Survival in an apartment, starting with a stroke of luck on a plane

The queen insect's monitoring data is updated every ten minutes. Lin Yu stood on the observation platform and watched the diameter of the passage slowly drop from 18.1 to 17.9, and then to 17.6.

It is shrinking.

"My Lord, the entity at the other end of the passage is retreating," the Queen's voice echoed in his mind. "The energy fluctuations have decreased by forty percent. At this rate, the passage will be completely closed in fourteen hours."

Lin Yu didn't speak, his Heavenly Eye kept its eyes fixed on that direction.

He could sense that the dark aura, which shared the same origin as the Void Serpent, was fading, like someone tiptoeing out of the door and closing it behind them before leaving.

It didn't dare to come in.

The annihilation of 470,000 Black Armored Warriors and the demigod-level Black Armored Leader being shattered on the spot—the energy fluctuations from these two battles traveled far and wide in the void.

The creature was initially attracted by the smell of blood, but upon getting closer, it discovered that its "prey" was harder than it, so it retreated.

Even wild animals know how to seek advantage and avoid harm.

"Downgrade from Level 1 to Level 2 combat readiness," Lin Yu said. "Legendary units should continue their shifts as usual, and turrets should be kept at 60% charge. If it returns, bring it back."

【clear.】

Lin Yu turned and walked down from the observation platform.

The tension that had been building for days eased slightly, but his face didn't show any relief. Whether the void creature retreated or not was a minor matter. What truly weighed on his mind was another string of numbers.

The system's core energy is 12%.

There are eleven days left until the system completely shuts down.

He returned to the small world and went to the Xuandu Purple Mansion first.

Purple mist swirls around the peaks of Zifu Mountain, where the statue of the True Lord stands majestically and serenely in the highest hall.

Lin Yu sat down on the futon, not in a hurry to cultivate, but first went through the events of the past few days in his mind.

The closure of the Northeast Passage is only a matter of time.

Elana the elf was well-behaved and contributed to the battle; the compensation of the Primal Energy Queen had already been transferred, and the score was settled.

The ruins of Aura are a thousand kilometers away, and the technological data is being moved to the Zerg side little by little. Forty percent of the non-military data has been absorbed.

The Red Demon was confined to a separate area within the heart chamber, watched over by a three-layer monitoring network, and behaved very well.

All things considered, he finally had a rare period of time that he could control himself.

Lin Yu never thought that being "idle" was a good thing. In his view, having nothing to do only meant that he was not prepared enough for the trouble that was about to come.

He opened his eyes and took out two items from his storage space.

Two boxes.

One is a random legendary item given by the system, and the other is a legendary equipment box.

After fighting so many battles, he had almost forgotten about these two things.

Now that I have some free time, I might as well open it and take a look. If it's useful, great; if not, I'll just give it to the queen to decompose.

He opened the equipment box first.

The lid of the box popped open, and a soft light rose up. After the light dissipated, a silver-white arm guard lay inside. It had no extra patterns on its body, except for a line of extremely fine system inscriptions engraved on the inside of the wrist.

Lin Yu picked it up, and the panel information popped up.

[Silent Flow Armguard (Legendary Grade, Mid-Grade): Forms a "Silent Flow Field" on the body, shielding the wearer's energy characteristics and soul fluctuations, making them appear as a lifeless object to external detection. The shielding strength increases with the energy injected; detectors below the legendary grade cannot penetrate it. Can withstand three legendary-grade directional scans per day.]

Lin Yu's eyes narrowed slightly.

This thing came at just the right time.

He was planning to probe the system. The worst thing about probing the system was being targeted by it in return. This arm guard could conceal his energy and soul fluctuations, essentially adding an extra layer of protection.

"Not bad at all." He put on the arm guards and tried to inject a trace of source energy.

A nearly invisible film adhered to his skin, and his outward aura instantly vanished. Even the purple aura around him no longer gathered towards him, as if the person sitting on the futon was not a mid-level legendary figure, but a stone.

He nodded in satisfaction and picked up the box containing the random legendary item.

The box contained a black chip about the size of a coin, with a smooth front and nine concentric rings on the back, each ring engraved with dense markings.

[Boundary Compass (Legendary/Special): Sensing and indicating weak points, man-made passages, and spatial anchors within a certain range of the "World Barrier." It has additional sensing capabilities for fixed passages established by the system. Note: The compass only provides directions, not protection.]

It's another item used for exploration.

Lin Yu twirled the black chip, his fingertip tracing the nine rings. The outermost eight rings were lit, while the innermost ring was dark, as if it lacked sufficient permissions and hadn't been activated.

He tried to pour source energy into it, but the dark ring remained unmoved.

"The ninth ring..." Lin Yu murmured.

The ninth floor.

The words left by the first group of contacts on the stone tablet in the Rift Corridor resurfaced in his mind—"There's nothing there, only nothingness."

He didn't dwell on it too much and carefully put away the compass and arm guard.

Two items, one hidden, one searching. It was as if someone knew in advance what he was going to do and deliberately gave them to him.

Lin Yu never believed in coincidences. But the item was issued by the system and its origin was clear. He checked it twice and found no backdoors or markings on it before he felt comfortable using it.

After leaving the Purple Mansion, he went to the Valley of Spirit Medicine.

The door to Qingmingzi's alchemy room was ajar. The old Taoist's spirit was tending the furnace, fanning it with a palm-leaf fan, keeping the fire as steady as if it had been measured with a ruler.

"You've arrived." Qingmingzi didn't even look up. "Sit down. Don't touch that shelf; it's drying pills for those big guys from the Zerg to return to their origins. If you spill them, I'll have to refine them for another three days."

Lin Yu sat down in the chair, took out the shattered Sky Armor and the almost burnt-to-charcoal Hun Tian Cloak, and placed them on the table.

"Can these two items still be repaired?"

Qingmingzi then raised his eyes, put down his palm-leaf fan, and picked up the shattered upper armor to examine it. His soul's fingers ran through the armor plates, feeling the remaining array patterns inside.

"The armor can be repaired, the main material is not damaged, but the array patterns were broken in thirty-seven places by that black guy's punch."

Use the Eternal Gold in your hand to redraw the patterns, and then have that iron lump... what's it called again, Aura? Use its precise methods to weld the armor plates back on; it should restore about 80-90% of its original state.

"Where's the cape?"

Qingmingzi picked up the charred cloak; the aura of its spirit, Huntian, was as faint as a wisp of smoke about to go out. The old Taoist frowned.

"This is troublesome. The spirit of the artifact hasn't dissipated, but the original fabric that carried it has burned through. We need to find a legendary material to reweave it."

You don't have any right now, so keep it warm and don't let it exert any more effort. Keep it alive while you wait for the materials.

Lin Yu nodded. He pushed the two pieces of armor back, then took out the Soul Nourishing Wood Elixir, and placed a small bottle on the table.

"Is this enough for Hun Tian to sustain his life?"

Qingmingzi glanced at it, his eyebrows twitching slightly: "Enough to last it for half a year. You're usually so stingy, but you're being generous this time."

"If the equipment breaks, I'll lose a layer of protection, and it'll cost me my life." Lin Yu left the Wood Heart Elixir, stood up, and asked, "How long will it take to repair the armor?"

"Give me the Eternal Gold, and have Aura produce a precision component that can weld armor plates. Five days."

"Three days."

"...Four days, no less. The array patterns must be nurtured one by one; it can't be rushed."

"OK."

Lin Yu didn't linger in the alchemy room and turned to leave. He treated everyone this way. Qing Mingzi had saved his life and refined pills for him, making him one of the few people in the world he wouldn't be wary of, but there weren't many unnecessary words exchanged between them. It was a mutually beneficial arrangement; he was alive so the old Taoist would have a place to stay—this had been agreed upon from the beginning.

After leaving the Valley of Spirit Medicine, he made a detour to Tangtang's Garden.

Nothing else, just passing by.

Tangtang was squatting on the ground, watering the row of pale golden sunflower seedlings, while Jinling was dozing on the World Tree seedling called "Little Green". Hearing footsteps, Tangtang turned around, her face immediately brightening.

"Big brother!"

"Hmm." Lin Yu walked over and glanced at the seedlings. They had grown taller than a few days ago, and the golden sheen on their leaves was more pronounced. "The passage to the Northeast is closing. There won't be any fighting recently, so you don't need to wear your armor all the time."

"I know!" Tangtang nodded, then pointed proudly to the corner of the garden, "Look, Aunt Queen Insect made me something new."

A small biomass pool has appeared in the corner, with a dozen or so glowing seeds floating on the surface, each one covered by a thin film of light.

"I figured this out myself," Tangtang said with a hint of pride. "The sunflower seeds are warmed with source energy, which doubles the germination rate. Once they grow, I plan to plant them on the outermost defensive line of the divine body. Aren't the black-armored people afraid of my source energy? More flowers will also form a defensive line."

Lin Yu squatted down and looked at the seeds for a moment.

He could tell that Tangtang wasn't joking. Her source energy naturally countered the system's energy, a fact that had already been proven when fighting the Black Armor Leader. If he could plant sunflowers on the defensive line, it would be like adding another layer of fixed countermeasures at a low cost.

"That's the right approach," he said. "Have the queen insect designate a test area for you, plant a thousand seedlings first, and test if they can survive in a virtual environment. If they do, then expand the program."

"Okay!" Tangtang nodded vigorously.

Lin Yu patted her head and got up to leave. Tangtang stopped him, rummaged in her pocket, and pulled out a small, crooked bracelet made of sunflower stems, with a dried flower the size of a fingernail attached to it.

"Here, take this." Tangtang handed over the bracelet. "You kept that dried flower from last time. You can wear this on your wrist to ward off bad luck."

Lin Yu stared at the bracelet and remained silent for two seconds.

He didn't believe in any kind of disaster-preventing magic. But he still took it, and instead of putting it in his storage space, he put it directly on his left wrist, right next to the newly acquired Silent Flow Armguard. The contrast between the hard and soft armguards looked a bit odd.

"Alright, I'm leaving."

"Okay! Goodbye, big brother!"

As Lin Yu walked out of the garden, he glanced down at the small bracelet but didn't take it off.

He explained to himself that this was a trace of residual sugar energy, which might serve as a warning if it encountered system energy.

As for whether that was the reason, he didn't think about it deeply.

Back in the heart chamber, he circled around to the Red Demon's isolated area.

Red Demon was practicing his swordsmanship on a bio-mass dummy, wielding a heavy sword forged for him by the Queen of Insects in one hand. Having lost his left arm, his style had completely changed; every strike and movement was now fierce and powerful, using speed and strength to compensate for any openings. Seeing Lin Yu enter, he sheathed his sword, panting heavily and grimacing.

"Oh, what a rare guest."

"That passage to the Northeast is going to be closed." Lin Yu pulled up a chair and sat down, getting straight to the point. "I have a question for you; think about it carefully."

"you say."

"Mr. Fang's hideout," Lin Yu stared at him, "you said those people in gray uniforms move in perfect unison, but how perfectly synchronized? Do they blink? Do they breathe? Do two people walking together land on the same spot?"

The red demon was taken aback by the question and frowned, recalling for a while.

"Now that you mention it..." he began slowly, "I was quite far away at the time, but a group of people in gray uniforms passed right under my nose, about seven or eight of them, carrying things as they walked into the stronghold."

"Their footsteps made the same sound." The Red Demon's expression stiffened slightly. "Seven or eight people, walking with only one sound. I thought it was due to good training back then, but now that you're asking... how could a normal person train like that?"

"And they have faces," the Red Demon added. "I saw their faces clearly; they were expressionless. Not just tense, but completely expressionless, like they were wearing human skin masks, their eyes were blank."

The same footsteps, eyes fixed straight ahead.

Lin Yu wrote down these two points and added them to the clues he had previously gathered.

Within the core of the black-armored leader lies the soul of the gray-uniformed figure.

The gray-uniformed soldiers moved in perfect unison, and the area around the stronghold was unusually clean.

Mr. Fang is a seventh-level authority holder. When the system crashed and the panel failed, his people were able to maintain order and gather the survivors.

"One last question," Lin Yu said, "Where is his base located? Can you still find it?"

Red Demon shook his head: "There are no landmarks in the void. I escaped all the way here, and I couldn't find my way back. But I remember the direction. From the collapsed neighborhood world, I went southwest, passing through two particularly large fragments. One was a mountain made entirely of glass, and the other was a dead black ocean. After passing those two fragments, I was almost there."

Glass Mountain, Dead Black Sea.

Lin Yu marked the two locations.

"Okay, you can keep practicing." He stood up.

"Hey, Lin Yu," Red Demon called out to him from behind, "Are you going to see that guy surnamed Fang?"

Lin Yu didn't stop walking.

"Be careful." The Red Demon's voice deepened. "Although I've never dealt with him, I felt a chill run down my spine while I was outside that stronghold. Something was off about that place; it was even more unsettling than the Black-Armored Men."

Lin Yu waved his hand, indicating that he had heard, and walked out of that area.

Of course he will be careful.

In his eyes, Mr. Fang was now more dangerous than the Void Serpent. The Void Serpent wanted to devour him, which was obvious; Mr. Fang wanted to "support" him as some kind of variable, smiling while hiding a knife behind his back—that was the hardest to guard against.

Back at the main hive, Lin Yu connected to the communications between the Queen and Aura simultaneously.

"There's something I need you two to do together." He mentally unfolded a diagram of the void surrounding his divine body. "I need to investigate someone. Before that, I need to thoroughly examine everything he left behind."

【My Lord, please give your orders.】

【Please provide the object that needs to be parsed.】Aura's neutral voice followed.

Lin Yu took out the metal box.

Mr. Fang gave him his world database.

Hundreds of world maps, power distributions, lists of legendary powerhouses, and several memory crystals.

When he first received it, he only glanced at it briefly. At that time, Mr. Fang was still a "seventh-level authority holder who provided intelligence." Now that he is highly suspicious, he looks at this box of things with a completely different perspective.

"Put the maps and lists aside for now," Lin Yu said, placing the metal box on the mushroom mat platform. "I need you to investigate three things."

"First, do these maps and memory crystals contain a second layer of information—hidden coordinates, encrypted commands, markers that will send my location outwards? Don't miss anything."

"Second, compare all the maps Mr. Fang gave you with the actual void terrain that you yourself detected. Mark out all the discrepancies and areas where he tampered with them."

"Third," Lin Yu paused, "investigate the box itself. What is it made of? Does it contain any tracking, eavesdropping, or location tracking devices? I need to know if, from the day I received it, anything I said or did could have been transmitted through it."

The Queen and Aura should be deployed simultaneously.

"Analysis will take time. I will scan the material of the metal box layer by layer, and preliminary results are expected in six hours," Aura said.

"I'll give you twelve hours," Lin Yu said. "Check carefully. It's better to have a thousand wrong labels than to miss one."

【clear.】

After cutting off communication, Lin Yu did not leave the main nest, but stood in front of the void map for a long time.

His finger landed on a point on the map—the location marked on the stone rubbing by the grey-robed man, the Night Watchman, the outer coordinates of the core area of ​​the system.

There was also the coordinate sequence paper next to him, which contained a series of safe transfer coordinates, the escape route left for him by the Night Watch.

On one side is Mr. Fang, and on the other side is the system itself.

Lin Yu knew very well that these two lines would likely end up being the same one.

Aura said that the core of the system is not a machine, not a program, but something—that sentence was deleted.

Mr. Fang is a seventh-level access holder, someone with the ability to delete data; there are very few people like him in the entire system.

"Twelve hours." Lin Yu looked at the picture and said to himself in a low voice, "First, strip away everything you left behind, then go see what you've been doing."

……

Twelve hours later, the results came out.

Deep within the main nest, the Queen Insect spread an analysis report, jointly generated by the Perceptual Network and Aura, into Lin Yu's consciousness.

Lin Yu read through the list one by one, his expression growing increasingly flat until it became completely expressionless. This was the look he only showed when he was truly angry or truly on guard.

First, the metal box itself.

[A set of dormant micro-rune arrays, made of crystallized system primordial energy, was detected in the interlayer of the box.] Aura's voice rang out. [It doesn't actively emit signals; it's in a "passive recording" state—when energy fluctuations of a specific frequency occur nearby, it records and caches them, waiting to be retrieved all at once by a higher-level device.]

"Record what?"

[It records the spatial coordinates of each time you activate it, as well as the energy level you emitted at that time.] Aura paused, [In simpler terms: it records where you've been and how much stronger you've become. The cache shows that it has already retrieved data remotely three times.]

Lin Yu tapped his fingertip lightly on the table.

three times.

In other words, from the day Mr. Fang handed him this box, his whereabouts and growth were right under Mr. Fang's nose. He had taken the box into the divine body, returned to the small world, and gone to the ruins and fragments; Mr. Fang had a copy of all these coordinates.

Fortunately, his true core elements—the Divine Core, Qingyuan, Tangtang's source energy, and the spirit of the Old God—were never displayed when the box was opened.

"Can we retaliate?"

"Yes," Aura said. "I can forge a fake set of coordinates and energy levels to feed it, making it continue to send out information, but what it sends out is what we want the other side to see. Or we can just destroy it."

"Keep it." Lin Yu said almost without hesitation. "Forge a copy. Give it coordinates to a fake location that randomly drifts around the area where it feeds its divine body, and suppress the energy level to the early stage of Legendary, so it will think that I haven't gotten stronger lately, but have been injured and hiding everywhere."

He didn't intend to alert the enemy.

This box is like an eye that Mr. Fang has offered. If you gouge it out, Mr. Fang will immediately know that he's become suspicious and will switch to a more subtle approach. Keeping this eye out and filling it with falsehoods can, in turn, lead the other party's judgment.

[Understood. The second thing is map comparison.]

The Queen of Insects unfolded the two overlapping void maps. One was given to her by Mr. Fang, and the other was based on Aura's month-long testing and Lin Yu's personal experience. The overlapping areas were one color, and the mismatched areas were another color.

There are a total of seventeen discrepancies on the entire map.

[Fourteen of these are minor discrepancies, likely caused by terrain movement during the world's overlap, and not necessarily man-made.] The Queen reported. [However, three of these were deliberately modified.]

Three glaring red dots lit up on the image.

[First, Mr. Fang's map marked a stable system channel as a "high-risk collapse zone," when in reality our reconnaissance bug had traversed it and the channel remained intact. Second, he marked a genuine void turbulence area as a "safe route." Third—]

The queen insect's voice paused for a moment.

[Thirdly, in the blind spots where all the maps were pieced together, he erased an entire area. That area actually existed in the actual measurements and was quite large, but none of the more than one hundred maps he provided showed it; it was as if someone had neatly erased a piece with an eraser.]

Lin Yu stared at the blank space.

The area that was erased was in a very subtle location.

It lies precisely between the "glass mountain fragment" and the "black dead sea fragment" mentioned by the Red Demon.

It happens to be right next to the "coordinates of the outer perimeter of the system's core area" marked on the Night Watch rubbing.

While Mr. Fang was leading people down dead ends and marking the way out as a dead end on the map, he also completely hid an entire area next to the core of the system.

What is he hiding? And who is he preventing from finding it?

"The third thing," Lin Yu's voice was flat, "What about the memory crystal?"

"The explicit contents of the memory crystals are fine; they're the lists of factions and the files of powerful individuals," Aura said. "However, at the very bottom of one of the crystals, we discovered a folded, encrypted fragment. It uses encryption at the seventh level of system access, which you cannot directly decrypt with your current permissions."

"Can we go around that?"

"I tried twelve different methods, but I couldn't crack it by force; that would trigger self-destruction and alert the encryptor," Ola said. "But I could read its 'shell information'—the time this fragment was created and the time it was last written."

"When?"

The last entry was made nineteen days ago.

Nineteen days ago.

Lin Yu quickly calculated in his mind. Nineteen days ago, it was exactly one after the collapse of the community world, the complete disappearance of the Balance Organization, and Old Chen being forcibly taken away by that force.

At that critical juncture, Mr. Fang wrote something locked at the very bottom of this "gift" using the seventh level of access control.

Lin Yu closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the vague guess in his mind had solidified into a cold, hard object.