Doomsday Wonderland

Game rules:

1) The entire district is the playing field. A total of five color balls had been hidden somewhere in the neighborhood.

2) The player who found the most color balls within three minutes won the game.

It seemed simple from the rules alone but looking from a grander scale, the entire neighborhood had nine apartment buildings which meant that there were a lot of apartment units.

Under the condition that hints were not given, it was impossible to look for a teeny-weeny colored ball hidden amongst the thousands of apartment units. It was like digging for a needle in a haystack, and it would take days to find all the color balls.

When the thought crossed his mind, Fatty’s ¹ mouth curled up.

Even he himself couldn’t explain how he had gotten the TV screen Evolving Ability, but since it was his ability, it would undoubtedly give him the best advantage.

She is so stupid. How dare she fight with me while she knows nothing about my ability? I’ll show her the consequences of defying me after she’s lost the game!”

Fatty had gotten the edge over Lin Sanjiu because he had more experience in the game while Lin Sanjiu, a beginner in the game, knew nothing about the game.

The anchorwoman was another personality of Fatty. The rules varied in each game. When Fatty realized that Lin Sanjiu was much stronger than him, he ordered the anchorwoman to put another restriction on Lin Sanjiu: “You can’t attack or get close to Mr. Fatty.”

“With these prevailing conditions—”

Fatty raised his eyes and started to look around when the thought flashed through his mind.

Much to his surprise, the tall woman didn’t start searching for the color balls after announcing her aggravation. Instead, she walked to her partner, who was still in an unconscious state and moved him to bushes beside the road.

“Hah, stupid!”

He cackled and darted, with absurd agility despite his large body into the space of two apartment building in the distance.

His steps were light, but they still caught Lin Sanjiu’s attention.

After she settled Ji Shanqing in the grass impassively, she straightened her back and looked around.

“Are you not going to look for the colored balls?” asked Ren Nan after wiping off his saliva. Since there was a knife in his mouth, he could only leave his mouth ajar, and saliva kept flowing out from his mouth, “Look, that fat-ass has found something from a dumpster over there.”

Lin Sanjiu knew very well that he was just her hallucination. However, she didn’t know why her schizophrenia still existed even though she had gained back her senses.

Though he was merely an illusion, what “Ren Nan” had said was true. As soon as the wind carried his voice away, the happy-go-lucky anchorwoman shouted from the TV screen, “The first point goes to Mr. Fatty! He has found a colored ball in the first twenty seconds. Mr. Fatty is really something, don’t you all think so?”

“Stop blabbering like a red-ass baboon if you’re not going to help,” Lin Sanjiu boomed at Ren Nan. Then, she raised her eyes and looked around, “Where is Xueqin?”

“I’m here,” A figure rose among the bushes. It was the ice queen Xueqin. She walked out from the bushes and said softly, “I had a child, but he was never born, died by his father’a hand as he constantly abused me during my pregnancy. During those few months, I always hummed my baby this song.”

“Is this real or is it yet another illusion?”

Lin Sanjiu looked to her side as she had fallen into a reverie. She nodded to the air then a soft and breathy nursery rhymes came from the dark.

“Mary has a little lamb, little lamb…”

The hum was so soft that nobody could notice its origin or who the singer was. It was like a puff of warm air hanging in the air. Xueqin walked to Lin Sanjiu and said to her matter-of-factly, “When the game begins, I heard this children’s song is playing in the background.”

“Nursery rhymes…?”

“This is the first hint,” said a voice filled with glee. Lin Sanjiu knew the speaker had now changed to Li Zhijun even without turning her back, “Think carefully, Xiao Jiu. What’s the thing that’s related to a nursery rhymes?”

Lin Sanjiu was stunned for a second before the word hit her. She suddenly charged toward the apartment building at the opposite of her.

“Anything to do with a nursery rhymes? It had to be children!”

It was just that Lin Sanjiu didn’t know whether or not children still existed in Meat Elysium. After all, children had the tenderest flesh, and it was just normal to think that they would be the first group of humans to be wiped clean from the surface of the earth, given that the world now had become a place where cannibalism was the way of living. Besides, she indeed had not seen any children ever since she arrived in this world—

“It must be somebody here, and that person has to be related to the word “children”…”

Suddenly, it clicked. Xuannie, one of the survivors whose mind had decayed to that of a child and called the duoluozhong  his mother rammed into Lin Sanjiu’s brain.

With a single kick, Lin Sanjiu laid waste to the two layers of doors that was blocking her way. Ignoring “Xuannie” screaming, she barged into the unit. The cumbersome bald man, who appeared to be in his 40s curled up at a corner of his bed with tears and mucus covering his face, peeked at Lin Sanjiu with a look of consternation as she rummaged through his closets and pulled out a ball from his “toy box.”

“Oh wow, seems like our red team is not giving up either! Right after Mr. Fatty, she has found a colored ball as well… Anyway, keep fighting, Mr. Fatty!” The loathsome anchorwoman’s voice drifted from outside the window.

Unlike the red ball used for demonstration, the color ball in her hand was made of plastic, with a colored pattern and a cartoon portrait printed on its surface. It looked just like a child’s toy. From here, Lin Sanjiu knew that every ball was different. Lin Sanjiu was afraid that she might not even know the appearance of the ball at all if she didn’t follow the hint,

“I’m sorry Xuannie, I’ll have to borrow this from you for a while,” Lin Sanjiu whispered to the man on the bed before jumped out of the window.

When Lin Sanjiu landed on the ground with a thump, the person who was standing downstairs quickly approached her. It seemed that he had been waiting for her all these time. After he came near to her, Lin Sanjiu realized she couldn’t find Xueqin anywhere.

After she found the ball, the nursery rhythm had dissipated as well. Suddenly, a gust of wind burst forward, whistling and blowing up whatever that was lost on this barren land.

“We have a new hint,” said Gong Daoyi as a lock of hair fell from his forehead, “This time, it’s something more than flesh and blood can bear.”

More than flesh and blood can bear?

Lin Sanjiu was perplexed. However, when she followed his gaze and looked, she understood everything.

In the middle of a couple of abandoned vehicles, there was this one particular car with its window broken and door opened. With the help from the wind, many banknotes flew out from the car and scattered all over the asphalt road. Lin Sanjiu wondered how much cash the car owner hid as brand new banknotes kept flying out from the compartment and dyed the sky pink.

“So the hint this time is about money?”

“Well, I don’t like money, to be honest,” the smuggler Gong Daoyi gathered his hair behind his head, “So I have to find another way to avoid touching the money and get what I want.”

Lin Sanjiu couldn’t judge if these people merely her hallucinations or were they real. However, it wasn’t the right time for her to get deep into this issue. After shaking off the thought in her mind, she murmured the word “money” in her heart as her eyes jumped from one apartment building to another.

Lin Sanjiu was clueless about what she should look for right now. Nevertheless, when the anchorwoman once again announced that Fatty had found another color ball, pressure began to form between her shoulders and she started to get anxious.

She was confident that every family would certainly have some cash left in their house, but she couldn’t tell what does money had to do with the color ball.

“Stop, stop, I ask you to stop!” A clear voice rang out behind her and stopped her progress, “Look! It’s over there!”

The voice frightened Lin Sanjiu. She darted a glance at the teenager with a pink wig. She still had the cheerful and lively demeanor like she was in Lin Sanjiu memory and the melancholy expression scarred by the Slave Training Camp was nowhere to be seen, “At the double chromosphere ² !”

Lin Sanjiu raised her eyes and her gaze met with a lottery booth at the corner of the apartment building in front of her. Under the signage which wrote sports lottery, welfare lottery, and et cetera, the booth owner had two balls, blue and red, hang in front of the booth. Mayhap due to the corrosion of the apocalypse, the red ball had been damaged beyond recognition, leaving only half of its original size meanwhile the blue ball still looked perfectly fine, hanging on the window.

“They are only my hallucinations,”  As Lin Sanjiu rushed toward the lottery booth, a thought crossed her mind,  “I don’t think the real Rena knows what a double chromosphere is.” 

“F*ck!”

Just when Lin Sanjiu arrived at the lottery booth and retrieved the blue ball, a cursed sounded behind her. She looked over to her shoulders and saw Fatty, who was a step behind her, grimaced at her with a puzzling face. Then, as if something had dawned on him, he quickly turned away and went for the last ball.

“Who would’ve thought we would come to a tie! The red team is really putting their everything in the game, aren’t they! Now, we’re here at the final part of the game and the last hint is the hardest to find. Who will be the first one to find the last colored ball? Oh lord, please help Mr. Fatty…”

While the anchorwoman was droning on and on, Lin Sanjiu whizzed past the TV screen and headed to her destination. She quickly jumped into the grass plain in the parterre and disappeared.

By the time Lin Sanjiu grabbed the blue ball, no more banknotes were flying out from the car. The sky no longer was covered with notes. It seemed that the hint for the color ball was related to its location.

And so forth…

When Lin Sanjiu came out empty-handed from the grass plain, she immediately changed her target and disappeared into another apartment building. The hardest part about the last hint was that it was difficult to detect. The district under the night was quiet. There weren’t any parts which looked stood out from the rest in the neighborhood. Even the rule breaker, Fatty was clueless.

“What happened to our red team? Why’s she barging in and out like a headless fly?” The anchorwoman was giving all she had to support Fatty as her laughter resounded from the TV screen, “Without a hint, all those ball-shaped objects you found do not count, do you know that?”

Though Fatty was quite shocked that the woman could find two balls in one go, it seemed to him that she was at her wit’s end now.

As a smile crawled onto the corner of his lips, he once again swept a glance across the district. The flesh that was stacked on his thick neck like layers of margarine moved with extra smoothness.

“There!”

The eyes glowed. He moved his two stumpy legs and darted forward.

Truth to be told, the last hint wasn’t hard, it was just that people would tend to overlook it.

Nevertheless, all of these were parts of his ability, and it would definitely give him the bigger advantage.

Just when the thought flashed across the mind, he had arrived at the location where the hint was.

“Ha, ha, ha, what a stupid woman!” he cackled. Then, he bent down and started to search for the ball in the parterre. His eyes gleamed when he found the ball, and he shouted, “She couldn’t find it even though she had looked for it here for so long!”

“Do you honestly think that is possible? That I couldn’t find the ball?” The happiness was short-lived as a clear, female voice resounded not far away from him, “After all, I’m the one who put it there.”

Fatty was stunned. With the colorful pattern and a cartoon portrait ball in his hand, he turned around with a dumbfounded expression.

“The ball in your hand is the second ball out of the five,” Since she was prohibited by the rules to get near to him, she stopped and sat down with her arms hugging her body a few steps away from him, “I put it there to lure you here.”

“Why would you do that?” Fatty forced himself to stay calm. He sneered, “Have you forgotten? You can’t attack me.”

“Well, you’re right. I can’t, but… Perhaps it’s too difficult for you to understand,” Lin Sanjiu threw him a smile. She tugged the red uniform on her body and said, “Thanks to your ability, you have saved my partner’s life.”

Blinking his eyes, Lin Sanjiu’s words seemed unable to reach his brain. Anyway, he didn’t need to understand whatsoever.

In the next second, a sharp silvery end appeared from his chest. As if cutting a through a piece of tofu, the [Vibroblade] slid into his thick body without much effort through his back and came out from his front, pushing his blood and fat all the way out at the same time.

“See? Both of us are wearing the same red uniform, but you thought my partner was dead, so you place all the restriction on me.” Lin Sanjiu cast a she-claimed-as-warm-smile at Fatty. The red uniform along with the TV screen floating not far away from them was disappearing into the air like a dissipating bubble. Within a few seconds, her black tank top was revealed, “…So he’s not happy about that.”

On the other side of the [Vibroblade], the jacket Ji Shanqing was wearing began to show itself as well. Though this was not the first time he killed a person, stabbing a person was something he didn’t welcome. After letting out a heavy breath, he pulled the blade out and jumped aside, leaving a way for the huge body to fall on the ground.

The TV screen had totally dissipated in the air as if it never existed before.

“How are you?”

When Lin Sanjiu walked forward, both Ji Shanqing and her asked the same question.

Both of them were stunned, and they laughed at it. Ji Shanqing pulled the shirt on his body and said, his voice shivering, “Luckily, you returned to your senses in the last second, sis. I have killed him, so his ability will amalgamate with my [Economy Bubbles] to form a new, more powerful ability… It should be less thrilling next time.”

Lin Sanjiu nodded, and she looked at the hallucinations that were standing by her side.

“Let me see what the heck is happening with this world.”