Chapter 64

Chapter 64

It traversed the sandy road and approached the neighborhood. A few hundred meters away, its soft feet brushed against the pavement, producing a "swoosh" "swoosh" sound.

Its smooth, grayish-white membrane-like exterior concealed no eyes, ears, antennae, or respiratory openings. How did it perceive the world? Through hearing, sight, or sound waves? This determined how they should escape.

Xi Bei asked, "What… What should we do?"

Lu Feng didn't respond. He walked to the window and reached out to push it open. However, the window seemed frozen or rusted. It didn't budge at all with the first attempt. His arm tensed up, and with more force, the window creaked in an incredibly unpleasant metallic sound, barely opening a small triangular gap at an angle.

The dark barrel of the gun protruded through this gap, but the colonel was not aiming at the creature; instead, he was targeting the street across from them.

A soft "bang" echoed—this was the sound of a silenced gunshot, barely audible from ten meters away.

The bullet left a fleeting silhouette on his retina before hitting the window of a building next to the street.

The bullets he used for outdoor excursions were different from the standard ones used in human trials. With a depleted uranium alloy head, they possessed armor-piercing penetration and destructive power.

A loud shattering sound erupted as the entire pane of glass broke into pieces, crashing down onto the ground.

The creature's movement visibly paused.

Lu Fen raised his gun again, firing off several shots in quick succession. The sound of shattering glass echoed as fragments rained down in that direction.

It had indeed heard the noise. The wriggling appendages changed course, hesitated momentarily, and then began to slowly advance toward the source of the sound—only to stop three minutes later, abandoning its original path and continuing toward the neighborhood where they were hiding.

Xi Bei subconsciously took a few steps back, his face pale. "I-I... Can we shoot it?"

Lu Fen's thin lips compressed slightly. He gazed at the creature with a piercing gaze, his expression eerily calm.

In the next instant, he reached out and clicked the silencer off with a sharp sound.

He pulled the trigger repeatedly!

"Bang! Bang! Bang!"

A series of explosions rocked the surrounding streets, detonating fiercely around the monster! In the overly silent city, the noise was akin to deafening thunderclaps.

The creature hesitated once more, but at that same moment, a shrill cry pierced the air from the other end of the city.

Suddenly, a massive shadow rose from that direction, as a colossal bird of prey resembling an eagle soared across the sky. Its wingspan stretched dozens of meters, gliding at a speed surpassing even bullets – it dove straight towards the white creature of similar size.

The monster let out a high-pitched screech. The white membrane tore open, revealing countless tentacles like soft, thorny vines that surged to entangle the eagle's beak.

A dull "thud" echoed as the eagle's armor-like wings pierced through its body. The creature recoiled in pain, its tentacles retracting like they were electrocuted. Seizing the opportunity, the eagle pulled away and, after one strike, immediately flapped its wings to ascend upward. Once it was beyond the reach of the dense, grayish-black tentacles, it circled in the air before, in the next instant, diving down with a piercing wind, its sharp beak aiming directly for the center of the white monster's body.

In an instant, a splatter of white and fleshy pink fluids erupted. Its razor-sharp beak had clamped onto something. As the white monster writhed and struggled wildly, its enormous size caused the surrounding houses to tremble and collapse, sending the ground rumbling. Amidst the gray human city, these two unimaginably colossal monsters engaged in a fierce battle.

For hundreds of meters around, the ground was stained with dark, sticky residue. The fight ended with the white monster unrecognizable, its organs spilled across the ground. The eagle, carrying a string of its dripping organs in its mouth, showed no attachment and turned to fly away into the distance.

An Zhe exhaled softly, only now grasping the rationale behind Lu Fen's frequent shots. There might not be just one monster in this city; he had used the gunfire to reveal its location, attracting other creatures.

Xi Bei asked, "Y-You... How did you know about that bird?"

Lu Fen holstered his gun, reattached the silencer, and turned around, executing each movement with fluid grace and efficiency.

"I didn't," he replied. "It was a gamble."

An Zhe gazed in the direction where the eagle had vanished. In their current situation, flying monsters seemed to hold an unparalleled advantage.

Having narrowly escaped death, they fell silent. Suddenly, an aged voice pierced the quiet.

"The time is almost here," Grandfather croaked. "I've lived long enough, sixty years is sufficient."

Lu Fen turned to face the elder.

He asked, "When is it?"

The old man opened his mouth but instead gazed into the distant horizon with a hint of madness in his eyes. "When it... arrives."

"What's arriving?"

"It's indescribable, unimaginable..." His voice was raspy with the echo of impending death. "Something greater than everything else, invisible... It's coming to this world."

Lu Fen spoke softly, "How do you know?"

"I'm close to death... I can feel it, I can hear it." His voice dragged on like an elongated whisper from a feverish dream.

As he spoke, the elder lifted his gaze to the grim, low-hanging sky above the city, which seemed to loom ominously overhead. The aurora was so bright; its green glow had descended, blending with the ashen clouds. Lu Fen explained that the intensified brightness of the aurora was due to the base increasing the frequency of its artificial magnetic field.

"Mortals are born on earth and die on it. The sky..." The elder's expression was serene as his voice softened, "The sky will only lower further."

—After uttering the final word, he slowly interlaced his hands.

His eyes closed gradually, bit by bit.

Xi Bei's knees buckled, and he knelt before the elder, placing his palms on the old man's bony knees. "Grandfather? Grandfather?"

There was no response.

The rise and fall of the elder's chest ceased. He had departed.

Death came in but an instant.

Two streams of tears rolled down Xi Bei's face as he buried his head in the elder's lap.

When he finally lifted his head again, An Zhe softly asked, "Are you alright?"

"I... I'm fine," Xi Bei stared blankly at his grandfather's face and murmured, "Grandfather once said he wasn't afraid of death. He said that everyone has their own purpose in life, and his was to protect everyone in the mine. To have seen the mine survive until today, he... he was content."

He lifted his gaze to the elder's withered, dust-covered face. The white hair was disheveled, knotted in some spots – in the dim underground, no one could maintain their dignity in death.

He said, "I... I'll go find a comb."

He got up numbly and walked towards another room.

A life on its last legs had passed away.

In this room, another long-deceased life lingered. An Zhe turned his head towards the sofa in the living room, where a skeleton lay.

Its flesh must have rotted naturally, as the entire sofa was speckled with green, yellow, and brown stains – the remnants of fungi that had once thrived there.

The poet's words echoed in An Zhe's ears, "At first, it was super-bacteria, fungi, and viruses multiplying in human cities, infecting everyone indiscriminately. Cities were filled with corpses; those who ventured into the wilderness ruins knew this truth."

He looked up at the window. This was a dead skyscraper, a deceased city – every building contained skeletons, each representing a life extinguished.

Lu Fen caught An Zhe's gaze, still that detached and composed look. Yet, under the gray sky, the subtle movements on his serene, handsome face combined to evoke an indescribable, ethereal sorrow.

Redirecting his gaze to the city, he said, "When the human base was established and full-scale search and rescue operations began, the base's power was insufficient. Many small cities didn't receive timely aid."

An Zhe gazed at the endless expanse of structures, a sea of buildings that would take hours to traverse from one end of the city to the other. He softly asked, "Is this a small city?"

Lu Fen replied, "Yes."

An Zhe's eyes widened slightly.

To him, a city that seemed boundless was, in the eyes of the once prosperous and glorious human civilization, merely a small town too late to save.

Then, just how magnificent had the human world been before the era of disaster? He had no idea.

The image of such a grand whole gradually succumbing—this notion conjured up a scene of a massive sunset slowly sinking into the black horizon at dusk, a protracted descent into death.

"Clang!"

Amidst the silence, a sound of something falling echoed from the neighboring bedroom.

Lu Fen inquired, "What's going on?"

There was no response, only the trembling breaths of Xi Bei audible.

Lu Fen frowned, gun in hand, and turned to walk over, with An Zhe following close behind.

The room was empty, devoid of monsters or foes, but Xi Bei stood facing away from them, his back trembling violently. Initially, An Zhe thought he was crying, but as he approached, he saw that Xi Bei was fixated on a comb in his hand.

It was an indescribable wooden comb, for it was actually two combs fused together. It was a common brown comb with a ten-centimeter handle and fine teeth. Two identical ordinary combs had their handles seamlessly merged, as if carved from the same piece of wood. The teeth were tilted at a 45-degree angle, one pointing left, the other right, like the twin heads of a serpent flicking out its forked tongue.

But how could two ordinary combs have possibly grown together?

Wood, a product of a single piece, something ordinary and safe, had become the most unparalleled terror due to its bizarre appearance beyond common understanding.

Lu Fen strode towards the dressing table where Xi Bei had found the comb. This was clearly once the room of a woman before the great disaster, with an ivory-white dressing table adorned with countless bottles, jars, and various tools of different sizes.

Lu Fen reached out to wipe the dust off the mirror, but after removing a layer, another remained. The dust seemed to be ingrained within the glass, causing the mirror to always appear foggy, distorting their reflections into black blobs.

An Zhe, observing all this, suddenly recalled climbing the outer city walls when sand would fall away only to reveal more sand beneath, as if the walls were made of a mixture of sand and steel.

Lu Fen no longer focused on the mirror. He knitted his brows, scanning the array of makeup tools, then reached out and pulled out a rusty pair of tweezers – or rather, not tweezers, for the metal instrument was fused with a plastic eyebrow scissor. They intersected in an "X" shape, blending seamlessly into an indistinguishable material, neither steel nor plastic, but perhaps something entirely new and unknown to humans.

With a clatter, Xi Bei's trembling fingers dropped the comb onto the dusty floor.

"This city…" he said. "Is there something odd about it? Let's… let's hurry and leave."

"Not this one," Lu Fen replied.

He gazed at the fused pair of tweezers and eyebrow scissors, uttering just three words.

"Engine."

These seemingly mundane words struck like a bolt of lightning.

If such bizarre fusion and transformation had occurred within the engine, then the plane crash was inevitable.

An Zhe bent down to pick up the comb. There were no signs of assembly, but the engravings on its handle were chaotic, a wild mess that defied comprehension as to how they could have merged together. It was reminiscent of the inky, sprawling tendrils on that flight manual.

An Zhe's eyes widened slightly. Suddenly, the words of Mrs. Lu, who had transformed into a queen bee before soaring into the endless sky, echoed in his ears.

She had said, "Human genes are too weak to perceive the changes happening in this world."

"We're all going to die. All our efforts will be in vain, only serving to highlight humanity's insignificance and helplessness."

A thought flashed across his mind like a bolt of lightning through the sky.

If... If... When a human and a monster, or two monsters, overlap or draw near in space, would there be genetic contamination — no, that's wrong, completely wrong.

"Genes..." he muttered, "It's not about genes..."

The problem wasn't genes, or at least not entirely. Contamination was the blending and reconfiguration of flesh between two living beings, only it was accomplished through genetic alteration.

If such a thing could happen, if the attributes of a living creature could change instantly, why couldn't it happen to other things? What was the difference between a living being's body and that DNA double helix, and the world's lifeless substances?

So paper and wood could contaminate each other, as could steel and plastic.

—Then everything tangible in the world would be susceptible.

It was just happening gradually, this deluge had only begun to surge. It was foreshadowed by biological genetic contamination, freshly revealed before humanity.

In the days since the geomagnetic field vanished, those hybrid monsters had been frenziedly devouring and capturing the forms of other creatures, as if humans stockpiling food for winter. Had they sensed something?

Xi Bei's voice trembled, "What on earth..."

He was rendered speechless.

What kind of era was this? What sort of calamity were they facing? What was happening? What was it? What was it?

A bolt of lightning slashed across the sky. The windows rattled, as ancient winds howled with a mournful wail, pouring into the room through crevices. Their clothing fluttered and danced in the gale.

An Zhe lifted his head, locking eyes with Lu Fen. Those cold emerald eyes held a darkness as profound as the sky outside.

In that moment of their gaze, a thunderclap boomed on the horizon. The heavens sank lower, and amidst the vast expanse, a downpour poured relentlessly.

Within the rain curtain, everything outside was obscured, silenced—limitless grayness, boundless emptiness, endless terror.

Mrs. Lu's gentle and mellifluous voice, mingled with Grandfather's withered and hoarse tone, echoed abruptly in An Zhe's ear.

—"The time is almost here."