The wind overturned the off-road jeep equipped with GPS positioning equipment and satellite phone, and it rolled over four times. The GPS positioning equipment and satellite phone malfunctioned due to severe vibrations, and several other off-road jeeps experiencing different breakdowns such as flat tires and the engine hood and intake pipe being filled with sand and stones, making the vehicles unable to move.
Compasses were haywire in the Gobi and kept spinning nonsensically, unable to find a direction. According to the American team leader of the expedition team, Professor Brin Jackson from Stanford University, there might be a large magnetite mine nearby.
“You’re welcome. This is what I saved. I’m not thirsty yet!” He squeezed his cracked lips. Wu Peng was also one of Dr. Qiao’s students and was working hard for his master’s degree like Lin Hui. The color of Wu Peng’s T-shirt was now indistinguishable, and he was covered in dirt, not looking better than a beggar. He sat down beside Lin Hui and looked at the Gobi from the shadow of the hill, lost in thought.
Lin Hui did not mock Wu Peng for his disheveled look because she was not much better. In this situation, she did not have sufficient water to freshen up.
“Soon! Don’t worry. Old Luo has already gone to search for help! I believe someone will come rescue us soon.” Lin Hui was still trying hard to maintain her confidence, despite the expedition team having lost contact with the outside world for four days, the strong winds causing the convoy to deviate far from the planned route, and even the guide not recognizing their position.
Everyone understood that the greatest danger encountered in the wild was not natural disasters but the loss of confidence in survival. Once desperate, death was not far away. Five days ago, the expedition team selected the vehicle in the best condition and loaded it with as much fuel, food, and water as possible. Old Luo, the best driver in the convoy, drove it to go to find a way out and seek from the outside world. The rest stayed where they were to wait for help, and no one dared to wander off on their own. Once they ran out of fuel, it would be truly dangerous.
They still had sufficient food for now, but they were consuming drinking water far beyond the original plan. The expedition team had begun to ration food and water a week ago.
While the Peking University professors and students in this team did not have much experience in dealing with this situation, the Americans who organized the team had rich field experience and were all relatively calm. But as food and water began to run out, their uneasiness started to grow.
The expedition team had entered the Gobi for fifteen days now. According to the original plan, they should have left the Gobi two days ago and reached Fuyun County in the north of the Junggar Basin to end the expedition.
After another cold night in the Gobi, there were no clouds in the sky of the vast Gobi, no plane that flew over, and no sounds from any vehicle in the distance, not even any trace of noise. Lin Hui, Wu Peng, and the rest started to become irritable.
Two days later, at the latest, the expedition team would run out of water, but there was still news from Old Luo. Lin Hui had even begun to understand why those Americans were behaving inexplicably in this dilemma. They had already become worried a long time ago. In order to prevent themselves from falling into despair, they were trying hard to find things to occupy themselves. But the activity could not be too physically strenuous, as they had to persevere until rescue arrived.
A roar came from the clear sky!
Aircraft?! Yes, aircraft! The people of the expedition team became excited. They walked out from the shadows of the tents and off-road jeeps, found things with eye-catching colors, came under the sunlight, and waved desperately at the sky. Wu Peng even lit up the already burst tire, causing black smoke to rise. However, this was not a real smoke signal, and it was blown away by the wind that came from nowhere before it could even rise more than ten meters.
A silver-white dot seemed to appear in the sky and drew a long smoke tail across the sky. But it did not seem to notice the ant-like expedition team on the ground and gradually disappeared into the sky with a resounding roar as it flew west.
“Damn it! Shit!” Professor Brin, the leader of the expedition team, could not help swearing. Planes would occasionally fly past in the past few days. He got the people in the team to issue signals desperately, but even using a burning stick, they still could not attract attention. In the Gobi with the same scenery all over, probably only an eagle could notice that the ants on the ground were different from usual.
Lin Hui had completely lost her lady-like image as she hid in the shadow of an off-road jeep angrily and muttered weakly, “God, Buddha, Allah, Three Pure Ones, please send people to rescue us quickly. I can’t hang on any longer.”
Wu Peng, who had given Lin Hui a bottle of water yesterday, was now lying down in the tent nearby, red-faced and mumbling incoherently. This unlucky person was bitten by some unknown poisonous creature last night and had only had time to shout before collapsing. Everyone quickly rushed to rescue him, but his situation was not optimistic due to the lack of effective medicine.
The sweltering heat during the day, extremely low temperatures during the night, drought, loneliness, and the unknown poisonous creature caused the expedition team to experience immense mental and physical torment.
Dr. Qiao’s face looked very unsightly. He had only wanted to explore a mysterious ancient tomb complex, but he did not expect to run into such terrible weather soon after entering the Gobi. He had a bad premonition as the person sent out to search for help and the rescue team were nowhere in sight.
“Qiao! Don’t worry! It’ll be fine!” Seeing Dr. Qiao’s worried face, Professor Brin Jackson patted Dr. Qiao’s shoulder, squeezed out an ugly smile, and encouraged, “This is something common. I believe someone will find us soon.”
…
“Gold Coin calling tower. Already searched zone five. Have not found target so far!” This was the third time he had refueled and taken off. Lin Mo was piloting the number 11 Chengdu J-10 and flying concentric spiral flights over the Junggar Basin in the Gobi. To make the search easier, the entire Junggar Basin had been divided into a few dozen zones to carry out the search zone by zone.
The moment Lin Mo entered the cockpit, Gold Coin had automatically jumped out and merged into cockpit walls. It was like a fish in water as it explored the insides of the airframe.
Since the last fusion, Gold Coin had grown very interested in Lin Mo’s new mount. It had a wonderful mechanical body with a complex structure. To the Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon that was known as the first weapon master under the stars, this kind of mechanical body that burned fuel in a special cavity to generate strong propulsion using the unidirectional driving force of fuel expansion combined with the technology of changing the wings to disrupt the airflow to change positions was truly amazing.
There were also many ultra-precision gadgets that had almost exceeded the imagination of the Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon’s understanding of metal. Gold Coin was obsessed with their unique uses and even forgot that this fusion was not much different from when it was Lin Mo’s mount in the other world. It was only different in form.
It could be said that the Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon merging into the jet fighter was another way of Lin Mo riding it.
As for why Gold Coin could remain in this form, Lin Mo knew more than when he was in the other world. Now, the core of all the essence of Gold Coin’s original dragon body was concentrated, and it was an indestructible existence. Even if it was severely injured, unless it was in a pure vacuum environment that isolated metal elements, it would slowly recover. No matter the world, there were traces of metal minerals in the water, air, and soil.
Now that it was no longer bound by its Giant Dragon mount identity nor restricted by the dragon flute, it patiently filled in Lin Mo about some secrets of the Dragon clan that were not known to outsiders in return for the things it wanted.
As a Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon that spent its life searching for and devouring all kinds of exotic metals, it would obtain interesting characteristics based on the different kinds of metal it devoured and was thus divided into different branches. And the branch that Gold Coin belonged to was called the Changeable Metal Giant Dragon and exceptionally good at changing form.
The reproduction of Metal-Attribute Giant Dragons relied on the fusion of part of the cores separated by the male and female dragons to form a new core and a dragon egg in the body of the mother dragon. After the mother dragon gave birth to the egg, it placed the egg in a hatching nest filled with various rare metal ores. The egg slowly absorbed the metal and gradually grew until it broke the shell. Where there were Metal-Attribute Giant Dragon eggs, there were often a lot of rare metals that made other races go crazy over. Every piece was a must-have for creating divine weapons and equipment. The lairs of dragons were usually treasure troves for the greedy and eternal topics of interest to them.
Gold Coin had once devoured the rare Liquid Iridium Magic Metal, so its body could transform between the most subtle forms to the most extreme forms, even surpassing the strangest slime variant that had no fixed form.
And even more fortunate was that it had once accidentally devoured something containing the legendary power of rules, the Eternal Indium Gold Dust. It had only been the size of a few grains of sand barely visible to the naked eye. It was extremely rare and not even a product of Lin Mo and the Giant Dragon’s original world. It was rare metal from legends, and it could only be discovered and not sought. Maybe it was in the sky or in the ocean. No one knew where it would appear. Just this tiny amount made Gold Coin’s metal-attribute core have indestructibility that other Metal-Attribute Giant Dragons did not have. While it was continuously destroyed in the space storm, under the protection of the power of the rules, it kept its life through constantly restoring and regrowing.
Gold Coin only remembered that when it was swallowed into the space storm, in order to protect itself, it gave up its Giant Dragon form and did its utmost to shrink into an egg-shaped form to save its life. It seemed that even Lin Mo was inadvertently wrapped in it. After coming to this world, Lin Mo coincidentally provided it with large amounts of metal and helped it regain its shape in a very short amount of time. It was fate that everything had happened this way.
In Lin Mo’s original world, humanity’s understanding of the major elemental Giant Dragons was superficial. There were actually many branches in each element, like Water-Attribute Giant Dragons were split into Raging Waves Giant Dragons, Acheron Giant Dragons, Deep-Sea Giant Dragons, Clean Water Giant Dragons, etc. Fire, light, earth, and so on attribute Giant Dragons also had many different branch types.