Doomsday Wonderland

Mrs. Manas was the first to react. “I will bring up your subconscious footage now,” she said with haste. “See if you can find anything!”

“The meat grinder! Bring that one up first! She asked me to get out of that window display just now!” When Lin Sanjiu finally came around to her senses, the first time that came into her mind was the meat grinder, as it was the most unique collection in the building.

Soon enough, a messy assemblage of images flitted across her eyes. Odd bits and pieces of what had happened in the window displays kept swirling around in her head like a kaleidoscope, jagged colors, and sharp edges bumping into each other until the meat grinder finally projected clearly in her vision.

However, there was nothing aside from the meat grinder in the window display.

Disappointed but unwilling to give up just yet, she turned her attention to the other places. With a mental tug, she urged Mrs. Manas to send her more footage. Countless scenes flooded into her eyes like a trotting horse lamp. It took her only a few seconds to finish watching all the footage.

None. She couldn’t find the words “checkpoint pocket dimension” in any of the window displays. “Where… Where is the checkpoint?” Lin Sanjiu pulled herself back to reality and muttered under her breath; her eyes were blank, full of confusion.

Cladded in her red blouse, Bliss stood quietly in the corner, staring at her.

When she realized Lin Sanjiu was turning her head, she turned away, not wanting to see the disappointment in her eyes. She was the one who put her through this, but now she felt extremely guilty.

Slowly, Lin Sanjiu dragged herself to the window.

Mid Mountsburg was surrounded by a range of snowy mountains dotted with patches of green. All the buildings in the heart of the town had different shapes and styles, each more bizarre than the last. The posthumans were weaving in and out of the crowd, keeping their heads low as they hurried towards their respective destination. None of them seemed to know that the interior of the building had changed. She turned her eyes down and saw that several posthumans were pacing back and forth in front of the Bliss Convention Center. When she saw them, she couldn’t help but think about the posthumans she bumped into on the first floor. Were they still inside the building when Bliss unleashed all her monsters? Were they still alive now, or were they already dead?

All of a sudden, Lin Sanjiu realized something.

Bliss had mentioned before that she knew it was her the moment she stepped into the building even though she was wearing the [Mask]. If that was the case, then why didn’t she release all her “collections” on the first floor straightaway to intercept her?

Lin Sanjiu then thought of the first duoluozhong she met. Bliss released it from its cage but she did not allow it to come onto the second floor and instead kept it on the first floor. Why?

Why did Bliss want her to go to the second floor? No, the question should be, why did she not want her to stay on the first floor?

There was only one answer to that question.

Lin Sanjiu took a deep breath to calm herself down and then shot a glance at Bliss through the corner of her eyes. She was now standing in the corner, very far away from her. She kept her head low and her expression unreadable.

“Why don’t you just give up?” Perhaps she sensed her gaze, for Bliss suddenly raised her head. “There is no way you can check-in now. Look at the time. Why don’t we just sit down and have a chat?”

Lin Sanjiu turned her body entirely to face Bliss. Her heart picked up its pace again, and she could even hear the sound of her blood rushing and gushing in her veins.

“Have a chat, huh?”

A ghost of a smile flitted across her face. Then, before Bliss could understand the meaning behind her smile, she jabbed her elbow into the window with all her might. As the window shattered into hundreds of pieces, she could sense warm liquid streaming down her arm and soaking into her sleeve.

Shielding her head with her arms, she leaped off the building.

She could feel her muscles tightening as the sharp wind cut through her thin garments like a knife. The snowfield was getting larger and larger in her eyes, and finally, she landed, eliciting screams of surprise from the crowd. Without wasting any seconds, she hopped up and darted straight towards Bliss’s main entrance.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Somebody stop her!”

“Stop now or I’ll shoot you!”

Lin Sanjiu ignored all shouts and threats as she rammed herself through the door. She stormed towards the first floor, but the scene that welcomed her eyes made her heart drop. She had passed through five window displays, but all of them were empty. No duoluozhongs or posthumans were in sight.

Could it be that there was no duoluozhong on the first floor?

Not wanting to give up, Lin Sanjiu commanded Mrs. Manas to scan the area with her [Higher Consciousness Scan]. Her [Higher Consciousness Scan] tumbled forward and soon covered every window display she passed through. She even checked the ceiling. By the time she stormed to the end of the corridor, she found out that the arctic white duoluozhong had already been put back into its own window display by Bliss. When it saw her, it stamped its face into the glass.

“Did you see anything?” Lin Sanjiu asked, a note of hysteria in her voice. Mrs. Manas had been too quiet the entire time, and she did not have a good feeling about it.

“Nothing,” Mrs. Manas replied. She sounded agitated like a cat on a hot tin roof. “I didn’t see anything! Let’s go back one more time!”

They repeated the same thing again and again and again like madwomen, hoping they could find the checkpoint. Yet, their hopes got crushed every single time. After Lin Sanjiu destroyed almost all of the window displays in an attempt to look for the checkpoint, she suddenly remembered a sentence Bliss said, and the thing that came along with the sentence was a deep sense of despair.

There was nothing in the window displays on the first floor.

She felt that her action was no different from looking for a needle in a haystack. Every window display was linked to a small cubicle. The cubicle was a few times larger than the window display, and looking at a single cubicle was enough to use up all her remaining time.

If the checkpoint was not in the cubicle, how about the ceiling? There was also the possibility that Bliss would keep the checkpoint in the ceiling. If that was the case, how was she going to look for it? What’s more, if the checkpoint was situated in the ceiling between the second and third floors…

She had only three minutes left. Even though she knew her chance of finding the checkpoint was slim, she did not plan to give up yet. Driven by her rage and unwilling to reconcile to her fate, she continued to kick the door open one after another. Until Mrs. Manas said, “Time’s up.”

As if somebody had hit the pause button, Lin Sanjiu was stunned for a long while. Mrs. Manas’s words had deprived her tongue of utterance. Her brain was blank, and that realization was the final straw. She kicked the door in front of her with all her strength. The door slid open to reveal a small room that had the same pattern as the other cubicles.

The room was dim, and her harsh intake of breath seemed to stir the air in the room.

A silhouette draped in a red blouse slowly raised her head to reveal her pair of blue eyes. With the darkness as the background, her eyes looked just like the sea.

“Time’s up,” she sighed.

For a moment, Lin Sanjiu thought it was nothing if she didn’t check-in for once. After all, she had been thrown into countless life or death situations before, and she triumphed over each of them. This was just another pocket dimension, there was no way she couldn’t…

Then, she thought about Lollipop.

Lollipop was locked up in jail. What’s more, Exodus was in the sky at that time, so there shouldn’t be anyone who could hurt her. Never did she expect that in the end, the one who would cause Lollipop’s “calamity” was none other than Woyu.

“Where did you move the checkpoint to?”

Bliss was hesitant to tell her the location of the checkpoint. Her expression was calm, and there was a light in her eyes that suggested that she was torn on whether or not to tell Lin Sanjiu the truth. Be that as it may, after a short bout of rumination, she decided to spill everything. “Even if you check-in now, you can’t escape from your “calamity”.”

As she talked, she lowered her head to avoid Lin Sanjiu’s gaze.

“The reason you couldn’t find the checkpoint is that I hid it inside the cement.”

That’s why Lin Sanjiu couldn’t see the checkpoint from outside. It was never a fair game, to begin with.

“It’s located in the ceiling between the second and third floors,” Bliss continued to say, her voice sounding like a dream that refused to go away after you woke up from a slumber. “Unless you destroy the entire building, there is no way you can find the checkpoint. Besides, even if you really go so far as to tear down the entire building, I am certain that my speed of rebuilding it will be a lot faster than your tearing it down.”

She had achieved her goal, yet she did not sound happy.

But nothing could be changed now. Lin Sanjiu might meet her end in the next 24 hours, just like how Lollipop had met hers.

Lin Sanjiu did not say anything. Her breathing was slowing down again. She turned around, and just as she was about to close the door, she suddenly thought of something. She looked at Bliss and asked, “Do you feel guilty?”

Bliss nodded.

“Then, do me a favor,” Lin Sanjiu said. “If you can help me with this, I promise I won’t hate you.”

“What’s the favor?” Bliss asked.

“Go to the mountain and help me look for a friend of mine,” she said, looking into the ceiling. “One of your “comrades” planted a bomb in my aircraft in an attempt to kill me. However, what he didn’t expect was for my friend to go on the aircraft and unknowingly activate the bomb instead. I want you to find my friend and save him because…” She paused for a while, her lips curling into a bitter smile before she continued, “I can’t do it anymore.”