Chapter 136 The Earth’s Wastelands 9
On Old Earth, the soil would never return to its fertile state after the ravages of war, and the ocean was seriously corrupted by pollution. After the doomsday threat, the planet had experienced an irrevocable change.
More than fifty percent of land turned into desert, and the ocean changed its color to purple and black. The effect of pollution manifested itself differently depending on the location. There were no living organisms in the areas closer to the beach. The disrupted food chain caused irreparable damage to the deep-sea organism. It was survival of the fittest, and those that could not adapt perished.
As predicted by the many scientists of the twenty-first century, the polar caps at both ends of the world melted. Ohio alley was swallowed up by a flood, the whole of Australia submerged under the sea, and New York turned into a swamp…
War brought death, and death stopped war.
When the last survivors laid their eyes on their ruined home and saw the second 'sun' disappear from the sky. Heat, thirst, pain, regret, and despair… Such sensations overwhelmed their minds and accompanied them until the end of their days.
Powerful radiation polluted the land around the equator. Ruins of cities glowed in the dark. That lasted for centuries. Some species went extinct; others evolved and transmuted.
Time flew forward as rain clouds started to gather over barren lands. The rain poured, cooling the poisonous sea that flooded the land and dispersing the toxicity in the air, healing the fissures on the ground.
After the cleansing of the rain, a quiet and dead Earth surfaced. However, some did survive. Human lives were as fragile as ants, but they too were as resilient as ants.
The survivors crawled out from the ruin of civilization and began their journey for survival. They discovered that the temperature was higher than before, but in non-desert regions, the moisture in the air was heavier. The sky above their heads was orange, and the sun blazed relentlessly.
Inside the ruins, some strange plants started to grow. Even without water, even exposed to the cruel sun, these wild plants with strange shapes and colors grew to cover more and more land.
For the injured Earth, this was not the first time it had experienced such a drastic change to its temperature. The Ice Age, the explosion of volcanoes, the shifting of the tectonic plates, all those events left scars on the planet, but they had never stopped the planet from moving. As it had been acting for the past thirty billion years, it spun continuously in space, orbiting around the sun.
Technology became a thing of the past. The survivors reverted to the prehistoric state and formed a tribal society. They became nomads, wandering the Earth, looking for food and reliable shelters.
In the non-desert areas, there were poisonous swamps, dark valleys, sinking marshes, and abandoned mountains. But other than that, on the large Earth, there were indeed one or two paradises that were untouched by the war and destruction…
One such paradise on Earth existed inside a valley in North American. It was a hole about the size of a city. It sank into the ground, and a thick layer of vegetation covered its existence like a 'cloud'. At the same time, the plants blocked most of the sun's rays. Thus, one could find a comfortable temperature, land, and environment suitable for animals and plants; clean and sufficient water; and most importantly, there was the remains of a 'half' spacecraft landing here.
No one knew why the spacecraft was there. Perhaps this was once the secret base of a country or a ship that had fallen during one of the many wars.
In any case, this place cultivated the last human civilization. The environment provided them a warm bed for survival, and the remains of the spacecraft allowed them to recover the seed of science. Life continued, and a new human civilization was growing.
Three decades had passed. This became the last place on Earth where a large population of humans could be found. The citizens that lived there called it 'The Village of Heavenly Blessing'.
…
Inside the Crystal Lake lab, Doomsday Assault had already reached the end of the road. He had explored all the forks and followed the path to this place. At that moment, there was a staircase that led aboveground before him. It was a normal staircase that one would find in a residential area. The banister was made from iron, and the steps were metallic. One could try to glance up the stairs to see what the situation was like above.
He took out his weapon and neared the stairs carefully. The lighting there was not good, and looking up, it was hard to tell if there was an ambush.
"You two from Jiang Hu, stop hiding. I can already see you!" Doomsday Assault was obviously bluffing. He was not afraid of announcing his presence because he knew that this was the end of the lab. The stairs led to the exit. If Flashes of Sword and Feng Bujue wanted to set up an ambush, this was their last chance. If they were indeed hiding up the stairs, waiting for him to come, they would have seen him already.
"I must admit, the trap with the grenade was brilliant," Doomsday Assault said. "But is that all you've got, Flashes of Sword? You bunch of cowards from Jiang Hu are quite good at these despicable tricks."
He tried his best to anger the other party without triggering the system's censor. He tried to get the enemy to show up. After all, he was in the open, and they were not; that was not advantageous to him.
"What's wrong? You're too afraid to come out?" Doomsday Assault scoffed with condescension. "You are fighting two against one. Even then, you're still so scared?"
His only reply was the echo of his own voice.
"Humph… You have to consider this," Doomsday Assault said. "Under the indiscriminate effect of the Life Points decreasing, the exhaustion on two of you is literally double the exhaustion on me. Being such cowards while you have the advantage is only going to waste your Life Points.
"I do not mind turning back now and going as far away as I can. By then, we'll see who has more health potions to expend. Even if I lose in the end, you will have to waste double the amount I do."
There were plenty of sense in Doomsday Assault's words, but the fact that he was saying that meant that he was not going to adopt that plan. If Doomsday Assault thought that he had no chance of winning the fight, he would not have volunteered to interact with the enemy. After Final Assault was blown up, he would have run down in the opposite direction and found a suitable place to hide and prepare an ambush. He would wait for the other team to find him. If his ambush was successful and he managed to take down one, then the playing field would be levelled.
Therefore… the only reason Doomsday Assault had shown up was that he had the confidence to win two against one. The basis for that confidence had to be some kind of very powerful skill or item.
He kept yelling for a while, but there was no reaction from up the stairs. This made Doomsday Assault feel awkward. He could not help but wonder, Is there another floor up the stairs? Could the floor above be as big as this floor?
With that in mind, he could only seek his way to the stairs and slowly head up. That was the all he could do. After all, if his enemy refused to show up no matter what, there was nothing he could do about it. Either he had to go up or leave. Secondly, if there was really another floor to this place, he could yell for a full hour, and no one would hear him.
He went up the stairs carefully and did not run into an ambush. He could not sense any traps either. However, Doomsday Assault did not lower his guard—the memory of the grenade was still fresh in his mind. His teammate had been too close to the blast to survive and had died on the spot. He too had almost died in the fire. This lesson was probably one that would follow him for the rest of his professional career.
He took almost five minutes to get up the stairs. When he reached the top of the stairs, Doomsdays Assault was stunned. In front of him was a corridor, an empty corridor, and the end was about ten meters ahead. The whole wall was a large door, one that parted to both sides. The doors were joined in the middle, the teeth of their edges closing together. The door was as thick as a bank vault, and the control panel next to the wall had already been destroyed…
"Where are they?" That was Doomsday Assault's first reaction. He and Final Assault had finished exploring the other side of the lab, and this side led to the exit. Along the way, he had seen the traces left behind by Flashes of Sword and Feng Bujue and triggered a trap set up by them. He was on the right track, but why… was there no one there?
"Could they have left this place?" This thought appeared in Doomsday Assault's mind, but he soon denied it. "That's unlikely… Based on the cinematic, the environment outside is much worse than here, and their Life Points would probably drop faster. Furthermore, this panel is broken… so how could they have left this place"
"Or… did it they use the panel to open the door and, before the door closed, destroy the panel to trap me here?
"But that's crazy… there's no benefit to going outside!"
Doomsday Assault paced around the entrance with a frozen expression. After a long time, he finally came to a speculation that he believed was correct.
"This has to be it!" There was a lightbulb moment in his mind, but his expression and tone were still as dull as ever. "They came to this end of the corridor and destroyed the panel to create the impression that they have already escaped from the lab. But in reality, they have gone back. They must have slipped past me when I was checking the other path. They're probably on the other side of the lab already."
…
At the same time, outside the lab was a sea of sand that spread into the horizon under the yellowing sky. The wind howled, and a sandstorm blew around the black desert. If one stood in this environment without any protection, it would be too hard to even keep one's eyes open. Whenever one spoke, sand would travel into the mouth, and the wind would stop the sound from being sent over five meters away.
A 'shark coach' was travelling through this sea of sand. The craft was about twenty meters long, six meters wide, and four meters tall. From the outside, it looked like a giant armored shark, but this shark had no fins, adopting a streamlined design. The color was the same brownish yellow as the sand around them. There was no windshield that they could look through to see the situation outside. The navigation was based fully on the scanning radar.
The air inside the coach was treated. Even though the two players were not wearing any protective gear, their Life Points had stopped dropping.
Feng Bujue placed both of his hands behind his head and sat leisurely in the driver's seat. It did not take him long to master how to operate the shark coach. The UI of the vehicle was not too hard to understand and the coordinates for their destination had already been keyed in, so he only needed to rely on the autopilot mechanism.
After Feng Bujue exited the lab and saw the outside environment, he understood that manual driving made no sense on his planet because there were no roads. There was not even any reference that they could use. So, this shark coach had to depend on autopilot to get to any destination.
So… the question arrived. How did this group of people find Crystal Lake lab?
Hank said that their team got 'the order' to explore this place. This meant that the leader that gave them the order had the exact coordinates for Crystal Lake lab. Thus, a new problem was born. Did their leader already know about those coordinates, or had it recently been discovered? And how did they find the place, through scouting robots?
Feng Bujue's suspicion was… about this team's timing. After the group of migrated citizens left, they arrived. This explained something obvious… and Hank's first reaction toward 'outsiders' supported Feng Bujue's prediction. Even though they had not arrived at the village, Feng Bujue had a broad idea about what was going on there.
"Why didn't you kill him?" Flashes of Sword sat next to him in the co-pilot seat. He turned over to whisper, "Aren't you afraid of him betraying us?"
Of course, he was whispering because he did not want his words to be overheard by Hank, who was tied up at the back.
"We have nothing against him. Why waste a precious human life?" Feng Bujue replied.
Flashes of Sword laughed drily. "You're kidding me… Isn't it a bit too late for you to act like an agent of justice?"
"This has nothing to do with justice. It's mainly because he is still useful to us," Feng Bujue said. "We need his help to get us into the village."
"He will help us?" Flashes of Sword questioned and turned his head slightly to glance at the pale-faced Hank. "But why? He might be helpless now, but once we reach the village, he can escape at any moment and call for his people to come arrest us."
"Everyone has their weakness. Once it is identified, they will betray their own principles, and then they will follow your every order." A smile appeared on Feng Bujue's lips. He stood up from his seat and said softly, "For Hank… that can be done through simple threats and psychological pressure."