Doomsday Wonderland

Her giggle resembled the sound of the ocean waves at night when lapping on the shore and softly wisping back to sea. It was soothing to the ears and could cleanse one’s soul.

Though, that was what Lin Sanjiu would think in normal circumstances. Right now, Bliss’s voices sounded just like an apparition whispering into her ears.

“I was right. You really are something else,” she said, “I wonder where you got the idea from. Many people have guessed my identity, but none of them gave an answer like yours. You are the only one who almost got the answer right.”

‘Almost? Does that mean she’s not the building? What is she, then?’

Lin Sanjiu raised one of her brows, and just as she was about to ask Bliss what she meant, a rumbling noise as if something was dragging itself on the floor erupted behind her. She jerked her head back and caught sight of an arctic-white shadow. However, before she could do anything, the staircase suddenly began to whirr to life. Like an escalator, it sent the creature down to the first floor.

Lin Sanjiu had no idea what was going on. She did not know why the staircase would suddenly move, and she did not know why Bliss would help her. Then, Bliss’s voice rang out once more, “See? As long as you listen to me and be a good girl, I won’t let them go near you.”

Following her words, all the lights on the second floor turned on one after another, bringing the window displays on both sides of the corridor into the light.

Lin Sanjiu squinted her eyes as a measure to protect her eyes from the sudden blast of light. Then, by the time she got a better view of her surroundings, she froze. She didn’t know where she should put her eyes, even though she did not want to look at any of the displays.

“All of these are your collections?”

In reply, Bliss gave a half-hearted assent.

“They are all duoluozhongs?”

“Well, not all of them,” she giggled, her voice sounding so near that it startled Lin Sanjiu. She quickly turned around to look about the corridor but she found no sign of Bliss. Instead, she found an old man, so old that he looked no different from a dead man, staring at her from a window display.

She had never seen such an old person before. His appearance had decayed to the point that it was too grotesque to look at, and the very sight of it would make a person’s stomach to churn. His gender and age were indiscernible, and Lin Sanjiu wondered how he could breathe with such a decrepit body. Her breathing quickened, and she had no idea if it was her brain or her nose playing a trick on her, but she seemed to be able to catch a strong, foul-smelling odor from the air even though the old man was locked away in a window display. When the old man turned his pair of bloody greyed-out eyes, it sent chills down Lin Sanjiu’s spine and her back drenched in cold sweats.

She never detested elderly people, but the old man’s flat, soulless gaze really made her queasy. She could feel her stomach shrinking a little more every second.

As an entity living inside her sea of psyche, Mrs. Manas seemed to be infected by her queasiness as well. She kept mumbling in the back of her mind, “I warned you about this, right? Right? I told you not to come to Bliss, but you wouldn’t listen. You are really cruising for a bruising. I wonder how you are going to reach the checkpoint in 20 minutes.”

Lin Sanjiu paid no mind to Mrs. Manas. She wiped the slime off her face and asked again, “What are you then if you are not this building?”

“You already know the answer, don’t you? About my real identity,” Bliss chuckled, “On that night…”

“So are you a human?” Lin Sanjiu interrupted.

Bliss’s answer caused her to frown.

“From a certain perspective, you can consider me as a human.”

“All you need to say is yes or no,” Lin Sanjiu said as she slowly inched forward. “There is no in-between.”

The last time she came to Bliss, she figured that she had to follow a certain set of rules. If she wanted to proceed to the next floor, she first had to pass by all the window displays on the previous floor. Right now, she was standing on one end of the second floor, and the staircase to the third floor was on the other side of the corridor. In between, there were about 30 to 40 window displays. Each floor had almost the same number of window displays. That was to say, if she was heading towards the swimming pool on the fourth floor, there would be about 70 monsters waiting for her along the way.

“One more step and I will release one of the monsters.”

‘Damn it!’

Lin Sanjiu stopped moving forward unwillingly.

The battle between posthumans was often predictable. After all, no matter how vast or bizarre an Evolving Ability or Special Item was, there ought to be a pattern. However, it wasn’t the same case for duoluozhong and other monsters. Their movements and abilities were often unpredictable. The best example would be the queen at Shambhala. Who could have thought that it could inject parasites into its victims’ brains to lure them to Shambhala and consume them?

The worst thing was that she rarely ran into a duoluozhong ever since she left Hyperthermal Hell. Hence, she couldn’t tell what those monsters in the window displays could do.

Even though she was very confident with her speed, there was no way she could cross a thousand meters in a flash. With that thought in mind, she pulled out her [Tailor Learning] and grasped the card firmly in her palm, hoping that the pointer could help point out the weakness of the duoluozhong.

“You’re not giving up yet, aren’t you?” Bliss suddenly asked softly. “You know, I can see very clearly what you are trying to do over there.”

‘If she isn’t the spirit of the building and if she isn’t here, then how on earth did she know I just moved my fingers?’

Lin Sanjiu quickly calmed herself down and said, “I am just a little curious about your collection.” She took a step forward and before Bliss could say anything, she stopped and pointed at a window display in the corner. Then she froze in confusion as she asked, “Is that a duoluozhong as well?”

There were several zebras standing behind the glass. Their furs were a little yellow and dirty but their idiosyncratic black and white stripes were apparent under the light. They looked at Lin Sanjiu with their beady eyes for a moment and then turned away. Their eyelashes fluttered from time to time, and they looked no different from the zebras in a zoo.

Bliss gave a half-suppressed laugh, “Try and take a step forward, then you will know the answer yourself.”

‘I don’t have much time left. I have to do something…’

However, she needed an opportunity.

She spun her head around and looked at the window display on her right side. It was filled with sand, and the grainy gravel was clearly visible on the glass. There were holes, similar to the burrows of a ghost crab on a beach, here and there in the sand.

The window display on her left side held a machine that was hovering in midair. The machine was a cube and had a bright metallic sheen.

She did not know what was the use of the machine, but compared to other creatures, it looked the safest.

The most important thing was, it wasn’t a living thing.

Lin Sanjiu’s body glowed as she activated the [Defense Forcefield]. She balled her hand into a fist and expelled a puff of air on her joint as she said in a low voice, “It seems to me that you love to avoid giving an honest answer. It is a little rude, don’t you think?”

Bliss was slightly stunned. However, before she could say anything, Lin Sanjiu thrust her fist into the glass on her left.

There were very few things that could receive her punch without breaking, and the glass was no exception as well. It burst into countless pieces of shards and plunged down to the floor like a hailstorm. Lin Sanjiu quickly slipped into the window display, and with her [Planar World] activated, she pressed her hand onto the machine.

The machine was still levitating obediently in midair. The air was filled with a faint noise that sounded like a mechanical whirring. Just as her hand almost touched the machine, a strange feeling rose up from her belly.

Something was not right.

She was inside one of Bliss’s window displays and she was about to do something to one of her collections, but why was Bliss so quiet? There wasn’t any movement in the corridor, and it seemed as if Bliss was waiting for something else to happen…

Lin Sanjiu’s heart made a somersault and she changed her direction just as the tip of her fingers grazed overhead the machine. The mechanical whirring seemed louder for a second, but then it dimmed down very soon in the next moment.

Bliss let out a relieved sigh. Her voice sounded soothing like the ocean’s tide.

“Luckily you pulled out at the last second,” she said, and Lin Sanjiu noticed a distinct hint of relief in her voice. “I really didn’t want to see you get turned into a sausage.”

‘That was a meat grinder?’

“All right, get out of there,” Bliss said affectionately, as if she was coaxing a child to take its medicine. “The machine cannot move or attack anyone actively, but don’t look down on it just because of that; this machine can do something far more fearsome than you could’ve imagined. It can turn anything it touches into grind meat. Be it an Evolving Ability or Special Item, they are nothing but materials for it to make sausage. Did you use your ability just now? Well, yeah, if you did not stop at the last minute, then it would have turned you and your ability into a sausage with ability. Of course, I can also entrap you with the machine in the window display, but I would rather not do that. Anyway, come on, come out now, that’s right, one step at a time and you will be fine.”

Lin Sanjiu did not know why, but she felt a little embarrassed, and her cheeks turned pink. Just when she stepped out of the window display, all the glass shards floated up into midair as if they were bestowed with life and began to assemble themselves back into an entirely new piece of glass.

She turned her head back, and she somewhat understood how the machine could hover in mid-air without touching anything. Be that as it may, there was something she couldn’t understand. “If anything that touches it will be turned into a sausage, then how did you manage to put it in Bliss?”

The woman laughed, “Who told you that I put it in Bliss?”

Lin Sanjiu frowned.

As if she was tickled pink by Lin Sanjiu’s reaction, Bliss gave out a hearty laugh, “You are so funny. Alright, alright, I didn’t put it into Bliss because I built Bliss around it.”

This was indeed a shocking answer, but Lin Sanjiu did not have the freedom to marvel at the machine right now. She had less than 20 minutes to check-in, and she was still stuck on the second floor. She held an arm up and called out a card by using the arm as a distraction.

“Even if I say I’d stay, you wouldn’t believe me, right?”

“Yeap. After all, you are not the kind of person who would give up so easily.” Bliss sighed, which sent chills up Lin Sanjiu’s back and made her remember the scene in the pool the other day. “So I had to keep an eye on you all the time.”

It occurred to Lin Sanjiu that Bliss and her comrades knew her very well.

“You keep saying that it is “them” who want to kill me and not you, but you never told me who they are and why they want to kill me,” Lin Sanjiu said as she secretly sized up the corridor that laid ahead of her. Even though the corridor wasn’t all the way straight, it was still possible for her to rush to the other side of the corridor if she went full out on her speed.

“Well, your very existence is a threat to us, and you have something on you that they want,” Bliss did not give a direct answer to her question. And just as she was about to continue, Lin Sanjiu saw her chance and hurled something to the front.

‘If Bliss is really a human being, then this might work…’

A plume of smoke sizzled out and filled the area in a split second. Lin Sanjiu could not see anything and her eyes began to tear up. She closed her nose with her hand and went into a full sprint. Using the [Battle Item] to imitate a smoke bomb might be a waste, but this was her best shot. She planned to pick the [Battle Item] up along the way, but she couldn’t locate it amidst the smoke.

After she galloped along the corridor at her top speed for a few minutes, her feet kicked something.

Her heart leaped from joy, but her happiness was short-lived.

It wasn’t the [Battle Item], but something else.