Chapter 175: Truly Hungry

Chapter 175: Truly Hungry

"Last night, a demon attacked the Gas District, devouring four extraterrestrial beings and destroying over twenty mechanical guards. The incident was extremely severe..."

Upon watching the morning news, Lu Heng and his two companions were left dumbfounded.

The event that occurred in the Gas District of City 3 the previous night was clearly a battle with Nagakawa Tomo.

How could the news report it as a demon attack?

Soon, the trio found the reason in the news video.

In the previous night's battle, four individuals were killed—a black man, two Japanese, and Nagakawa Tomo.

Lu Heng's actions were swift and precise, mostly finishing his opponents with a single sword strike, leaving clean cuts.

However, the four bodies shown in the news video appeared as if they had been gnawed on by wild dogs, with not a single piece of intact flesh remaining.

Even the contents of their skulls had been devoured, leaving a gruesome and bloody scene.

Lin Zeyu's eyes widened as he exclaimed, "We didn't do this!"

It was evident that they hadn't.

Even if they had wanted to do something like this, they couldn't have left such uneven bite marks.

There was only one possibility—after the trio left, something had devoured the four bodies.

"How could this be so terrifying?" Su Muyu felt nauseous as he watched the bloody scene in the video.

"It seems like there wasn't much to eat, and this thing was starving," Lu Heng joked darkly.

However, his words weren't entirely in jest.

The Sykes Civilization was already a semi-mechanical civilization, and all Sykes citizens in the city were mechanical beings.

As mechanical beings, they only needed to recharge and didn't require food, so there was little food in the city, and organic life was scarce. It was no wonder something was starving.

As the trio was still in shock over the news, Su Muyu raised his eyebrows and reminded them, "Liorana Sexes is coming with a team of guards."

Just as he finished speaking, the door was pushed open from the outside.

Liorana Sexes, accompanied by a team of mechanical guards, entered and demanded, "Which of you is the demon?"

Maintaining his composure, Lu Heng replied, "Are you referring to this news report?"

"What else could it be? Don't tell me those people weren't killed by you," Liorana Sexes said, her eyes filled with deep caution.

Lu Heng shrugged and said, "We killed them, but we didn't eat them."

This explanation might be more believable if said to other humans.

After all, no human would think that such a bloody scene was caused by another human.

However, Liorana Sexes didn't share this belief.

To her, humans were just another form of extraterrestrial life.

If aliens were to land on Earth one day and gnaw humans to this state, it wouldn't be surprising to humans either.

Lu Heng waved over the mechanical tiger, Anka, and said, "You can ask Anka. If you don't believe us, you should believe Anka, right?"

In Anka's binding information, Liorana Sexes was the second in command.

Without saying a word, she directly connected with Anka to exchange information and then nodded, "The bodies weren't eaten by you, but you did kill them. This incident is still related to you."

Due to her mechanical transformation, Liorana Sexes' thinking leaned more towards mechanical logic.

For mechanical logic, judgments were binary—either '0' or '1'.

The information provided by Anka was enough to convince her of Lu Heng and his companions' innocence.

Lu Heng pondered and said, "I suspect this incident is related to demons. Our purpose here is to find demons. I hope to obtain a visa to investigate the scene. Perhaps we can find that terrifying creature."

The speed of a computer's thought process is determined by its computational power, and Liorana Sexes had immense computational power.

Therefore, when deciding whether to grant Lu Heng and his companions visas, she only needed 0.01 seconds to make a decision.

Subsequently, she took three wristbands from the mechanical guards and said, "These are visa bracelets, allowing you to move freely in the planet's B-level and below regions."

The Sykes Civilization's planetary regions were divided into three levels: A, B, and C.

Typically, A-level regions housed military and research facilities, which were off-limits to those with B-level visas.

Lu Heng took the wristband and asked, "Can we go to the scene to investigate? We were there last night, and revisiting the site now might uncover more clues."

After a brief moment of thought, Liorana Sexes replied, "Yes, I'll have a team of mechanical guards escort you there, but I need to be informed of any clues you discover immediately."

...

In the afternoon, Lu Heng and his companions donned metal-clad suits and headed to the Gas District.

The area had been sealed off, and they needed to be escorted by mechanical guards to pass through the blockade and enter the street where the battle had taken place the night before.

The trio retraced their steps from the previous night.

At the spot where Lu Heng had eliminated the black man and two Japanese, there were minimal signs of combat, as he had dispatched them with a single move.

The three bodies showed no signs of having been moved; they had been gnawed to the bone where they fell.

There were even tooth marks on the bones.

Su Muyu repeatedly covered his mouth, suppressing the nausea rising from his stomach.

"It's been eaten so cleanly; it must have been starving," Lin Zeyu commented, crouching down in front of the scattered bones and offering an objective assessment.

Lu Heng picked up a steel bar and turned over a bone, revealing a strange mark.

The bite marks on the bones were indeed made by sharp teeth, but some of the marks were not caused by teeth but rather by something metallic.

The skeleton was broader, belonging to the black man whom Lu Heng had swiftly defeated with a single sword strike.

Therefore, the scratches on these bones were not caused by the Aurora Blade.

"That's odd."

"What is it?"

"There are marks made by a sharp metal blade, but other parts show signs of being bitten by sharp teeth. If there were only bite marks, it wouldn't be unusual; any demon with sharp teeth could have done it. But the presence of both metal scratches and bite marks is strange." Lu Heng voiced his confusion.

"Could it be that these bones were gnawed on by two different creatures, one with sharp teeth and the other a metallic creature?" Lin Zeyu speculated.

Su Muyu shook his head. "That's unlikely. Although this isn't the center of City 3, the commotion would have attracted the attention of the mechanical guards. It's impossible for two separate creatures to have enough time to gnaw on the bones."

"I think there's another possibility. Remember the laboratory we destroyed on Orion Lambda 838? The underground lab was conducting experiments on mechanical modifications for demons. If someone was conducting similar experiments here, it would make sense."

Lu Heng also considered this possibility, and it seemed more plausible than Lin Zeyu's speculation.

"If that's the case, following this lead might lead us to the source of the abyssal pollution."

One of the challenges in this mission was to find and eliminate the source of the abyssal pollution.

[2. Find the root of the abyssal pollution and eradicate it.]



Initially, they had no leads, but now with this clue, they had a good chance of finding the pollution source by following this trail.

Afterward, Lu Heng went to examine Nagakawa Tomo's remains and noticed that some mechanical modification modules seemed to be missing.

Lu Heng clearly remembered using the supersonic Piercing Strike the night before, piercing through Nagakawa Tomo's mechanical modifications with a single sword strike.

The powerful kinetic energy had torn apart the mechanical modules, and they had even erupted with lightning power, destroying the modules.

The mechanical modules had exploded, scattering pieces everywhere.

As the modules were severely damaged and there was no time to collect them, they were left at the scene.

However, the mechanical module fragments scattered on the ground were noticeably reduced by a third, as if someone had taken some.

If the officials from the Sikes Civilization had cleaned up the scene, they should have taken everything, not just a portion.

The fact that only a third was missing suggested that the collected fragments contained some hidden secret.

...

After half an hour at the scene, a mechanical police officer arrived.

The officer first checked Lu Heng and his companions' visas by scanning their visa bracelets, then allowed them to leave.

After leaving the scene, Lu Heng went to meet Liorana Sexes.

He still had questions that needed answers from her.

Lu Heng pointed at the holographic screen showing the photo of the mechanical module fragments and asked, "Can you identify what these modules are?"

Liorana Sexes accessed the scene inspection report using her authority and replied, "The identification report just came out. These module fragments are mainly for anti-gravity systems, micro-missile launchers, and evasion radar systems."

Lu Heng continued, "Are there any others? Any other modules?"

The night before, when fighting Nagakawa Tomo, Lu Heng had recognized these modification modules on him.

Liorana Sexes shook her head. "The fragments are too small to identify, so we can only determine the module's function through the main control components. That's why the report only mentioned these three types of module fragments."

Lu Heng fell into deep thought and asked again, "Are there any modules for enhancing psychic energy?"

The night before, when fighting Nagakawa Tomo, Lu Heng had clearly felt that his psychic force field was stronger than the first time they met.

So, Lu Heng had judged that his psychic energy had exceeded 70 points.

It was impossible for psychic energy to increase so quickly in such a short time.

Therefore, Lu Heng had suspected that Nagakawa Tomo had installed a psychic enhancement module.

Liorana Sexes was surprised. "There's no such module as you described."

"Are you sure?"

"It's not that it's not among the fragments, but we Sikes don't have any technology for enhancing psychic energy."

Lu Heng raised his eyebrows in surprise. "Are you certain?"

"Of course, we only need computational power, not psychic energy." Liorana Sexes replied decisively.

Lu Heng was stunned for a moment because what she said was indeed correct.

The Sikes Civilization was in the late stages of a semi-mechanical civilization, and robots did not possess psychic energy.

Due to this characteristic, robots were completely immune to psychic control skills.

Following this logic, it was normal for the Sikes Civilization's mechanical modification technology to lack psychic enhancement modules.

However, in his previous life, Lu Heng had seen psychic enhancement modules when he entered the Sikes Queen Star.

If his memory served him right, it meant that the Sikes Civilization did not possess this technology now, but they would in a year's time.

(End of Chapter)

Chapter end