Doomsday Wonderland

No matter how many times Qing Jiuliu jabbed the mermaid or hassled it, the Special Item would only sing that strange song when he held it.

“Quit it,” Lin Sanjiu quickly stopped Qing Jiuliu when her vision went blurry. “I guess the whistling is from the mall,” Lin Sanjiu said as she turned back and looked at the ruins behind them.

“You’re not planning to go back to investigate that sound, right?” Qing Jiuliu stuffed the mermaid back into his pocket. “Typically, horror movies start that way.”

“My life is already a horror movie,” Lin Sanjiu replied mildly. She surveyed the ruins again before she looked away. “But I need to do something more important now. I don’t have the time to investigate… Let’s go.”

Qing Jiuliu followed her lethargically.

It was almost as if that whistle was just figment of their imagination. As they walked further and further away, they did not hear that whistling sound again.

The two of them walked silently for some time. Qing Jiuliu was so bored that he yawned widely a few times. Even after finishing half his cigarette, he didn’t feel any less lethargic. “Hey, Strongman Lin!” Qing Jiuliu yelled at the silent woman walking in front of him after he wiped a tear of boredom from the corner of his eye.

The person under the black cloth was clearly jerked a little as if someone had suddenly interrupted her thoughts. “What?” Lin Sanjiu responded glumly.

“Ever since I met you, I’ve already fulfilled the walking quota I’ve accumulated over the past years,” Qing Jiuliu complained before he approached her dragging his feet. “I have a suggestion. You can go and look for your companion and I can go over to that hotel to rest. How ’bout that? It is rundown and covered with graffiti but I think it was a five-star hotel.”

Lin Sanjiu sighed. “Wait,” Lin Sanjiu said to Mrs. Manas in her mind. “No, if Irezumi finds out that we are not together, it might become troublesome,” she turned to him and said firmly.

“You’ve deprived me of an opportunity to die while lying on a comfortable bed.” Qing Jiuliu clicked his tongue wistfully before he took the last breath of his cigarette.

“You’re welcome,” Lin Sanjiu replied and threw a new stick of cigarette to him. “Don’t bother me right now. I need some time to plan what we should do next.”

“Oh.”

After she heard his short affirmation, Lin Sanjiu sighed before she continued her conversation with Mrs. Manas. “He will keep himself occupied for a while with that stick of cigarette. What were you saying before? My [School of Higher Consciousness] has leveled up?”

“It is almost as if you’re taking care of a pet.” Mrs. Manas laughed softly before she answered gently, “That’s right. Fighting is the best way to grow. Your higher consciousness works that way too… After fighting with Nüwa, your higher consciousness is now much stronger. Your [School of Higher Consciousness] has finally reached the middle school level.”

“Middle school…” Lin Sanjiu remarked insecurely. “Does that mean that I gained a new ability based on my higher consciousness?”

“Yes and no,” Mrs. Manas hesitated before answering. “This time, I wouldn’t call it an ability you developed but rather, you’ve unlocked…”

Before Mrs. Manas could finish her sentence, a series of loud rumbling sounds rang out from a distance. It sounded like a building had collapsed. Startled, Lin Sanjiu quickly withdrew from her mindscape. Next, she only heard Qing Jiuliu wailing as he pointed to the building in a distance.

Lin Sanjiu looked up and saw the five-star hotel. Like a crumbling pile of toy blocks, the building broke from the middle and crumbled from the top. The impact of the destruction caused the ground to shake. Lin Sanjiu and Qing Jiuliu ran and hid at the corner of a street while they stuck their heads out to observe the building. The loud rumbling sounds continued for more than ten minutes as the building collapsed. The ground shook for one last time before the sound finally stopped.

Qing Jiuliu took a step out from their hiding spot and Lin Sanjiu immediately grabbed him back.

“There’s someone there,” she whispered by his ears. “It is obvious that the hotel didn’t collapse on its own.”

“What sort of person hates beds?” Qing Jiuliu lamented with a sigh. He didn’t try to go out again and instead hid with Lin Sanjiu in the darkness.

No matter who that culprit was, he or she was definitely a very cautious person. Even though the two of them waited for some time, they did not notice any commotion. Apart from the occasional breeze and the sound of rustling leaves in the night, their surrounding seemed tranquil. There didn’t seem to be anyone near them.

“Did the person leave in another direction?”

Although they had no idea why anyone would destroy a hotel building for no apparent reason, that act seemed irrelevant to them. After some consideration and waiting for a little more than ten minutes, Lin Sanjiu walked in the direction of the hotel, bringing Qing Jiuliu along with her.

It was impossible to tell the original structure of the collapsed hotel building. It was now just a large pile of useless rubble. The pile of rubble spanned across half the road, swallowing the pavements and knocking down several roadside trees. Lin Sanjiu knew that she probably couldn’t rely on Qing Jiuliu to notice anything unusual. She told him to wait around while she jumped over the rumble and started checking the surroundings carefully. However, she didn’t find anything amiss. She didn’t find any evidence of a recent fight or even a single fresh dead body.

“It’s none of your business why someone wanted to destroy this building,” Mrs. Manas suddenly spoke when Lin Sanjiu walked away from the rubble. Her voice sounded a little icy. “What’s important now is that you get a better grasp of your [School of Higher Consciousness]. I’ll continue explaining. You’ve to pay attention—”

Mrs. Manas was interrupted again. It was almost as if someone was trying to stop her from talking to Lin Sanjiu properly. She had been interrupted by another loud noise of another structure collapsing. Even though the noise was much softer this time, Lin Sanjiu heard an “Ah!” amidst the sounds of colliding bricks and concrete. That was Qing Jiuliu!

Lin Sanjiu’s heart skipped a beat. She couldn’t concentrate on what Mrs. Manas had to say and immediately sprinted to where Qing Jiuliu was standing. When she stopped abruptly in front of him, she was surprised to see the latter sitting on the ground. He was perfectly fine and had just exhaled a mouthful of cigarette smoke.

“What’s the matter?” Lin Sanjiu asked. She was still a little worried as she looked around.

“That,” Qing Jiuliu pointed at a spot in front of them using his cigarette. “Do you see that slab of concrete? Move it aside—be careful. Don’t touch that thing beneath it.”

“What’s beneath it?”

Lin Sanjiu hesitated for a moment before she lifted the heavy slab of concrete with some effort and threw it aside. The piece of concrete hit the ground violently and revealed the gap behind it. Lin Sanjiu peeked through the gap and looked at Qing Jiuliu.

The latter walked over with a serious expression. He reached down and touched the item below before he nodded his head.

“This is one of the most expensive luxury bedding brands in the world. I didn’t expect to see it in this world too,” Qing Jiuliu said with satisfaction as he spat another mouthful of cigarette smoke. He gestured for LIn Sanjiu to converted the bed into her card, “Though the building has collapsed, this bed is still intact. I sure am lucky.”

Crash! Crash! Lin Sanjiu glared at him as she immediately took out a few bottles of good wine and smashed them against the rubble. As the bottles of wine were smashed into smithereens, Qing Jiuliu felt as though his heart was breaking like those bottles. It hurt him so much to see those bottles of alcohol go to waste that the corner of his lips even started twitching. “What are you doing!” he yelled at Lin Sanjiu to stop her.

“Do you have any sense of danger? Or any sense where you are right now?” Lin Sanjiu couldn’t help yelling back at him.

“If you were drunk, you wouldn’t sense those things too!” Qing Jiuliu retorted. When he noticed another bottle of wine in that woman’s hand after she moved her hand slightly, he immediately relented, “Hey, other than that, I discovered something else. I’m not lying!”

“What?”

“Look,” Qing Jiuliu pointed to the slab of concrete that Lin Sanjiu had thrown aside. “There are words on that piece of wall.”

As Lin Sanjiu’s full attention was on the gap under the concrete slab, she didn’t notice the words before. She turned around and eyed Qing Jiuliu before she kicked off the broken bricks and a thick layer of dust on it. Amidst the cloud of dust she stirred up, she squinted her eyes. Under the moonlight, she finally spotted the few faded words belonging to the last half of a sentence.

“—sular Officer West.”

Those were the only four words on the wall as the other half of the sentence had been destroyed. Lin Sanjiu stared blankly at the four words for some time before she slowly frowned.

“Sular Officer?” After Qing Jiuliu took a sip of alcohol, he sat on the ground floppily like a person without a single bone in his body. “Um, could this be a message about a consular officer? West? Is there a consular officer in the west?”

“Are you also looking for a consular officer?” Lin Sanjiu asked casually when she noticed that he had the same thoughts. Based on Qing Jiuliu’s lackadaisical personality, drifting randomly through the worlds seemed more like his modus operandi.

“I used a visa in my first three worlds. I even got a 6-month prior visa.” Qing Jiuliu answered nonchalantly, “But I never received any visas after I stopped shaving.”

In other words, the consular officers who gave him his visas were most likely women.

Lin Sanjiu heard Mrs. Manas chuckling quietly in her head. For some reason, Lin Sanjiu felt a little awkward. She grabbed Qing Jiuliu’s collar roughly and pulled him up. “If that’s the case, let’s head west and find that consular officer!”

Generally speaking, only a consular officer would leave such a message. Lin Sanjiu did not have any intention to get a visa immediately. After all, Irezumi was an unpredictable factor, so doing that could possibly expose her identity. However, Ji Shanqing probably didn’t know that she became a candidate so he would be expecting her to find a consular officer to get a visa. If he was looking for her, Lin Sanjiu knew he would not waste this opportunity. Following this track of thought, she could probably find Ji Shanqing nearby if they found the consular officer in the message. Even if they didn’t find him, other posthumans would usually congregate near a consular officer. That would also be a chance for her to look for more clues about Ji Shanqing’s whereabouts.

Thinking about the possibility that she would find her grand prize soon, Lin Sanjiu felt a new burst of motivation and set off immediately.

“Bed. The bed—” Qing Jiuliu muttered, disgruntled.

Lin Sanjiu heaved a heavy sigh. In the end, she walked back, reached for the bed and converted it into a card.

For some reason, Mrs. Manas laughed again and asked, “You like him a lot?”

“I prefer a dog,” Lin Sanjiu scoffed inwardly. Then, she leaped up to a higher spot among the rubble.

Lin Sanjiu looked into the distance standing from a vantage point and spotted the site where the second noise came from. The section of a freeway wall had been destroyed. Just like the hotel, the wall crumbled from the center of its structure and it left a pile of broken bricks on the ground. From the looks of it, that was probably caused by the same person. If they headed west, Lin Sanjiu and Qing Jiuliu would also walk past that section of the wall.

When they stopped at the wall, Lin Sanjiu noticed something peculiar. This time, she didn’t even need Mrs. Manas to point it out.

“Look, there are words here,” she kicked away a few bricks and gestured to get Qing Jiuliu’s attention. “Officer West. The handwriting is the same.”

“This means that someone is destroying that consular’s officer’s messages on purpose.” Qing Jiuliu commented indifferently, “This sure is interesting. I think I need that bed now.”

Lin Sanjiu had the exact cure for Qing Jiuliu’s apathetic attitude. She took out a bottle of wine and he immediately showed her a better attitude.

“It’s strange. Why would someone be so adamant about destroying a consular officer’s message?” Lin Sanjiu searched through the broken bricks and found another ‘lake’ within the message but she couldn’t make out any other words. After that, both of them continued westward.

“Even if others don’t get their visas, they might not get a visa either. Why would someone intentionally sabotage others for no reason? ” Qing Jiuliu mumbled as he held a cigarette in his mouth and tried a few times to light it with his lighter.

“Sabotaging others for no reason?” Lin Sanjiu was startled by her own thoughts and stopped immediately. The last time she heard someone saying something similar was at Harry’s Farm.

“Hehe.”

Almost as if to prove her right, a sudden chuckle rang out in the dark. It came from further down the road. Even with Lin Sanjiu’s enhanced senses, she didn’t notice anyone hiding in that direction. Both of them took a few steps backward and looked around but they didn’t see anyone.

“Look up, I’m here.” A gentle female voice that sounded familiar called out to them cheerfully.

A blurry object the size of a soccer ball floated in mid-air hidden under the shade of a tree. After some rustling sounds, that object bobbed a few times before it moved to the end of a branch and showed itself under the moonlight. Qing Jiuliu gasped when he saw that sight. His cigarette fell from his mouth.

Lin Sanjiu’s face darkened. At that moment, she understood why she didn’t notice that person.

Even if she activated her hypersensory state, it would probably be difficult for her to spot an unmoving human head.

No, to be accurate, it was ¾ of a human head.

“Hey, you!” Sunny looked as if someone had sliced off part of her face with a diagonal cut. Despite that, they could still see that she was smiling. Without giving Lin Sanjiu a single glance, the girl pouted her lips at Qing Jiuliu and asked him sweetly, “You look a little familiar. Have I seen you somewhere before?”

“Ah!” Qing Jiuliu reacted as if he had never imagined that a floating human head would ask him a question. “You have probably seen my photos,” he replied in a slight daze.

“Oh—I know!” Sunny bounced, excited. “That’s right! You are an actor. That woman was holding a poster even when she died. Wow, I didn’t think that you would look so much better in real life. Hey, you in that cloak.”

Lin Sanjiu stuck her chin at that girl coldly. Her current disguise must be very successful because Sunny didn’t realize who she was.

“You can leave now. Leave the actor with me.”