Chapter 254: Subsiding
The disaster on Sakura Island subsided, dark clouds dispersed, thunder receded, the sky was pristine, leaving only the earth wounded all over, informing people that the doomsday catastrophe not long ago was not an illusion.
The people of Taomuki City were saved, but their minds still couldn’t escape those terrifying and detestable shadows, especially when they emerged from the air-raid shelters where they took refuge and returned to the ground, seeing those horrific scenes; those whose spirits were already vulnerable lost their minds and went mad on the spot, screaming in despair on the filthy land after the disaster receded, and their voices, transmitted only a very short distance to the sky, could go no further, as if the walls in their hearts blocked them there.
That unknown person—or more accurately, unknown number of people overlapping, melting, and mixing into a tumor-like corpse entangled inextricably with the city’s steel and cement, with facial features flying everywhere, either ferociously bulging or wrapped in organs resembling hearts; if not for the pre-death clothing or jewelry still on them, no one would believe these were human corpses, more like the remains of some painfully deceased monster.
Corpses like these were countless, appearing in places people never expected, like after a night of heavy rain, poisonous mushrooms viciously sprouting wildly all over the city, with toxicity that made people shiver with fear just from their appearance.
With the arrival of professional teams, people gradually discovered that corpses still retaining “shape” were already quite rare; in the shattered city, those puddles of unknown mucus in the pits and depressions, after identification by professionals, were actually determined to be human corpses as well—death states even more terrifying, possibly from dozens, even hundreds of human corpses disintegrating from the cellular level and mixing with other unknown substances into a mixture.
Upon learning this message, countless disaster victims erupted in secondary screams, unable to restrain their mad vomiting; some even seemed to suddenly suffer from ten thousand insects tearing and biting, terrified and flustered as they stripped off their clothing and shoes, because after returning to the city surface, most of them had inevitably stepped in, rubbed against, or accidentally touched those places.
No one present knew exactly what happened in their city while they evaded the dimensional power invasion, but these events were enough to tell everyone that an unknown disaster far beyond people’s imagination had occurred here.
After the disaster victims of Taomuki City received proper evacuation and resettlement, investigator organizations from all over the world arrived one after another on the land of Taomuki City.
This was the third super-large-scale supernatural collapse event since Cuizhu City and Fengxiang City this century, and all three events basically ended within the destruction range of a single city; for the investigators, they also didn’t know whether this was humanity’s sorrow or luck.
Fengxiang City hadn’t even finished “cleaning” yet when Taomuki City on Sakura Island welcomed termination next; the world’s investigator organizations also felt unprecedented sense of oppression, as if something even more unimaginable and terrifying was accelerating its arrival, yet they could take no action, because that powerlessness was far more suffocating than watching a countdown-to-zero bomb explode right before one’s eyes.
In the oppressive and stifling air, while investigators were “cleaning up” the city, they finally discovered the corpses of those “human heroes” crushed beneath the ruined walls and ruins.
“Old He…” A veteran member of the Mysterious Group barely identified that shriveled corpse, but the sadness for his comrade couldn’t squeeze out from his currently oppressed mind; those unknown fears numbed other emotions, turning them into machines.
If possible, they truly wanted to become some kind of machine at this moment, but not the ultra-high-tech artificial intelligence kind; their wish was simple—just to become some tool capable of discarding thought.
Because not thinking, not understanding—that alone would be a kind of luck.
Probably only at times like these could ordinary people understand the feeling of a genius’s “extreme wisdom wounds.”
Through the core communication messages sent to the Mysterious Group by those few at the time, they guessed how these investigators made heroic sacrificial deaths when Taomuki City faced great disaster, then used a computer to roughly reconstruct the scene at the time, finally gaining a general understanding of how the disaster was timely stopped at the critical moment.
However, careful people could sense the eerie aspects within.
One core prop needed to set up the seal was an important body tissue part of an abnormal god—how did these people prepare all the seal props completely in that moment of extreme crisis?
The sea monster recorded in Shenzhou ancient books was merely an incarnation formed from a very small part of Thousand Illusions Moon’s body; in ancient times, people barely succeeded in sealing It with the help of another abnormal god, yet this invasion of Taomuki City by Thousand Illusions Moon was an unimaginably more massive body part—how did He Jia’an and the others succeed?
Could there have been some even more bizarre and powerful being present at the time?
Layer upon layer of such thinking led to falling into an icy abyss…
…
“Boss Brother, why did the lake and small river outside our shop suddenly change color? It wasn’t like this last time I came.” Li Yuning stood on a small stool, leaning on the counter to look outside the window, her two eyes wide open, very curious about the changes in the forest outside the Forest cabin.
Lin Ling leisurely sipped the freshly brewed flower tea, unhurriedly answering Li Yuning’s question: “Because the water quality changed.”
“Isn’t that just getting dirty?” Li Yuning’s facial expression changed. “We just had a science class recently—contaminated water can’t be drunk.”
She stared at the teacup in Lin Ling’s hand, then looked at Lin Ling with a face full of worry, afraid he’d suddenly drop dead in front of her after drinking tea brewed with lake water.
That would make her sad for several days.
“Mm… it is indeed dirty.” Lin Ling thought for a moment, then replied, “But actually it’s fine; boil it and it’s okay. People even used it for soup before.”
“Make soup with this water? Could it taste good?” Li Yuning was shocked beyond measure; at her young age, she witnessed the darkness of humanity, and was also very curious about the taste of that soup Lin Ling mentioned.
Lin Ling smiled and said: “Whether it tastes good is a question I can’t answer, because the people who drank the soup don’t remember the flavor.”
“Then it must taste awful, so bad it causes amnesia.” Li Yuning licked her lips; this little girl seemed to have the idea of trying it.
Li Yuning turned back around, continuing to look at the river in the forest, innocently asking: “Boss Brother, since people used it for soup before, it must have existed long ago—does this river water have a name?”
“Yes, it’s called Nai River.”
