, otherwise he risked separating from the tower's body and falling into space.
This was probably what it felt like to do a spacewalk without a safety tether. If he really let go and drifted off, he couldn't imagine how he'd "swim" back in a vacuum with zero gravity. At that point, he'd probably just have to open a door and go home.
But maybe he could first leave a "coordinate" on the tower's outer shell? Although this thing might be moving right now (without a reference point, Yu Sheng couldn't tell if it was flying), if he recorded the coordinates using the tower under his feet as the reference origin, he should still be able to open a door back...
Various thoughts were spinning through Yu Sheng's mind. After crossing over a metal protrusion of unknown purpose, he stopped again.
He pulled out his new "bloodletting knife"—made from the fingertip blade of an artificial saint, tough and extremely sharp—and cut a gash in his palm.
Blood immediately spurted out, accompanied by wisps of red mist, boiling in the vacuum.
Yu Sheng was startled at first, but soon found the scene rather interesting—fortunately, he hadn't forgotten why he was letting blood, and quickly concentrated to control the gushing blood, letting it slowly drift to the nearby tower shell.
Before the wound healed rapidly, the boiling blood silently merged into the tower.
Yu Sheng closed his eyes slightly, sensing the information the blood conveyed to him.
He "saw" some blurry structures. The tower revealed its secrets to him: beneath the thick outer shell—which looked like rock but was actually alloy armor—were complex pipes, wires, cavities, corridors, and many technological things Yu Sheng couldn't even guess.
His range of vision was very limited, and within that limited range, he tried to find a path to infiltrate the tower's body.
Wherever the blood penetrated were paths, but Yu Sheng had to find a "safe" landing spot—he wasn't afraid of dying, but he was afraid of dying too pathetically. After working so hard to infiltrate this far, if he went in and just got chopped up by cultists with a yell, the shame would be huge. Later, Ai Lin would nag about it until next month...
There was no suitable intrusion point nearby, so Yu Sheng moved a distance along the shell and repeated the trick near a chain connecting to ancillary facilities, once again granting the tower blood.
After three attempts in a row, he finally stopped near an armor joint, a pleased expression on his face.
There was a "safe passage" underneath, with no signs of living people nearby, and several paths leading deeper.
Yu Sheng unhesitatingly pressed his hand against the thick, cold alloy armor.
The armor was thick, and there were several layers of protection, cushioning, and sensor structures underneath. But the door Yu Sheng wanted to open wasn't about directly "cutting" through these thick layers. Instead, it formed a short-range teleportation channel, using the blood that had already seeped in as a link. The span of this channel was enough to bypass all the structures on the tower's outer shell and circumvent any damage alarm systems that might exist under the armor layer.
Yu Sheng didn't know much about spaceships, but he guessed this ship definitely had similar alarm systems to ensure that if anything pierced the armor, the people inside would know immediately—since he was infiltrating this time, the later he was discovered, the better.
The "door" quickly took shape.
Yu Sheng gently turned the "handle" and silently pulled open the illusory door that had abruptly appeared on the tower's outer shell.
"I'm coming in..."
......
"Can't find him! The drones are in position, no one spotted outside."
"The 'Knight' is searching near Cabin Three, nothing here either."
"Sensors have no response either—the external monitors remain offline. When will this subsystem be fixed?!"
The "Sage" sat in the center of the control hall, a grim expression on his face as he listened to the reports and conversations around him.
A tense atmosphere hung over the hall, but at least all the staff had regained their composure, and everyone was doing what they should be doing. However, the Sage could clearly feel that a certain unease was once again growing in everyone's hearts.
Because they couldn't find that "monster" moving on the outer shell of the Pillar of Order.
If that guy was the culprit behind the earlier failure of the cloaking field and the jump failure, then the current situation was undoubtedly the worst—seeing a space hitchhiker "riding outside" in outer space was certainly a horrifying thing, but then he vanished in the blink of an eye, creating another level of terror...
"Could it be some kind of mass hallucination?" someone finally said cautiously, voicing a hope everyone shared. "We hastily exited the jump state earlier, which causes great stimulation to the nervous . There are documented cases of mass hallucinations under such circumstances."
"You mean the 'Ruby' incident in Sacred Year 1882? That ship stopped in space four light-seconds from the starport after a failed jump, and the crew walked out of the ship without any protective gear—they thought they had safely arrived home."
"Maybe, I mean, just in case..."
"Enough," a member of the Hermetic Order interrupted the pointless conversation. "Rather than comforting ourselves with mass hallucination, I'd rather believe that guy has already sneaked in!"
As soon as these words were spoken, the entire hall fell silent instantly.
And as if specifically to puncture that silence, a few seconds later, a Hermetic Order member guarding a console suddenly broke the silence.
"R-report! The perimeter corridor of the core area has monitored an intruder... he really has sneaked in!"
The white-robed 'Sage' stood up abruptly upon hearing this. While the people around were in doubt and uncertainty, a smile instead appeared on his face.
"Excellent—find him, and deal with him!"
***
Yu Sheng felt a bit lost.
He had entered the tower, but found its interior structure was like a maze, full of intersections and inexplicable rooms. The good news was that there was gravity inside, so he could finally walk on solid ground. The bad news was that gravity was clearly malfunctioning in some areas, causing him to suddenly "fall" to one side as he walked, making it even harder to tell up from down and left from right.
But he felt this wasn't a big problem.
Because he didn't know the way in here anyway, getting lost or not was the same. Moving around here mainly relied on using blood to open X-ray vision and strong self-confidence.
After wandering around in a few corridors for a moment, he stopped in an unoccupied corner, then fished in his pocket and pulled out his phone.
Unlock, screen on, enter the Border Communication interface.
Yu Sheng was sure that this seemingly ordinary "phone" was absolutely packed with the Special Affairs Bureau's black tech. Setting aside everything else, the fact that this thing had stayed with him in space for so long and still operated smoothly meant it couldn't be using ordinary civilian components.
Of course, the phone surviving in space wasn't the most absurd thing. The most absurd thing was that when he pulled it out, he found it had a signal.
A signal!
Yu Sheng had originally planned to just take some random pictures of the surroundings and then open a small door to give Bai Liqing a surprise. But when he saw the signal was full, he was shocked. Then he pulled down the status bar for a look, and noticed that the service provider suffix had changed from " Communications" to "Interstellar United Communications," followed by a line: "Currently using interstellar united channel, additional charges may apply."
This astonished him greatly, but he didn't delay doing the serious stuff—after a brief moment of astonishment, he hurriedly took a bunch of pictures of the surroundings and also turned on the phone's environmental data monitoring function. Then he sent a message to Bai Liqing: "Guess where I am?"
Shortly after, he received a reply from Bai Liqing, beginning with a string of question marks: "??? You've already entered that tower?!"
Yu Sheng was a bit surprised: "Huh, you already know about this?"
"I received a report that you were launched by Hu Li using her tail, and then disappeared with that strange tower into the thick fog of Mist City," Bai Liqing replied quickly—she had now become quite adept and calm at arranging words into these magical sentences. "I called you a few times just now, but you didn't pick up."
Upon hearing this, Yu Sheng quickly checked his phone's call log and indeed saw several missed calls, all from Bai Liqing.
He was a bit dumbfounded, because he didn't remember the phone ringing at all. But after just a moment, he realized and explained via message: "Ah, it might be because I was in a vacuum just now, so I didn't hear it—and I was busy looking for a way in, so I didn't notice the vibration."
Bai Liqing sent another string of question marks.
Yu Sheng felt it was hard to explain in a few words the whole process of him riding outside a spaceship and then opening a door on its hull to sneak in, so he only replied vaguely: "The situation here is a bit complicated. I'll explain later."
After sending the message, he looked at his already healed wound, pulled out the bloodletting knife from his pocket, and made another cut on his palm.
Blood oozed from the wound, as if it had a life of its own, slowly drifting and covering the nearby walls and floor, then seeping in within seconds.
After confirming the blood had fully permeated, Yu Sheng continued walking forward.
He kept walking and stopping along the way, doing this all the time.