Volume 15 Gray Fog Forest Chapter 732: Great Basin
The high-speed transport aircraft equipped with battleship-class thrusters is very fast. Even with a large machine like the Blasphemer Mech mounted on it, it is still took.
In just seven hours, this high-speed transport plane brought them to the edge of the Great Basin, one .
Ke Lan and others, who were used to the hellish start, felt a rare sense of inexplicable relief - saving an hour on the road meant that this free hour could be used to deal with various emergencies, without having to race against time for every step of the action as in the original plan.
"We arrived at the designated location one hour in advance." Ke Lan looked up at the high-speed transport plane that took off vertically and said, "We have more time than expected, but we still have to cross the Great Basin in three hours - before we enter the Gray Mist Forest, the Undead Crew may send someone to intercept us at any time."
"Three hours. As long as there are no obstacles on the road, it should be fine." Sanshisan said, and jumped onto the passenger seat of the armored SUV.
This armored off-road vehicle is the only vehicle they carry besides the Blasphemer mecha. It was customized by "Jigang Industry" under the Soma Group. It has an all-Nino alloy frame and is powered by a quad-crystal engine. It can maintain a cruising speed of 300 kilometers per hour on flat unpaved roads. When necessary, it can even "fly with great force" - relying on rocket thrusters hidden in the chassis and foldable gliders to perform short-distance low-altitude flights... Of course, these magical modifications were completed independently by Layton and Chi Hanfeng. If the engineers of Jigang Industry knew that these two people had changed their masterpiece into this appearance, no one knew what kind of expressions they would show.
The short-distance flight function may seem stupid, but it is definitely not useless - there are many fissures and rifts of unknown depth in the Great Basin, and the widest of them can even reach more than 50 meters. The Blasphemer Mech can naturally rely on thrusters and anti-gravity devices to jump over, but ordinary ground vehicles can only choose to take a detour when encountering such terrain.
For Ke Lan and his friends, taking a detour was a waste of time - if they wanted to cross the Great Basin within three hours, they could only choose the straightest route.
Ke Lan got into the cockpit - this armored off-road vehicle used an independent cockpit similar to that of a mecha, and the driving method was almost the same as that of a mecha. If it weren't for Valentina needing to drive the Blasphemer, it would not have been Ke Lan's turn to sit in the driver's seat.
"Are you all seated firmly?" Ke Lan adjusted the angle of the driver's seat to a position between sitting upright and half-lying, raised his hand to conduct a preliminary adjustment of all the devices in the cockpit, and then started the engine.
Compared with the roar and vibration of traditional engines, the crystal engine is much quieter, but the moment Ke Lan stepped on the accelerator, he still felt a strong push on his back.
The armored off-road vehicle rushed out in an instant, and the Blasphemer, who was gliding on an air cushion, followed closely on the side of the vehicle.
…
Although the Great Basin is named "Basin", it is actually a huge meteorite crater on Alpha. The meteorite core located in the center of the crater has long disappeared, leaving only an inverted cone-shaped deep well with a depth of more than 100,000 meters and a diameter of more than 20 kilometers.
Ke Lan and his team's crossing route is actually the tangent of the edge of the deep well, spanning about 850 kilometers. At the cruising speed of the vehicle, they can barely cross it within three hours.
Of course, the premise is that there are no obstacles throughout the process.
But anyone who knows something about the ecological environment of the Great Basin knows that this is almost impossible to do.
Although the Great Basin is a barren land without any large-scale vegetation or water source, and everywhere you look is a desolate scene of earth yellow and mud gray, there is no shortage of traces of indigenous creatures in this place.
At the beginning of the formation of the Great Basin, a meteorite from the distant universe hit the surface of Alpha Centauri hard, creating this super crater and also integrating some rare elements carried by the meteorite into the land in the form of fragments.
In the long years that followed, with the erosion of wind, sand and rain, these meteorite fragments that were originally buried deep underground gradually emerged on the surface of the basin... These rare elements with strong radiation are deadly things that humans must stay away from, but for some indigenous creatures on Alpha, they are "necessities" for growth and development.
These meteorite fragments attracted a large number of indigenous creatures to eat the soil and gravel in the basin. These indigenous creatures that came to search for radioactive materials in turn attracted a group of predators that took them as prey... In this way, a somewhat deformed but very reasonable ecosystem appeared in the large basin.
However, these indigenous creatures attracted by radioactive substances will not live in the Great Basin for a long time. After all, there is nothing here except meteorite fragments and sand... Humans cannot live without food and only rely on vitamin supplements, and indigenous creatures cannot rely on a little bit of meteorite fragments in the sand to fill their stomachs. It is for this reason that the Great Basin's ecosystem has a strong "seasonality".
Just like migratory birds and fish migrations on Earth, those indigenous creatures would also regularly run to the Great Basin to consume the radioactive elements necessary for survival. At this time, the Great Basin would begin to become lively.
Based on this characteristic, the experts on the Ark divided the ecological environment of the Great Basin into two stages: "active period" and "dead period".
However, it was originally called the "active period" and the "calm period", but later some scholars felt that the word "dead silence" was more appropriate to describe the large basin without any vitality. The second name gradually became popular and replaced the first name and became the mainstream.
Unfortunately, the period when Ke Lan and his team chose to cross the Great Basin happened to be the "active period".
There is no way around it. The "active period" and "dead period" of the Great Basin alternate for as long as three months. It is impossible for Ke Lan to wait until three months before taking action.
By that time, the Undead Crew would have already discovered that he had found clues about the Gray Mist Forest... It would probably not be so easy for him to escape.
"There is an indigenous biological community five kilometers ahead." As the off-road vehicle moved forward at high speed, the released reconnaissance drone was also following up simultaneously in the airspace above, conveying the surrounding situation to the car in real time.
