The hunched figure moved. He didn't touch Lin Mo. Instead, he bent down, reaching out his claw-like hands, also wrapped in oily cloth, and began to clear the twisted and deformed metal fragments that had trapped Lin Mo. His movements were unexpectedly... precise? With a stability and efficiency that was almost mechanical, at odds with his appearance. Under his fingers and a rusty, yet incredibly sharp-edged metal crowbar he had procured from nowhere, the rusted metal groaned harshly as it was pried apart and removed bit by bit.

Lin Mo watched all this in astonishment, even temporarily forgetting the pain. This person... wasn't here to kill him? Was he... saving him?

"Uh...why...why..." Lin Mo used all his strength to squeeze out a few broken syllables from his hoarse throat.

The hunched figure didn't pause in his movements, not even glancing at him. Only the red light of his mechanical eye flickered slightly as he spoke. A voice, hoarse and dry, as if it hadn't spoken in centuries, accompanied by a heavy dose of electromagnetic interference, suddenly rang out in Lin Mo's ears, not through the air, but more like a direct impact on his auditory nerves:

“…The light…hasn’t…extinguished…”

The sound was intermittent, like a broken radio with poor connection. "...worth...a...bit...of...waste..."

Light? Waste?

Lin Mo couldn't understand it at all. Was he referring to the faint light in his left eye? Was he saving him because he still had value as "waste"?

At that moment, a hunched figure cleared the last piece of twisted metal plate from pinning Lin Mo's left leg. The excruciating pain made Lin Mo's vision go black. At the same time, he felt the other person's bony fingers, with a strange, inhuman, cold touch, quickly press on several broken bones in his body, as if to confirm the injury. The movement was so fast that it seemed like a phantom.

Then, the hunched figure leaned over and roughly threw Lin Mo onto his bony back like a bag of garbage. This action once again triggered a sharp pain throughout Lin Mo's body, making him almost faint. He could clearly feel the protruding, hard joints on the other person's hunched back.

"Ugh..." Lin Mo let out a painful groan.

The hunched figure didn't care at all and carried him with an agility that was completely inconsistent with his appearance. Like a gecko that had adapted to gravity, he quickly crawled out of the wreckage of the escape capsule and stepped onto the desolate and deadly surface of the garbage planet, which was composed of metal debris, solidified waste and gray-black dust.

Garbage planet, surface of "Rusted Heart", East District 7, edge of Waste Canyon.

The air here is even more filthy, carrying a strong, acidic, corrosive odor. Vast abandoned reactors, like the carcasses of steel behemoths, stand silently on either side of the canyon. Rusted pipes, like dying blood vessels, hang from the cliffs. At the bottom of the canyon flows a viscous, fluorescent industrial waste stream, like a festering boil on a planet. At the canyon's edge, in a relatively flat area, lie low, chaotic shanties forcibly constructed from discarded living quarters, twisted spacecraft hulls, and shattered alloy plates. This is the "nest" of East District 7, a gathering place for scavengers and mutants struggling on the brink of death.

The air was filled with despair, numbness, and a sense of raw violence that could erupt at any moment for a sip of clean water or a half-dead energy battery.

The old dog carried Lin Mo as if he were carrying a bundle of scavenged scrap metal. He ignored the numb, greedy, and wary gazes from the surrounding shacks and headed straight for a most inconspicuous corner on the edge of the canyon. There, half-embedded in the mountainside, was a "door" welded from thick, discarded spaceship armor. There were no markings on the door, only traces of countless years of rust and suspicious dark brown stains.

The old dog stretched out his bony fingers and rapidly pressed a few times on an equally rusted metal panel beside the door. A complex, ever-shifting series of dark red runes lit up on the panel, followed by a heavy "click" as it unlocked. The heavy armored door silently slid inward, a gap just wide enough for one person to pass through. A stronger, strange smell, a mixture of motor oil, disinfectant, chemicals, and some kind of... high-frequency energy field, the distinctive ozone scent, hit him in the face.

The door closed silently behind him, blocking out the polluted air and prying eyes outside.

The interior was far larger than it appeared from the outside, and also… far stranger. It was a complex complex of abandoned spaceship cabins and mining equipment operating rooms, crudely welded and connected. The lighting was dim, illuminated only by a few hanging emergency lights emitting a pale glow and various old instruments with blinking indicators in the corners.

The space was haphazardly divided into several areas. One side was filled with mechanical prosthetics of varying models and ages, powered exoskeleton components, and electronic devices with exposed circuit boards and chips, like a warehouse of a frantic prosthetics doctor. On the other side, rows of metal shelves were filled with various biological organ specimens (some clearly not human) immersed in an unknown, murky liquid. There were also various chemical tanks labeled with hazard symbols. The air was filled with the pungent smell of chemical reagents.

The most eye-catching area was the central area of ​​the space. There stood a massive, complex "operating table," a forcible patchwork and modification of various medical devices from different eras and models. Extending from its periphery were countless robotic arms of varying thicknesses, equipped with tools such as laser cutters, high-frequency welding heads, syringes, and bio-scanning probes, all gleaming with a cold metallic sheen. Above the table hung a complex scanning array composed of multiple optical lenses and sensors, resembling the eyes of a compound spider, emitting a faint blue light.

My dear, there is more to this chapter. Please click on the next page to continue reading. It will be even more exciting later!