After two not-so-funny jokes, Jinmo politely put out his cigarette and began to briefly recount his exploration of the outside world.

In fact, their experience was not complicated. It was nothing more than crossing the plains, crossing the swamps, reaching the village, killing them all, and then returning along the same route.

But precisely because of this, a certain seemingly uncoordinated part in the middle became a knot in Jinmo's heart.

“I know that if we stay in the swamp settlement, we can get more information and intelligence.

“I also know that many of them have no idea of their current condition or even why they died.

"But since they don't have any memory of what happened after they fell asleep, we can't infer whether the mysterious ritual is performed once a week, once a day, or at some other frequency. I must put the interests of Hope City first and the lives of the team first..."

Jin Mo, who put out his cigarette, seemed to be telling a story, but in fact he was convincing himself.

Lin Qingliu didn't interrupt much. He pretended to scribbled something in his notebook, waiting for the other party to finish explaining himself.

"To be on the safe side, I used my power to cover every corner of the swamp settlement. No matter whether it was people, trees, or even the crops planted in the settlement, nothing survived.

"We lost a lot of valuable intelligence because of this."

"But you don't regret it, do you?"

Lin Qingliu put down his pen, raised his head and asked.

Jin Mo nodded without hesitation.

"Maybe a little at the time, but after linking this matter to the Nian team, it's completely gone."

"Bad news."

Lin Qingliu's expression became more serious:

"Today is October 31st, and the external exploration phase of the exploration plan officially ends today.

"Do you know how many superpower teams have successfully returned?"

Jin Mo looked at Lin Qingliu's expression and wanted to guess some numbers, but felt that he should not jump to conclusions, so he finally shook his head.

"Two teams, ten people."

Jinmo felt that this answer was beyond his expectations, but it was indeed reasonable.

On paper, her team is the strongest, but the other teams also have their own strengths and should not be easily underestimated.

"Whose team is it? Crush? Or Wind Blade or White Stone? Their teams are all very strong."

Lin Qingliu shook his head.

"As an eyewitness, you should understand that the greatest danger outside the city is invisible. It would be biased to only look at the frontal combat capabilities."

Seeing that there were only two options left, Lin Qingliu did not hide his thoughts and directly announced the answer:

"It's Fresnel's team."

"It turned out to be him."

A look of surprise flashed across Jinmo's face. After all, Fresnel was not an unknown person. His strange ability of being a lightsaber superman during the day but not as good as normal people at night made it easy for people to remember him.

She felt that she needed to take another look at the information of this humble team to lay a solid foundation for possible future cooperation.

"What I want to say is that the reason why the number of teams that successfully returned did not reach '1' is inseparable from your caution and carefulness."

"No need to counsel me anymore, I just have a few questions I want to discuss with you."

Jin Mo waved his hand to stop Lin Qingliu from speaking next, and asked instead:

"Doctor, what do you think the possibility is that this 'sanctuary' exists?

“Although it can be basically confirmed that those people are puppets controlled by creatures outside the city, the more I think about it, the more I feel that the ‘underground shelter’ they mentioned must be real.

"If this thing doesn't really exist, then it would be very unreasonable to invent such a concept to deceive people."

Jin Mo took his legs off the table, put his hand on his chin and showed a thoughtful expression:

"But the man said it so easily, which shows that it doesn't seem to be important."

The corner of Lin Qingliu's mouth twitched slightly, and she thought to herself that she did have a spy outside the city surveying the terrain for her. If she asked again in a few months, she might even have a map.

Thinking of this, Lin Qingliu could only combine some of his own thoughts to deduce some related possibilities for Jinmo, including some thoughts about the biofield.

Jinmo listened carefully, and finally said with emotion:

"From my perspective as an outsider, your prospects for working at a research institute should be very bright."

Lin Qingliu did not say that he shot the arrows first and then drew the target. He just told some information that he had inferred through many incidents and fake bodies. He passed over the topic and began to guide the other party's psychology in a real sense.

Half an hour later, the tense Jin Mo relaxed a lot, and the smoke in the room dissipated little by little.

With the sound of Lin Qingliu's finger snap, the other party fell into a deep sleep leaning on the back of the soft single sofa, and Lin Qingliu invaded the dream of this super-powered man and began to watch the memories from a first-person perspective.

Ten minutes later, Lin Qingliu, who had received the hint, was the first to wake up from the dream. He began to summarize some recent information while Jinmo was still asleep.

According to Jinmo's memory, the straight-line distance between the swamp settlement and the southernmost tip of Hope City would not exceed sixty kilometers, but it seemed a little far away because of the special terrain.

Judging from the mysterious rituals performed by the residents at night, under normal circumstances the swamp settlement is separated from the external mycelium ecosystem and is more like a "colony" of mycelium outside itself.

Otherwise, even if those people are truly pure human beings, they will lose themselves little by little due to the erosion of the biofield.

This situation probably occurs due to two reasons. The mycelium cannot directly erode this area because there may be some substances in the swamp that are very harmful to them, so the alien beasts can only be sent out sporadically.

After confirming this, in order to obtain more information related to humans, the mycelial life simply separated out this problematic area, allowing some humans who were controlled or resurrected by them to a certain extent to live a difficult life in it.

Based on the cleanliness of the square in the swamp settlement, Lin Qingliu believed that these people should hold a ceremony every night.

This ritual can gather and strengthen the biological field, and upload the information about Hope City that the puppets have obtained from real humans. This matter has been accumulated for twenty years, and some information that is not very timely may have been clearly understood by the mycelial will.

How insidious...

Lin Qingliu frowned unconsciously. Even if it was a consciousness generated by collective life, this mycelium might be a little too anthropomorphic.

Deception, concealment, disguise... these things all need to be learned. In the very beginning, when the mycelium just arrived on this planet with the meteorite, when it had not yet spread over a large area, who gave it such ability?