Chapter 1 Vivian's Strength

Vivian's strength was indeed quite formidable. Hao Ren had finally experienced it firsthand. Enduring the vampire girl's lightning strikes at close range in the water was unbelievably excruciating. Later, when the group emerged from the wreckage of the spaceship, battered and disheveled, they discovered the entire ship was shimmering. A large number of fish and shrimp around it had died—if this talent for electrofishing was possessed by someone else, they would have become rich long ago.

Vivian was the only one who emerged unscathed. She was immune to her own power, but not to Lily. So, after fighting with the furious husky, she wasn't in much better shape than the others. Of course, the reason Lily was chasing her was because she genuinely felt guilty. The vampire girl was a good girl—it was just that her physics teacher had died a bit too early.

"I wasn't paying attention," Vivian said apologetically, approaching Hao Ren and Doudou, who were competing to spit out black smoke on the shore. "I always acted alone before. I've never been electrocuted myself, and I forgot that water conducts electricity."

Lily, who had somehow found a brush, continued to grumble angrily while brushing the curly fur on her tail, "Being with you, I'll die from an unknown AoE sooner or later."

Hao Ren wiped his face, thinking that he really had to pay attention to Vivian's area-of-effect attacks in the future. When Izhaks threw down meteorites, at least he knew to tell his teammates to dodge. This vampire girl launched her lightning strikes without hesitation every time. Today was their first time teaming up to raid a sunken ship, and she scored a pentakill, taking out both opponents and teammates…

Doudou grabbed Hao Ren's collar and coughed again, spitting out two smoke rings. Hao Ren took a look, and that made it a sextuple kill, counting the little one…

Lily tried for a long time but couldn't restore her feather-duster tail. In the end, she had to give up and decided to wrap it in a warm towel when she got back. She put away the brush and came over to check on Doudou with concern, "Is the little one alright?"

"It seems like she just got a scare," Hao Ren said, feeling incredulous. "Her health is a bit unbelievable. She was struck by lightning at such close range…"

Vivian looked at the little mermaid covered in soot and muttered with lingering fear, "She can be boiled in boiling water, so what's so unbelievable."

Izhaks looked at everyone, still full of vitality, with a smile. He was the least injured. In fact, other than his face being a bit dark, he seemed perfectly fine. He patted the sand off his pants and came to a large lump of alloy monster not far away, "Anyway, this thing is dealt with—Vivian's lightning seems to be particularly effective against it."

Lying not far away was the mechanical monster that had attacked them earlier. It had been directly hit by Vivian's lightning strike, and then Lily, in her berserk state, had rushed up and clawed and scratched it. A large hole had been torn in its spherical core, and the key structures inside were in a mess. It looked like it wouldn't be moving again.

Hao Ren went over and fiddled with the mechanical monster's "arms." The thing had a spherical main body less than a meter in diameter, but connected to the sphere were dozens of squid-like alloy tentacles, making it cover a considerable area. Now, some of these mechanical arms had been cut off by Lily. From the broken ends, one could see something that shone with metallic luster, as flexible as muscle. At the end of each mechanical arm was a complex terminal. Hao Ren could barely make out that the terminal contained a beam weapon, a visual component, and several other sensors. This thing was clearly a combat unit, and its design was excellent. It had been submerged in the Blood Lake wreck for two months and still maintained good performance.

Hao Ren had brought it out with him when he left the wreck out of curiosity.

Actually, he had originally wanted to stuff the entire spaceship into his portable dimension and take it back with him. After all, having such a thing sunk at the bottom of the Blood Lake was a potential hazard. Although the spaceship had been shut down, there was still a risk of its power plant leaking, and the coolant in some parts of the ship had already begun to contaminate the water near the Lake Heart Island—that was the green gelatinous substance. But in the end, he gave up on the idea: the data terminal's scan showed that the front end of the ship had completely merged with the rock layer at the bottom of the lake. It was probably a byproduct of the spatial accident. In any case, the ship couldn't be moved easily, or it might cause the collapse of Lake Heart Island.

The data terminal knew that Hao Ren was thinking about the ship again, and suggested from the side: "Next time you come, you should bring some professional equipment. You can apply for it from the Administration. But if possible, it's best to find the superior unit of this ship and let them handle it."

"How do I find them?" Hao Ren was dealing with this kind of thing for the first time. Don't look at his identity as an inspector, but so far, the most he had done was to pick people up from various places. Now, with such a large wrecked ship right in front of him, he felt a bit at a loss: accident handling, contacting the person in charge, various reports, whether he needed to be responsible for the aftermath, whether he needed to contact the ship's affiliated forces, whether he needed to deal with some troublesome official organizations. In an instant, Hao Ren thought of countless headache-inducing things. This kind of interstellar civilization diplomatic issue was a bit beyond his worldview.

"Just go to the local cosmic channel," the data terminal said with ease. "You're an inspector. You have an official information broadcasting right in all the information links in this universe. Post the situation of this ship, see who lost it, and then see what level of event they plan to classify it as. If the event is small, then a personal organization will come forward. If the event is big enough, then the head of the civilization circle will come forward. Anyway, it makes no difference to you. Inspectors are independent of all civilization circles. You just need to follow the Empire's regulations. The only troublesome thing about this event is that one of the dead was a Tobelo insectoid. He should be a technical consultant hired by a low-level civilization from another world at great expense, which is equivalent to a township enterprise inviting the richest man in the country to visit and guide the factory. As a result, the richest man died of food poisoning while eating in the staff cafeteria. This is likely to cause a bit of diplomatic trouble for a certain civilization… but it has nothing to do with you."

Hao Ren sighed, "Let's talk about it later, let's talk about it later. It gives me a headache just thinking about it."

He remembered the situation in the ship's control room. In the end, the group didn't go to the control room. After Vivian's lightning strike turned her teammates into critically wounded, only the data terminal floated over to take a look at the situation there, and then brought back the scene of the control room: most of the ship's crew had died in the control room. Even though they were a group of little green men who were very different from humans, it was still quite creepy to look at.

Because there was no way to move the ship for the time being, and he didn't know how to deal with the alien corpses, Hao Ren could only leave the deceased crew members at the bottom of the lake. However, according to the custom of accident handling, he protected the scene as much as possible: he asked Nangong Wuyue to set up a field around the crash site similar to a barrier. This barrier would control the pollution of the crash site within a certain range and further slow down the rate of decay of the personnel's corpses in the wreckage. He hoped that he could contact the ship's affiliated forces as soon as possible. If he couldn't contact them in a short period of time, he would find a way to transfer the ship himself.

After all, one could never be sure when the Church of the Radiant Sun on the Dream Plane would organize a group of suicide squads to go to the bottom of the lake to see what was going on—although the probability was small given their religious taboos and the actual environment at the bottom of the lake. But it's better to be safe than sorry. After all, the environment at the bottom of the lake is only harmful to ordinary people, and the strong in this world should still be able to withstand it. They just need the Pope's permission now.

Shaking his head vigorously, Hao Ren temporarily threw the creepy scenes from the wreckage of the ship to the back of his mind: "Now let's sort out the events that happened in the Blood Lake, we should have a lot of information on hand now."

Vivian took the opportunity to quickly get rid of Lily's entanglement and was the first to analyze the situation, counting on her fingers: "Let's go by the timeline: two months ago, the Church of the Radiant Sun conducted the touring ceremony of the Holy Relic Orb. The orb disappeared in the Blood Lake. On the night of the disappearance, there were various strange phenomena; at the same time, a ship from the surface world appeared at the bottom of the Blood Lake due to a spatial accident and exploded at the bottom of the lake. If I'm not mistaken, some of the strange phenomena seen by the orb's guards that night came from the firelight when the ship exploded; in the two months after the orb disappeared, various abnormal situations began to appear around the Blood Lake. According to the district leader, the monsters in the forest became more active; two months later, we came here and discovered the fallen rock giants in the Dragon Ridge Mountains. The rock giants' target should be the Blood Lake, and there are four other rock giants heading towards the grassland for unknown reasons. That's basically it."

"You missed one," Hao Ren reminded her, "Hilda drifted to this world about seven days ago, which is only two days earlier than us. This also happened during these two months."

"Now it depends on whether these events are related," Izhaks said, sitting cross-legged on the beach. "I think at least the orb's disappearance and the ship's accident are directly related, and Hilda's entry into the Dream Plane… tsk, what reason can explain all these 'transmigration events'?"

"There is one explanation," Hao Ren glanced at the data terminal, remembering a sentence that this guy mentioned at the bottom of the lake, "Some kind of balance is weakening, and the Dream Plane is becoming easier and easier to enter. Perhaps… 'holes' have appeared in some places."