In the confinement room, the sound of the laptop keys tapping was loud. The owner of the laptop, Lin Mo, was lying on the bed, holding a thick book about flying and reading it carefully. After crossing over into this world, the Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon Gold Coin that could no longer appear in its normal dragon form was like a liquid slime with countless transformations. It extended tens of tentacles to tap loudly on the keys non-stop.
This place was a whole new world with countless new things that neither Gold Coin nor Lin Mo had seen or heard of before. Without the restraint from the Dragon Knight and having experienced the military might of this world, Gold Coin was like a curious baby. It had no time to unleash the arrogance and bloodthirst of Metal-Attribute Giant Dragons, as there were too many things it needed to learn. If it was behind the times, it would suffer a beating. Regardless of whether it was the other world or this world, the Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon needed the ambition to roll up its sleeve and regain its prestige.
Just like this laptop. Lin Mo had briefly taught it how to use it. The Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon was not a brainless fellow. On the contrary, it was pretty smart and quickly grasped how to use the laptop. Other people could not see it, but Gold Coin was currently like a thin protective film covering the keyboard, and dense, fine lines covered the surface. It was using the laptop to search for all kinds of interesting things on the internet. This world was in an era of information explosion, and this alien Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon sank into this ocean of countless information about science and technology, culture, entertainment, economy, and history.
Given that it was the metal attribute, Gold Coin even had the thought of transforming into a USB stick to plug into the USB port of the laptop to learn and simulate a more direct operation method. But Lin Mo stopped it. Gold Coin would probably short-circuit the laptop and burn it before grasping and adapting to this type of inputting and outputting of electrical signals.
Although Gold Coin’s idea could enable it to have infinite development potential in this world in the future, it was not convenient for Lin Mo, who had limited access to leave the base and did not have much money. This kind of extravagant research was not something he could afford.
The one week of confinement passed quickly. The Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon Gold Coin and Lin Mo seemed to live together in a subtle relationship. The identity of a Dragon Knight was a thing of the past, and Gold Coin did not need to be Lin Mo’s mount and fight all its might anymore. Since it protected his safety, Lin Mo protected its identity and gave it a stable source of metal food.
There was no choice. Despite Gold Coin hating and even wanting to kill Lin Mo to get rid of the shackles of being a Dragon Knight’s mount in the past, it now firmly believed that as long as it appeared before the eyes of the humans of this world, it would not take long before it would be locked in a research laboratory and undergo all kinds of unimaginable torture and decomposition research. By then, death would be a luxury. Thus, it could only accept Lin Mo’s protection and form a special symbiotic relationship with him.
After leaving the confinement room, Gold Coin no longer followed Lin Mo around in the form of an egg. Its new shape was a one yuan coin of this country’s currency. In order to avoid being spent by Lin Mo as a one yuan coin, it was golden, as though the one yuan coin was made of gold, just like its name, Gold Coin.
Normally, Gold Coin pretended to be a one yuan coin that Lin Mo played around with in his hand, rolling back and forth between his fingers. No one could find anomalies in Lin Mo’s language and behavior. There were no worries even if it accidentally said anything. About the subject of the gold coin speaking, it was most often regarded as Lin Mo talking to himself and having a fetish. But no one would have thought it was a ferocious dragon from another world.
What a wonderful world this was. The Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon did not miss the original word at all. Since it was here, it would make the best of it. The developed metallurgical industry refined a variety of metal elements and alloy formulas. Just like human food, there were countless combinations, and the delicious, natural-tasting, high-purity ones caused Gold Coin to be unable to extricate itself.
The Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon did not eat and drink for free, and it only needed to pay attention to Lin Mo’s flight safety occasionally. If something happened, it would be similar to what occurred last time. According to Gold Coin’s contemptuous statement, Lin Mo’s new aerial mount’s speed, attack power, flexibility, and safety were not even comparable to a sparrow.
Although the base executives ordered a one-week confinement to penalize Lin Mo, they were extremely envious of this super-lucky guy in private. The black box retrieved from the Chengdu J-10 contained flight data and the cockpit sound recording. After the small square box painted in bright orange was removed from the tail of the plane, almost everyone who saw the exported data was dumbfounded. Lin Mo’s recovery actually happened at less than one meter from the ground. When the jet nozzle was about to touch the ground, he was able to recover from the stall vertically. This was nothing short of a miracle, a miracle that had never happened before.
Recovery at an altitude of one meter, this data shocked many people. The results of the investigation from the local villagers who witnessed this firsthand confirmed this point. They had to acknowledge that Lin Mo was not an ordinary type of crazy, saying that ‘can’t give up as long as there is altitude’. Even the most experienced pilots with the best skills on the base and even those who had participated in aerobatics did not dare do that.
The base leaders’ evaluation of Lin Mo’s piloting skills had invisibly raised another level.
After the week of confinement, Lin Mo, who just got out of the confinement room, was not even idle for an hour before receiving a new mission. A Chinese-foreign cooperative expedition team disappeared in the Junggar Gobi, and the assistance of the Air Force was needed in the search. Regiment Commander Jiang at the base had picked Lin Mo and Chen Haiqing after going through the list of pilots. Who asked these two to be the best among the new batch of fighter pilots? Furthermore, Lin Mo’s ultra-low-altitude ground recovery record undoubtedly put him on par with the veteran pilots who had thousands of hours of flight experience on the base.
The dazzling sunlight shone on the Junggar Basin in the Gobi Desert. Looking around, there were only very sparse weeds, moss plants, and gravel all around that reflected the light like points of luster on the ground, looking like gems. This desert contained huge treasures, beautiful quartz stones, agate, ancient animal and plant fossils, and even precious gems.
There were legends of countless treasures in the Gobi, and many adventurers recklessly intruded into the Gobi in search of their dreams of wealth. Some people found precious gems and became rich overnight, while others had no news again, as though they had vanished into thin air. Only the occasional large skeletal remains that were hard to distinguish whether they were human or animal in the depths of the Gobi proved that not everyone here could be lucky.
In the shadow of an unremarkable small hill in the Gobi, there were four off-road jeeps parked, and a few red and white tents that could accommodate six or seven people were scattered on the sides. The tent cloth covering the gravel fragments did not make people feel any comfort, so the tent also had a thick layer of cushions.
Phew! Lin Hui, who came from Peking University and was both beautiful and smart, felt that her lungs were about to burn. Although she had applied a thick layer of Avène SPF 30+ sunscreen cream on her exposed face and arms, this famous French brand cosmetic product that was known for specializing in sun protection still could not withstand the harsh climate of the Gobi Desert. Obviously, its R&D lab had not taken into account an environment like the Gobi. On the second day after entering the Gobi, Lin Hui’s originally fair skin was already showing signs of turning wheatish.
The sunlight and the heat in the Gobi, even in the shade, made people feel like they were in a stove. It was actually not much different from a real stove. The wet-bulb thermometer hanging outside a tent was at 51°C, and the humidity was at 20%. Under this hot and dry temperature, a glass of water would quickly evaporate.
Looking at the sunlight from the shade, two Americans, Huck and Mike, were both playing around with a multi-functional military shovel made in China and happily playing a game of frying eggs without fire. Although it was nearing 5 p.m., the blazing weather in the Gobi could still cause eggs to solidify slowly, and they only needed a bit of oil and salt to make authentic sunny-side-up eggs.
Lin Hui’s tutor, Dr. Qiao, and a few foreigners were sitting in a tent, shirtless and discussing something excitedly, exactly the same as the scholars’ demeanor in normal days. It made people dizzy looking at their shiny, white, fat flesh. How could these people have so much energy under these circumstances? Lin Hui did not even want to move at all. If not for obtaining her master’s degree, she would not have braved the dangers and risked her life to follow her tutor and the other classmates on this expedition team organized by the United States to the vast Gobi Desert known as a life forbidden zone.
“Miss Lin, have a drink!” A bottle of Nongfu Spring appeared in front of Lin Hui, who was about to start hallucinating.
Lin Hui opened her eyes and rubbed them. It was not a hallucination. She quickly took this bottle of precious water in the Gobi and smiled sweetly at the young man who had handed her the bottle. “Wu Peng, thank you so much.” A sense of coolness entered her body and dissipated a lot of that hotness. After taking five sips, she resisted the urge to drink more and screwed the bottle cap back on.
Even before the departure, everyone knew the dangers of the Gobi Desert were not just for scaring others. People became lost in the Gobi and never came back every year. On the sixth day after entering the Gobi, the expedition team suddenly encountered a strong gale of sand and stones. It blew for two days and two nights. Most of the paint on the vehicles had been polished clean, and some windshields had been smashed into large spider webs.