Mou Xuan's mycelium burst out with blue arcs in the concrete debris, and the overlapping time afterimages in his tactical lenses made his temples throb.
Chen Yao suddenly grabbed his tactical vest, and his military boots drew a semicircle in the sea water that was over his knees: "At seven o'clock, there is something breathing in the waves!"
Assistant Liao was lying on the edge of the surging whirlpool, holding a tactical flashlight in his mouth and pressing a yellowed old newspaper against his chest with a waterproof film.
When half of a rusty ventilation duct emerged from the waves, the young man suddenly groaned - the engineer boy in the newspaper headline photo in 1972, the Big Dipper scar on the back of his neck was emitting phosphorescent light through the waterproof membrane.
"The time anchor points overlap!" Mou Xuan's mycelium suddenly wrapped around the two people's waists, and the tips of the mycelium pierced into the sea water seeping out of the bronze door.
The moment the ice-blue fluorescence exploded along the waterline, they saw countless amber-like corpses frozen in the thirty-meter-high wave wall - the same seven-star scar flashed on the back of each corpse's neck.
Chen Yao suddenly turned the muzzle of her shotgun, and the bullet brushed Assistant Liao's ear and hit the pattern on the bronze door.
The moment the wisteria carving cracked, a strange sound of gears jamming was heard from deep within the air-raid shelter, and the moss on the wall faded to gray at a speed visible to the naked eye.
"Not now!" Mou Xuan dragged the two of them towards the waves that were crystallizing. The moment the mycelium net caught the three of them, the sound of the tide in the entire space suddenly reversed.
The seawater seeping from the gap in the bronze door flowed back into a strange spiral, revealing the rusty mechanical gears behind the door - between the bearings engraved with production codes from the 1970s, there were some kind of translucent gelatinous nerve bundles entangled.
Assistant Liao suddenly slapped an old newspaper on the violently vibrating door panel, and the yellowed photo perfectly coincided with a protruding rivet somewhere on the gear set.
As the phosphorescent light in the shape of the Big Dipper flowed along the rivet lines, Chen Yao suddenly poked the barrel of the gun into the gap between the gears: "Twelve o'clock direction, three bursts ready!"
Mou Xuan's hyphae pierced into the nerve bundle nodes at the same time as the gunshot. In the double image caused by the disordered flow of time, he saw the boy in the engineer's hat in 1972 operating the dashboard behind the door. The scar on the back of the boy's neck was clearly some kind of biological interface, connecting to the slowly rotating star map module inside the bronze door.
"Hit that red pressure valve!" Assistant Liao suddenly took out a multifunctional military knife and threw it towards the center of the star map. The blade accurately stuck into the junction of the 1972 rivet and the 2023 mycelium.
The entire air-raid shelter emitted the humming sound of an old-fashioned cathode ray tube television being turned off, and the wisteria pattern on the bronze door suddenly burst into a blindingly bright light.
Dense time codes appeared on Mou Xuan's tactical lenses in the strong light. When he inserted the mycelium into the core of the star map module, the same coordinates of fifteen different eras suddenly emerged in the blue mist produced by the reaction of the refrigerant and the gelatinous nerve bundles - from 1972 to 2023, each red dot fell precisely on the position of this bronze door.
"It turns out to be a time-travel trap." Chen Yao suddenly smashed the crystallizing waves with the butt of his gun, revealing a bronze valve underneath that was connected to pipes from different eras.
As her combat boots crushed the last gelatinous bundle of nerves, the false starry sky above the dugout suddenly flickered like a projection with poor contact.
Mou Xuan's mycelium captured a set of encrypted coordinates before the valve was completely rusted. The mycelium veins automatically outlined a map of Shanghai's underground pipeline network on the damp wall - seven flashing Big Dipper marks were distributed in some kind of ancient formation along the undercurrent of the Huangpu River.
"These nerve bundles..." Assistant Liao suddenly picked up the half-dissolved gelatinous substance with tweezers. "In the 1972 supplement of Xinmin Evening News, it was mentioned that similar prehistoric biological tissues were found when laying underground pipe networks."
Suddenly, a wail of metal fatigue was heard from deep within the air-raid shelter, and the three of them simultaneously pounced on the collapsing bronze door projection.
At the last moment, Mou Xuan's mycelium entangled a fallen gear. When the mycelium from 2023 came into contact with the copper rust from 1972, the tactical lens suddenly reflected an underground facility full of culture cabins - in each cabin there was a sleeping "engineer boy" with a scar on the back of his neck.
The gears wrapped in mycelium suddenly emitted a string of binary codes before they completely rusted, and a familiar pharmaceutical company logo flashed across Mou Xuan's retina.
Chen Yao's military boots suddenly stepped on the vaporizing fragments of the bronze door. The moment the wisteria pattern disappeared, they heard hundreds of overlapping tidal echoes coming from thirty meters underground - as if countless bronze doors were opening at the same time at the bottom of the Huangpu River.
(Continued from the previous article)
The hyphae on Mou Xuan's fingertips moved across the damp wall, and the blue-purple electric arcs burned the patterns on the pipe network, making them sizzle.
Chen Yao knocked on the crystallizing remains of the bronze door with the butt of her gun, and suddenly picked out a piece of oily kraft paper from the peeling wisteria carvings.
The paper was soaked in sea water but was not damaged at all. The pen writing from 1972 was stained scarlet by the mucus secreted by the hyphae.
"This is..." The waterproof film on Assistant Liao's tactical gloves was suddenly corroded by the map, leaving scorch marks. He hurriedly used tweezers to pick up the newspaper fragments for comparison. "The longitude and latitude coordinates are automatically updating!"
Mou Xuan's tactical lenses were suddenly covered with blood mist, and his retina reflected fifteen flashing Big Dipper symbols.
When the tip of the hyphae pierced the pharmaceutical company's seal on the lower right corner of the kraft paper, the entire map suddenly projected a holographic image in the humid air - seven rotating star tracks were moving slowly along the undercurrent of the Huangpu River, and each light spot was marked with a depth coordinate accurate to the centimeter.
Chen Yao suddenly opened her collar to cool down, and the luminous paint on the shoulder straps of her tactical vest drew fluorescent arcs in the darkness: "Mr. Liao, are you sure the newspapers in 1972 didn't say that these slug-like things would recognize their masters?" She poked the gun barrel at the still squirming gelatinous nerve bundles on the ground. The translucent substances were trying to crawl towards a certain coordinate in the map projection.
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