Chapter 255: 251. Subsidence

251. Subsidence

The disaster on Sakura Island has subsided; the dark clouds have dispersed, the thunder has gone silent, and the sky is clean as if washed, leaving behind only a scarred earth to tell people that the apocalyptic catastrophe from moments ago was no illusion.

The people of Taomu City have been saved, but their souls have yet to escape those terrifying and hateful shadows. Especially when they emerged from the Air Raid Shelters where they had taken refuge and saw the tragic, inhuman scenes upon returning to the surface, those whose spirits were already fragile lost their minds on the spot, screaming in despair upon the Huitu where the disaster had passed. Yet their voices could not travel even a short distance into the sky, as if the walls within their hearts had cut them off right there.

It is unknown who—or more accurately, how many people—these tumor-like corpses were, fused and melted together, entangled inextricably with the city's steel and concrete. Facial features flew about everywhere, some ferocious and bulging, others wedged inside organs resembling hearts. If not for the clothing or jewelry they still retained from their lives, no one would have thought these were human corpses; they looked more like the remains of some monster that had died in agony.

Corpses like these were countless. In places people would never expect, like after a heavy rain at night, vicious, poisonous mushrooms grew wildly all over the city, possessing a toxicity that made one shudder just by looking at them.

With the arrival of professional teams, people gradually discovered that the corpses that still retained a "shape" were already quite rare. In the shattered city, those pools of unidentified, pockmarked slime were, after expert identification, also determined to be human corpses. It was a more terrifying state of death; perhaps a dozen, dozens, or even hundreds of human corpses had disintegrated at the cellular level and mixed with other unknown substances to become a hybrid liquid.

Upon learning this news, countless disaster victims erupted into a second round of wailing, vomiting uncontrollably. Some, as if suddenly bitten by ten thousand insects, frantically stripped off their clothes and shoes in terror, because after returning to the city surface, most of them had inevitably stepped on, brushed against, or even accidentally touched those very spots.

No one present knew exactly what had happened within the city they inhabited while they were hiding from the encroachment of the Other-dimensional Power, but these few incidents were enough to tell everyone that an unknown disaster far beyond human imagination had occurred here.

When the disaster victims of Taomu City were properly evacuated and settled, Investigator Organizations from all over the world arrived one after another on the land of Taomu City.

This is the third super-large-scale supernatural collapse event since the beginning of this century, following those in Cuizhu City and Fengxiang City. These three events basically stopped at the destruction of a single city at most. For the Investigators, they did not know whether this should be considered humanity's sorrow or its luck.

Fengxiang City had not yet finished being "cleaned up" when Taomu City on Sakura Island met its end. The world's Investigator Organizations felt an unprecedented sense of oppression, as if something even more unimaginable and terrifying was accelerating toward them, yet they could take no action against it because there was no way to do so. That helplessness was far more suffocating than watching a bomb with a zero-second countdown explode right before one's eyes.

In the oppressive and stifling air, while "cleaning up" the city, the Investigators finally discovered the corpses of those "human heroes" who had been crushed beneath the ruins of broken walls and debris.

"Old He..." A veteran member of the Xuanmi Group managed to identify the shriveled corpse, but the sorrow he wanted to feel for his comrade could not be squeezed out from his oppressed heart. Those unknown fears had numbed all other emotions, turning them into machines.

If they could, they would truly wish to be some kind of machine at this very moment, though not the high-tech kind like artificial intelligence. Their wish was simple: just to become some tool that could discard the need to think.

Because to not think, to not understand—only that could be considered a kind of luck.

Perhaps only at times like this can ordinary people understand what the "wisdom that brings injury" of a genius truly feels like.

Through the Earth Core communication messages sent by those few to the Xuanmi Group at the time, the Investigators guessed what kind of heroic sacrifices those Investigators had made when Taomu City was facing its doom. They then used computers to roughly reconstruct the scene, and only then did they roughly understand how the disaster had been stopped in the nick of time.

Yet, a careful person could sense the strangeness within it.

One of the core items needed to set up the seal was an important body part of an Alien God. How did these people manage to have all the sealing items prepared at such a critical moment?

The sea monster recorded in the Ancient Book of Shenzhou was merely an Avatar formed by a very small part of the body of the Moon of a Thousand Illusions. Back then, the ancients had barely managed to seal her only with the help of another Alien God. Yet this time, the Moon of a Thousand Illusions that invaded Taomu City was an unimaginably larger body part. How did He Jia'an and the others succeed?

Could it be that there was some even more bizarre and powerful existence present at the time?

Thinking through these layers, one feels as if falling into an abyss of cold ice...

"Boss Brother, why have the lake and the small river outside our shop suddenly changed color? It wasn't like this when I came last time." Li Yuning stepped on a small stool, leaning on the counter to look out the window, her two eyes wide open, very curious about the changes in the forest outside the Forest Cabin.

Lin Ling leisurely sipped his freshly brewed flower tea and answered Li Yuning's question unhurriedly: "Because the water quality has changed."

"Doesn't that mean it's dirty?" Li Yuning's expression changed. "We just had a science class recently, and you can't drink polluted water."

She stared at the teacup in Lin Ling's hand and looked at him with worry, fearing that he might suddenly drop dead in front of her after drinking tea made with the lake water.

That would make her sad for several days.

"Hmm... it is indeed dirty." Lin Ling thought for a moment and replied, "But actually, it's fine. It's okay once it's boiled. People used to use it to make soup."

"Use this water to make soup? Can that taste good?" Li Yuning was shocked beyond measure. At her young age, she had witnessed the darkness of human nature, while also being curious about the taste of the soup Lin Ling spoke of.

Lin Ling smiled and said, "As for whether it tastes good, I'm afraid I can't answer you, because those who have drunk the soup don't remember how it tasted."

"Then it must taste terrible, so terrible that it causes amnesia." Li Yuning licked her lips; the little girl seemed to have the idea of wanting to try it.

Li Yuning turned back, continuing to look at the river in the forest, and asked innocently: "Boss Brother, since people used to use it to make soup, it means it existed a long time ago. Does this river have a name?"

"It does. It's called Naihe."