Doomsday Wonderland

The sounds of heels belonging to a pair of fine-looking black leather shoes echoed through the corridor. The person entered a cabin and stood behind another person. She bent over slightly and called out softly to the person in the room filled with noisy game music, “Ji, your sister is calling for you.”

Ji Shanqing had bundled himself in a thick blanket and was playing video games. He pressed the pause button and the game music stopped immediately. He put down the game controller and smiled at the female airship crew member he had gotten familiar with over time. “Okay, I will go over now. This is a Wii? It’s pretty fun.”

“This is a keepsake from before the apocalypse. There aren’t many left in Red Nautilus. Our captain spent quite an effort to get a few game discs for it,” the female crew member explained with a smile. She took the controller from him and stored it properly. “Come, I will go together with you.”

Even though the airship crew wasn’t quite sure if Ji Shanqing was a boy or a girl, they quickly became fond of him. After all, he looked kind and gentle and always gave people the impression that he was pure and innocent. He was also very nice and polite when he spoke and interacted with them, completely different from his elder sister.

When the captain of Flaneur—the name of the airship—found out that the people who wanted to boarded his airship were not Geran and associates and were requesting him to bring them to a place he had never heard before, he wasn’t keen on letting the two strangers board his airship. Even after Ji Shanqing spent quite some time explaining, he refused to change his mind. That was when Lin Sanjiu walked over with a fishtail in her hand.

At that time, Lin Sanjiu was in a slightly violent mood. As she listened quietly to their conversation, she suddenly slammed her fist into the wall of the airship, creating a dent that was 20 cm deep. When the captain noticed that, he retreated and drew some distance between himself and the duo. However, Lin Sanjiu reached him with just a few steps and placed her hand on the captain’s trembling shoulders.

“Set sail. I will make this trip worthwhile,” she said calmly.

Just as the blood-soaked demonic woman promised, the airship crew of the Flaneur did earn quite a lot from her. She rewarded them with 35 medium crystals after they prepared a bed for her and provided her with some food. When they took out their first aid box and tended to some of her wounds, she rewarded them with 30 or 40 medium crystals.

After receiving many payments of shining red crystals from her, the initial tension and dreariness in the airship had long disappeared.

“Miss Lin, your brother is here,” the female airship crew member knocked on her door and called out to her.

“Come in.”

Ji Shanqing entered the room when he heard her words. After they walked past a small saloon, they entered a bedroom. There was a down mattress topper on the large bed. As the room was originally reserved for VIP guests, it was furnished with various pre-apocalypse furniture that the crew had tried their best to gather. They even managed to keep the color of the different sets of furniture quite consistent. Lin Sanjiu lay lazily on the bed. Her body was covered with bandages and she even kept her dirty boots on.

It had been some time since they had left Starry Carnival Amusement Park. Lin Sanjiu was finally looking like her usual self again after recovering for some time.

“How’s your recovery?” Ji Shanqing walked to her side. He took a biscuit from the plate of snack by her bedside and placed it in his mouth casually. “Oh, are you actually rich? I noticed that you have already spent more than 200 medium crystals in less than two days.

Lin Sanjiu sank into the mattress. Ji Shanqing couldn’t tell from her expression how she was feeling.

“I haven’t fully recovered but it’s good enough,” Lin Sanjiu threw a glance at Ji Shanqing without answering his question. “I have something I need to ask you.”

“What’s do you need to know?”

“How powerful are you without the mirror maze?” Lin Sanjiu sat up and went straight to the topic. “Do you have any abilities like posthumans?”

Apparently, Ji Shanqing had never considered this question before. He froze for a moment after he heard her question. He cocked his head to one side and thought for quite a long time before he answered hesitantly, “I’ve never tried to use any ability.”

“You don’t know?” Lin Sanjiu stood in the middle of the room with her arms crossed as she waited for Ji Shanqing to continue.

“Well… ever since I was born, I only know how to fight based on instinct. You know the techniques I can use. I can’t activate them outside the mirror maze.” Ji Shanqing was still wearing his trench coat which only showed his face. “Logically speaking, I probably don’t have other abilities, other than my bare arms and legs, once I get out of the mirror maze.

“But… I mentioned this to you before. All the people that I kill in the mirror maze would become part of the grand prize. This means that the abilities that those people possess would combine together to form a new ability that is within me.”

Ji Shanqing couldn’t help licking his lip after he said that. Then, he threw a quick cautious glance at Lin Sanjiu. Whenever he had that expression, Lin Sanjiu knew that he was only worried about one thing…

Lin Sanjiu didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. “I already told you that I won’t unwrap you. You can just say what you want.”

“If I get unwrapped,” Ji Shanqing said nervously, “the combined ability would be part of the prize for the winner—that is you. If you don’t unwrap me, I can ‘borrow’ this ability.”

No matter how many times Lin Sanjiu repeated to Ji Shanqing that she wouldn’t unwrap him, he still seemed to have trouble trusting her.

“So, what ability do you have now?”

“As it is a combination of a few people’s abilities, I need to use it to find out,” Ji Shanqing replied honestly.

Lin Sanjiu did not respond. She sighed for some time and walked over the window. She bent over and looked under the bed. Then, she took out two backpacks. Before Ji Shanqing could ask her what it was, she already threw one of them to him.

“Come with me,” she ordered before she walked out of the room without saying where she was going.

Ji Shanqing held the bag worriedly and stood in the same spot for a few seconds and only followed her after she left the room. When he opened the door, a strong gust of wind nearly knocked him down.

The quiet corridor he had walked through previously was now sealed with two steel plates and had already been converted into a small independent section. One of the corresponding walls was now open and wind was gushing in noisily.

While the wind raged, Ji Shanqing struggled to hold on to the handle of the bedroom door before he could stand on his feet again. After that, he squinted his eyes and looked outside. He shouted but his words were quickly swallowed by the wind so he thought no one heard him. However, Lin Sanjiu turned to him and replied, “We are getting off here!”

“What?” Ji Shanqing blinked in his eyes as he held on to both the door handle and the backpack. For a moment, he couldn’t react.

“The Slaves Training Camp isn’t at the Free District. It is on a deserted volcano island that already existed before the apocalypse took place here,” Lin Sanjiu explained coolly. From the tone of her voice, she didn’t sound like she was sitting a few thousands of meters up in the air and preparing to jump out of the airship and into the insane wind. Instead, she spoke as she was just sharing a piece of news she found out, “The airship can’t fly too near that volcano island due to its topography. We have to jump into the sea and swim there. Come over here! Stop moving backward!”

As Ji Shenqing was Lin Sanjiu’s “property”, he had to follow her. No matter how unwilling he was, he eventually listened to her obediently and walked over to the edge of the opening. He took a quick look below him and finally found out after five months of living—he was afraid of height. “Can’t we jump off when the airship is lower?”

“The airship is too large,” as Lin Sanjiu said this, she prepared both her own parachute and Ji Shanqing’s. “If we need to go lower…”

Ji Shanqing didn’t know what they needed to do if they wanted to go lower. While he waited for Lin Sanjiu to say the second half of her sentence, someone suddenly pushed him from behind.

“Ahhhh! You lied!” He screamed as he fell out of the airship.

“Remember to open your parachute!” Lin Sanjiu yelled after him and jumped off quickly behind him.

Lin Sanjiu felt as if her heart was in her throat when she suddenly felt a feeling of weightlessness. She opened her arms and legs as she heard the wind gushing past her. Lin Sanjiu stretched her hands and legs out and quickly approached another small figure in the sky.

Poof. Two slightly weathered parachutes opened up in the azure blue sky.

“Ji, that is also something from the pre-apocalyptic times. Our captain spent a long time getting them,” that previous female airship crew peeped out from the airship exit and looked down below her. After she said that, she closed the door once again.

But, of course, at that moment, Ji Shanqing didn’t care where the parachutes came from. The old parachute ropes creaked constantly. His face was so pale that it was as if he had fainted while he was falling. When Ji Shanqing finally fell into the water below with a splash, he quickly took a deep breath and broke out from the surface of the water. He watched as the parachute fell behind him. The fabric then bobbed along with the waves.

Meanwhile, there was also another person in the water nearby. The person stirred up white foams as she swam toward him… Lin Sanjiu slowly grew clearer as she came closer to him.

“I took a compass from the airship,” Lin Sanjiu said as she wiped off the seawater on her face. She stopped beside Ji Shangqing, “If we swim straight in that direction, we would see the volcano island very quickly.”

Ji Shanqing stared at her without moving.

“You’re good at water treading,” Lin Sanjiu praised him ignorantly. “I can’t swim that well. You have to help me along… Hey? Why aren’t you swimming?”

“I don’t know how to move in water!” Ji Shanqing couldn’t stop himself from shouting.

“But, why aren’t you sinking?” Lin Sanjiu was quite stunned. Ji Shanqing’s head and shoulders were above the water and seemed rather stable…

“I’m a present! I am not a human!” Ji Shanqing did his best to shrug off the parachute around him and then he reached out for Lin Sanjiu’s clothes. “I’m very light. You can swim in front of me. I’ll just hold on and float behind you.”

This time, Lin Sanjiu really didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Even though posthumans had incredible athleticism and Lin Sanjiu no longer had to drag around a pair of heavy skeletal wings, her poor swimming techniques meant that she had to struggle to pull Ji Shanqing behind her. Eventually, they saw the small volcano island in the distance with the additional momentum from the waves. It was covered with dense forests and mountain ridges.

Even though they already saw the island then, it was only in the next morning that they reached it and climbed up the rocky cliffs by the shore.

Lin Sanjiu was exhausted after swimming for such a long time. Both of them sat on the ground, feeling very tired. Even though Ji Shanqing only had to hang onto Lin Sanjiu’s clothes, that endeavor was also very taxing. The two of them sat on the ground panting and catching their breaths for quite some time. After she felt a little better, Lin Sanjiu moved her hands and the cards in her hand turned back to food. A pork floss bun and other food items fell to the ground. When Ji Shanqing reached out for one of them, Lin Sanjiu swatted his hands unceremoniously.

“You don’t need food so don’t waste my resources,” she argued as she started tearing her bread. “We are not on the airship now. Food is precious.”

As Lin Sanjiu’s grand prize, Ji Shanqing ate only for taste so it was really a waste of food. He watched longingly as Lin Sanjiu finished all the food in a few minutes. Finally, he couldn’t hold back the question he wanted to ask, “What should we do next? How are we going to find the Slaves Training Camp? I think we need to split up and infiltrate that place. We can’t let them find out that there are intruders on their island…”

With her stomach filled, Lin Sanjiu looked way more energetic. She dusted the bread crumbs on her hands and swallowed the last morsel of food in her throat. She mumbled something but when Ji Shanqing heard what she said, he thought he had misheard her.

Before he could question her again, Lin Sanjiu was already on her feet.

He watched as she took a deep breath. Next, she yelled out at the top of her lungs, in her brightest voice, facing the dense forest in front of them. “COME OUT! YOU SCUMS FROM THE SLAVES TRAINING CAMP!

“IF YOU COME OUT IN FIVE MINUTES, I WILL LET YOU DIE WITH AN INTACT BODY!”

Her crisp and loud voice resonated through the forest. The trees quivered and numerous birds suddenly flew out from the canopy and into the air. Ji Shanqing was still sitting in the same spot as he watched her in a daze.

They could have chosen a thousand other method to find the Slaves Training Camp, but this was certainly the worst.

Lin Sanjiu turned behind to look at Ji Shanqing before smiling as if to reassure him.

“If I just sneaked in, I wouldn’t be able to vent my anger,” Lin Sanjiu explained adamantly as if that was proper justification for her choice. “I’m going to beat all of them up and I will vent my anger on them. Look…”

Lin Sanjiu pointed to the forest. Ji Shanqing noticed some movements.

“The scums are here!”