Doomsday Wonderland Vol. 14: Cloudwalk Heights [Complete]

1750: Lin Sanjiu is Afraid Alone

Lin Sanjiu almost felt like someone was playing a cruel joke on her, or maybe she'd accidentally walked into a pocket dimension shaped like Chimeric City.

Since parting ways with Cyrus, she'd been walking through the layered, twisting passages of Chimeric City for nearly twenty minutes without encountering a single duoluozhong. Not only duoluozhong, even the ordinary people seemed to have vanished underground, leaving no trace behind.

In this vast Chimeric City, had she become the only one left?

"Eight-Heads De," she said, holding the Beacon-Smoke Signal terminal, "any new intel now?"

The little white box was silent for a moment, and then Eight-Heads De's weak, feeble voice emerged, making Lin Sanjiu's heart sink. Could his injuries be so severe that even a full cup of coffee couldn't help him much?

"This... is strange," Eight-Heads De murmured. "For the last minute or two, I haven't picked up any intel."

If you removed the posthumans, there were still a few thousand ordinary people in Chimeric City. Despite it being nighttime, the chaos of recent events made it hard to imagine those thousands going back to sleep after being startled awake by posthumans and duoluozhongs. When she first entered Chimeric City, Eight-Heads De could still hear plenty of chaotic, panicked, and useless chatter. But as the night deepened, the flow of information grew sparse and faint, and then finally dried up completely.

If the Shadow Hall's operatives hadn't yet arrived in Chimeric City, then where were the duoluozhongs that had caused the Noble Accord to surrender?

Thinking of the duoluozhongs made her recall Cyrus's parting words.

"The Shadow Hall's storage facilities have a special warehouse for storing various types of doomsday elements. Under the same doomsday element, posthumans can evolve in countless ways, but duoluozhongs can only exist within a specific framework. Individual differences only occur within that framework. You see, the so-called mutants, despite having different transformation areas and forms, share the same core characteristics."

Lin Sanjiu took a cold breath. "Their limbs... are all constantly expanding outward?"

"Yes," Cyrus had explained, using no precaution to block their conversation. Glancing at the distant small craft, he continued, "Duoluozhongs replicate, proliferate, and expand their limbs for one goal: to increase their coverage area. In that apocalyptic world, the larger the coverage area, the greater the survival advantage. What kind of apocalyptic world it is, I don't know. But here, this kind of duoluozhong has become a weapon for rapidly clearing out Chimeric City."

Given Eight-Heads De's ability, he undoubtedly heard this too. Now, unwilling to speak of it, Lin Sanjiu found it hard to broach the subject. Cyrus's explanation clarified at least two things: First, the Shadow Hall used their doomsday elements to turn some of Chimeric City's ordinary people into duoluozhongs.

Considering that under the influence of doomsday elements, most people neither evolved nor degenerated—and simply died—the number of dead ordinary people likely far exceeded the number of duoluozhongs. If someone was unlucky enough to evolve, they probably wouldn't survive the process.

Second, after transforming, these duoluozhongs began hunting more ordinary people. For example, the victim Lin Sanjiu encountered while patrolling—Ah Pu—had ended up like an empty crab shell, devoured completely.

The blow must have been devastating for Eight-Heads De... Lin Sanjiu sighed internally. He'd desperately wanted to help the "mutants," not realizing that when the middle-aged woman heard Eight-Heads De was there, she didn't hesitate to attack. She was already a duoluozhong, no longer caring about Eight-Heads De's fate.