Chapter 627: Propping Up the Sky, Anchoring the Earth
Of course, despite Teach's shock, the movements of his hands didn't pause for a moment.
His ten fingers moved with a nimbleness completely unsuited to his massive physique, and in an instant, dozens of spells, shimmering with a grayish-black light, were hurled by him from space towards various locations on Mars.
These unassuming spells advanced towards Mars with remarkable regularity.
Still remaining on Mars' surface, Ying Huo watched with extreme tension the trajectory of each falling gray meteor, calculating their final landing points to confirm the extent of deviation from the plan.
At this moment, the ceaselessly shaking Mars was the epicenter of all chaos.
...
"He spent his entire life harming countless people, yet unexpectedly, this time he did a great deed to save the world." The Ironheart Exterminator, whose main body was already aboard the escape rocket, thus evaluated Teach, who had only spoken at the last moment.
Of course, whether there was another hidden meaning in his words was something only he knew, for discussing Bai Mo had always been a rather dangerous endeavor.
"Turn around, we're returning to the Moon."
"But what?"
"Our ship is traveling too fast. Turning around now is extremely difficult. It will take at least seven hours for the ship to descend to the Moon again," the pilot in the control cabin replied helplessly.
"Seven hours... that's too late."
The Ironheart Exterminator had calculated before that, if he exerted his full effort, he would need approximately twenty-two hours of work to complete the repair of the Myriad Gravity Device.
If just the return flight took six or seven hours, adding that to twenty-two hours of actual work time, it would far exceed the twenty-four-hour limit set by Bai Mo.
"Is it truly only twenty-four hours?" He transmitted this encrypted mental wave directly to Bai Mo via the ship's communication device.
He didn't know what method Teach had used to persuade the other party to act, but the final defensive line now stretched between Mars and the Moon was undoubtedly Bai Mo's own doing.
They would recognize the "signature" of those white lights even if they turned to ash.
235955
Six streaks of white light flew out from the sea of light, transforming into six sweeping and majestic colossal numbers. Each stroke forming these numbers possessed a width exceeding ten kilometers.
A single digit, as vast as a city from Earth's era.
Upon seeing those digits representing the countdown, the Ironheart Exterminator understood Bai Mo's meaning. He sighed deeply and made his own decision.
...
"Shut down the ship's engines."
"What?!"
"Shut down the engines. Do you not understand my words?"
"Respected Ironheart Councilor, our current kinetic energy is insufficient to escape the Moon's gravitational pull. If we shut down the engines, the ship will crash on the Moon in two hours and fifteen minutes!"
"Shut down the engines. I will personally take over the ship's power system."
"But..." The pilot still wanted to argue, for in his view, shutting down the engines now was tantamount to seeking death. His superior might wish for death, but he certainly did not.
"So much nonsense."
"Bang!"
"Co... Councilor, sir."
The pilot, who had still been attempting to argue with the Ironheart Exterminator at the last moment, saw his vision go dark and collapsed stiffly in the cockpit. The co-pilot beside him was instantly terrified, unable to move a muscle.
A few seconds later, the Ironheart Exterminator, in the form of a liquid metal robot, seeped out from the cockpit wall, dripping onto the floor, before re-forming into a humanoid shape.
"Such a bother." The gray-silver liquid metal robot casually tossed the pilot he had knocked unconscious onto the floor behind him, then unconcernedly settled into his seat.
"Complete shutdown will take ten minutes, deceleration twenty minutes, landing thirty minutes..."
"Ir... Ironheart Councilor, how do you intend to land?" Upon hearing "landing thirty minutes," the co-pilot beside him grew even more panicked.
Under normal operation, that amount of time would be utterly insufficient for him to safely land such a large spacecraft.
"My power." The Ironheart Exterminator had no intention of explaining further to a mere junior.
His left hand dissolved into a puddle of liquid metal, flowing into the ship's internal power system.
...
After a while, a grayish-silver "tumor" suddenly sprouted from the ship's head, looking like a mass of human tissue dyed the wrong color.
The "tumor" on the ship's prow continuously proliferated and swelled, growing like a balloon, and before long, it burst open with a "bang!"
Pus-like liquid silver metal gushed forth, eerily landing entirely upon the ship. Specks of silver spread outwards, merging, encasing the ship's exterior in a grayish-silver shell.
And where it had originally burst, a metallic flower, somewhat resembling an engine, appeared.
...
The co-pilot, like an outsider, watched everything unfolding around him with shock.
As a spaceship pilot, he simply couldn't imagine someone being able to bypass the entire ship's control system and directly manipulate its tens of thousands of intricate components.
Not only that, but to resolve the issue of the time-consuming turn-around, the Ironheart Exterminator transformed his left hand into a new jet engine, mounting it on the ship's prow and effectively swapping the ship's front and back.
...
"Twenty-three hours, five minutes, twenty seconds."
In just fifty-four minutes, he was back on the Moon.
At this time, under the confinement of a psychic field, most people on the Moon were in a state of stasis, with only a few high-level superhumans who hadn't left aimlessly wandering about with unease.
Everything had happened too quickly, so fast that they hadn't even fully grasped the situation before the apocalypse descended.
...
It wasn't that Bai Mo didn't want to give the Ironheart Exterminator more time; it was simply that his own power had limits.
Projecting the spirit energy required to keep Mars and the Moon separated for twenty-four hours across hundreds of millions of kilometers would deplete his main body's power to a low, threshold-alert level.
Connecting the thought network of billions of Holy Progenitors on Earth also required his power to sustain. He couldn't possibly abandon his fundamental base to save this group of people.
If it truly became too late to salvage the situation and Mars collided with the Moon, he would simply have to spend a few more decades cultivating a new generation from Earth to participate in rebuilding Lunar civilization.
...
Anchoring the Earth!
Propping up the Heavens!
Whether it was the people on the Moon or the Martians on Mars, at this moment, only these four words remained in their minds.
The sea of light finally condensed into the silhouette of a single person. The giant's feet trod upon the Martian soil, while his hands held up the Moon, supporting a sky of hope for everyone on both planets.
It was an indescribable shock.
For every 'zhang' the distance between the Moon and Mars widened, the body of the Giant of Light stretched by another 'zhang'. At this moment, Bai Mo was like Pangu cleaving heaven and earth.
Only, this heaven was the Moon, and this earth was Mars.
PS: Lately, the web novel community has been filled with all sorts of alarming rumors and paranoia. I'm feeling a bit flustered myself.
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