The Combat Shuttle and a Daring Idea

The last room at the top of the three-thousand-meter tower held one final surprise.

A vehicle was hovering inside — suspended there, silent and still.

It was roughly twenty-five meters long and fifteen meters wide, jet-black from nose to tail, shaped like a flattened diamond. If anything, it looked even sleeker than the Night Hawk fighter Lu Yuan had ridden from Xili City all the way to the capital.

Lu Yuan and Amy stepped inside.

"What is this?" Amy breathed, her eyes wide.

Lu Yuan reached out and pressed his palm to the hull. A flood of information poured into his mind.

*Black Diamond Type 1 Combat Shuttle — Second-Rank Flying Spirit Object*

Maximum speed: ten times the speed of sound — enough to outpace even a speed-specialized Battle Venerable. At standard cruising velocity between three and five times Mach, fuel consumption ran to one Fourth-rank Spirit Crystal per hour. Pushing to maximum burn jumped that cost to one per minute, equivalent to a hundred Second-rank Spirit Crystals. The craft's full charge held the equivalent of a hundred Fourth-rank Spirit Crystals of Spirit Power, giving it just over a hundred minutes of maximum-speed flight. That figure covered propulsion only; activating the crystal shield or engaging the Spirit Cannons billed separately.

Defensively, it could absorb a single strike from a Second-rank advanced Lord Grade entity. Its built-in Spirit Cannons hit with comparable force.

Interior: a cockpit — largely unnecessary, since the shuttle was an intelligent craft with full autopilot and auto-targeting. A passenger compartment, roughly fifty square meters, twenty seats. A bedroom. A bathroom. Total interior space: just over a hundred square meters.

Lu Yuan stared at the readout, eyes wide.

*No wonder they kept this in the highest room of the core zone.* This was almost certainly the single most valuable object in the entire Floating City.

Amy placed her hand on the hull as well. Her eyes went a little wider, and she let out a soft, involuntary exclamation.

"Beautiful."

What struck them both most was that the shuttle could function here at all — inside the Land of Origin. A purely technological construct would be barred from entry. But this shuttle was a spirit object at its core, fueled by Spirit Power rather than any conventional energy source. A flying spirit object, specifically — which meant, like a Gene Armament, it could be bonded to its owner and integrated directly into their body.

Lu Yuan explored the interior more thoroughly. Outside: black. Inside: silver-white. The passenger cabin had twenty seats that looked rather lonely at the moment; they'd arrived with a crowd, but they were leaving with fewer than twenty people, and the space stretched out emptily.

Then he found the bedroom, and stopped.

*A bedroom.* He genuinely hadn't expected that.

He thought of every night he'd spent pitching a tent in the wilderness somewhere. After this, he could sleep in a spacecraft.

*Quality of life: dramatically improved.*

The one caveat was that, unlike a Gene Armament, the shuttle provided no direct stat buffs to his own body. That barely mattered. The buffs weren't the point. The point was that he'd never have to run anywhere on his own two legs again. And since he'd already inscribed Mechanical Control, he didn't even need the cockpit to pilot it anyway.

He ran the numbers. At auction, something like this would fetch around a million Fourth-rank Spirit Crystals, easily. Half of that was five hundred thousand.

*Five hundred thousand Fourth-rank Spirit Crystals.* Enough to fully temper one Lord Grade Transcendent Gene. Maybe two, with good luck.

He looked at the shuttle. He looked at Amy.

By their standing fifty-fifty split on spoils, half of this was hers by rights. He was desperately short on Spirit Crystals right now. He could offer her the shuttle in exchange for Spirit Crystal compensation — give up his claim, collect the payment, solve the problem. But five hundred thousand Fourth-rank Spirit Crystals? He couldn't produce a fraction of that sum. And besides, looking at this sleek, elegant, jet-black craft...

He really did not want to give it up.

*God, I'm so broke.*

While Lu Yuan stood there with conflict written all over his face, Amy stole a quiet glance at him.

Her violet eyes flickered. Then she grinned and clapped him cheerfully on the shoulder.

"Lei Feng — I'm giving you this combat shuttle. No need to split Spirit Crystals with me over it. I'm not short on them."

Lu Yuan stared at her. His jaw dropped slightly.

"Amy," he said, half-disbelieving. "Are you a legendary angel?"

Amy's face went crimson. She grabbed his arm and — *thwack thwack thwack* — hammered his back repeatedly with both fists.

"Don't think your flattery makes me happy! Once I reach Second-rank, my great-grandfather is giving me a powerful mount. This thing would just go to waste with me — so I'm letting you have it cheap. That's all. Don't read into it."

Even so, warmth spread steadily through Lu Yuan's chest. He rubbed the back of his neck.

"Thank you, Amy. Really."

He cleared his throat. "Ahem. Let me bond it first."

He pressed his palm flat against the metal hull and focused his will. His Gene Battle Marks surfaced across his skin, threads of light drifting slowly along their lines, seeping steadily into the hull.

A moment later, a mechanical chime rang out from within the shuttle:

*"Beep — Black Diamond No. 1 Combat Shuttle bonding complete. Please name your vessel."*

Lu Yuan paused. He'd been going to call it "Black Diamond" — obvious, derived straight from the model name. But Amy had given it to him. Maybe she should be the one to name it.

"Amy — what do you think it should be called?"

Amy considered for a moment. Her eyes lit up.

"Little Bunny No. 1?"

"What does this have to do with bunnies?"

"Because little bunnies are cute!"

Lu Yuan smiled. A slow, particular kind of smile. He looked at Amy steadily.

"But Amy, you're way cuter than any bunny." His smile widened a fraction. "How about we call it 'Little Angel Amy'?"

Amy froze solid.

One beat. Two.

Then her face flooded scarlet from her ears down to her collar. She stared at him, equal parts mortified and furious, and launched another volley against his back.

"That name is completely off-limits! Absolutely not! My name belongs to me and me alone!"

Lu Yuan's smile stiffened. He touched his own cheek.

*...is it really that disgusting?*

"Fine, fine. Pick something else."

Amy thought it over with exaggerated gravity. Then she gave a firm, solemn nod.

"Black Bear No. 1."

The room went quiet.

"...why is it called Black Bear No. 1?" Zhu Yu asked, genuinely baffled.

Lu Yuan glanced at Amy and gave a long-suffering look. "Your young lady named it."

Amy lifted her chin with a hint of self-satisfaction. "Isn't it nice?"

"As expected of the young miss," Zhu Yu said. "What a cute name."

Lu Yuan had long since given up making sense of Amy's thought process. Black Bear No. 1 it was.

As a flying spirit object, the shuttle could be merged into its owner's body just as a Gene Armament could. The massive craft dissolved into a streak of light and poured into Lu Yuan's chest, merging seamlessly within him. Its ghostly outline settled at the outer edge of his Gene Chain, orbiting there like a distant planet.

It was his.

*All in all — cause for celebration.*

They left the room and descended through the tower. In the lobby below, Lin Xixi and the rest of the group had been waiting, and they came forward as soon as they saw the two coming down.

"Young Miss, Mr. Lei — all finished up there?"

"Done." Amy nodded. "We can leave this Floating City now and head to the next one."

The group filed out of the three-thousand-meter tower and into the plaza.

"One of what we picked up this time," Lu Yuan said, "is the Black Diamond Type 1 Combat Shuttle. We'll take it to the Sky Elevator plaza — it'll be faster."

He smiled. A streak of black light swept through the air, and Black Bear No. 1 materialized above the plaza, hovering in place. With a flicker of his focus, it touched down and popped open a hatch along the front-facing side of its diamond hull.

Lin Xixi's group stared.

"What a gorgeous aircraft!"

"Mr. Lei — what is this thing?"

"Why is it called Black Bear No. 1?"

They boarded. Inside: all silver-white and quietly spacious, a sharp contrast to the black exterior. Someone found the bedroom and paused in surprise. The passenger cabin looked emptier than expected — they'd come up with a crowd, and were going back with fewer than twenty. The rows of seats stretched out with room to spare.

Black Bear No. 1 lifted off, settling into a cruising speed of roughly three times the speed of sound — approximately one kilometer per second. From the core zone to the Sky Elevator plaza at the city's edge was nearly fifty kilometers. They covered it in under a minute.

"Less than a minute," someone said quietly. "That fast."

They landed, disembarked, and Lu Yuan dismissed the shuttle back into his body.

The Sky Elevator plaza swarmed with aircraft.

Hundreds of them circled the Sky Elevator like a dense school of fish — Mechanical Warriors with Spirit Cannons making their rounds, heads turning periodically toward the elevator. An invisible barrier seemed to keep the entire swarm at a perimeter of at least a hundred meters, repelled from coming any closer.

Lu Yuan stood and looked at them.

*Right. I have Mechanical Control now.*

The thought crystallized into something sharper. *Could I actually seize all of those aircraft and Mechanical Guardians?*

His pulse kicked up. He activated the Combat Technique, letting his concentration spread outward in a steady wave. Spirit Power began draining steadily from within him. His Gene Battle Marks surfaced, light pulsing along their channels.

With the level of mental resistance these mechanical life forms possessed, any of them within a hundred meters fell within his reach. He issued the command.

Every aircraft surrounding the Sky Elevator lurched to a simultaneous halt.

Then, as if answering a single silent order, they lined up into a neat, precise formation, circled the elevator twice in perfect unison, and peeled away into the distance.

The sky around the elevator emptied completely.

Silence settled over the group.

"...what just happened?"

"Where did all the aircraft go?"

The others pressed against windows and peered out in baffled confusion. They'd seen the invisible barrier once before on their way up — but the aircraft had only kept their distance then. This time, they had all departed entirely.

Lu Yuan stood quietly and watched the last of them disappear.

Amy looked at him from the side.

"Your smile is disgusting."

Lu Yuan's grin froze. He reached up and touched his own face.

*...is it really that bad?*

He cleared his throat and offered no response.

They boarded the Sky Elevator. Lu Yuan activated the control unit, and the elevator disengaged from the Floating City's landing plaza, beginning its long descent toward the thousand-meter tower far below.

Inside the elevator, Lu Yuan looked upward.

A slow smile spread across his face — wide and unhurried, his eyes burning with something close to barely-contained excitement.

He gazed up through the ceiling at the Floating City growing smaller above them.

*Yes. He really could.*

A bold idea had taken shape in his mind.

A very bold idea indeed.