174: Collapsed entrance

In the hotel room, the air conditioner quietly blew cold air, but the atmosphere was frighteningly hot and oppressive.

It had completely transformed into a temporary operations command center.

Several military-grade laptops whirred with their fans spinning wildly. On the screens, countless dense green data points refreshed like a waterfall, rapidly constructing an extremely complex 3D LiDAR model of the scanned mountainous area in real-time.

The flickering, jumping green point cloud data made Wang Dalong's eyes blur and his temples throb, feeling like his brain was being scrambled into mush by these ghostly scribbles.

He couldn't understand it at all, but he was deeply impressed.

"Brother Feng, this... can this really work? This thing is more complicated than a hospital CT scan. Just one look and my brain would crash."

Lin Feng didn't speak, just stared at the screen, his fingertips unconsciously tapping lightly on the desk. The only sounds in the entire room were his tapping "tap, tap" and the hum of the computer fans.

Time passed minute by minute.

Two hours later.

"Sir, found it!"

A technician responsible for data analysis sprang up from his chair as if electrocuted, eyes fixed on the screen, then slammed the Enter key!

"Whoosh!"

On the screen, the chaotic 3D topographic map composed of billions of data points was instantly filtered by a complex algorithm.

All normal, natural undulations were erased.

Finally, an almost vanished, straight linear trace, nearly washed away by decades of vegetation and soil, appeared crystal clear before everyone!

That line, like a massive scar forcibly buried by time, started from a long-abandoned logging camp marked on the map at the foot of the mountain, stubbornly and persistently winding its way up to the mountainside, before disappearing beneath an extremely steep cliff.

"Holy shit..."

Wang Dalong's eyes nearly popped out. He rushed to the screen in one stride, his jaw almost hitting the keyboard.

"This... this can actually be found?! Is this the 'ghost road'?!"

"Coordinates locked."

Lin Feng's voice was so calm it betrayed no emotion. He stood up, his slender finger tapping heavily on the endpoint of that line on the screen.

"Shitou, prepare to move out."

"Yes, sir!"

Without a single unnecessary word.

Shitou and his team immediately sprang into action, checking equipment, loading ammunition, starting vehicles—the entire process flowed smoothly, filled with cold efficiency.

Ten minutes later.

"Vroom—"

Three pitch-black Mercedes G-Class SUVs roared dully in the night. Their thick tires crushed over the town's cobblestone roads, headlights like three sharp swords slicing through the silent darkness, plunging without hesitation into the forest path leading to that abandoned logging camp.

The night became their best cover.

The convoy jolted along the rugged mountain road for over half an hour, finally finding the starting point of the "ghost road" marked on the map at the edge of the abandoned logging camp.

There was no road in sight.

The so-called road was now just a gully completely reclaimed by waist-high shrubs and wildly growing vines.

"Turn on the searchlights, vehicle one leads the way, advance slowly!"

Shitou's command came through the walkie-talkie.

"Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!"

The searchlights on the roofs of the three SUVs lit up simultaneously, their stark white beams tearing through the thick darkness, illuminating the scene ahead as if it were daylight.

The lead vehicle roared, forcefully crushing forward.

Thorns and small trees blocking the way snapped "crack, crack" under the steel body. Wheels sank into the mud, emitting heavy growls.

The vehicle moved extremely slowly—less like driving and more like forcibly carving a path with several tons of metal.

Under the wheels, occasional violent jolts—"thud"—came from the roadbed gravel buried under thick soil for over seventy years, silently testifying to its former existence.

The cabin was dead silent.

Everyone held their breath, only hearing the engine's low growl and countless thick branches scraping against the bulletproof windows and steel plates with a screeching noise.

Wang Dalong tightly gripped the overhead safety handle, his palms sweaty.

The convoy crawled arduously along the "ghost road" for another hour.

"Screech—!"

The lead vehicle suddenly stopped, and the two following vehicles braked as well.

"Sir, we've reached the endpoint."

Shitou's voice came through the walkie-talkie, tinged with gravity.

Everyone immediately pushed open the doors and got out.

"Snap! Snap! Snap!"

Several beams from powerful flashlights shot forward simultaneously. When they saw the scene before them, everyone, including the battle-hardened security team members, froze in place.

At the road's end stood a sheer cliff face nearly a hundred meters high, almost vertical to the ground!

And beneath that bare cliff face, an enormous entrance—a giant tunnel mouth at least twenty meters in diameter—was completely blocked by an astronomical amount of boulders and cascading soil!

Now, it was nothing but a shocking ruin.

Countless twisted, broken reinforced concrete structures jutted menacingly from the rubble pile, pointing straight at the night sky like the bleached bones of a giant monster, silently telling of how terrifying and decisive that explosion had been back then.

The signs of demolition were too obvious.

All the rubble showed a pattern of explosion from the inside out.

Shitou quickly walked to the ruins, brushing thick dust off a large boulder with his tactical-gloved hand. He carefully observed the smooth fracture surface, his expression turning grim.

"It's internal directional demolition," he judged gravely. "The detonation points were on several key load-bearing structures inside the tunnel. They calculated it very precisely, with only one goal: to make the entire entrance collapse completely and permanently, so no one could ever enter again."

Wang Dalong's face instantly paled, his lips trembling.

"We're... screwed... Forget using engineer shovels, even if we brought a large excavator, it'd take at least a month or two to dig through this, right?"

An experienced security team member nearby shook his head, pointing his flashlight at the dark, looming mountain structure above.

"Dig? Look up there—the entire mountain structure is very unstable due to that explosion back then. If we use heavy machinery here and cause strong vibrations, there's a high chance it'll trigger a secondary collapse. Then, all of us would be buried alive here."

A dead end.

A completely dead end.

After expending such immense effort and deploying top-tier equipment, what they found was an entrance the Germans themselves had sealed in the most extreme way.

A mix of disappointment and frustration began to silently spread among everyone.

However, Lin Feng acted as if he hadn't heard their conversation at all.

He didn't even spare another glance at that pile of despairing ruins.

He just slowly raised the military binoculars hanging around his neck, their dark lenses aimed at the towering cliff face directly above the collapsed entrance.

This action made everyone freeze.

Wang Dalong looked utterly confused. "Brother Feng... what are you looking at? That area up there is bare, smooth as a mirror, not even a bird's nest."

Lin Feng didn't answer him.

In his vision, enhanced by the system's extraordinary insight, on that cliff face illuminated by pale moonlight, amidst what seemed like seamless rock and vines, he discovered an extremely tiny, less-than-half-square-meter area of "anomaly"!

The rock texture there had extremely subtle, nearly imperceptible fractures and splicing marks compared to elsewhere!

That wasn't naturally formed!

It was camouflage!

At that moment, the system prompt in his mind sounded right on time.

[Ding!]

[Key structure detected: 'Valkyries Slumber' base, emergency ventilation shaft number one.]

[System analysis: This structure is covered with modular rock camouflage panels, with a special alloy grid inside. It is the only weak point of the base aside from the main entrance.]

Lin Feng slowly lowered the binoculars.

His face showed no trace of frustration or despair; instead, there was a calmness that made Wang Dalong's heart palpitate.

He raised his hand, pointing straight with his index finger at a spot about forty meters high directly above the collapsed entrance—an area of cliff face that looked utterly ordinary, even somewhat smooth, to everyone else.

"Shitou."

"Sir?" Shitou responded immediately.

Lin Feng's voice was exceptionally clear and forceful in the dead-silent valley, each word distinct.

"Send someone up there."

"There's something wrong with that spot."