There was no fog beneath the Floating City.
Like the area around the Underground City, this place had been artificially turned to desert more than fifty years ago to stop the sprawling growth of the black vines. The military even came down periodically to clear them out.
The massive human base floated above the clouds, a cluster of cities like an archipelago, casting a seemingly boundless shadow that loomed heavily over the desolate land.
Looking up from below, one felt an oppressive sense that the sky itself was fractured and could collapse and fall at any moment.
The armored vehicle drove beneath this immense shadow, heading for the coordinates Yi Shuyun had marked for them.
They had heard it was a sampling area where, compared to other places, the black vine coverage was small and they could still receive a signal from the Floating City.
Yi Shuyun would contact the Underground City Base to pick them up there.
The road ahead might be perilous, but they firmly believed this was the best choice.
It was more than four hours later when the armored vehicle drove out from that shadow, leaving the area beneath the Floating City.
The afterglow of the setting sun spilled across the fogless wasteland. Chai Yuening looked up at the massive city suspended high in the orange-red sky, an indescribable feeling in her heart.
They had just escaped the area it overshadowed, yet they were already very, very far from it—so far they couldn’t see what the city above the clouds was experiencing at this very moment.
Were the beast hordes still attacking the city?
Were the people in the outer city able to escape to safety?
Had the incensed crowds been brought under control?
Chai Yuening couldn’t help but let her thoughts run wild, even if she would get no answers.
She had once thought the Floating City was free, or at least far freer than the sunless Underground City.
Now, she was gradually discovering that a place where you could feel the sun and the wind was not necessarily free.
The cages meant for humanity were, and always had been, everywhere.
She thought that perhaps she would never have anything to do with this city again.
And perhaps, it wasn’t just this city…
The sun sank into the wilderness. Having fled the human base, they sped toward the Fog Zone.
A signal from the Underground City Base came through the communicator. Everything was moving in a good direction.
The armored vehicle traveled over the desolate, uninhabited wasteland. It crossed the sandy ground and entered the ruins of an Old World city shrouded in thin fog.
The human base, which had been visible just by turning and looking up, was now left far behind them. It grew smaller and smaller in their field of vision, until it seemed like nothing more than a mountain range hidden among the clouds, and once obscured by a wisp of fog, it could no longer be seen clearly.
As night slowly fell, Lu Qi, who had been staring blankly out the window, suddenly let out a cry of alarm.
“You guys, look!”
Chai Yuening heard him and looked back toward the distance.
She saw one of humanity’s “islands” on the distant horizon, flashing with electricity and fire. Amidst the vast, dark sea of clouds in the night, it tilted continuously, then finally plummeted downward. The moment it broke away from the “archipelago” it should have been connected to, just as it was about to crash to the ground, a blinding white light illuminated the entire night sky.
She subconsciously squinted, raising a hand to shield her eyes.
The next second, through the small gaps between her fingers, she saw a massive mushroom cloud erupt upward.
The dim sky was ignited in that single instant by the dazzling blaze.
Then, a deafening roar, accompanied by a gasp beside her, struck everyone to the core.
They closed their eyes and turned away, unable to watch any longer.
The sounds from the distance did not cease. One after another, the outer cities were blown up in mid-air before they could fall, the series of rumbles like a death knell rung by the Grim Reaper for this sorrowful world.
In the very end, only a single, isolated island remained, floating in that despairing sky.
“The Floating City… what happened?”
Chai Yuening took a long, deep breath. “They… abandoned the outer cities.”
To prevent the fallen districts from becoming a breeding ground for the mutated beasts’ evolution, the Underground City Base had once made a similar decision, but they were nowhere near as swift or resolute as the Floating City.
Yi Shuyun had said that the Floating City’s defense systems were far less robust than the Underground City’s. If a large-scale infection occurred in any district and wasn’t suppressed in a short time, the spread would be much faster than in the Underground City Base.
For that very reason, to protect the main city, they abandoned all the outer cities.
In less than a day, how many people could have been safely evacuated?
Probably not even one percent.
For the survival of the species, humanity was truly resorting to any means necessary…
As long as humanity itself survived, then anyone could be sacrificed.
Chai Yuening lowered her gaze to the black vine coiled quietly on her arm. Her heart, which had wavered slightly, became firm once more at this moment.
That quiet night, everyone hid in the ruins of an unfamiliar city, waiting for the fighter jet from the Underground City to follow the special signal in the communicator and take them home.
The night was profoundly silent.
Chai Yuening looked at everyone in the vehicle, her eyes filled with reluctance to part.
She stood up and gently pushed open the vehicle’s door.
Lao Xiang, who had been sleeping sprawled out in the driver’s seat, cracked open an eye. Chai Yuening’s heart couldn’t help but tighten.
Lao Xiang seemed to want to ask something, but he only mumbled a few unintelligible sounds in a daze before sinking back into a heavy sleep.
When everything fell silent again, Chai Yuening jumped down from the vehicle, took one last look at her teammates inside, and turned to walk into the boundless, dark fog.
She took a gun, five clips of ammunition, and had stuffed a few compressed biscuits and a bottle of water into the utility pouch on her belt, which also contained some medicine and gauze for bandages. But on the surface now, it made little difference whether one had these things or not.
After all, getting injured would most likely lead to infection and mutation.
This was fine. She came with nothing, and she would leave with nothing.
She would not take Chu Ci back to a human base.
Whether it was the Floating City or the Underground City, as long as humans had not found what they wanted from Chu Ci, then only endless torment awaited her.
She knew that if she said what she was thinking, this bunch of fools who would give their lives for loyalty would surely follow her into the Fog Zone, into the abyss capable of swallowing humanity.
She could risk everything for Chu Ci, but she could not lead them to their deaths with her.
So she left by herself, on a silent night, departing without a sound.
She was going to take her wandering, to a place where humans could never find them, to the farthest, farthest, farthest place her own two legs could carry her.
If tomorrow was to be her doomsday, she didn’t care about using the short remainder of her life to send this caged bird, who had never known a moment of freedom, far away from the shackles of the human world.
Chai Yuening walked through the night fog, all alone, her figure so solitary it seemed like a speck of dust that a gust of wind could scatter.
In a daze, she recalled the day she first met Chu Ci. They had supported each other and walked through that long, long night together.
Back then, she had known where she was going. But now, the road ahead was a vast expanse of uncertainty.
How much longer must they walk? Where were they going? When would danger creep up on them?
She didn’t know, and she didn’t want to know.
This world was vast, and everything was unpredictable.
Take these ruins before her, for example. Humans had clearly been here not long ago. Chai Yuening found a small, blood-stained armored vehicle. The damage wasn’t severe, there was fuel in the tank, and the vehicle could still run. It was much faster than her own two feet.
She stepped on the accelerator and drove into the depths of the Fog Zone. The wind she stirred up poured into the vehicle through the broken, leaking window.
After such a long period of waiting, for the first time, she truly, tangibly felt that she was still alive.
Able to make her own choices, no longer forced into helpless silence, no longer blaming herself for being unable to do anything.
As the sky began to lighten, the communicator clipped to Chai Yuening’s waist began to buzz frantically.
The vehicle continued toward an unknown destination. The small black vine slowly wrapped around her waist, its leaves and branches lightly touching the incessantly buzzing communicator.
Chai Yuening paid it no mind, simply driving silently through one city ruin after another.
Only when the vehicle ran out of fuel did she jump out with the black vine.
“We’re not going back,” she said softly to it.
After a brief silence, she picked up the communicator Yi Shuyun had given her and held it to her ear for a moment.
She heard one anxious inquiry after another, and at the very end, as the Underground City’s fighter jet landed, she heard Ren Dong’s voice, crying and begging her to answer.
Chai Yuening thought for a long time, then finally replied faintly, “Don’t wait for me. I’m not coming back.”
It was a decision to forsake everything, yet her tone was as placid as if she were just telling her beloved family, “I won’t be home for dinner tonight.”
Finally, she took two deep breaths and forcefully threw the communicator into the distance.
In that instant, the arc of the thrown communicator seemed to fall like fate to its endpoint, shattering into broken pieces.
It was probably broken, of no more use to humans.
But from this moment on, where the Floating City’s confidential sample and the person who stole it would go, whether they would be exposed to the elements, whether they would live or die—no one could control that anymore.
Chai Yuening looked at the desolate surroundings, at this city that might have once been prosperous.
A thick fog shrouded the ruins. Countless black vines clung to the dilapidated skyscrapers, a reddish-purple light flowing within their branches, tingeing the color of the fog in the dawn light.
These black vines were completely different from how she remembered them.
They had “grown up.” The largest one, like an ancient, gnarled tree, stretched between two skyscrapers, sprouting countless smaller vines that probed and enveloped the seemingly crumbling, dilapidated place.
And on the other side of the skyscraper pierced by the giant vine, a black vine flower large enough to cover three stories had burst through a wall high above, blooming silently in the eerie, misty light.
Standing beneath the skyscraper, Chai Yuening was as minuscule as a speck of dust.
She thought that everything she was seeing had perhaps already surpassed humanity’s understanding of the black vines.
But in this world, humanity’s understanding was no longer worth mentioning.
The black vine on her arm suddenly tightened. Chai Yuening snapped back to her senses, holding her breath and focusing.
A strange hissing sound was approaching.
Chai Yuening lightened her steps and retreated. Upon reaching a ruined building, she turned and hid inside, climbing upward and using the crumbling walls to conceal her figure.
Soon, she reached a high point and looked in the direction of the sound.
She saw a serpentine behemoth, roughly two meters thick, its tail stretching out of sight.
Its massive body flowed with a reddish-purple light similar to that of the black vines. It flew low over the city ruins like a kite, its serpentine form slowly winding through the fog-shrouded, abandoned streets.
It was approaching her location as if it had found its prey, without a moment’s hesitation.
As it drew closer, Chai Yuening gradually made out its appearance. It was a being completely beyond her comprehension.
It was a giant centipede-like creature with countless pairs of insect wings. Its upper body was partially covered in hard scales, but its lower body was just a transparent, dark-red membrane. Inside the membrane, bloody, jumbled limbs of some unknown things squirmed faintly.
Perhaps they were its undigested prey.
It drew even closer.
This was not something that could be killed with an ordinary firearm.
“Perhaps… this is as far as I can take you.”
In that instant, her heart pounded.
Yet Chai Yuening’s words held an indescribable calm.
Author’s Notes:
High energy ahead—
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