Doomsday Wonderland

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.

Searching for Meme blindly would be a waste of time and since the source of everything was before their eyes, there was no reason for them to not head over there.

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.

Feelings in a dream should be stronger than in real life.

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.