Doomsday Wonderland

Ignoring the negligibly small pieces, she found seven pieces of door panels from the warehouse. All of them were wire mesh tightly coiled together into two layers. Had it been before the apocalypse arrived, it indeed was a substantial door strong enough to hold back any impact.

“Alright, remove these few rows of racks.”

With a snap of her fingers, several rows of thinly scattered racks began to vanish like ice melting into water before her eyes. She raised her head and looked skyward into the night sky. Then, she sighed. “Why am I so stupid?”

Dumbfounded, Mrs. Manas asked, “Why?”

“Not only me but you and Ryuji as well. Why did none of us realize this just now?” Lin Sanjiu said accusingly before asking again, “Don’t you feel like this building lacks something very important?”

“Quit beating around the bush and just spill it,” Mrs. Manas said, exasperated.

“Ceiling! The ceiling! Don’t tell me that none of you realize this building doesn’t have a ceiling yet!”

The bushes in the distance rustled and a spherical silhouette popped out. The shadow opened his mouth, and Ryuji’s characteristical insouciant voice rang out, “Is a ceiling that important?”

“Of course,” Lin Sanjiu replied in a low voice when she saw the fast-approaching corpse. Without wasting a second, she pinned the pen-shaped [Power Of Word Picture] on her collar, and then murmured something under her breath. In the next second, row upon row of racks rose from the ground, acting as a barricade to block the corpse from getting to her. Unlike previously, these new rows of racks were positioned very closely to each other so that there was no gap in between and they looked like a wall.

“I still don’t understand,” Ryuji said listlessly.

“I will explain it to you once I get out of here!” Lin Sanjiu shouted, “You stay there and watch.”

“Huh?” Ryuji replied with confusion written all over his face, “What are you trying to do?”

The rack could only hold the corpse for a while, but several seconds were more than sufficient. Lin Sanjiu paid no mind to Ryuji’s question and began examining the three walls around the warehouse while her mouth opened and closed rapidly.

In the warehouse, where silence prevailed, the rustling and the bestial growls from the corpse were slowly drowned out by the clatter of rocks. She looked up to see several patches of shadows seeping in from each corner. She turned to the only side of the warehouse that had no wall earlier and found out that the last wall was growing out as well.

The shadows soon met one another in the center and formed a ceiling. It blocked out the last remaining light from the moon and thrust the warehouse into darkness, leaving the silver beam from Lin Sanjiu’s [Ability Polishing Agent] as the only light source that provided illumination in this pitch-black atmosphere. From the outside, the warehouse now looked like an enlarged version of a rectangular box.

“Why would you block out the moonlight?” Mrs. Manas shouted nervously, “It’s even darker now. How are you going to see where the corpse will—”

Crouching low, Lin Sanjiu lifted her silver bottle and peered out through the slit on the rack. The first thing that flooded into her vision was the head of the corpse that was buried deep into its chest. Since it was very far away, she could only register the back of its head and its shoulders that were squeezing out from the rack.

“You didn’t realize it, did you?” She chuckled, “We are now standing next to the main door.”

“So? Then what?”

Holding the [Ability Polishing Agent], Lin Sanjiu groped in the dark and walked towards the door made of wire mesh. It was only when she changed her direction midway that Mrs. Manas and Ryuji realized she was not going for the door but the wall beside her. After she felt about the wall with her fingers, she said softly, “Found it.”

“What?”

As a buzzing permeated the air, a blast of white light filled the warehouse. Lin Sanjiu had closed her eyes beforehand, and by the time she cracked her eyelids open, the warehouse was as bright as daylight.

There were a dozen incandescent lamps lined up neatly on the ceiling, scorching their eyes with blaring white light.

“Even if this is a warehouse, there must be lamps,” explained Lin Sanjiu, “And the switch for the lamps, in general, is installed near the door. Therefore, we don’t really need to fight in the dark as the warehouse has already provided us with the best lighting.”

“B-but without factual basis, how can you activate the [Power of Word Picture]? This is too—”

“Of course, there is,” Lin Sanjiu replied indifferently, “Do you still remember that before we began to rebuild this warehouse, there were steel bars and wires jutting out hither and thither from the broken walls. The moment I saw the steel bars, I knew that this warehouse isn’t a single-storey house. With the wires as the premise, we can use the [Power of Word Picture] to describe the lamps into existence.”

“Is that so? Only the wire will do the job?”

Lin Sanjiu did not reply to Mrs. Manas’s question instantly. She stuffed her [Ability Polishing Agent] away and turned around, utilizing the dazzling light to search for the corpse. She soon found her target. Through the light, the monstrous form of the corpse was fully revealed. She found that although it looked less strange under the light, it was still as grotesque as before. Staring at the corpse that was getting closer and closer to her, she continued, “To be honest, I’m actually experimenting with the effect of the [Power of Word Picture].”

“Huh? What do you mean by “experimenting”?”

“Remember the glass fragments we found? I used it as a basis and made a window. However, when I think about it, it’s too unplanned to be a coincidence. I think the glass fragments are a part of the window, but are they really? What if they are actually a part of the lamps? What would happen if that was the actual case? So, to find the answer, I did an experiment,” Lin Sanjiu said as she pointed at the window on the wall, “The answer is that so long as they contain the same element in their constitution, we can use the [Power of Word Picture] to construct the same basic material into different objects.”

“In other words, we can use the [Power of Word Picture] to make different things as long as they all contain “glass” and the necessary factors, can’t we?”

“Yes, but there’s one more hidden requirement.”

“What’s that?”

“I had to first organize the electric circuit in my head before using the [Power of Word Picture] to describe a lamp that could really be lit. If I didn’t do that, the result would’ve been the same as the wall lamp I used to hoist myself up. It would only have the impression of it without any substantial ability.”

She was telling the truth. The “wall lamp” was merely a block of cement in the shape of a lamp. After all, Lin Sanjiu just needed to use it to support herself and the situation at that time did not give her the freedom to make out an entire electric grid in her brain.

“If you don’t understand how something works, you can’t use the Special Item to bring it into reality.” Lin Sanjiu sighed disappointedly. “Regardless of that, this Special Item is indeed very powerful.”

“Well, I know you are impressed by the Special Item, but we can leave the impression aside first,” Mrs. Manas raised her voice to warn, “The corpse is coming!”

Upon hearing the warning, Lin Sanjiu raised her head and looked at the racks in front. As if it wanted to pull its head out from its chest, the corpse was squeezing itself through a slit that did not match its body size. She could hear the popping sound emitted from its spine. She could also clearly see how it fine-tuned each of its bone segments were so that it could fit through the slit. Sighing, she snapped her fingers and all the racks before her eyes disappeared in the blink of an eye.

Seizing the chance as the corpse fell to the ground with a plop, Lin Sanjiu pulled her [Tornado Whip] out. Then, without wasting a second, she summoned a tornado towards the corpse, sending it flying through the air. Since there were no racks in the warehouse anymore, the corpse found no leverage to stop its momentum. Flailing its arms and legs madly in the air, it smashed right through the wall and dropped into the bushes outside.

Almost in an instant, rows of racks reappeared in the warehouse once more. Then, with a flick of her arm, she brandished the [Tornado Whip] and obliterated all of them, causing the air to be filled with flying steel bars and planks. She sent all of them towards the hole and blocked it out. After experiencing the tremendously destructive force of the [Tornado Whip], the warehouse now looked like it had been ravaged by a storm.

“Well, I’ve bought us some more time.” Lin Sanjiu kept the whip away and dusted herself. “Even though mostly pocket dimension beings are very annoying, if we can utilize our surroundings to the maximum and make the correct decision, it’s actually not that hard to minimize the risk of getting hurt by them.”

Mrs. Manas was dumbfounded. She waited for a bit longer before she finally found her voice. “Ji Shanqing…he didn’t have the same level of combat power as yours, so I didn’t know he could be this scary.”

Lin Sanjiu did not reply.

“So, what now?”

“We are getting out of this warehouse.” She turned around and pointed at the door made from wire mesh. “See, the door is still not complete yet. Look, there’s only half a lock.”

Nobody could tell what had happened to the warehouse in the past that might have caused the lock on the door to be split into half. There was only half a lock on the door that was created using the [Power of Word Picture].

It was easy to recreate the door as they only needed several pieces of the wire mesh. However, that was not the same case for the lock. Even with the residual part of the key as the “basis of reality”, Lin Sanjiu still needed to find out the internal structure and the working principle behind the lock first before she could recreate it.

Using Lin Sanjiu’s eyes to examine the lock, Mrs. Manas said while sounding a little lost, “There’s only half of the lock left, so what should we do now?”

“This is why I need the lamps.” Lin Sanjiu smirked. “I’m going to find out the internal structure of the lock according to the remaining half.

“Then,” she took a deep breath and closed her eyes before speaking, “I can use the key to open the door and get out of here.”