novel bin Chapter 138: Surrounding Manhattan in Half an Hour!
Chapter 138: Surrounding Manhattan in Half an Hour!
Chapter 138: Surrounding Manhattan in Half an Hour!
Alex crossed his arms, waiting with a cold smile for Pei Qi's retort.
Based on his understanding of the man, this guy had an arrogance that seemed to come from a higher dimension, like a spectator watching a show, and would definitely respond with an extremely malicious joke or an even more outrageous argument.
But to Alex's surprise...
Pei Qi did not respond to his words.
The imposing outfit he was wearing had already been hidden by the [Fashion Transmogrification] effect.
At this moment, Pei Qi looks like an ordinary white-collar worker wearing a fitted trench coat and with his hair neatly combed.
However, this seemingly unsuspecting "ordinary person" gradually lost his smile after hearing these sarcastic remarks.
The temperature of the surrounding air seemed to plummet to freezing point in that instant.
"Don't worry about my grades. After all, in this messed-up universe, only those who survive have the right to define what morality is."
Pei Qi raised his wrist, glanced at the holographic tactical panel, and his tone became extremely cold and serious.
"That's enough small talk. Now that you've proven through that questionnaire that you're not just a piece of trash who only knows how to kill on instinct, let's get down to business."
"I have completed all the preliminary infrastructure preparations for the final step of the 'extermination process'."
Pei Qi raised his head, his calm voice echoing across the empty ruins.
"The final step?"
Alex frowned, a strong sense of unease rising within him.
"What extermination procedure?"
Pei Qi didn't answer directly, but instead pointed behind Alex.
"Turn around and look around, Alex."
Alex, filled with doubt and wariness, slowly turned around.
At first, he didn't notice anything unusual.
The distant ruins were still burning, and dark red virus spores still floated in the sky.
Everything looked exactly the same as before he bent down to fill out the questionnaire.
But in the next second, the Blacklight virus's abnormal visual nerves began to automatically adjust the focus.
Alex's pupils, like a cat's eyes that have been exposed to a bright light, instantly shrank into a vertical line!
He saw it!
Several kilometers away from their neighborhood, at the edge of a field of vision that is beyond the limits of ordinary human vision.
At the boundary between the sky and the ground, a layer of extremely faint yet real distortion appeared.
It was as if someone had erected a gigantic magnifying glass on the edge of Manhattan.
Looking out over that boundary at the Hudson River and across to New Jersey, everything appears to be distorted by an extremely subtle, unnatural refraction.
Alex took a few steps forward abruptly, the muscles around his eyes twitching wildly.
He pushed the capabilities of thermal imaging and macro observation in virus vision to their limits!
"What the hell is that thing?!"
Alex, who was known for his coldness and expressionless demeanor, had a slight, uncontrollable tremor in his voice at this moment.
It was a wall.
A giant wall made entirely of some kind of extremely transparent and pure material!
It was so high that it pierced the clouds over Manhattan, even disrupting normal airflow.
It was so thick that even from several kilometers away, Alex could accurately estimate, by using the parallax of his eyes, that the thickness of this transparent wall was definitely more than five meters!
[Item: Neutron Radiation Shielding Reinforced Glass]
[Source Module: HBM Core Technology]
In Alex's enhanced superhuman vision, this transparent giant wall had not a single seam, no screws, and no mortise and tenon joints.
There wasn't even any reinforced concrete as load-bearing support.
It's like a huge, monolithic crystal that suddenly appeared out of nowhere and stood there, as if it had existed there since ancient times.
He looked to the left along the transparent giant wall.
At the edge of the line of sight, the wall, with an extremely grand and precise arc without the slightest deviation, spanned countless blocks and disappeared into the thick smoke.
He suddenly turned his head to look to the right.
The same transparent giant wall continues to stretch endlessly along the Manhattan coastline!
There is no end!
No matter how far Alex looked, this transparent blast-proof wall, made of high-density polymer and depleted uranium interlayers, resembled an endless crystal python with its head and tail intertwined, tightly coiling around the edge of the entire Manhattan Island!
"You—you circled it up?"
Alex turned around abruptly and stared at Pei Qi as if he were a madman, feeling a chill run down his spine.
"You've built a dome around this island?!"
"To clarify, it's not just around the island."
Pei Qi put one hand in his pocket, extremely satisfied with Alex's look of utter disbelief.
"I have sealed off the entire subway network and sewer system, including the area 50 meters underground in Manhattan, with solid blast-proof stones."
"Congratulations, Alex. You are now inside a perfectly sterile petri dish, where not even a mutated mouse or a single viral spore can escape."
"This is impossible! This is absolutely impossible!"
Alex completely lost control of his emotions.
His common sense of physics and engineering, which belonged to Dr. Mercer, was frantically reporting errors in his mind.
"Do you take me for an idiot?! Manhattan Island is nearly 60 square kilometers in size! Its coastline stretches for tens of kilometers!"
Alex pointed to the giant wall in the distance.
"Build a ring-shaped defensive wall several hundred meters high, over five meters thick, and even sealing off underground network pipes?"
"Do you know how many cubic meters of building materials that would require?! Do you know how many tons of mass that would represent?!"
"Even if the US government were to use all its national resources, mobilizing all its engineering corps and heavy machinery, to pour concrete 24 hours a day without interruption."
"Just laying the foundation, erecting scaffolding, and waiting for the materials to solidify takes years!"
Alex stared intently at Pei Qi's seemingly harmless face, as if trying to find some flaw in it.
"And you—how long were you gone? Twenty minutes? Or half an hour?!"
"Are you trying to tell me that while I was working on those few math problems, someone, or some organization behind you, conjured up tens of millions of tons of special glass out of thin air and perfectly assembled them into a super spectacle that covers the entire city?!"
Alex's imagination began to run wild and out of control, and he even began to wonder if he had been poisoned by some kind of mental toxin.
"How did you do that? Do you have a pocket dimension filled with a million slaves?"
Or have you acquired some kind of superpower that allows you to accelerate localized time? Or perhaps—this is just some kind of visual hallucinogenic virus you forcibly implanted into my brain?!
Seeing Alex lost in his wild imagination and even starting to doubt the reality of life, Pei Qi finally couldn't help but laugh out loud.
"Slave labor? Time acceleration? Hallucinogenic virus?"
Pei Qi shook his head helplessly, looking at Alex as if he were a country bumpkin who, though intelligent, was firmly bound by primitive common sense.
"No wonder you can only take the path of biological mutation. Your imagination is too bound by the physical laws of carbon-based life."
Pei Qi took a step forward and looked directly into Alex's shocked eyes.
"First of all, please don't try to understand me using your outdated and incredibly backward civil engineering knowledge."
"When you build a house, you need blueprint approval, you need to level the land, you need to calculate load-bearing walls and wind resistance, and you even have to consider the workers' social insurance and housing fund and the drying period of concrete."
"But this is too slow, it's like a waste of life."
Pei Qi extended a finger and gently shook it.
"But in my understanding, architecture is simply a very basic coordinate-filling procedure."
"No cranes or scaffolding are needed."
"All I need is a storage box filled with material blocks, plus thousands of blueprint cannons powered by gears and clockwork."
"As long as I input the 'NBT blueprint file' into the system and fill it with enough gunpowder."
"Those cannons would fire hundreds of rounds per second, launching tens of thousands of tons of glass blocks directly into the air."
"They don't need to follow gravity, nor do they need to wait for solidification."
"As soon as they reach the preset XYZ three-dimensional coordinate axes, they will instantly transform from virtual to real and fit together perfectly."
Pei Qi, seeing Alex completely stunned, added, "Oh, by the way, as for where those tens of millions of tons of material came from..."
'
Pei Qi patted the seemingly flat pocket of his trench coat. "You'll never know how many black holes' masses are compressed into my body."
Alex was completely silenced.
Blueprint cannon? Coordinate filling? Compressed black hole?
He understood these words individually, but when put together, they were completely beyond his comprehension as a prototype of a virus.
He finally realized that the methods this casually dressed man possessed were completely above the fundamental logic of this world.
"So, what exactly do you want to do with this shield?" Alex's voice was dry and tight.
"I already said that."
Pei Qi's smile gradually turned cold as he turned to look at the infected city, which was still screaming madly inside a huge glass enclosure.
"After all, it takes a long time to completely eliminate a mutated hornet's nest covering sixty square kilometers."
"The most effective and least harmful method is to first completely cover it with a glass jar —"
"Then spray it in thoroughly with a whole can of deadly insecticide—"