Chapter 457: Ruins

The slanting sun shone through the corner of a ruined building, and Luo Qi squinted. At first, they saw an abandoned three-story building from the gravel-covered road, followed by a second dilapidated structure. As they climbed higher on the gentle slope, an abandoned city suddenly appeared before them. It was abrupt and devoid of aesthetic appeal, like a deformed pearl placed in the center of a gravel display stand.

The street leading into the city was sloped, extending upward; in another district of the city, there seemed to be some skyscrapers, their shadows visible from afar. Not a single building within sight was intact, and most had collapsed. No glass could be seen in the windows, the facades of the buildings had long since become so mottled that their original appearance was unrecognizable, and plants were growing wantonly inside and outside the structures; it looked as though nature would firmly gain the upper hand here before long.

Near the street corner on the right, some rusted cars were parked in a disorderly fashion, and Luo Qi leaned in to discover that some personal items were still left inside. He reached out and grabbed a plush rabbit from the back seat of a car; it was filthy and covered in dust, but it was still a plush rabbit. He held it by the ears and tapped it against the roof of the car, shaking out a miniature sandstorm.

He stared at the rabbit for a moment, then suddenly handed it to Liu Ziyi, "I hunted a rabbit."

Liu Ziyi subconsciously took the plush toy, looking in confusion at Luo Qi's strangely enthusiastic and excited eyes. "Is this how you are when you're with my senior brother? I mean, this relaxed?" She looked around suspiciously again; the traces of humans were too obvious here. Did the person manipulating everything build a human city here? Did they stuff an abandoned human city into a Sandbox? What for?

"You've got to be kidding. If I were this handsy in front of him, he'd beat me up," Luo Qi said. He reached into the car again and hooked out a child's water bottle with a tiger pattern on it. "The year is very close; I feel like I see kids carrying this thing all the time."

"Does that have any significance?" Liu Ziyi asked.

"Under calm circumstances, children generally don't let go of the plush toys they carry with them, and their parents wouldn't let go of their water bottles either. So if this place is real, or if it's imitating some real scene, then the people here were suddenly evacuated." Luo Qi let go and tossed the water bottle back into the car, "By the way, are there any signs of Radiation exceeding the limit here?"

"No, otherwise the machine would be beeping again," Liu Ziyi said. She looked down at the rabbit and carefully placed it on the hood of the car.

"Don't you think the scale is a bit too big?" Luo Qi asked, walking forward along the street while searching all the cars. He vaguely recognized the car brands, but as a child of a Mage, he could only identify some of the models and couldn't even tell the years.

"Big to the point of far exceeding rationality," Liu Ziyi sighed and said. She had nothing else to do, so she automatically followed Luo Qi's pace. "Unless they originally intended to trap a group of people here. To deal with two scattered customers like us, this is too cost-inefficient."

Luo Qi didn't speak. If this was aimed at him, it might not be a spur-of-the-moment idea, but a common tactic. Or rather, he should correct his thinking: this wasn't aimed at him, but more likely aimed at Mind Mages like him. A place with no people and no Yajian made a Mind Mage's abilities completely useless.

But if that were truly the case, Du Zhengyi would never have specifically warned him not to fully unleash his abilities.

"Under what circumstances would humans abandon a city? I heard you're still an anthropologist? Anyway, that's how my senior brother explained it to the old pedants of the Qionglin before," Liu Ziyi said from the side, pulling back his attention. She had given up on guessing the rationality of the enemy's actions—that was a puzzle that couldn't be solved for the time being, lacking parameters. So she turned to other content, curiously observing her surroundings, "I haven't looked at a human city from this angle before."

Luo Qi remembered that she was a laboratory child raised by the Qionglin, not as deeply immersed in the human world as other Mages; she was actually relatively more isolated. However, Luo Qi then thought about how she actually had a mobile phone and used WeChat, making her much more fashionable than Du Zhengyi. She wasn't in the human world, yet she seemed more reasonable than the average Mage, which might ultimately be due to her intelligence.

He thought about Liu Ziyi's question, "Humans will abandon some villages due to population shrinkage, but they never abandon cities. The site selection for every city has very complex reasons; under normal circumstances, even if that place is frequently hit by major earthquakes, they will still keep rebuilding on the original site. So far, there is only one possibility for humans to abandon a city: radioactive contamination."

"That's really interesting," Liu Ziyi said with interest, then continued to ask out of pure curiosity, "Then if humans just disappeared from the city for no reason like this, how many years would these ruins they left behind last?"

"Are you referring to reinforced concrete cities?" Luo Qi asked.

"That kind of magnificent and vast city, oh, right, that's exactly it, reinforced concrete cities."

"A hundred years, maybe two hundred at most," Luo Qi said.

"What? Within the lifespan of a Mage?" Liu Ziyi asked in astonishment. They were walking deeper into the city, and the silent city cast dark shadows upon them. "I don't think that should be right... cities are... magnificent, aren't they? Many human cities now have histories of several hundred years, right? And that's not even with us Mages helping to maintain them!"

"It's not maintained by us, but humans have their own Magic. Without human Magic, the traces of their existence would disappear very quickly. They constantly paint the exposed steel of bridges to prevent corrosion. They build water conservancy projects to prevent rivers and oceans from backflowing, and build sewer systems to resolve the problem of waterlogging from rainfall. They also use various methods to suppress plant growth to prevent roots from prying their houses apart—you saw how the Highland Mage was almost killed by plants." Luo Qi couldn't help but smile, although thinking about that incident still made him feel extremely eerie.

"Oh," Liu Ziyi understood, "That makes sense. It's not like I haven't seen humans doing these things; hmm, come to think of it, humans are busy with maintenance all year round. I just didn't think of it here. You're actually quite special; I guess not all humans realize this themselves."

Luo Qi felt dazed upon hearing this. He suddenly realized that before Liu Ziyi asked, he actually didn't know either; he hadn't paid attention to these things himself. But when she asked and he thought about it, he easily found the answer in his mind. However, he wasn't clear on which head this answer came from; too many people's memories existed in his brain. At the moments when his Anchor Point was unstable, the edges of these "existences" began to blur in an ominous way.