Doomsday Wonderland Vol. 12: New Game Launch [Complete]

1528: Yu Yuan Leads the Way

"The nation has its laws, and the family has its rules. If you just do whatever you want, won't things fall into chaos?"

Short Bangs hadn't yet moved the camera into the forest, but he had already spent three to five minutes explaining the background of the appearance of the prison. Lin Sanjiu had still been sitting on the sofa, silently watching him, smiling only when he finally finished speaking.

"Now, show me," she said.

Her smile seemed to make Short Bangs a bit nervous. He rubbed his fingers together for a while, and one hand slowly rose, reaching into the air.

The forest was zoomed in and enlarged, countless tree trunks whizzing by, sunlight blocked by the canopy, as if entering the flowing darkness at the bottom of a lake. Lin Sanjiu squinted and saw the prison in the forest.

The farmhouses, built by the game players themselves from chopped trees, were the result of very few being construction workers: neat but askew. Neither house nor tent-like, made of wooden frames covered with cloth. If the living spaces were like this, how crude must the prison have been? How could it keep posthumans from escaping back to the farm?

The answer to this question quickly revealed itself to Lin Sanjiu, and it was very simple.

In a place full of posthumans, Special Items for imprisonment, confinement, and restriction were abundant. It seemed all such items in Taoyuan Township had been gathered and used to detain criminals.

Several emaciated prisoners, their hair cut short, squatted in a circle, each washing a large bucket of clothes. Around them, bright bubbles encased them, as if bubbles from the wash buckets had grown and enclosed them along with the dirty clothing. These bubbles stretched across the forest, interspersed among the trees, each bubble containing several people, all silent, heads down, working.

Bubbles were just one form of imprisonment. Along a seemingly unremarkable grass rope, five or six posthumans were bound like grasshoppers, limbs tied, necks constantly twisting, mouths bulging with something unknown.

They didn't seem to be eating, as no one eats with such expression or lies on the ground to eat. They bit from a pile on the left, chewed silently like donkeys, then spat onto the right. Saliva, tears, lips worn to bleeding, and strong jaw muscles were common features.

"Prisoners can't just sit there and eat; how can we have good people working hard and supporting criminals in prison?" Short Bangs explained. "They do work within their capacity to earn their food. Dangerous ones are hung on ropes, and only their heads and mouths can move. But even with only the mouth, they can still work."

"What work are they doing?"

"In the mountains, there aren't many things to feed chickens and ducks, so some villagers collect things like husks, stones, and tree bark. If not broken down, they can injure young birds, so the prisoners chew them first. That way, the birds don't get hurt."

Lin Sanjiu nodded. On the screen, the wind passed through the forest, its rustling distant and lonely.

She asked Short Bangs to raise the camera angle, which he reluctantly did. The view moved over the forest like migrating birds, revealing scene after scene of a prison formed by various confinement tools. The few people in the farm wouldn't have had so many, so probably later ones were provided by the game itself. The heads filled the spaces between the trees, dark masses everywhere. Minute after minute passed, the prison still stretching on.

As the camera continued to move, Lin Sanjiu slightly turned her eyes, watching a bird flash across the distant corner of the screen, disappearing into the cloudy sky. Left behind on the earth, the black mass of heads wriggled and squirmed, the rustling of the forest the only sound in the silence.