Doomsday Wonderland

“…How good it would be if I could turn back time. I’m sure my past self would rather choose to be mauled to death by that bastard if he knew he would have to walk so much one day in the future.”

The sun above them was blazing like Titan’s fiery wheel in the sky. Lances of its dazzling molten-gold beams splashed on the ground, vaporizing every single water particle that hung around in the atmosphere. With every step Lin Sanjiu took, choking dust particles would be raised into the dry air. Looking ahead, the districts were as barren as a wasteland. All of the buildings, avenues, and facilities from the modern days had been reduced to mere heaps of golden-colored sand and dust that accumulated to around the height of a human’s calf. Whenever somebody stepped into the sea of sand and dust, it was as if stepping in a pool of quicksand, and it demanded strenuous effort to pluck their feet out of the sand.

Walking in this kind of environment was a soul-swelling experience, yet it was nothing compared to Qing Jiuliu’s protracted and variety whining that took a different guise in every single passing minute. It wasn’t something bearable to a normal human being, and it needed further forbearance to endure against it.

Lin Sanjiu covered her mouth with her hand and tried her very best effort not to query Qing Jiuliu about the anecdotes between him and that bastard.

“Why are we even here?” Qing Jiuliu whined. The liquid level of the whiskey in the bottle dropped a little, and this had prevented him from talking. Puffing his cheek, he revelled in the contentment of gargling his cakehole with the alcoholic drink before guzzling it down along his throat reluctantly. The moment he gulped down the beverage, he parted his lips again, “The tobacco & liquor can’t be in here. That’s axiomatic. You see, if it was here, it would have been long reduced to sand and dust along with other buildings.”

“Then give me something more specific!” Lin Sanjiu raised her brows, “The location tobacco & liquor is on the roadside with a telephone pole next to it—to be honest, that’s basically looking for a needle in a haystack.”

Qing Jiuliu didn’t give any comment. He remained silent for a short while and sighed. Then, the liquid in the bottle dropped again.

[Insolvent Drunkard’s Light of Hope]

Those who are not addicted to something would never understand the excruciating feeling of being kept on the anxious seat. Imagine that when you have no beer and no money, anguish is probably the only feeling that you would feel. You can still squeeze out some nickel and dimes to purchase a few packets of fags by selling some household things, but that isn’t the case for fine wine. The fine brew is the plaything for mega-rich, it isn’t something like us who have only a few pennies in our pocket could afford.

How great it would be great if I could drink the beer in the bottle by just touching it—one day, a drunkard really had developed such a skill.

Since the initial goal of the drunkard was to drink alcoholic beverages, this ability allowed the drunkard to remove the liquid inside something through the protective layer. He could extract beer through the bottle, wrench out blood through the skin, and remove urine through the bladder… Of course, nobody would want the last thing. All the liquid that had been extracted would be then ushered into the user’s body—which in other words mean that the drunkard could only blot up the amount of liquid equivalent to how much his body could hold. If he tried to absorb every single drop of blood from his victim, he would blow up. However, the drunkard was willing to undertake the risk.

PS: This ability would automatically bypass the aftereffect of mixing different blood types. After all, no matter what type your blood is, it would become alcohol when it’s absorbed into Qing Jiuliu’s body.

“In any case, I can instantly recognize that place the moment we reach it.” Right after Lin Sanjiu had again pressed onto him to think harder about the surrounding original spot of the tobacco & liquor, Qing Jiuliu added another sentence under his breath, “…I’m more anxious to find the place than you are.”

Like hanging a radish in front of a donkey, Lin Sanjiu had to take out a bottle of wine or a cigar now and then to force Qing Jiuliu to continue to move forward. If they came across a shop that sells tobacco or alcohol along with their journey, Lin Sanjiu would need to engage in a battle with Qing Jiuliu first before she could keep the new alcohol and tobacco into her card. The good thing was she only needed to take care of his hand, and she could effortlessly maintain the upper hand in every single of their physical exchange.

Both of them moved bit by bit and very soon they had covered almost half of the city. This was, nevertheless, merely their assumption as the borderline of the city had long been blurred by the erosion of the apocalypse, so they couldn’t tell the exact scope they had actually covered. Two days whizzed past like lightning yet they didn’t come across any building with deep-blue colored paint.

The longer she walked, the more anxiety she’d built up.

So many days had passed and the probability that Ji Shanqing would still stay in the same establishment was almost non-existence. Although she didn’t know what had happened to him, the only thing she could do right now was to look around in the building for any clues that he might have left behind.

That was… only if she could locate the building.

After the seventh time he said “this pole looks familiar” to a certain telephone pole along the road, Qing Jiuliu threw himself to the ground, sticking his butt firmly by the roadside and demanding Lin Sanjiu to give him a rest.

Lin Sanjiu couldn’t do anything to make him move, so she sat next to him. After she thought for a while, Lin Sanjiu took out her [Tape Recorder] and have Qing Jiuliu to record “immune to crypt particle” into the recorder. Since the ability was a one-time use, she decided not to use this until the situation called for it.

“I wonder how you survive in the apocalypse world,” Lin Sanjiu cast a sidelong glance at Qing Jiuliu and said. The latter was lying prone on the avenue, looking like a dead fish. “How many worlds have you gone through?”

The man whose face was hidden behind his beard and fuzzy hair raised his hand after a short while and drew a “six” in the air, surprising Lin Sanjiu.

“I only needed to live, what’s so hard about that?” He was slurring his words, “I have been alive for such a long time, though I was drunk for the majority of the time… If I had to say, for me, dying is much harder than living.”

“You wish to die?”

“Oh, no. I guess you have it wrong,” The wine in the bottle suddenly went down a bit and Qing Jiuliu muttered, “We’ll all die one day. I just wish that my death would come along either when I’m drinking, smoking, or when I’m having a good night sleep in a nice, soft, and comfortable bed. Girls… I’d prefer to not have them around me when it’s time for me to return to His side. They would be too sad if they saw me die.”

Lin Sanjiu couldn’t think of anyone who would cry for him when he died. And he wasn’t just talking about a girl; he was saying “girls” which means a lot of girls would be crying for his death.

Both of them kept each other accompanied by talking. She didn’t know if it was because of the anxiety and pressure in her heart or because she hadn’t been drinking any water for the past few days, but her parched lips were so dry that they felt like two old leather sofas. Sighing heavily, she stopped talking. Every word that was being said felt like somebody was holding a blade, cutting at her hollow and seared breathing tube.

“Why don’t you drink some water?” Qing Jiuliu suddenly asked. Then, he waved his hands, “…Anyway, it doesn’t really matter to me.”

“Are you nut? Don’t you know that we’ll go crazy if we drink the water?” Lin Sanjiu chose to simplify her words into a more simple sentence, despite her original wish to demolish him with a stream of expletives.

“Did you become crazy after you drink the water, or you witnessed somebody go insane after he or she drank the water?”

“No… but, as long as it’s exposed in the air…”

“Says who?” Qing Jiuliu said as he jerked up from the ground. He lit up a cigarette and placed it in between his lips as if he was proving something to Lin Sanjiu, “See? Like you said if the crypt particle would contaminate everything that has been exposed to the air, and it would turn a person into a nutjob the moment we put the contaminated object into our mouth, I should’ve lost my mind right now.”

Lin Sanjiu was stunned. She didn’t categorize cigarette as food, so she didn’t think it that way. Right now, after Qing Jiuliu had explained to her, she felt that what he had said actually made sense.

“And we should’ve inhaled more than enough crypt particles when we breathed through our nose and mouth, yet we’re still fine.” Drawing her brows, she said to herself.

“So don’t trust everything in this world as the rules are a bit strange. We won’t have any trouble if we drink the water, but wine does not work that way,” Qing Jiuliu let out a regrettable breath as his voice was getting lower and lower. “The process of drinking wine is a holy ritual. To fully admire the greatness of a finely brewed wine, we should first press the cold-stored glass onto our lips before taking a sip.”

Lin Sanjiu didn’t reply as she was fully absorbed into the thought that had just surfaced in her mind.

Water had no problem, but the wine wasn’t… Cigarette and breathing were fine…

The common point of food and wine, and the similarities between breathing and water…

Her body quivered at her thought.

If her conjecture was correct, then even though she found a way to remove all the crypt particle from the surface of the food, she would still become crazy if she ate it.

Raising her head, Lin Sanjiu was going to say something to Qing Jiuliu but she was stunned at what greeted her eyes.

Unbeknownst to her, the man had fallen into a deep slumber. His loud snore reverberated through the air. His sleeping posture was so bad that he had exposed his belly to a stranger.

Lin Sanjiu shook her head and sighed. In the grand scheme of things, she felt bringing this guy around was no longer a necessity anymore as judging from the interaction they had for the past few days, she really doubted if could she actually rely on him.

It was just that she couldn’t bring herself to leave him so vulnerable there.

She dragged him along the avenue to a small compartment that seemed to be the housing for an ATM. Even though the condition in the small compartment was awful and the ATM had been destroyed beyond recognition that it was now only a chunk of wire-filled waste iron, she still thanked God for the fortune as the door of this compartment was still left intact, albeit only half of it. After she’d stuffed the man that slept like a log behind the door, she was dumbfounded by what she saw when she straightened herself.

… Maybe God had listened to her prayer. She had spent a lot of time searching without any result, yet it now had appeared in front of her.

She was sitting on the ground just now so another building blocked her line of vision. Once she stood up, the slightly slanting deep-blue building swum into her sight.

She never thought that Qing Jiuliu was actually right this time!

Lin Sanjiu’s heart picked up its pace but she didn’t submit to her delight to make any rash moves. She recoiled two steps backward and scrutinized her surrounding thoroughly. After she had made sure that nobody was around in the street, she took out two bottles of wine and a cigarette from her card and placed them beside Qing Jiuliu. After that, she ghosted across the blocks toward the office building.

The building was much shorter that it was in her memory. It appeared a little bit slanted and its bottom had chipped off—clear evidence of a collision. Though it sounded pretty impossible, the building looked like it was lifted by an invisible hand that had accidentally let it fall which resulted in the impact.

When she recalled her memories, it seemed that tobacco & liquor had the same collision mark as well.

The districts here were relatively well preserved. She found the scene very much similar to the scene before the arrival of doomsday, minus the charred shop lots that were licked by an inferno and wailing of people that drifted into her ear from far away at odd occasions.

When Lin Sanjiu strode past a convenience store, she suddenly stopped at the corner.

Her destination was only a few hundred meters away from the corner she was at right now, yet Lin Sanjiu didn’t proceed forward. She retreated two steps back and waved her hand in the air; the [Tornado Whip] then appeared within her fingers.

As if it felt it had burst his guise, a large shadow suddenly shot from the corner and collided with the small tornado Lin Sanjiu had released. Both of their attacks covered half of the sky and none of them were willing to back down from the confrontation. Nevertheless, the dead heat was short-lived. The tornado roared wildly in the air for only a few minutes before being swallowed up by the shadow at an unimaginable speed.

The moment the gale dissipated from the air, Lin Sanjiu had already tumbled back. Only then she saw the shadow that hovered in mid-air was a piece of red velvet cloth that reminded her of the stage curtain in the theater.

“Oh my, you’re pretty darn sharp!” A tender childish voice came from the darkness behind the corner. However, when the owner of the voice stepped into the light, it wasn’t a kid but a short-stature man with a large forehead. He looked at Lin Sanjiu with a lifted brow and that made his large-as-brick forehead to crowd with many wrinkles, “I thought I had masked my body and my presence.”

Indeed. Well, truth be told, Lin Sanjiu didn’t actually realize there was somebody behind the corner. It was just that she felt uncomfortable and did not feel like taking another step forward when she reached the corner. She had lost count of how many times her instinct had saved her butt.

“What do you want from me?” Lin Sanjiu lowered down her chin and hissed. She gestured her hand again and turned her [Tornado Whip] into her [Vibroblade].

The man was short. He reached around the height of her shoulders and she doubted did he even break through 5 feet. Though he had a child-like voice, the wrinkles on his rough dark skin suggested that he might probably be a middle-aged man. The goblin-like man stared at the blade in her hand and narrowed his eyes with a smirk tugging at the corner of his lips, “Nothing; I want nothing from you. I just want to beat you up so that I can carry on with my interrogation more easily.”

“Indeed, I can see your point being,” Lin Sanjiu smiled. As she was speaking, she had vanished from the man’s vision. Before the man could even lift his eyes to locate Lin Sanjiu’s whereabouts, a shadow had already loomed down above him.

Although the man sounded like he was mighty, Lin Sanjiu found that he was pretty weak on combat. The man didn’t respond to Lin Sanjiu’s assault at all until her vibroblade almost touched his shoulder. Out of fear, he quickly yelled “Lower the curtain!” and then a scarlet color was summoned out from nowhere and instantly engulfed the blade in her hand.

The moment the soft and heavy velvet fabric wrapped around [Vibroblade], the blade that could even slice open a diamond couldn’t move an inch and was slowly ceasing to live. As if she was stuck in a swamp, Lin Sanjiu couldn’t retrieve her blade no matter how hard she tried. When she landed on the ground, she had already lost her blade in the red velvet cloth.

“Hahaha, show me more,” the man couldn’t hide his delight. “Show me more of your Special Items.”

Staring at the red velvet that floated in the sky, Lin Sanjiu’s expression had turned ugly.

The man giggled, exuding his confidence from every pore on his body. Right after that, he suddenly turned back and yelled something to somebody behind him.

“Were you not going to look for another candidate? You can leave without me. When you’re back, I will have already settled the thing on my hand,” the man said as he gave a sardonic smile at Lin Sanjiu.

“There’s another person here? Candidate?”

Lin Sanjiu’s heart skipped a beat by that thought. She instantly raised her head to see that there was another figure leaping into the sky toward their location from the top of a building. To her horror, she was quite confident with her own speed yet her blood still went cold when she saw the person’s movement. That person glanced at her without saying anything and in the next instance, he was already gone from her field of vision. She didn’t know where he had gone to.

In a hurry, Lin Sanjiu could only catch a glimpse of the person’s serpentine yellow eyes.