Doomsday Wonderland

For those posthuman who had successfully reached the final pitstop, they had to be fairly tough. In her years fighting posthumans, some of them relied on their Special Items, while some of them excelled in a battle through their excellent battle sense and combat capability. Aside from that, there was a third type of posthuman who were equipped with tricky Evolved Abilities. Horse-Face was the third type. In addition to his excellent physical quality, he was somebody worth challenging.

However, he couldn’t last more than a minute facing the wrath of Lin Sanjiu.

Any trick would be powerless in the face of great power. When the disparity of strength in between two fighters had reached a certain level, all Evolved Abilities and Special Items lost their effect and would no longer affect the outcome of a battle. Besides, Lin Sanjiu’s reaction time was ultra fast. Before Horse-Face could put any of his moves into action, he had already fallen to the ground with Lin Sanjiu standing on his face.

“What did you say?” Lin Sanjiu exerted more strength on her feet and crushed the horse-faced man deeper into the ground. To prevent him from performing any retaliation, she sat on his back. Her weight now couldn’t be compared to the past as her highly-developed muscles alone could easily reach hundred or so pound. When she sat on Horse-Face, he yelped. Apparently, her weight was too unbearable for him.

“Squeeze the information out from your mouth?” She sneered; her mouth curled into a wicked grin, “That’s good. I’m pretty keen on bullying the weak. Just thinking about it is enough to make my blood boil.”

“Wa-wait,” Horse-Face gabbled. His face was stuck in between the ground and Lin Sanjiu’s feet and his voice was filled with fear, “P-Please spare me.”

“Well, that depends on how cooperative you are,” said Lin Sanjiu while grabbing the man’s arm with her cattail fan-like palm. Then, she gave his arm a yank, and with a bone-cracking sound, she dislocated his shoulders. Horse-Face couldn’t hold the pain and screamed.

“I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” He gasped in pain, “I promise I won’t get in your way to get the grand prize as well.”

“What a big talker. Do you think you can get into my way?”

Lin Sanjiu scoffed the man’s impudence in her heart and asked, “Are you trying to make me break the mirror?”

Horse-Face instantly fell silent. After two minutes, he confessed hesitantly, “Y-Yes.”

“Why?”

“Be-Be-Because, you can warp by touching the mirror. In the meantime, if you break the mirror when you touch it, something bad will happen. I can’t tell you what because I don’t know.”

“Bullshit, he must have known about it. He’s just afraid I would get angry at him, so he doesn’t want to say it.”

Lin Sanjiu frowned deeply. She thought for a while and tried to scoop out as much information as possible from the man through a different approach, “Okay, then. Is the mirror beneath my feet one of the passages?”

Horse-Face heaved. He seemed relieved, “No, it isn’t. There’s no way you can warp through the mirror beneath our feet since we are on the ground floor.”

His reply had sparked the memories in Lin Sanjiu mind as she somehow pictured a three-story building in her mind. Then, driven by her curiosity, she raised her head and looked up into the mirror overhead. At the same time, a plumpy Lin Sanjiu was looking back at her. “So you’re suggesting that if I want to proceed to the second floor, I have to touch the mirror overhead?”

“You have it half-right. You can, of course, proceed to the next floor by touching the mirror above, but I can’t guarantee you which floor you will eventually end up…” Horse-Face carried on after he paused for a brief second, “I will tell you everything, so whatever it is, don’t kill me. This building is filled with different mirror houses, and its building structure defies the conventional architectural work. Here, the concept of floors doesn’t exist.

“Try to look around. This mirror house has a total of twenty-one mirrors. Each of them is connected in a random geometrical shape. Although the number of mirrors is the same in each mirror house, the structure they form varies. Hence, they can’t stack on top of one another like a normal building,” Lin Sanjiu obviously wasn’t prepared for this. She had a dumbfounded expression while Horse-Face continued his explanation, “I’m guessing that these mirror houses are randomly stacked, so they have a huge space in between them which results in no flat surfaces. Hence, floors don’t exist in here.”

Lin Sanjiu, who had been in deep thought, glanced at Horse-Face again and asked, “Did you meet any other people in the mirror house?”

“Hah, plenty,” Horse-Face forced a bitter smile on his face, “I was trapped here so long ago that I have met dozens of people. Some of them are too powerful that I didn’t even dare to stay with them in the same mirror house. I would touch the mirror and warped the moment I saw them. Speaking of which, I have seen not many people recently. I’m not sure if I’m just lucky or they are all dead.”

“A dozen?”

Lin Sanjiu frowned again. She grabbed—his neck that was considerably thinner compared to hers—and yanked his head upward. Then, she thrust the head forward slamming it into the mirror on the ground. This time, cracks finally appeared in the mirror.

“My player number is 57, and you said you had met ten or so people?” sneered Lin Sanjiu, “Since you’re not going to be sincere with me, I have to find it out myself, then.”

“No, no. Wait.” The eyes at two sides of the horse face bulged, filling with fear, “You have misunderstood me. My player number is 1208!”

“What?”

“The Starry Carnival Amusement Park will disappear once in a while and reappear again,” said Horse-Face quickly, “I mean, you probably are the batch that came in after my batch.”

“When did you come in, then?”

“I have already told you, I don’t know, but since I haven’t been sent to the next world, I’m certain I’ve been stuck in here less than 14 months.”

Lin Sanjiu slowly loosened her grip.

“If what you said is the truth, then why did those kingpins from Red Nautilus not realize the existence of Starry Carnival Amusement Park until recently?” Then, without waiting for Horse-Face to answer, she continued, “Seems like—”

Horse-Face turned his head to a side, “What are you talking about? What the hell is Red Nautilus?”

Lin Sanjiu was stunned. She looked at Horse-Face and realized there was a genuine blank look on his face. It doesn’t seem to her that he was faking his ignorance.

“Nobody wouldn’t know about Red Nautilus, unless—” A thought flashed into her mind, and her blood went cold.

“Through which world did you find this pocket dimension?” She asked this question with a low tone as if somebody was eavesdropping their conversation.

Every word that came out from Horse-Face’s lips struck at her eardrum like a huge bell.

“Hmm? I came into this pocket dimension through the “Dark Forest. So you’re not from the “Dark Forest?”

Lin Sanjiu was totally blown away by his answer. If Horse-Face was telling the truth, then this pocket dimension could transverse across worlds!

Something deep in her brain was telling her that this was a major discovery that might allow her to uncover the truth behind the apocalypse world. Her blood boiled at this revelation, but she wasn’t at all sure what that meant nor did she have the answer of how could it affect the posthumans.

While she was in an utter shock, she was oblivious to what was happening around her. When she finally snapped out of her thought, things around her had gone wild.

The body that she pinned down suddenly melted like a heated wax, and in the twinkling of an eye, the fleshy body of a human disappeared into nothingness. She tumbled across and looked up to see that Horse-Face had appeared in a mirror not far away from her.

“See you no more! Hahaha!” As he burst into a great fit of brazen laughter, his body melted into the mirror and soon vanished without leaving any trace.

“I’m so careless! Who would have thought that horse face still has an ace up his sleeve!” Just as Lin Sanjiu cussed herself inwardly, the narrator spoke again, “Player number 57, you have stayed here beyond 3 minutes.”

“Jesus! Another ten seconds left!” In desperation, Lin Sanjiu looked around the mirrors and touched on either one.

Familiar darkness flashed around her in a twinkle, and when she once again opened her eyes, she found that the ground of the mirror house she currently resided in was perfectly fine without any cracks. And when she lowered her head, she was startled when her gaze met her reflection in the mirror.

Indeed, it was a human body with flesh and blood. However, it now had a long and slender, serpentine shape. Even when she walked, the body would swing more than usual in that step and that freaked her out.

Well, since she couldn’t change her situation now, she just had to accept it. After letting out a breath to calm herself down, she raised her elongated hand into her mouth and took a bite.

Accompanied by a slight but distinct sensation of pain, mild crimson liquid seeped away from the wound. Quickly—almost immediately—Lin Sanjiu paced toward the corner of the mirror house and dropped three droplets of blood at each edge of the mirror.

The blood dropped to the ground, forming a contrast with the sparkling mirror. Luckily the gap between each drop of blood was considerably large, so she could still count the amount of blood droplet on the ground.

This counted as her marking.

“This is the third mirror house, so three dots of blood?” Mrs. Manas suddenly came out from nowhere and asked.

“Yea—Hey, where have you been?” Lin Sanjiu countered with a question of her own. She sounded unsatisfied, “You pay no heed to me when I called you. This place is too weird, and I need some suggestions.”

Mrs. Manas sighed, “I’m certain the only person who’s still in the dark is you.”

“What have you found?”

Suddenly, something swam into Lin Sanjiu’s mind. As she hurried her step toward a piece of mirror, she threw the question to Mrs. Manas. Just as her finger contact with the mirror, Mrs. Manas’s voice spread in her brain concurrently, “Did you know that everytime you warp between the mirror houses your body has been atomized—”

It was too late and Lin Sanjiu’s finger had already fallen on the cold mirror surface.

Before Lin Sanjiu could ask the question in her mind, her eyes blacked out. When she opened her eyes again in the new mirror house, her breath was still fluttering, and her heart was still jumping fast due to Mrs. Manas’s half-spoken sentence.

Mrs. Manas then moved on, “The mirror is a medium, a conductor. When you go through the image “set” by the mirror, your body particles would be reconfigured. Since your body is completely broken down and your body cells have gone through many reconfigurations, in a sense, you’re no longer Lin Sanjiu.”

Lin Sanjiu, or should be better known as a new Lin Sanjiu, couldn’t come back to her senses even after Mrs. Manas had finished her lecture.

“I’m bad in physics… Since you’re part of me, by right you should be reconfigured as well, so how come you would know?”

“A substance can be dematerialized into particles, but your consciousness cannot,” Mrs. Manas summed up everything in a single sentence so that Lin Sanjiu could understand better, “However, this isn’t the reason why I come out now… Since it’s inevitable, I found no reason to tell you the whole story. It’s just that I found a hole in this system which we can make good use of it.”

“What it is?”

“You still remember that your body has mutated, right? Now, you have the consciousness of Nüwa and your cells contain the Neuhume’s genome, and you still couldn’t control the Neuhume’s cells perfectly. Although for now, you can use the skeletal wings as your weapon, who knows what kind of mutation would happen to you next. And at that time, you’ll be in huge trouble.”

Almost every time Mrs. Manas disappeared, she would bring back some stunning news.

Sighing, Lin Sanjiu asked, “Then? What should I do now?”

“Though my plan might have a flaw, it’s still worth a shot.” Mrs. Manas’s voice was stern, “The next time you touch the mirror, activate your [Defence Forcefield] and [Higher Consciousness Scan]. Let’s see if we can record the state of particles when they are completely atomized.”

The words “completely atomized” sent a chill down Lin Sanjiu’s spine. Pushing the odd feeling to the back of her mind, she said softly, “Okay, I’ll try.”

After picking a reflection that had a hind leg of a cat, she took a deep breath and walked to it. She was ready to become another person.

The darkness was nothing different from what she had experienced.

Even though she had pushed to release her consciousness full throttle, she couldn’t sense anything when she opened her eyes.

For a feline’s soles, her shoe was too large and she almost tripped off because of that. After she got them off and took it by hand, she jumped and reveled in the powerful jumping ability. Then, when she had enough, she asked, “How was it? Was it a successful one?”

“Wait a sec, let me take a look,” Mrs. Manas went disappeared again after she had replied Lin Sanjiu. Lin Sanjiu urged her to come back earlier by reminding her of the three minutes limit, but she didn’t answer.

The process of waiting was tedious. To whiled away the time, she crouched at a side and observed the marking on her furry hind leg.

When her hypersensory caught a slight movement from the air, the voice of the intruder, filled with happy tone, wafted into her ears first, “Oh wow, look what I found. Is that the leg of a leopard? It looks beautiful!”