Scott Harris clicked his tongue. “Let’s make a deal—calm down for one minute and stop trying to get yourself killed, okay?”

Mason hadn’t even gotten close to the dragon pillar before he already felt a faint tearing force, which startled him into taking two steps back. Sheepishly, he returned to Scott Harris’s side.

The villa’s door lock also used identity verification, which posed no obstacle for Scott Harris—after all, this was his house.

He led the two Mason, one big and one small, straight to the basement storage room with practiced ease.

To save energy, they deliberately took the stairs.

The storage room was astonishingly airtight. As soon as they entered, they could smell a mix of electronic circuit boards and metal—a scent that had built up over fifty years of being sealed. Scott Harris switched on the smallest emergency light, just barely enough for the two of them to make out the outlines of the equipment inside—

Nine cryogenic capsules neatly occupied most of the storage room. Of the other three walls, two were lined with cabinets filled with various items, and the last one was an operations console connected to several screens of different sizes—who knew if they were for monitoring or something else.

“How long can the power in this room last?” Mason asked. “Come on, let’s hurry up and get these charming cryogenic capsules running—I’m about to suffocate in here!”

Maybe it was the hope of survival, but his tone was almost cheerful.

But instead of heading for the capsules, Scott Harris bypassed them and went straight to one of the cabinets, rummaging through the top shelf for something.

“What’s up? Do you need to find something else before you can start them?” Mason asked in confusion, glancing at his watch as he followed.

In the fourth cabinet, Scott Harris found a metal cube. Without even lifting his eyelids, he said, “Capsules can wait. I’m recharging the communicator first.”

“Communicator?” Mason hadn’t caught on yet, blinking a couple of times. “Why are you recharging the communicator? Do you need it to start the capsules?”

Scott Harris replied, “No, I need to reply to a message.”

Mason: “…………………………”

With a thud, he dropped to his knees in front of Scott Harris. “Can’t you save our lives before you start chatting?”

Scott Harris pressed the metal cube against the back of the communicator and pushed a button on the cube.

With a ding, the communicator sent a jolt through his fingers, then the screen lit up and rebooted.

Only then did Scott Harris glance at the kneeling, weeping Mason, grabbed a cable from the floor, and plugged it into a wall socket.

“Smart system activated. Cryogenic capsule operation test restarting. External monitoring detected previous abnormal shutdown. Relocating for you… Relocation complete. Monitoring continues.”

Mason stared blankly as the electronic equipment rebooted, and the nine cryogenic capsules emitted a humming sound as they finally powered up.

“These capsules are mainly used for testing, so the activation method is different from the ones in the forest,” Scott Harris said, leaning against the operations console, one hand propping himself up, the other tapping quickly on the communicator screen.

A message from Eric Bennett-Young complaining about boredom was still sitting in his inbox—it had been seven minutes since it arrived.

This time, Scott Harris didn’t type anything provocative. To save time, he didn’t even write a word—he just tapped a period and sent it.

At least, that counted as a reply.

As the cryogenic capsules powered up, oxygen slowly seeped out from vents at the base. The two Mason, one big and one small, clung to each other, slumping half-paralyzed beside the capsules.

Once the machines were running normally, the humming faded, and the storage room gradually quieted down.

“Whew—” Mason let out a long breath, squinting at Scott Harris. “Finally, I can breathe again.”

He felt so comfortable he could have hugged a capsule and slept. After a while, he suddenly remembered something and asked, “Why were you in such a hurry to recharge? What message did you need to reply to? We’re practically space dust now—who would still bother messaging you?”

It was simply incomprehensible!

Scott Harris lifted his eyelids. “A terrorist.”

Mason: “…How terrifying? Is it so bad that if you don’t reply, he’ll blow you up?”

Scott Harris casually tossed the communicator onto the console. “Of course not. If he blows anything up, it’ll be a planet.”

“????”

Mason dug at his ear. “Wait, did I just hear something outrageous… You’re joking, right?”

Scott Harris had already turned to look at the various screens behind him and didn’t answer.

“…” Mason stared at him in horror for a while, then decided that something so shocking couldn’t possibly be said in such a casual tone.

He mulled it over, then relaxed and took another breath of oxygen. “He must be joking.”

The screens on the electronic console glowed, each one corresponding to a different part of the villa or the cedar forest outside, rotating at set intervals.

But given their current situation, the so-called surveillance was useless for now—on this fragment, it was likely just the three of them.

Two of the screens showed areas at the edge of the fragment, where a sheer cliff dropped off into endless space.

The sea of stars was above their heads—and beneath their feet.

It was a truly strange sight, but Scott Harris only watched quietly for a couple of seconds before moving his finger to the power button.