Crossing the road that was covered with yellow sand, it came to the front of the community. Still a few hundred meters away, the soft thing's feet made rustling noises as they rubbed against the road.
On the surface of the slick, pale membrane, neither eyes, ears, nor antennae or breathing holes could be seen. How did it perceive the world? Hearing, sight, or sound waves? This would determine how they ought to escape.
Xi Bei asked, "What… what do we do?"
Lu Feng said nothing. He walked over to the window and pushed it, but the window seemed like it was frozen or rusted. With the first push, it unexpectedly didn't budge in the slightest. His arms tensed, and only after exerting some more force did the window let out an ugly-sounding screech of metal breaking and grinding. With difficulty, a small triangular gap was pushed open.
The jet-black muzzle of the gun stuck out through the gap, but what the Colonel aimed at was not the monster, but rather the opposite street.
There was a soft "bang." It was the sound of a silenced gunshot, unable to be heard from beyond ten meters away.
The bullet left a fleeting silhouette on his retinas, and
then it was right in the window of a building next to the
street.
The bullets he used when he went out into the field were different from the ordinary bullets he used when he tried humans. They were bullets of depleted uranium alloy, possessing the power to penetrate armor and crushing strength.
With a loud noise, a whole sheet of glass shattered and fell to the ground.
The monster's movements clearly paused.
Lu Feng lifted his gun again. In the direction he fired, broken glass crashed to the ground.
Sure enough, the monster had heard it, and the wriggling feet changed direction. It seemed to hesitantly stop for a moment, then move slowly toward the source of the noise, but it stopped again three minutes later, gave upits original direction, and continued to move toward the residential community where they were.
Xi Bei unconsciously stepped back, his face deathly pale. "It… It… Can you hit it?"
Lu Feng slightly pursed his thin lips, and he looked in that direction, his gaze cold and expression frighteningly calm.
Then he reached out, and there was a click as he detached the silencer.
He continually pressed down the trigger!
"Bang! Bang! Bang!"
A string of blasts exploded violently in the street around the monster! In the too-silent city, this sound was no different from deafening thunderclaps.
The monster once again lingered on the spot, wavering, but at the same time, a shrill cry suddenly came from the other end of the city.
Then a massive black shape launched into the air from that direction, and a massive hawk-like bird flew across the sky. It spread out its wingspan that was dozens of meters wide, and its gliding speed was even faster than bullets as it dove straight toward the similarly shaped white monster!
The monster emitted a high-pitched scream. Its white membrane split open, and countless soft bramble-like tentacles extended outward and wound around the eagle's beak like a tidal surge.
With a dull "pfft," the eagle's steel-armor-like wings pierced its body. At the pain, the monster's tentacles shrank back like they'd been electrocuted. The flying eagle took the opportunity to get away. After one strike, it immediately flapped its wings and flew up. Far outside the attack range of those plentiful dark gray tentacles, it circled once in the sky. The next moment, wrapped in the piercing shriek of the wind, it swooped down again. The sharp beak stabbed straight into the center of the white monster's body.
In an instant, white and flesh-colored liquids splashed everywhere. The razor teeth in its sharp beak bit down on something. The white monster's body was too enormous. As it madly writhed and struggled, the surrounding houses trembled and collapsed while the ground buzzed. In the gray human city, two unimaginably enormous monsters continued to fight—
An area of the ground hundreds of meters in circumference was stained with dark mucus. The battle concluded with the white monster destroyed beyond recognition, its internal organs dripping all over the ground. The eagle held its dripping-wet organs in its mouth. Without any reluctance, it turned and flew into the distance.
An Zhe breathed a soft sigh of relief. It was only then that he had understood Lu Feng's purpose in firing so many shots. There was not necessarily only one monster in this city. He had exposed its location with the sound of gunfire
and attracted another monster.
Xi Bei asked, "How… How did you know that bird was there?"
Lu Feng pulled his gun back, reinstalled the silencer, and turned around, the series of actions fluid, neat, and well-practiced.
"I didn't," he said. "It was a gamble."
An Zhe looked in the direction where the eagle had disappeared. Under this current circumstance, flying-class monsters seemed to have shown unparalleled advantages.
Having escaped from the jaws of death, none of them said anything. In the silence, an elderly voice suddenly spoke up.
"It's almost time." Grandfather's voice was hoarse. "I've lived until age sixty. It's enough."
Lu Feng looked in the old man's direction.
He asked, "Time for what?"
The old man opened his mouth. As he stared at the distant sky, there was a hint of madness in his expression. "The time… the time of arrival."
"The arrival of what?"
"The unspeakable, unimaginable…" His voice was filled with the hoarseness of one on their deathbed. "Bigger than everything, cannot be seen, in the world… will be arriving soon."
Lu Feng's voice was very low. "How do you know?"
"I'm almost dead… I can feel it. I can hear it." His words were as slow as sleeptalk that had been stretched out countless times.
"What can you hear?"
"I can hear…" The old man continued, "Chaotic—"
As he spoke, the old man looked up at the gray sky above the city. An Zhe followed his gaze and looked up as well. The sky was so low as to be frightening, heavilyweighing down on the upper part of his field of vision. The aurora was so bright, its green glow also lowered and mixed with the dark gray cloud cover. Lu Feng said that the reason why the aurora was so bright was because the base had adjusted the frequency of the artificial magnetic field to be stronger in order to resist distortion.
"People live on the ground and die on the ground. The sky…" The old man's expression was peaceful, and his voice became softer and softer. "The sky will only get lower."
After he spat out the last word, he slowly folded his hands.
His eyes slowly, slowly slid shut.
Xi Bei's knees went soft, and he knelt in front of the old man and put both hands on his knees. "Grandfather? Grandfather?"
No response.
The old man's chest stopped rising and falling. He was gone.
His death occurred in the span of only a moment.
Two streams of tears flowed from Xi Bei's eyes, and he buried his face against the old man's knees.
When he finally lifted his head back up, An Zhe softly asked, "Are you okay?"
"I'm… okay." Xi Bei blankly looked at his grandfather's face and mumbled, "In the past, Grandfather said he wasn't afraid of death. He said that when people live, they eachhave their own mission, and his mission was to protect everyone in the mine. Having been able to see the mine live up to today was… was enough for him."
He lifted his head to look at the old man's face, the haggard and dusty face. His white hair was unkempt, with some parts tangled together. In the dark underground, nobody could live with dignity.
He said, "I… I'll go find a comb."
He dazedly got up and walked toward the other rooms.
A dwindling life had passed.
In this place, there was also another life that had passed a long time ago. An Zhe turned to look at the living room sofa, where a skeleton lay.
Its flesh must have naturally decayed, because with the skeleton as the center, the sofa was covered with green, yellow, or brown splotches, which were the traces of where mold had grown.
"Initially it was superbacteria, fungi, and viruses. They propagated in the human cities, indiscriminately infecting all people and leaving corpses everywhere in the cities. Those who have been to the ruins in the wilds all know about this." What Poet had once said sounded in An Zhe's ears.
He lifted his head and looked out the window. This was a building that had passed away, a city that had passed away. The buildings were full of skeletons, and every skeleton was a life that had passed away.
Lu Feng saw An Zhe's eyes, which were still so calm, as though it were the gaze of someone completely uninvolved. But in the lighting of the gray sky, the subtle movements on his quiet and beautiful face combined together, yet his face also showed an indescribable sorrow that was like a wisp of smoke.
After looking away and at the city instead, he said, "When the human base was completed and the comprehensive search and rescue carried out, the base's strength was insufficient, so many small cities did not receive a timely rescue."
An Zhe looked at the boundless ocean-like stretch of buildings. To walk from this end of the city to the other end, it would take at least several hours. He softly asked,
"Is this a small city?"
Lu Feng said, "Yes."
An Zhe's eyes widened slightly.
What seemed to him to be a city unmatched in vastness, to the once thriving and glorious humans, was unexpectedly just a small city that had not received a timely rescue.
Then before the Age of Calamity, exactly how magnificent was the humans' world? He did not know.
And since there were handfuls of people around the city who were clinging to life amidst the calamity, then in countless places, were there also countless unrescued people struggling, despairing, and dying? This city was full of skeletons, the base was by no means safe and calm, and the human world was full of crying, weeping, and screaming.
The gradual fall of such a grand whole—while imagining this sight, he seemed to see a huge sunset gradually, gradually sinking into the black horizon, a protracted death.
"Clunk—"
Amidst the dead silence, from the next-door bedroom suddenly came the sound of something falling to the ground.
Lu Feng asked, "What is it?"
There was no reply, only the sound of Xi Bei's trembling breaths.
Frowning, Lu Feng took the gun, turned, and walked over, with An Zhe following him.
The room was empty, devoid of both monsters and enemies, but as Xi Bei faced away from them, his back trembled violently. At first, An Zhe thought he was crying. Then, after walking over to him, An Zhe saw that he was staring at a comb in his hand.
For a while, An Zhe found it difficult to describe the wooden comb because it was not only one, but rather two combs fused together. It was the most common kind of brown wood comb, with a handle ten centimeters long and fine teeth. The handles of the two equally common woodencombs were perfectly joined together, as though they had been carved from the same piece of wood. The teeth were tilted forty-five degrees, one to the left and one to the right, like a two-headed snake spitting out its tongues.
But if they were initially just two ordinary combs, how could they have fused together?
Wood, the product of a tree, was the most ordinary and. safest thing, but because of this strange appearance that went beyond common sense, it brought about the most unrivaled terror.
Lu Feng strode to the dresser where Xi Bei got the comb. This was clearly a woman's room before the great Calamity Age. Upon the ivory-white dresser rested countless bottles, jars, and tools of various sizes.
Lu Feng reached out to wipe away the dust on themirror, but after wiping away one layer, there was another layer underneath. The dust seemed to be forming inside the mirror, and the mirror was always clouded over, distorting their figures into a blob of black.
While looking at all of this, An Zhe suddenly recalled that when he was climbing the wall of the Outer City, one layer of sand fell, but inside was yet more sand, as though the city wall had become an aggregate of sand and steel.
Lu Feng no longer looked at the mirror. With brows furrowed, he glanced over the variously sized makeup tools, then finally pulled out a rusty long tweezer—although it also wasn't a tweezer, because this metal tweezer was stuck to a plastic eyebrow trimming knife, and the X- shaped part in the middle connecting them was fused together seamlessly. It was hard to say whether it was steel or plastic, or a brand-new material unknown to humans.
Xi Bei's fingers trembled, and, with a clack, the comb fell to the dusty floor.
"Does this city… have some strange thing about it?" he asked. "Let's… Let's hurry and go."
"It's not just this city," Lu Feng said.
As he looked at the fused tweezers and eyebrow trimmer, he spoke only two words.
"The engines."
These ordinary two words sounded in the room like a thunderclap.
There were complex mechanical structures inside the engine. Once those precise structures were damaged—
If strange fusions and changes occurred inside theinsides of the engines like this comb, then the plane crashes were inevitable.
An Zhe bent down and picked up the comb. No trace of a join could be seen, but the carvings on the handle were chaotic, both chaotic and mad. It was impossible to imagine how they were fused together, just like the flight manual's writing with the inky tentacles that reached out every which way.
An Zhe's eyes widened slightly. Suddenly, the words that Madam Lu spoke after transforming into a bee and before flying into the boundless sky sounded in his ears.
"Humans' genes are too weak, so they are unable to perceive the changes currently happening in the world. We will all die. All work was futile. It only proves the insignificance and powerlessness of humankind."
The thought crossed his mind like lightning slicing across the sky.
If, if… when people and monsters or monsters and monsters physically overlapped or got close, genetic contamination would occur—
No, that was wrong, that was completely wrong.
"Genes…" he mumbled. "It's not genes…"
The problem was not genes at all.
Humans believed that alterations in genes were the fundamental cause of the contamination. But contamination was the fusing and recombining of the flesh and blood between one organism and another. Their own attributes had changed, but these alterations were completed by genetic changes.
If, if something like mutual contamination could occur, if a living creature's qualities could instantly change, why couldn't other things do the same? And what was the difference between the bodies of living things—those DNA helices—and the world's other inanimate materials? Therefore, paper and wood would also contaminate each other, and steel and plastic would as well. In that case, all tangible things in the world would as well.
It was just that this process was taking place gradually, not immediately. The flood current had only just begun to surge; with the contamination of organisms' genes as an omen, it had only just appeared before humankind.
Over the period of time when the geomagnetic field had disappeared, those hybrid-class monsters madly ate, madly acquiring the forms of other creatures to strengthen themselves just like humans hoarding food for the winter.
Had they felt something humans had not?
Had they known what was coming?
Xi Bei's voice trembled. "Exactly wh…"
He could no longer speak.
Exactly what kind of age was this?
Exactly what kind of disaster were they faced with?
Exactly what was happening right now?
What was it?
What was it?
A streak of lightning cut across the sky. The windows vibrated, and the primeval wind made drawn-out howling noises as it poured into the room through the crevices. The hems of their clothes flapped about, blown by the wind.
An Zhe lifted his head, and he and Lu Feng locked eyes. Those cold green eyes were as dark and gloomy as the sky outside.
Right when they looked at each other, a peal of thunder sounded in the sky. The sky lowered even further, and between the vast heavens and earth, torrential rain came pouring down.
In the sheets of rain, nothing outside could be seen nor heard—boundless darkness, boundless emptiness, boundless terror. Madam Lu's gentle and mellow voice and Grandfather's withered and raspy voice overlapped as they sounded abruptly in An Zhe's ear.
"It's almost time."
Then they found even more proof in the room.
The difficulty in opening the window was because the steel edge of the window had adhered to the sill.
The skeleton's leg bones, upon more careful examination, had fused with the couch beneath them. The ugliest existence was a chandelier in the form of an inverted cluster of lily-of-the-valley flowers on the ceiling of the second bedroom. Its lampshade and metal stand had fused together, melted, and flowed down like a candle that had burned to the end. The formerly snow-white lampshade was filled with pitch-black dust, and each speck of dust was a pinprick-sized black dot. They densely clustered together, as though in the very next moment they would creep forth.
All of these things that were strange, should not have happened, and exceeded the limits of human understanding and science combined, giving An Zhe a certain impression —just like wax being melted by fire, the world was gradually blending together.
Xi Bei returned to the living room. He dumbly sat on the floor and picked up Grandfather's body, lifting it from the chair before getting far away from that place with
Grandfather, as though the chair was the most frightening monster, as though in the very next moment this body would be one with the chair. After getting far away from the chair, he put Grandfather on the floor, but the muscles in his cheek immediately twitched with nervousness—after all, the floor was a monster, too.
He gave a start and suddenly took a few rapid steps backward, for his own existence was also a source of contamination.
Seeing his panic-stricken and helpless appearance, An Zhe stepped forward, but just as he took one step, Xi Bei looked at him with terrified eyes and retreated a few steps.
Supposing everything in the world would pollute each other, then only by staying far away from everything would one be able to preserve oneself.
An Zhe could understand his fear, and he distanced himself, unbidden, from Xi Bei again.
"Sorry, I…" Xi Bei's teeth chattered. "I have to… calm down a bit."
Lu Feng led An Zhe into the bedroom.
After stepping into the bedroom and seeing the flowing chandelier once more, he stopped in his tracks. An Zhe looked at the Colonel and saw that his green eyes seemed to have frozen over.
The next moment, Lu Feng took out his communicator from his coat pocket and held it tightly, his knuckles white.
An Zhe simply watched from the side. Xi Bei had already fallen apart, and as a human, he knew that Lu Feng's state would not be much better than Xi Bei's. In fact, the Colonel had experienced even more things than Xi Bei. While enduring the fear brought about by this mad world, he still needed to think about the distant human base.
He needed to stay strong, for the human base if for no one else.
If the engines in the plane had broken down due to the mutual contamination of substances, the communicator would as well. There was a screwdriver in the drawer of the bedroom nightstand. Lu Feng picked it up and loosened the screws on the communicator's chassis.
The chassis, intricately lined chips, crisscrossing circuits, and countless small parts were laid out on the bed. Lu Feng picked them up one at a time and examined their minute structures in the light.
The communicator had many parts. After looking for a while, An Zhe also picked up a few components with relatively simple structures from amongst the pile of parts and checked whether they conformed to the clear-cut standards of humankind's machinery.
After closing the bedroom door, it seemed like only the two of them were left in the world. Neither of them spoke. In the rain, apart from the sounds of them going through the parts, nothing could be heard. Lu Feng's speed was very fast; those parts seemed all very normal.
But An Zhe was suddenly stunned.
He looked at a small chip board in his hand. Upon it were two parallel red copper wires, both consisting of several dozen strands of fine copper wire twisted together. They originally should have been parallel to each other, with a few millimeters of distance in between. But now theywere all loosened up and bent into strange arcs. The two copper wires had gotten close to each other and were mixed together, which was definitely not ordinary.
At this moment, at least for a brief moment, An Zhe suddenly thought that if even the communicator was thoroughly broken due to the distortion of matter, if Lu Feng could never return to the base, what would they do?
But he was not such an evil mushroom.
As he looked at the chip in his hand, he bit his lip. Amidst the slight pain, in the end he still tugged on the edge of Lu Feng's sleeve.
On the inner side of Lu Feng's military boot, there was a hidden buckle, and tucked inside was a sharp dagger that was now removed. An Zhe lit the chip with a flashlight that had been taken from the mine, then watched Lu Feng pick apart the tangled copper wires with the tip of the dagger bit by bit. Signs of adhesion had already appeared between the copper wires, but fortunately it had been discovered in time, so they could still be separated.
When it was finally cleaned up, however, An Zhe's mental state was slightly strained. But he also felt a slight dizziness in his head, as though he were sick. Ever since the spore started showing signs of maturity, his body had weakened more and more.
Lu Feng examined the remaining parts one more time, then assembled them in the proper order and pressed the button to turn on the communicator.
But what came out was not the "I'm sorry, but due to the effects of the solar wind or the ionosphere, the signal has been interrupted…" that An Zhe was accustomed to.
"Beep—"
"Beep—"
"Beep—"
The rain got louder again. Thousands of big raindrops pelted the window like bullets, making ceaseless thudding noises. This was a rainstorm that would only occur in midsummer, and outside the window, it had become a gray waterfall.
The raindrops seemed to strike An Zhe's very soul.
In a trance, he vaguely heard the soft mechanical female voice come out of the communicator, but the dizziness became more severe. Before his eyes, the world turned into colorful lights—and in the following second, he pitched straight forward.
Before losing consciousness, he had only one thought.
I hope the spore won't fall out so soon.