Chapter Fifty-Three: The Dawn of Chaos and Upheaval

Guren pushed her way through the crowd all the way out of the zoo. Disregarding the astonished gazes of those around her, she sprinted desperately toward the botanical garden.

They had all fallen into a trap—a trap specifically designed for the Containment Bureau!

The masked woman was never going to show up at all.

What the enemy wanted were these throngs of endless spectators... but the true stage was not in front of the panda enclosure!

"Guren! Where are you going?" the team leader called out over the comms.

"The enemy's target is the botanical garden's breach point! I am on my way to the west gate. Have the rest of the members intercept the remaining three gates, blockade the surrounding roads, and have the local civilians evacuated immediately!" Guren said in a single breath.

"Impossible. Only the government has the authority to do something like that."

"Then use your connections to make the government do it! I know the Bureau has that kind of clout higher up!"

Captain Wan was silent for a few seconds. "Are you certain this series of erosions was caused by the masked woman?"

By this time, Guren had already passed through the Great West Gate, leaving only about four hundred meters to the coordinate location. "I am certain! If I am wrong, I will take full responsibility!"

"Are you the captain, or am I?" Wan Chongshan made a clicking sound with his tongue. "The one who takes responsibility can only be me. Did you all hear that? Head to the botanical garden right now to reinforce Guren. You must stop the expansion of the breach point."

"Understood!" Wang Baihu and the others replied in unison.

"Aaaaaagh—!"

Suddenly, a strange cry swept across the skies above the botanical garden.

It was a sound Guren had never heard before, resembling the roar of some colossal beast, yet she could not match it to any known creature.

The ominous foreboding in her heart grew even stronger.

After running past two more scenic viewpoints, the "Great Forest" lay ahead—a flat and expansive slope planted to mimic a tropical rainforest, which was also the location indicated by the coordinates.

Before she could even reach the edge of the slope, the ground beneath her feet suddenly trembled violently.

It felt as though a fleet of ten heavy dump trucks were charging forward side by side!

Screech!

The peripheral tall trees crashed down amid a series of snapping trunks, and a robust quadrupedal creature burst out from within. It stood nearly four stories high, with each leg comparable in thickness to an adult's torso!

Though this was the first time Guren had seen such a creature with her own eyes, she quickly associated it with a category of ancient animals from her memories.

Dinosaurs!

Then came the second and the third! These behemoths roared as they pushed aside the trees blocking their path, seeming panicked. Fortunately, judging by their long, slender necks and sturdy quadrupedal legs, these were all herbivores.

After the large herbivores cleared a path, a few more dragons with fleshy fins growing along their backs emerged from behind. Their heads were sharper and their bodies much lower to the ground, crawling about like gigantic lizards.

What kind of dinosaur was this?

Guren didn't recognize them, but she had definitely seen similar things in dinosaur movies!

What made her scalp tingle even more was that there were tourists in the botanical garden, though far fewer in number than at the zoo. Now, all these tourists had been drawn over by the extraordinary commotion, and upon seeing actual dinosaurs, their first thought wasn't to run away, but to pull out their phones and take pictures!

She didn't bother trying to dissuade them, knowing that verbal persuasion would have a negligible effect.

The only way to stop the disaster from happening was to extinguish the source!

Guren nimbly wove her way through the herd of running dinosaurs and plunged headfirst into the dense woodland. Yet this forest seemed unfathomably deep, and the interwoven branches and green leaves overhead grew increasingly dense. Sunlight no longer shone down directly, instead casting tiny pillars of light through the gaps.

After running for about two minutes along the dinosaur footprints and the wreckage of smashed trees, she finally heard some different noises.

"Roar! Awoo!"

"Run faster... catch up and I'll give you meat."

"Awoo-awoo!"

The sounds were coming from right ahead and to her right!

Guren immediately adjusted her direction and sprinted toward the noise. But no sooner had she taken a dozen steps than the surroundings suddenly opened up wide—the feeling was akin to the fisherman of Wuling crossing the small mountain cave to reach the secluded paradise in *The Peach Blossom Spring*, leaving her entire field of vision expansive and pleasant. The forest had vanished, replaced by a vast grassland. Clear streams meandered across the ground, birds and beasts frolicked by the water, and in the distance, a migrating herd of dinosaurs could be seen.

Looking closer, she noticed a concrete bungalow at the base of the hillside, appearing utterly out of place with the surrounding scenery. A plaque hung beside its doorway: Rainforest Service Station.

In front of the house, a tall, masked, colorful-haired woman was using a piece of beef jerky to lure a short-clawed dinosaur roughly her own size into running in circles repeatedly by the doorway, seemingly playing some entertaining game.

That building indicated that this territory still belonged to the botanical garden.

Yet the space nearby had completely merged with another world.

This was precisely the advanced form of a breach point; perhaps it had initially been closely linked to only a single door of the service station, but it had now evolved into a part of the rainforest zone.

Despite the absurdity of the scene before her, she was forced to conclude that the wanderer causing the expansion of the intrusion point was a dinosaur. However, it was not the mastermind; the woman guiding it to repeatedly cross the boundary was the true culprit—the other party clearly knew this, using a seemingly naive and innocent facade while secretly executing the most heinous of crimes!

She was committing a crime against the entire human world!

Following a piercing chill came an indescribable fury. Guren could no longer control her emotions; she raced down the earthen slope, pulled out the Bureau's specially crafted handgun from her waist, and fired consecutive shots at the woman and the dinosaur.

However, the bullets tipped with tranquilizer needles failed to hit their target.

Two blades of compressed air blocked the path of the gunfire, just as they had when facing Joan in the dungeon.

Guren realized it instantly—it was this person again!

The masked woman and the air-blade man were actually in cahoots!

Before she could execute her Castle Swapping ability to get closer to the house, a third and a fourth air blade materialized in succession. One stabbed toward the spot where the bullets had landed, while the other slashed directly toward her hands, sealing off all of her offensive routes.

Guren no longer possessed the graceful, continuous evasions from her first skirmish. Driven into a panic, she was forced to roll backward, covering herself in mud while her handgun was cleaved apart by that single slash.

Cold sweat broke out all over her.

Had she been even 0.2 seconds slower, the thing shattered would likely not have been the gun barrel, but her own hands!

The opponent was clearly improving as well; both the speed of the sword swings and the lethality of the strikes were now far more fatal than before!

What was even more infuriating was that the person still refused to show their face. After driving her back, four air blades simply hovered mid-air, isolating her from the woman.

Guren roared with raging fury, "Do you have any idea what you're doing?"

The woman tilted her head to look at her, her sharp pupils entirely devoid of wavering. "Of course I do. Because this is the only correct course of action."

The moment her voice trailed off, she vanished without a trace.

The air blades dissipated along with her, as if the clash just now had been nothing more than a nightmare, leaving behind only the bewildered dinosaur standing in place.

At that moment, a humming sound came from overhead.

Guren looked up and spotted a helicopter hovering mid-air, its occupant clearly filming this direction continuously. From an aerial perspective, this region looked like a massive "spatial tear," fusing two completely distinct landscapes and environments together. It was no wonder they had been drawn here.

She knew in her heart that it didn't really matter whether this helicopter was here or not. The enemy setting up the secondary stage right next door had already attracted far too many gazes. The massive influx of deployed drones, or even passing satellites, would sooner or later lock onto this distorted space.

Situations similar to this had happened before—such as the mirage last time—but that intrusion hadn't lasted very long, and no entrance could be found from the outside. Now that the breach had occurred on the ground and allowed a group of dinosaurs to escape, even if the logistics team pulled out all the stops, it was unlikely they could keep it hidden.

Seen in this light, the interception case that had taken place earlier in the abandoned clubhouse was in all likelihood also the work of these two individuals.

Guren felt a surge of unmitigated fury; she had actually been led around by the nose the entire time!

At the same time, numerous questions battered her mind incessantly—

Anticipating and detecting breach points was something only the Bureau could do; how was it that they could know in advance?

Allowing the erosion to expand would only bring more chaos and destruction to the world; what good did that do for them?

And that remark from the other party, "Of course I do," spoken as though she were the only one who understood the truth of the world!

It was simply preposterous!

"Oh my god... where on earth have we ended up?"

"Could this be time travel? This place is so gorgeous!"

The gasps of passersby echoed from behind one after another.

Guren looked back; those were clearly tourists from near the "Great Forest." They had recovered from their initial shock and were now stepping into this landscape area—which radiated an aura of absolute impossibility—filled with boundless curiosity.

Coupled with the dinosaurs still roaming outside and the crowds swarming in from the zoo to watch the commotion... the situation had become uncontrollably chaotic. Guren realized that for the Containment Bureau, this might merely be a catch-off-guard blow, but for the entire world, it was the beginning of chaos and subversion.