Chapter 319 - 246: Laval Nozzle and Heavy-duty Attitude Power Battle-Axe

Chapter 319: Chapter 246: Laval Nozzle and Heavy-duty Attitude Power Battle-Axe

"What do you think it is?" Lin Fan asked, pointing at the screen.

"Haven’t you been the one in contact with her?" Ye Qingzhou retorted without looking up.

"I know what *she* is. I’m talking about *it*," Lin Fan said, tapping the screen firmly a couple of times.

"Are you sure that Mutated Zombie is *her*?"

"Not sure. I’m just going by what the boss said in the previous surveillance video."

"So, the key question isn’t what *it* is, but the relationship between them."

Ye Qingzhou’s hands finally paused for a moment, but her gaze remained focused on the lines of the blueprint.

"What do you think the relationship is between her and this Mutated Zombie? ’Mother and child,’ or ’shell and egg’?"

Lin Fan fell silent.

If it was the former, it would be some unknown form of monstrous reproduction. But if it was the latter... it would mean that terrifying banshee-like zombie had only ever been a vessel for incubating "her" from the very beginning.

"You’re the expert. I asked you first..." he said, spreading his hands helplessly.

"Either is possible," Ye Qingzhou said as she continued to draw. "We just talked about this catastrophe. We know nothing about any of this, and now we’ve just added one more piece to this enormous puzzle."

"How are you so calm right now?"

Lin Fan couldn’t help but ask as he watched the woman bent over her work, her wrist not trembling in the slightest.

"Oh? And how should I be?"

Ye Qingzhou’s pencil paused. She looked up and glanced at Lin Fan. Her eyes were devoid of ripples, holding only a confusion that bordered on cold indifference.

"Should I be screaming to burn her at the stake, or should I be bursting with scientific fervor, clamoring to dissect her?"

"The latter fits your persona better," Lin Fan said honestly, rubbing his nose.

Ye Qingzhou lowered her head and resumed sketching the direction and schematics of the power transmission on the blueprint. The soft SHHH of the pencil tip was steady and rhythmic.

"Science requires passion, but not emotion. It’s meaningless to talk about dissection when we don’t have a sterile lab, a microscope, or even a proper scalpel."

At this, she stopped what she was doing, her tone turning more serious.

"Besides, do you think she’s dangerous? Is there a risk of her losing control?"

"If she were an uncontrollable danger, none of those people at the meat packing plant would have survived."

Lin Fan said this aloud, but inwardly, he was thinking about what he had seen. ’Whether it’s the color of her health bar, its border, or the pattern of her Life and Energy Values, she’s no different from a normal Awakened One.’

"That’s what I was thinking, too."

Ye Qingzhou nodded, her wooden ruler drawing a straight dividing line across the paper.

"Since you’ve made that judgment, you must have your reasons. When it comes to these things, I trust your perception.

So, whether it’s an examination, a blood draw, or taking a biopsy, all of it will have to wait until we have the equipment and a lab."

Here, she stopped her pencil again.

Ye Qingzhou straightened up, turned around, and her eyes scanned Lin Fan from top to bottom.

Her gaze traveled from the lines of his shoulders and neck, which were filled with power even in a relaxed state, to meet his eyes, which held who-knows-how-many secrets.

Her stare was a few degrees hotter than when she had been watching the video.

"If we had a lab, the one who should be sliced up for research first is you."

"Ahem..." Lin Fan was taken aback by this sudden "confession." "Colonel Ye, we’re comrades-in-arms now. Let’s not resort to this kind of psychological terrorism..."

"Alright." Ye Qingzhou pressed her pencil down on the desk with a sharp SNAP, cutting Lin Fan off.

She straightened up, stretching her stiff neck while rubbing her sore wrist. A large, silvery-gray graphite smudge was smeared across the heel of her fair-skinned palm.

She extended her smudged hand and pushed the A3 paper on the desk toward Lin Fan. "This is the first draft. Take a look at the core structure."

"Oh?" Lin Fan casually shut down the computer and unplugged the hard drive caddy. Then he leaned in, bending over to look at the paper under the overhead light.

It wasn’t a detailed engineering blueprint, but a concept drawing on an A3 sheet. Besides the lines, the white paper had some blurry black smudges from the heel of her hand, suggesting the desk wasn’t at a very suitable height for drawing.

Although it was just a messy, smudged sketch, the lines were clean and neat, varying in thickness, perfectly horizontal and vertical... That was about as much as Lin Fan could critique it.

It’s just that...

Lin Fan looked at it from the left, then from the right, his brow gradually furrowing. He couldn’t help but tilt his head to look at it from another angle before finally pointing hesitantly at the bizarrely shaped "weapon" and asking,

"Is... is this a spaceship?"

You couldn’t blame him for thinking that.

No matter how you looked at it, the object in the drawing had nothing to do with the word "weapon." Instead, it was a massive, U-shaped, dual-winged structure.

Two cylindrical nozzles were attached to the back, with a huge, monolithic structure in the middle. It had sharp points and edges, looking just like a simplified version of a spaceship from a sci-fi movie.

"To be precise, this is a ’Heavy-Duty Attitude-Control Power Halberd’ designed based on the principles of ’vector-thrust’.

Your greatsword has the energy release efficiency of a ’firecracker in a dog bowl.’ It’s too low. We need a ’rocket’...

I’ve observed your power generation methods and combat style. An overly complex design wouldn’t be suitable for your ’shaping’ ability.

Therefore, the structure must be as simple as possible, but the overall mechanical design must be optimized as much as possible."

"A rocket..."