Chapter 119

"Where are they now?" Lan Yanzhen asked Li Haohao.

"Barely any news," Li Haohao said. "But from the stuff Yi Ying's been advertising on the regional channel, there are five of them, and the total haul suggests they're around the fifty-third or fifty-fourth section."

"Excellent!" Lan Yanzhen glanced at the road sign above marking the fifty-second section, then honked twice. Behind her, a convoy of over thirty vehicles roared to life at the sound.

"Thirty-five people can clear stages way faster than five," Lan Yanzhen said confidently. "No way they'll snatch the reward before us this time."

At the same time, outside the fifty-eighth section, six motorhomes and one small SUV were making their final preparations.

Indeed, over the past ten to twenty days, her teammates' vehicles had all been upgraded from standard campers to small motorhomes, while Lin Tu's car remained a modest SUV, looking out of place.

But small as it was, it had everything. Radiator, air filter, oversized tires, protective bull bars, underbody guards... and a solar panel on top, perfectly embodying the phrase "small but mighty."

"According to Lu Zhu, the fifty-ninth section falls under the second tier of difficulty. If we're not careful, we could get stuck in there for ages without clearing it, so," Yi Ying organized, "everyone, list the items you crafted last night and today—what they are and how many—and I'll advertise them."

Over these days, not only Infinite Calamity players but others too had obtained more and more blueprints, to the point that opening the trading house meant scrolling for ages before finding what you needed.

So Yi Ying collected what her teammates crafted each day and advertised it uniformly on the regional channel.

However, she only handled the "lazy ones"; the professional black market trader Dong Huadan had her own methods and didn't need Yi Ying's help.

Little did Li Haohao know that because of this coincidence, he had completely misjudged which road section Lin Tu's team was on.

"I'll make the fuel engines and solar panels as usual." These two sold the best, so Lin Tu generally only made those.

Yi Ying nodded and reminded her, "The fuel engine market hasn't saturated yet. You can keep mass-producing them. Recently, a lot of people have been asking about repair tools, saying they'd pay a high price. Sister Lin, you might want to consider it."

Lin Tu nodded. "Three white items in exchange. If they agree, I'll do it."

Yi Ying gave an OK gesture.

Once all the teammates' items were handled, the group made their final preparations and drove into the untouched fifty-ninth section.

"A1D1Q17 Road"

Exits: "A1D1Q16 Road, 1000 km", "A1D1P17 Road, 1000 km"

"Be warned! A flood is spreading across this road. Monsters from the deep sea have broken through the water and are about to destroy the entire road. You must find their lighthouse in time and destroy it to protect your road. Otherwise, you'll have no way forward."

"A flood?" The six vehicles stopped before the sign to analyze the warning. Luo Yongzhi tried to stay optimistic. "A flood in the desert—how bad could it be? You could just open your mouth and drink, right?"

Lin Tu imagined a person being swallowed by a flood, their first reaction not fear but gulping down water.

Before she could laugh, Guan Suixing let out a cold chuckle. "Now I don't know whether to worry about the flood or the drought."

Her icy joke nearly froze people to death in the seventy-degree heat. Only Liu Sheng seemed to suddenly get it and covered his mouth to laugh.

"Keywords: flood, monsters, lighthouse," Lin Tu said. "From this sentence, there might also be a time limit. We must find and destroy the lighthouse before the monsters destroy the road."

The group gazed out at the silent, endless desert, unable to imagine where the flood and monsters were. They fell silent for a moment in unison.

"Let's move forward first," Dong Huadan said.

The six vehicles returned to the road and drove forward slowly, but this time, everyone was exceptionally vigilant. After about an hour, a rustling sound of crawling insects suddenly came from all around.

"Crunch—crunch—" It sounded like the crisp shell of chocolate being bitten through while eating ice cream, emanating from every direction.

"Stop!" Lin Tu honked twice.

From all around, little sand dunes suddenly rose, and then green, pale purple, and flesh-colored beetles emerged from within. They were flat and oval-shaped, covered entirely in shells. Their heads were at the very tip of the oval, extremely small, and seven pairs of dense jointed legs were hidden under the shell, only the traces of their legs digging through the sand visible.

"Giant deep-sea woodlice," Dong Huadan, well-traveled, immediately named them.

Lin Tu picked up a crossbow bought from the game, loaded an arrow, and shot at one of the big bugs.

With a thump, the arrow pierced through its body, bursting out a thick white pulp. Then the next deep-sea louse crawled over its head, and in a few bites, devoured the corpse before continuing toward the group.

"They're scavengers. They'll eat anything, and they're very good at it!" Dong Huadan quickly warned Lin Tu.

More and more deep-sea lice surged forward. Just as Lin Tu was about to take out matches and set them on fire, the lice stopped at the edge of the road. They seemed blocked by the road, lowering their heads to gnaw at the surface.

Layer upon layer of big bugs, dense yet uniformly stopped at the edge of the road—anyone with trypophobia would have a fit on the spot.

"Go!" They were endless and infinite. Staying here to stall for time was clearly unwise. Lin Tu immediately honked the horn and signaled everyone to move out.

Ahead, the deep-sea lice lined both sides of the road, piled up like two rows of small hills. After about five minutes of driving, the butler finally analyzed the data based on their speed of advance: "They will finish gnawing through the road in eight hours."

This section of road was a full thousand kilometers, and the players had already covered about a hundred. At the ideal maximum speed of 120 kilometers per hour, they would need nearly eight more hours to drive out of this section. That meant for the rest of the journey, they couldn't stop for even a second.

But speak of the devil.

Just as the players accelerated toward the finish, a massive head rose from the end of the road.

This head was almost taller than the sandstorm they'd encountered that day, casting a terrifying shadow over the desert under the blazing sun, dimming the sky. As its long, thick, vine-like legs were pulled out from underground and lifted into the air, sand cascaded like waterfalls, and countless suckers on its legs contracted and writhed, as if trying to absorb all the light from the sky.

"Damn!" Lin Tu couldn't help cursing.

"What the hell is that thing!" The players were about to lose it. "An octopus? Something like that blocking the road—are we supposed to fight it to the death?!"

"There's only one way now," Lin Tu remembered the warning on the road sign, "find the lighthouse and destroy it."

But where was the lighthouse? The players looked around, but tragically found only endless desert. The only suspicious things were the giant deep-sea lice and the octopus.

No wait—under Guan Suixing's direction, everyone noticed that in the distant desert, another pole shaped like a street lamp had emerged, its bright light making it seem as if there were two suns in the sky—an anglerfish.

"Stop!" Lin Tu honked twice.

There was no point in charging over recklessly. They needed to find a way to break the situation.

Apart from the monsters, there should still be a lighthouse, but here there was nothing else... Wait—Lin Tu suddenly realized that she had summarized three keywords earlier: monsters, lighthouse, and flood. She'd focused on the first two but ignored the third.

Hadn't the flood swallowed this road? Where was the flood?

Thinking about how these monsters had burst out of the ground, Lin Tu crouched down and brushed away the sand piled on the road with her hand. To her surprise, but also not, she found that beneath the sand wasn't the road surface, but a rough, flat surface of solidified white crystals.

"What is this?" The other players also noticed the road was wrong.

Dong Huadan crouched down, rubbed the crystal surface with her index finger, then put it to her mouth and said, "Salt."

"Why is the road salt?" Luo Yongzhi muttered.

"We're on a salt bridge!" Lin Tu, who excelled at geography, immediately linked this to the Salt Crust Road in this world and deduced their location—

In a desert lake, due to long-term evaporation, the surface forms a hard salt crust. Below the salt crust, several meters deep, lies the lake water, or brine.

That is to say, though they appeared to be on a desert road, they were actually above a salt pool of unknown depth and extent. The road they drove on was a bridge formed by the salt crust.

Lin Tu lit a match and tossed it to the roadside to scatter the nearby deep-sea lice, then took out a long knife and gently swept away the sand on the surface. Sure enough, there was a thin salt crust. She stabbed the knife in, and it went through with surprising ease, like stirring water.

"So if this bridge breaks, we fall right in?" Luo Yongzhi felt the sun making him cold.

"That seems right," Lin Tu said.

Her eyes quickly scanned the surroundings. The flood was here, the monsters were here, but the lighthouse—or rather, the monsters' lighthouse—where was it?

The human lighthouse guides ships; the monsters' lighthouse must guide the monsters too. So what was driving and guiding these creatures... Lin Tu fell into thought.

"Earlier..." Liu Sheng suddenly said, "I noticed a stretch of road I drove over was very strange. When I passed, the sound was 'gurgle gurgle', as if there was empty space beneath the road. Could there be a problem there?"

Liu Sheng's car was in the leftmost lane. It was possible he'd noticed something alone that no one else did.

"Go! Let's go back and check." Lin Tu made the decision on the spot.

The six vehicles quickly turned around, heading back to find the anomaly Liu Sheng mentioned.

Liu Sheng was nervous. They were already running short on time to reach the end. If they turned back because of his information and found nothing, that would be even worse! So as soon as they turned, he hesitated and said, "What if I'm wrong..."

"Trust your instincts. Even if it's a false alarm..." Lin Tu comforted him, "I'm only missing aircraft fragments and an engine to upgrade to a small plane. At worst, Sister Huadan can get those two things for me through the Black Market system, and we'll just fly out."

If not for the fact that [Anju] was restricted in this disaster and could only be placed on a small cart, Lin Tu would have wanted to directly [Switch Form] and fly wherever she pleased.

"I can find them," Dong Huadan immediately said.

The two women's words calmed Liu Sheng down. He returned to his original lane and continued searching. Yi Ying and Luo Yongzhi also breathed a sigh of relief, but they didn't let their guard down. From Lin Tu and Dong Huadan's words, it was clear that upgrading to a plane came at a huge cost, and unless absolutely necessary, this method wouldn't be used.

Guan Suixing: "...So after motorhomes, there are planes?" Of course—she knew she couldn't be complacent about being the number one player in the game, because Lin Tu could already upgrade to a higher level!

Fortunately, when the players reached the spot Liu Sheng mentioned, they indeed found something wrong.

On this stretch, there were few or even no deep-sea lice, and the road surface did indeed vibrate slightly when stomped on.

Lin Tu picked a spot on the roadside without bugs, and just as she cut open the salt crust with her knife, she heard 'crunch—crunch—' as the salt crust along the road edge shattered and fell from above to somewhere below...

The players craned their necks to look, and saw a narrow path supported by salt blocks winding toward the distant underground. Below the path was a bottomless abyss, with only crystal-like salt blocks faintly reflecting a dim red light.

"This is way too deep..." Yi Ying couldn't help marveling. "Are we really going down there?"

As she spoke, Lin Tu had already measured the width of the path—

"The lighthouse can only be down there!" Lin Tu turned her vehicle around, started the engine, and was the first to drive onto this unknown fork.

The other players followed her in.

Beneath the salt crust, it was like another world. The players drove along this fork to its end, then merged onto another road. This road hung in midair, surrounded by salt pillars of varying heights and uneven surfaces. From the darkness in the depths, they could faintly hear rustling sounds.

To their surprise, Lin Tu and the others found this road also had a sign, identical to the one on the section they'd been on—A1D1Q17 Road.

However, the warning was slightly different—

"Be warned! The flood has already flooded this road, and monsters from the deep sea are wreaking havoc on it. You must find another exit from this road because... this road ends at a cliff."

The players continued forward, encountering a group of rotten deep-sea lice and a large fish with legs. After dealing with these two monsters, they found another salt crust road descending further.

The players continued downward, then came to another road again—

"A1D1Q17 Road"

"Damn! Same name again!" After driving in the darkness for so long, Luo Yongzhi was about to break down. He said despairingly, "Are we stuck in a loop?"

"Don't panic!" Yi Ying pointed to the warning sign.

"Be warned! The flood...water has already flooded this road, and monsters from the deep sea are wreaking havoc on it. You learn from the road worker Zhang Haide that the purpose of building this road might be to find an unknown underground experimental base..."

"Zhang Haide?" Lin Tu vaguely remembered that big fish with legs. If she remembered correctly, that fish had a name tag hanging around its neck.

"Looks like it's a mission with layers to clear," Dong Huadan checked her watch. "It's been an hour and a half now. To be safe, we'd better finish within six and a half hours."

"We'll do our best." Lin Tu listened to the roars coming from the distance. She had a feeling the monsters on this road would be harder to deal with.

.

Two days passed like this. When the second night fell, Lan Yanzhen led her group to the edge of the fifty-ninth section of the road and organized everyone to rest and sleep.

Early the next morning, they charged into the fifty-ninth section of the road.

"A1D2Q16 Road"

Exits: "A1D2Q15 Road, 1000 km", "A1D2P16 Road, 1000 km"

"Be warned! A flood is spreading across this road. Monsters from the deep sea have broken through the water and are about to destroy the entire road. You must find their lighthouse in time and destroy it to protect your road. Otherwise, you'll have no way forward."

Lan Yanzhen was extremely excited. "Go!"

Nearly thirty vehicles sped across the endless desert. Suddenly, a rustling sound rose all around, and countless deep-sea lice burst out from the ground, crazily surging toward Lan Yanzhen and the others.

"Ignore them! Keep going!" Lan Yanzhen commanded.

"Won't the people in the side lanes get attacked?" Someone asked worriedly.

"Stop the nonsense. Do you know the game better than Sister Lan?" Before Lan Yanzhen got angry, Li Haohao scolded the newcomer on her behalf.

Indeed, the worries of this new player who had just joined the game didn't come true, because the deep-sea lice couldn't climb onto the road at all. They piled up tightly at the edges, as if cursed—the moment they touched the road, they turned to ash.

"I feel this road is a bit weird..." The new player voiced another concern, but seeing that everyone else seemed fine, he kept it to himself.

About an hour later, a giant octopus rose at the end of the road. The players were terrified; some even wanted to stop and not go forward. But under Lan Yanzhen's insistence, they continued driving.

Soon after, a giant anglerfish appeared, then a huge rotten sea turtle, then a snake as tall as a mountain with a pair of yellow eyes... As the convoy advanced, the creatures gradually turned their terrifying, dreadful gazes toward them.

"Sister Lan, maybe we should give up..." Someone started to waver again. "I feel like this road under my feet is driving a bit strangely, like it's hollow. Maybe we should check what's under the road first? Maybe..."

"Me too, Sister Lan," another person said. "I just felt the road beneath was hollow too."

The new player also mentioned when he'd first noticed it.

"Go explore? Leaving the road is the real way to die!" Lan Yanzhen sneered. "At worst, there are a few monsters waiting ahead. Leave the road? Then go ahead!"

The players wouldn't dare act alone without Lan Yanzhen. When the convoy continued, Lan Yanzhen sent a private message to Li Haohao: "Those who objected to my decision just now—put them in one team and let them scout ahead for me later."

Li Haohao quickly replied, "Got it, Sister Lan~" He used his light screen to note down the names of those who had objected, and added one more name—Chen Rui.

Finally, they reached the octopus, but the players weren't attacked. Looking closer, they saw the octopus had surrounded the fifty-ninth lane. Three of its tentacles were at the very top, occasionally poking down.

And at the very front of the lane, there was a sign—

"This is an octopus that loves mazes. This is its maze. Be careful not to take the wrong path~"

"Sister Lan is so wise!" Someone immediately praised. "Following the road is definitely the right choice!"

"Following Sister Lan is the way to go!"

Lan Yanzhen smiled slightly. Not just now—in many previous road missions, she had already earned the trust of most people. So when she proposed splitting into teams, almost no one objected.

Entering the maze, there were three different entrances. The first person from the first team drove twenty meters in one direction, confirmed it was safe, and the rest followed him. He chose correctly for the second direction too, and everyone followed step by step.

At the third intersection, he confidently chose a direction again, but this time, just two meters in, a 'bang!' rang out as a tentacle descended from the sky, piercing through the entire vehicle from top to bottom, skewering him like a kebab.

"Crunch—crunch—" As the players froze, chewing sounds came from above.

"No one can get out of my maze. This octopus is very pleased, so it decides to make it easier for you~ Now you only have to face a choice between two paths~"

"Ah, he was so careless," Lan Yanzhen said cheerfully. "We'll surely carry on his will and keep going. Who's next?"

"No! Not me! I don't want to!" A vehicle tried to reverse, but was blocked back by another that Lan Yanzhen had arranged in advance.

"We're a team. You got this far thanks to the team, so don't you want to contribute now?" Lan Yanzhen said with a smile.

What kind of contribution was this?! It took someone's death to lower the difficulty! But seeing how unruffled Lan Yanzhen was, everyone understood—she had planned this all along, knowing this method could clear the stage, and deliberately used it. But now, either the next person died, or the rest would have to die for them.

As for the first team... it was only a matter of time.

As the last person in the first team, Chen Rui wanted to run immediately, but he felt several gazes fall on him. He knew they were guarding against him.

Recalling what had just happened, he felt his hands and feet trembling, his whole body cold. The feeling reached its peak when he heard Lan Yanzhen's sigh—

"Thanks to everyone, this time I'll definitely be the first to clear the fifty-ninth section of the road. The game reward is mine!"