Doomsday Wonderland c1-855

by N. Heller

  On top of her Higher Consciousness fading rapidly, Lin Sanjiu was actually constantly fighting another voice that kept screaming at her. In only a few seconds, both her arms, which supported her on the ground, started to shake. However, Silvan was petrified, his body stiffening beneath her.

  "Hurry!" Countless black tongues poured down at them like a storm. They rained down on her and the ground beside the two of them. The moment the black tongues landed on the ground, they rapidly wriggled their way up to the two of them, whipping a dust storm on the ground around them. As countless black shadows assaulted them, she shouted again, "I—"

  Before she could finish, Silvan reached out to her and held her tightly to his c.h.e.s.t. "It's fine, I can still shoot while lying down."

  When he swiftly retracted his hand, several black tongues extended their iron needles toward the back of his hand and poked it into a bloody state. Lin Sanjiu tried to use her body to block his movement. She then felt a gun barrel prop on her shoulder. "Cover your ears and hold on. This will be fast," said Silvan in a low trembling voice.

  Although Lin Sanjiu diverted a part of her willpower to cover her ears, she still felt the powerful shot roar like a rising tide beside her ear. The firearms from the Munitions Factory were really different from normal ones. The burning sensation on her shoulder and the thick smell of gunpowder lasted for two to three minutes before slowly fading.

  As soon as the shots stopped, she turned around and bolted up to quickly scan the surroundings. The mist slowly merged, and in the area of purplish slime, broken shells and ground meat, she did not see any signs of Meme.

  "What was wrong with Meme's voice?" Silvan remained lying on the ground, his elbows supporting him upright as he looked at her for a few seconds. Atop Lin Sanjiu's back was a large area of slime with a vile stench, but the rest of her was clean. "I heard your voice earlier and thought you were attacked, but you appeared from another direction… Is there something here that can mimic our voices?"

  "No, I don't think it's mimicry." Lin Sanjiu shook her head.

  It was then that she got overwhelmed and froze uncontrollably.

  "What's wrong?" Silvan asked while standing up.

  "No matter what's mimicking our voices, I never heard something we did not say before… I suspect that it must have recorded our conversations, cut segments out, and replayed them to mislead us. That, or it is trying to split us up and take us down one by one." Lin Sanjiu slightly gasped for air and forced herself to be nervous. Despite understanding the logical truth of what was going on, her feelings were numb as if she was tranquilized.

  As her words subsided, Silvan immediately understood the situation.

  "You are saying Meme really called for help but we just don't know when?" He tightly shut his eyes and let out a sigh.

  "I split up with him for only seven to eight minutes, and I never heard him call for help before," Lin Sanjiu said with furrowed brows.

  "It means he must have ran into trouble within that time. Since the situation has come to this, you don't have to worry about startling the things underground anymore. Just blow the mist away. We must find Meme as soon as possible," Silvan nodded. He frustratingly ripped his uniform collar open, and his shaking fingers picked up the gun from the ground.

  If that boy fell into the center of the purplish-black tongues, in the span of seven to eight minutes, he would have been melted several times over. Lin Sanjiu knew she should feel angry and nervous, yet she could not emotionalize anything, as if she felt that Meme had seemingly gone on a vacation.

  She summoned the [Tornado Whip] and did her best to stir up several strong gales. The wind whistle tore the sky and earth apart. It was so sharp that it struck fear in people's hearts. Under the unbridled power of the wind, the mist no longer gathered but dispersed like clouds. The bowl-shaped marshland slowly revealed itself under the light of the sky.

  The two of them were standing on a slope covered with 'human mushrooms'. After the mist dispersed, it suddenly went silent.

  At the bottom part of the bowl-like marshland, a blurry figure the size of a hill slowly emerged.

  "The queen…" Lin Sanjiu heard herself mutter.

  Chapter 783 - Cave Entrance

  Who and what was this queen?

  The two of them stood frozen on the slope for a few seconds. When the mist cleared up, the wind carried a fishy stench to their noses, and the plain light from the sky shaded everything within their sight a duck egg green color. Further away in the marshland, a figure as big as a hill was covered in a mixed grayish color as if countless small patches were sewn on its body.

  "S-Shall we go have a look?" Lin Sanjiu asked softly, her gaze glued to the little hill.

  It stood still and quiet in her sight; it felt like home, the home that one had left for years. It brought tears to her eyes and gave her an impelling feeling of laying down beside it, to tell everything that happened after leaving.

  The feeling was not unique to her alone.

  Silvan tightened his lips. He should also be fighting another voice in his body, but his emerald-like eyes were glistening as though his eyes were a lake in the forest that the wind grazed. Not answering right away, it took him a while before he said softly, "I think… we should go have a look, but I daren't trust my judgment and I've been fighting with the thought a few times."

  "Me too… What are you thinking about now?"

  "I think we really should head over, unless you have a better idea." Silvan looked at her. The light from the sky shone on his face and accentuated his emerald green eyes.

  She did not have any better ideas in mind.

  Was the thought a product of her serious thinking or did she simply act like it was? Perhaps she actually just wanted to give herself a reason to get close to that hill? She did not know.

  Even though Lin Sanjiu could not hear Mrs. Manas's voice, she left her message nonetheless before she headed down the slope with Silvan. To prevent themselves from plunging into the thick patch of mushy rotten meat, the two of them slotted their feet between the crooks of elbows, knees, and heads of the stiffened dead bodies with careful but swift steps. The stench got worse, and even though they were making slow progress, they were getting closer to the bottom of the marshland.

  They spotted no signs of Meme along the way.

  Some time had passed since they started walking, and the ground finally flattened and expanded further away. They arrived a little further away from the giant figure; the stench in the air was so thick that it became a substance of physical matter and slowly seeped into their nasal cavities and tracheas, causing them to retch.

  The two of them looked up with pale faces, their bodies shaking. Neither took the initiative to speak first and when they finally suppressed the urge to jump on the giant figure, Silvan looked at her and his lips barely opened when he muttered, "This is going to be difficult."

  He barely opened his mouth, but his tongue was able to taste the stench of the dead bodies in the air. Lin Sanjiu spoke in the same manner, her lips barely opening, "I never would have expected this, I really thought this one was the queen."

  After that, she could no longer hold her urge back and looked up.

  On the hill in front of both of them, a concentration of black soles covered in dust and mud was sticking out, they looked like pairs of black mushroom when seen from afar. Countless pairs of feet extended all the way up until the top of the hill, and only then the legs of the dead bodies were visible—these people must have jumped on the hill using the same posture before they died. All their heads and feet were facing the same direction. Their bodies were piling on top of each other, and their original shape was messed up. Only clothes of different colors were barely visible on them.

  Beneath the hill of dead bodies, the crawling backs were even more closely lined up than before. There was not even space for a hand to slip between the dead bodies.

  The two of them had to hold back their disgust and the urge to throw up. They pushed away
the dead bodies in front of them one after another, using their legs to open up a passage—the huge amount of dead bodies were laid here for at least a decade, and a simple push with the leg caused the dirt, shredded clothes, flocculent objects from the dead bodies, crushed bones, and many other unnamed filthy to burst into the air. The two of them covered their noses and mouths, and continued forward arduously to the bottom of the hill of the dead. Lin Sanjiu looked down and noticed a lock of deadman's hair tangled up on her boots and, she gulped nervously right away.

  "Judging from the rate of decay, the people around this hill of the dead should be the earliest batch of people that arrived in Shambhala."

  With his hand in front of his mouth, Silvan spoke in a muffled voice, "Batch after batch, every single one of them submitted to the urge of laying down, just like what happened to us earlier. Until this place got too crowded, the later batch started to surround first in circles."

  "Under this hill of the dead… should be the queen, right?" Lin Sanjiu said softly as she pictured what happened here a decade ago.

  "It should be, the queen must be living underground like those black things. Look at the people who were attracted here, their faces are all facing the ground. I guess it would have been easier for them to jump into the people's faces."

  "Then, Meme…"

  "I don't know where he is, and since he is only an intern combatant, he doesn't have comms with him either." It was rare for Silvan to be nervous. He answered before she could ask about Meme.

  After his voice subsided, the two of them tacitly went silent. They knew in their hearts that the odds of the boy surviving after so long without any news or signs were slim.

  "He tried to save us..." Lin Sanjiu only said half of what she intended to say, as the rest got stuck in her throat. She shockingly realized she did not feel sad about that boy at all, there was only a tinge of faint sadness, as though she had just parted with a friend.

  A while later, Silvan wiped his face with his hand and said in a gravelly voice, "Let us have a look at this queen."

  Having been struggling in the Doomsday World for many years, they had been met with many ups and downs in their journey and had witnessed countless amounts of deaths that were even more abrupt and unacceptable than Meme's. Losing something was the norm; the unfulfilled gratitude, love, anticipation towards the dead usually ended up in a void and dimmed away. In the end, it would be covered in dust along with their name.

  Sending every life away was like a part of themselves dying a little.

  Lin Sanjiu summoned [Tornado Whip], and measured the size and weight of the hill of the dead before lashing the whip into the air. What followed her air-ripping gale that struck the hill was Silvan's Mobile Cannonballs. When they were fired into the air, several blue lights shone brightly, as if a passage was built upon the air. In the blink of an eye, the cannonballs blasted a giant hole at the bottom of the hill.

  The ground shook, the hill felt like it was charged with electricity, body after body was shaken down and it disintegrated to dust in mid-air. Further away, the dead bodies that crawled on the ground finally lost their balance and rolled down the slope one after another. The slope around the hill was instantly shrouded by a dust storm.

  "Look!" Amid the sharp whistling storm, Silvan's voice sounded muffled, "There is a cave at the bottom of the hill!"

  As he spoke, more dead bodies rolled down the slopes and filled that cave completely in the blink of an eye. Lin Sanjiu immediately stopped her whip and waited for the wind to weaken before she dashed towards the messy sea of dead bodies.

  They trudged in the sea of bodies as if they were walking in a landfill. They laboriously cleared the area surrounding the entrance of the cave. None of the dead bodies had faces, only half empty skulls that looked like torn rubber balls, and they barely looked like humans anymore. The broken limbs and torsos blocked the cave leading to the underground. When the two of them finally reopened the cave by digging through the dead bodies, even Silvan looked like he was a dirty mess, which was rare for him.

  When the two of them looked at the dark hole on the ground that was the size of a human skull, Silvan sighed softly and said, "I never get to ask you, what kind of dream did you have? The thing you brought out from the Reverie Libretto led us here, meaning it has something to do with your dream."

  "I don't want to think about it," Lin Sanjiu coldly answered.

  Even though she massacred all of Peanut Town in her dream, the realism that she felt was the same as massacring a whole town for real. She could even feel the fresh warm bodies of the townspeople twitching in front of her. However, the reason she did not want to recall the dream was not because of how real the dream was, but because she felt nothing towards the massacre.

  A few seconds later, she realized her tone was not appropriate, so she added, "If you really want to know, in my dream… there was a hill that was similar to this."

  Silvan nodded and did not press the question. When he averted his emerald-like eyes, Lin Sanjiu suddenly had a feeling in her heart: he was a man who could quickly cut ties with the people around him.

  "The hole is too small, we can't get in. Look around for something that can make this hole bigger but won't cause a commotion," he said. He tapped his wrist, and a projection jumped into the air right away; it wearily floated up, and provided pictures and words for all kinds of items.

  Lin Sanjiu searched her memory and realized she indeed had something, even though that thing was not used for digging holes.

  When the artist was summoned, he was as confused as Silvan.

  "Don't draw on the ground around the hole, get it? I want the ground around the hole to fill your drawing, then it will be big enough. If you don't know how to draw, you can start digging." Lin Sanjiu squatted down and pointed around.

  In the end, the bleak painting covered in dead bodies was like a breach opened up from hell. Even when seeing it use the darkest of beauty standards, it had nothing to do with beauty. Lin Sanjiu had no idea how the artist dealt with the old paintings, but this time, the artist rolled the painting up and gave it to her.

  "A smart Special Item. Are you ready?" Silvan gave a rare smile for the first time since Meme's disappearance.

  Lin Sanjiu nodded. She looked at that dark hole with clenched teeth, then jumped in and slid down.

  Chapter 784 - Something Big

  The depth the artist dug into the ground was only a little more than a man's height. After jumping into the hole, the passage started to shrink. Lin Sanjiu was forced to crawl all the way down, digging chunks of dirt out of her way and transforming them into cards. There was a limit to how many cards she could transform per day, and soon enough, she began to run low on numbers. Fortunately, the passage slowly widened up and extended to a spacious cave.

  They could finally straighten their backs. They held onto the dirt wall and moved forward as quietly as possible.

  Everything was simmered in darkness, and after reaching a dozen or so meters underground, their sight was blinded and even their fingers became invisible in the darkness. The smell of dirt grew heavy. As they traveled further, at times, they would step on some slippery goo on the ground that would produce a disgusting hiss. The two of them wandered around in the darkness for a while before she sensed a faint scent of fig waft from around her ear. Silvan's voice then softly entered her ears, "Shed some light,"

  Before Lin Sanjiu could take out her [Ability Polishing Agent], a faint white light was cast from her shoulder. She looked over her shoulder and realized Silvan was actually ordering the little robot with claws on her shoulder.

  As the light was cast into darkness, it softly spread open and covered the entire cave, which was filled with countless dust particles.

  The cave was around 20 to 30 square meters in size, similar to the capacity of a bedroom. The walls of the cave had areas of crooked indentations, as if they were left behind by something walking past the walls. The ground was slippery and puddles of sticky goo gl
istened softly.

  The wall opposite the two of them seemed to have absorbed all of the light source, but was still hiding in the darkness. Lin Sanjiu walked towards the wall, the light followed her footsteps and moved closer, but it soon dimmed in the vast darkness. She checked up and down, and was slightly surprised by what she found. She turned around and said, "It's an empty space, we can continue downwards."

  "Both sides of the cave have a radioactive alignment; the further we go, the wider it is. But this space is really big." Once Silvan caught up, he measured the wide space, using the dim light from the robot.

  His voice echoed in the broad space and slowly faded. The space behind this cave seemed like the living room that was connected to the bedroom, it was really deep. The light was barely able to reach the dome ceiling, failing to reach the dark bottom.

  A slope wider than the walls of the cave connected the cave and the big empty space. There were also many crooked indentations on the ground, but it was much wider and deeper than on the slope, messily intertwining with each other. The two of them stepped on the bumpy indentation and slowly walked deeper into the empty space in silence. The further away they were from the surface, the more it felt like they were getting closer to an outrageous dream.

  Beneath the empty space was another and yet another, gradually becoming deeper and wider than the previous. The two of them had walked for who knows how many hours and they could no longer see the walls of the empty space, only the crooked indentations accompanying them all the way. The indentations also became larger and larger, to the point that it was wide enough for two people to stand inside. Silvan took two torchlights out, but after the light pierced a tiny area of darkness, it helplessly scattered and was ultimately devoured by the darkness further away.

  "The surface here should be flat."

  As the light and darkness intertwined, it made Silvan's face look like the reflection of a forest lake, his mortal presence almost gone. He moved the cylinder away from the ground, stood up and said softly, "Maybe there are more empty spaces that lead downwards… Who knows how far we have to go to reach the end."