This was a road of mad dashes, a road of sparks and lightning, a road of artillery fire and smoking butts—because Lily’s tail had been set on fire by a little monster. Fortunately, the armor had built-in health monitoring and fire suppression, otherwise she would have felt the pain until next month.

In short, this was the way of the reckless.

The fully armed armored siege Lily beast rampaged across this burning plain, unstoppable. The close-in weapon systems installed on her back and shoulder armor sprayed beams and particle weapons like water at the wandering monsters, blasting a charred path straight through the enemy ranks. Those seemingly insurmountable great fissures were nothing more than slightly wider ditches to Lily, who could easily overcome them with a leap. It had taken everyone two full days and nights to get from White Maple Leaf City to the Black Forest, but it looked like it would only take a few hours to get back from the Black Forest to White Maple Leaf City.

This was perfectly normal. After all, before, everyone had left with the attitude of experiencing life, riding horses and walking and stopping along the way, and also advancing along the road in the way that "normal humans" should. But now, rushing back was like providing battlefield support: Lily in her giant beast form could even approach the speed of sound when running, and she was charging straight towards White Maple Leaf City in a beeline, following the idea that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. If she encountered flowers, trees, or small hills along the way, she would simply fire a missile to clear the path, without even stopping. This was more than ten times faster than the speed when they came!

Hao Ren had even considered that since the data terminal's teleportation couldn't be used, he might as well have Nolan come down to pick them up. At worst, when Leah asked, he would say that he was a photography enthusiast from the Centaurus constellation who had come to travel (this was a "special agent skill" taught in the operations manual, although it seemed unreliable no matter how you looked at it). But now, looking at the effect of Lily's rampage, he felt that Nolan might not be able to pick them up any faster than the dog girl…

Of course, this wasn't the only reason for choosing to have Lily lead the team back across the plains. Hao Ren chose to travel through the monster-infested scorched earth for another important purpose: to figure out what was going on.

Returning by spaceship would naturally be easy and comfortable, but since the plains were already full of monsters, it was obviously necessary to have close contact with them.

May was comforting the slightly agitated Leah: "Sit tight, relax. Lily is very powerful in this form, so we don't have to worry about those monsters at all."

The mage was obviously not agitated about this. She was waving her arms and legs in her seat, unable to calm down at all: "I'm not worried about those monsters! I'm talking about you guys—what exactly is going on with you? I've heard that werewolves can transform, but I've never heard of werewolves transforming and then wearing such a powerful arsenal!!"

It seemed that the werewolves in this world also had the ability to transform into giant wolves, but Lily was clearly the only one who wore a high-tech battle suit after transforming.

Nangong Sanba smiled slightly, pretending to be mysterious: "You're not the only one who has dug up treasures from ancient ruins."

"…I knew you guys weren't that simple!" Leah glared at Sanba. "Saying you were down-on-their-luck adventurers, looking for people to take on missions to make a living… So you were targeting me from the very beginning, weren't you? Because you were also looking for ancient ruins, so you inquired in advance about who the greatest and smartest ancient civilization scholar in White Maple Leaf City was, and then… Ah, you were really planning to inherit my legacy!"

"Can you restrain your imagination a little…" Nangong Sanba rubbed his forehead in exasperation. "I've been trying to act cool for half my life, and this is the first time I've hoped that my attempt to act cool would fail miserably—I only said one sentence to you and you were able to imagine so much!"

Hao Ren ignored the increasingly lively situation in the back seats and instead looked down at the holographic projection floating in front of him.

The holographic projection device was installed directly on the base of the passenger seat. The original design idea was to play DotA while traveling on the dog's back… It had to be said that at least one of Hao Ren and his data terminal was in a state of mental illness when designing this armor, and many of the systems on it were simply baffling.

But these systems could come in handy at strange times.

The holographic projection displayed a lot of things, including the analysis data of those flame monsters, as well as energy fluctuation charts of the surrounding environment. Of course, the most important parts were reserved for the stratum analysis report—Lily's breastplate was equipped with a comprehensive solid detection radar. This radar device had been collecting geological readings all along the way. Every fissure that Lily crossed, as well as the deep structures hidden beneath those fissures, were clearly visible on the scan.

"What did you see?" Vivian couldn't help but ask curiously when she saw Hao Ren fiddling with the stratum scan reports.

"These fissures," Hao Ren pointed to the holographic projection, "they shouldn't be here at all. We had Nolan use radar to roughly scan the geological structure of this area before. Although it wasn't very in-depth, we could at least confirm that there was neither enough energy accumulation under this area to tear open these fissures, nor any potential weak zones that could cause the rock layers to crack. But those fissures not only appeared, but also gushed out with large swaths of monsters… completely out of nowhere."

"It's certainly unscientific, but perhaps it conforms to magic," Vivian didn't think much about it. "What if someone forcibly summoned these things with magical power? Although it seems that there shouldn't be such powerful figures in this world of Lahrehn, at least it's an explanation."

"I'm not finished yet," Hao Ren shook his head with a smile. "I also had Lily keep increasing the radar power and keep scanning the deeper structures below the fissures, until we reached the radar power limit. Guess what I found in this process?"

Vivian glared at Hao Ren unhappily: "Can't you just say everything at once?"

Hao Ren smiled. "In this process, every time the radar power was increased a little, and the scanned range was expanded a little, the previously scanned areas would undergo slight changes…"

"Ah?" Vivian didn't understand at once. When she figured out what Hao Ren meant, her eyes widened. "You mean, because the radar observed more things, the 'reality' that had been observed before would change? Doesn't that mean…"

Hao Ren didn't let Vivian finish, because he still remembered that it was when he was about to say a certain conclusion that countless fissures of all sizes appeared on the earth: "Don't say it. I have something I want you to help with."

Vivian blinked in confusion. After leaning closer to listen to what Hao Ren said in her ear, she couldn't help but widen her eyes: "Are you sure you want to do this? The risks of doing this are not small…"

"The Dark Domain is indeed a very dangerous place, but it has a special attribute that makes it safer than other areas of the Dream Plane," Hao Ren said confidently. "That is, it is not actually located within the world barrier of the Dream Plane—strictly speaking, it is a fragment attached to the outside of the world barrier, which means that no matter how much we make a fuss, we don't have to worry about triggering anything in the Dream Plane."

Vivian thought for a while and nodded slightly: "I see… Then I understand. But when are you going to…"

"We'll confirm one last thing after we go back."

The two ended their brief conversation, and at the same moment, the towering city walls of White Maple Leaf City appeared before them.

This city had recently stood proudly under the Changfeng Ridge as the "largest city on the plains," but at this moment it was already deep in the flames of war. Although the monster siege had lasted less than half a day, it had already dyed the entire city the color of gunpowder smoke.

The towering white stone city walls had not been breached, but they were covered with scorched pits left after being bombarded by high temperatures. The plains outside the city had been completely occupied by monsters, and countless wandering flame monsters were rushing towards the city with waves of fire. Behind them was a scorched wasteland, and in front of them was a protective barrier that humans were struggling to maintain: before the monsters attacked, the magic guards on duty in the watchtowers had observed the fissures on the great plains and notified the city defense soldiers in time to activate the protection, a move that saved the lives of countless people in the city.

Monsters surged up wave after wave, and were repelled wave after wave by magic missiles, arrows, and stones pouring down from the city walls. But there were always some monsters that could break through the defenses by chance, and they would explode on the solid stone city walls, using their most powerful attacks to damage the protective barrier. The translucent shield covering the city walls could absorb most of the impact, but it was not a 100% defense. The part of the explosive power that penetrated the magic shield directly acted on the stone bricks, and the scorched pits that could be seen everywhere on the surface of the city walls were caused by this.

The worst thing was that White Maple Leaf City didn't have a moat—this meant that the monsters could attack the city from almost any angle, and the city's defenders could only run around in a frenzy.

This was the scene Hao Ren and the others saw when they arrived.

Fortunately, the locals could still hold on, not only because they had city walls and magic barriers as cover, but also because of the timely arrival of armed drones and autonomous machines that were providing them with air support.

The city guards didn't know where those strange things flashing with silver light came from, but they knew that those things had been helping them resist the tide of monsters from the great plains since they appeared. In this life-or-death situation, even the most compulsive person wouldn't care about the origins of the mysterious visitors in the sky: the investigation could be considered later, but the question of whether or not they could survive was the problem in front of them.

But even after accepting that there was a group of mysterious flying objects in the sky helping them, the city guards couldn't help but stir when they saw a fully armed white giant wolf (dog) charging across the plains: the commotion caused by that giant beast was simply too great.

Cannons roared, beams flew, and as the giant beast ran, an absolute no-man's land existed within a radius of several kilometers around her (in fact, the range of this no-man's land could be even larger, but Lily hadn't opened the safety of the nuclear missile launcher yet). The Lahrehn people knew that some extremely powerful werewolves had the ability to transform into giant beasts, and the "creature" running from afar also seemed to have three points of the giant wolf's characteristics—such as the ears and tail, however…

Werewolves don't have that strange arsenal after transforming!

"Hold on! Hold on!" The officer on the city wall shouted hoarsely, "Don't attack that giant wolf!"

"Sir! I think the most important question now is whether ta will attack us!"

"You're just too talkative!"

And in the time it took to say these few words, the city's soldiers discovered that the giant wolf had crossed the seemingly wide plain battlefield. She used the strange weapons on her back to sweep away the surrounding monsters, and even emitted a huge beam from her mouth, sweeping away most of the pursuers while running. Then, she rolled and crawled, using her claws, chin, nose, and head to decelerate in the final stage, until she crashed into the city wall and finally came to a complete stop.

Fortunately, she worked hard to slow down before hitting the city wall, otherwise the White Maple Leaf Wall, which the monsters had failed to break through for several hours, might have been smashed into a big hole because of this blunder.