As Mou Xuan held Chen Yao's wrist and walked through the crowd, the warmth of the future bloody scene still lingered on his fingertips.
The sizzling sound of fat on the barbecue grill suddenly made him feel nauseous. The smell strangely overlapped with the burnt stench of burning corpses in his memory.
"Mr. Cui!" he shouted at the young man with glasses who was huddled in the shadow of the campfire. The half-eaten rabbit leg in the other's hand fell to the cinder ground with a "plop".
This civil engineer, who had just been assigned to the infrastructure team last year, was now shaking like a quail in a rainstorm.
Chen Yao bent down to pick up the rabbit leg, wiped it casually on her combat uniform, and stuffed it back into Engineer Cui's hand: "Take us to see the crack you found." Her voice was like a dagger dipped in ice water. The reveling crowd around them suddenly quieted down. Someone kicked over half a box of beer, and the glass bottles rolled into the darkness with a clang.
Engineer Cui adjusted his crooked silver-framed glasses and swept the beam of his flashlight across the concrete base at the base of the wall as he led them through three sentry posts.
Mou Xuan suddenly grabbed the back of his neck: "Stop!" The tactical boots crushed the thin ice, revealing a crack as wide as a fingernail underneath - like a dead centipede, greedily gnawing at the foundation.
"It appeared after the snowstorm last week." Engineer Cui's Adam's apple rolled up and down, "I tried to pour cement slurry, but the temperature was twenty degrees below zero..." He suddenly shuddered, because Mou Xuan was using a military knife to dig into the crack, and the tip of the knife came with the teeth-grinding sound of steel bars breaking.
Chen Yao suddenly pulled off her scarf and pressed her steaming neck against the concrete wall.
Mou Xuan saw the white frost on her eyelashes tremble: "There is a cavity three meters below, at least two adults can hide there." The white mist she exhaled when she spoke smelled of rust, which was the sequelae of excessive use of mental detection.
"Notify all district chiefs to complete a cross-check of the base's defense network within three hours." Mou Xuan's tactical gloves scraped the edge of the crack, bringing up a string of ice chips, "Focus on checking all people who have handled building materials in the past three months, especially..." He suddenly fell silent, and the crisp sound of metal collision came from not far away.
Chen Yao had already pounced out like a cheetah, and the bayonet drew a cold arc in the moonlight.
Five breaths later, she came back carrying a boy with coal dust all over his face. In the child's arms was a piece of rebar that had been frozen into a lump of ice.
Mou Xuan narrowed his eyes and recognized that this was Fatty Shao's favorite apprentice in the Logistics Department.
"Notify Director Shao that I need five tons of quick-setting cement and three hundred supporting steel frames." He said as he crushed the child's dropped work badge with the toe of his shoe. The photos under the plastic film glowed with an eerie blue light in the snow. "Tell him that if it is not ready within two hours..." Before he finished speaking, a loud noise of concrete cracking suddenly came from the northwest corner, which sounded like the sound of a zombie tide breaking through the defense line in a future scene.
Chen Yao's pupils suddenly contracted, and she saw that Mou Xuan's right hand behind his back was trembling at a strange frequency - that was a sign that he was activating his time ability.
The moonlight suddenly dimmed for a moment, and when everyone came to their senses, three intersecting bloodstains had appeared out of thin air in the cracks of the wall, as fresh as if they had just been carved with a hot iron.
The tungsten filament light bulb in Fatty Shao's office had poor contact, making his greasy face flicker.
Mou Xuan stared at the other person's thick lips and found that this person always liked to use his fingernails to pick the wood lacquer on the corner of the table when he spoke, and the crumbs fell on the report full of numbers.
"Captain Mou, look at this." Fatty Shao spread out the account book, and the smell of cigarettes came over as he turned the pages. "The quick-setting cement was borrowed by the West District last month to build a watchtower, but there are still some supporting steel frames left..." He suddenly started coughing violently, and the collar of his work clothes stained with sauce was shining with oil as his fat neck shook.
Chen Yao suddenly stabbed the bayonet into the account book, and the blade accurately pierced through the four red words "Building Materials Inventory": "Director Shao, this was not what you said when you used concrete to build a doghouse for your mistress last week." The ice crystal pendant hanging on the handle jingled. It was a fragment of time and space that Mou Xuan solidified with his supernatural powers.
There were hurried footsteps outside the house, and when Team Leader Wang of the inspection team pushed open the door, a fishy wind blew in.
The bandage on his left arm was oozing blood, and ice formed on his cuffs: "The power grid base of the No. 3 outpost has cracked, and two brothers were scratched by steel bars while repairing it." He swallowed the second half of the sentence with his Adam's apple rolling - the wound was turning black at an odd speed.
Mou Xuan suddenly grabbed the enamel pot on the table and poured the boiling hot wolfberry tea onto the diagram of the cracks on the wall.
The brown water stains spread along the red line of the fortifications, completely overlapping with the newly collapsed gap in the northwest corner.
Chen Yao noticed that the little finger on his right hand was twitching slightly, which was the aftereffect of excessive use of time reversal.
"Old Shao, I remember your daughter is on duty in the medical team?" Mou Xuan used a tactical dagger to peel the frozen wolfberries, and the pulp fell on the back of Fatty Shao's trembling hand. "The virus laboratory needs volunteers to test the new vaccine tonight..."
Before he could finish his words, he was interrupted by the loud noise of a metal shelf falling to the ground.
From outside the door came the apprentice's cry: "Cold storage!
The load-bearing columns of the cold storage..." When Chen Yao dodged out, she saw a wall of frozen meat falling down in the icy mist at the end of the corridor, and the groaning of the twisted steel bars sounded like the wailing of some dying creature.
Fatty Shao suddenly started rummaging for his keychain like crazy, the fat on his waist banging against the iron cabinet, "Third floor underground!
The spare quick-setting cement is three floors underground! "His gold-rimmed glasses slid down to the tip of his nose, revealing his bloodshot eyes," but the transportation requires a heavy forklift, and the current battery power..."
Mou Xuan tore down the power transmission network map hanging on the wall, and suddenly stopped when his fingertips passed over a dark red mark.
Chen Yao came back from the icy fog, frost on the ends of her hair: "It was man-made damage, and there are traces of acetylene burning on the cut." She threw the half-broken chain on the table. There were still unmelted blue ice crystals stuck to the inside of the chain link - exactly the same color as the antifreeze distributed by the supply department.
"Inform the kitchen staff to boil 20 pots of water." When Mou Xuan picked up the intercom, a countdown of three hours suddenly appeared on the face of his watch. "Drain the fuel tanks of all idle vehicles, and give priority to the construction area with diesel generators." He turned to look at Fatty Shao, who was slumped in his chair, and the shadow of gears turning flashed in his pupils: "Let your people move the cement to Engineer Yin's old laboratory, immediately."
Chen Yao's action of wiping the bayonet suddenly stopped.
The name that was kept secret by the entire base was like a rusty nail stuck in the suddenly quiet air.
Amid the whistling sound of the wind outside the corridor, the sound of some sophisticated instrument being turned on could be faintly heard, strangely overlapping with the rhythm of the cracks in the wall spreading.
Continue read on readnovelmtl.com
