Doomsday Wonderland

In the few hours before the next day arrived, Lin Sanjiu and her grand prize had found something new to waste time away. Both of them kept Deun by their side, conducting various kind of experiments on him, and the first thing they did was strip him naked.

It seemed that the word embarrassing wasn’t in Deun’s dictionary. He was unconcerned even though he was in his birthday suit, sitting with his legs crossed and allowing the two people to study him.

“None,” the grand prize ran his eyes here and there, up and down Deun’s body multiple times to be certain that Deun had not deceived them, “He doesn’t have any genitals.”

“I didn’t like that thing, so I took it off,” said Deun, crestfallen, “I cannot understand why some gods would keep that. It’s troublesome. It kept swinging here and there while I’m walking.”

“He can remove his man parts just like that?”

“So where did these gods come from, and what species are they?”

Two questions flashed though Lin Sanjiu’s mind in an instant.

Lin Sanjiu knew she wouldn’t be able to get any answers at the moment, so she returned Deun’s tattered shirt to him. Ever since Deun had grown bigger, his shirt had become larger as well. According to Deun, this was also the effect of “Divine power.”

Divine power level 1 needed one idol, while level 2 needed two idols. When a god had reached level 3, he or she required four idols to advance into the next level. At level 4, such requirement doubled to 8. In short, the number of idols demanded would be increased twofold for each level, and the size of the idol must correspond to the height of the particular god.

If it wasn’t possible to build a huge idol, they had to compensate it with numbers. This also explained the massive number of Deva’s idols inside her territory.

And to them, Level 5 was a watershed in the divine power development.

Leaping from 16 to 32 might not sound like that much, but when you had to paint each drawing and carve each idol manually with your hands, it became a tiresome task. Even with the aid of her Special Items, Lin Sanjiu still needed a long time to finish drawing 32 portraits of Deun, let alone those “Inhuman” who sculpted and painted the god’s idols with their own hands.

The maximum items she could convert into a card in one day was 64. Hence, after Lin Sanjiu had helped Deun level to Divine power level 6, she put the [Unfinished Drawing] away.

“What are you doing?” Rumor said that it was easy for a frugal person to become extravagant but very difficult to reverse the process. And now that Deun had tasted blood, he refused to return to his previously poor state. He stomped his feet in fury as he shook his body eagerly, “Why did you stop? Keep it going!”

Lin Sanjiu gave him a sidelong glance, ignored him, and focused on the [White Towel].

The [White Towel] was a resource she collected from Kisaragi Train Station. For the same item, she had another eight bundles inside her card. Whenever Deun’s divine power leveled up, she would take out a towel and force Deun to throw an attack at her. Then, she stored those attacks in the card of [White Towel]. Right now, she had six cards containing divine power attacks, and she had a hunch that she was closing in on her cap.

Although she couldn’t test it, she surmised that her maximum output should be comparable to that of Divine power level 9 or level 10.

“That’s too weak…” She sighed inwardly, expressing dismay at her own capabilities.

Seeing that Lin Sanjiu wasn’t going to paint him any more portraits, Deun muttered under his breath, “I’m a True God! Can’t she show me some respect?”

He had seen with his own eyes that Lin Sanjiu had turned all his portraits into a card, and all the attacks he had thrown at her did not work at all, vanishing into the ether before they even touched her. Deun was desperate, but he couldn’t do anything. He paced back and forth, impatiently to let off his steam.

He was now as tall as a three-story building, and he could hold both the grand prize’s legs in his palm without sweating. However, even with his towering size, he couldn’t do anything to Lin Sanjiu

The night screen came down. Lin Sanjiu and the grand prize decided to call it a day after they had enough of toying with Deun for the day. The moon was bright, and even with the white fog, there was some moonlight on the ground below coating the village with a bright silvery gleam, giving the village a cold and serene ambiance that looked like a utopia of peace and happiness away from the turmoil of the world.

The grand prize started a fire in the center of an opening. The orange-red hue licked up into the sky and created a stark contrast with the silver glow of the moon. As the colors played off one another, their surroundings became warmer. Since the dilapidated houses and beds had been flattened to the ground, they had no other alternatives left but to spread a mat on the ground and sleep under the sky. Then, the grand prize cooked a large pot of mee soup, topped with a few bird eggs and a huge chunk of spam.

Of course, Deun was left out of this dinner as well.

“You can go to sleep first.” After they had their stomach filled, Lin Sanjiu called out to her grand prize, “I’ve leveled up, so I want to try whether or not I can enter Astral Plane tonight.”

“How about him?” The grand prize pointed his finger at the giant shadow far away from them, “We can’t just leave him there. It’s too dangerous.”

“Check and see whether [Notebook] has any Special Items that we can use to restrain him,” Lin Sanjiu said after a short contemplation, “We can still keep him. His Divine Power is pretty useful.”

Put everything else aside, for the very least he could provide her a limitless of supply of Divine power level 6’s attack.

“Alright then,” Ji Shanqing answered, and just as he took the [Notebook], the shadow, which looked as huge as a hill suddenly screamed and ran towards the outside of the village.

“He heard our conversation?” The grand prize asked, his countenance was blank with perplexity.

“Gosh, I have never seen a god as stupid as him,” Lin Sanjiu cursed impatiently. She went after Deun, “All his portraits are with me now, where does he think he could run to?”

Although Deun was intellectually-challenged, his speed as a god with Divine power level 6 was something to be reckoned with. He soon covered half of the mountain in a matter of second. Since her grand prize was in the village, Lin Sanjiu did not dare to go too far away. Just when she was going to release her Higher Consciousness, the shadow in front suddenly stopped and stood in a trance under the sky.

Stunned, before she could grasp the whole situation, she saw Deun had run towards her.

“What the hell—”

She never had a chance to finish her sentence. With the help from the moonlight, she saw Deun face, ashen-white and entirely written with fears. Her blood went cold.

She raised her head and looked ahead. Before her lay chain of undulating mountains, standing silently amongst the dark. The birds had stopped chirping, and only the whistle of the wind could be heard. When Deun ran past her, she extended her arm and clutched at his large-as-a-flag hem, hissing, “What the hell have you seen?”

There were droplets of sweat crawling all over his flat face. His lips quivered for multiple times, yet no sound came out from it. Frowning, when Lin Sanjiu was going to press forward, the ground underneath her feet shook violently. In the next second, they were thrown into the air.

Deun shouted uncontrollably, a mindless scream of pure fear sliced over the silent of the night. They began to fall as soon as they were flung into the air. When Lin Sanjiu looked down, the thing below that met her eyes had made her heart stopped jumping for a moment.

The grass and the trees were all uprooted, and as if somebody had installed a zipper on it, the forest ground beneath their feet had opened up, slowly revealing the darkness within.

The entire forest was a terrible mess. The rocks, grasses, tree roots, everything in the forest was swaying along with the vibration. As the ground was torn asunder, all of them fell into the void below. For a moment, the soil and the mud flowed together, and the moon dimmed. Deun was tall, standing at the height of a small building yet now he looked just like a piece of rice stuck to the corner of a lip compared to the black emptiness that had just revealed itself.

Lin Sanjiu’s mind raced, and as she thought it was another dimensional rift, or perhaps too much sand and mud had fallen into it, a long stretch of dark red suddenly rushed out from the bottomless void. However, there was too much sand and soil disrupting her vision, so she couldn’t see the entirety of the being very well in the dark. Thrashing and falling fast in the air, Lin Sanjiu made a desperate attempt by flourishing her [Tornado Whip] around, thrusting herself away from the “zipper” and successfully avoided the fate of being gobbled up by the giant crack.

When she turned around in midair, she caught the full picture of the deep red thing that swung madly in the air.

It was a large, meaty tongue.

The surface of the fleshy and flexible tongue was coated with a thick layer of yellowish-white fur. After it had extended itself out of the black hole—Lin Sanjiu now knew that it was a mouth—she found there was a layer of sticky saliva glazing over the two sides of the tongue, flickering under the moonlight.

The tongue slithered around in the air as if it was looking for a target. Then, it seemingly found its target. It quickly rolled itself around Deun. Deun tried to resist, but a level 6 Divine level proved to be futile against the huge tongue. The tongue retracted, pulling Deun straight into the mouth and vanished from Lin Sanjiu’s sight. A long howl echoed in the air, and then came to a sudden halt.

The black hole closed, and the ground shook. The piece of land now looked oddly bare, as the forest within the radius of a thousand miles had been utterly wiped off from the surface of the earth, falling into the abysmal darkness beneath. After the silence had set in for a few minutes, the forest surrounding suddenly trembled.

It stopped for a moment, and the trees in the forest swayed towards another direction.

It looked as if a behemoth was breathing, huffing puffs of air that blew the trees in the forest swaying back and forth like a pendulum.

Lin Sanjiu’s heart seized. She immediately released a few cyclones to propel herself into the air towards another direction. She saw stars, briefly, and after she rammed through the thick foliage and landed heavily on the ground, her vision turned black. She couldn’t see anything, but she could feel the pain when the trees and rocks hit her. It caused her so much pain that she had to activate her [Defense Forcefield] to mitigate the searing sensation.

By the time she had calmed down her surging blood, her vision had returned. The darkness had just faded from her retinas, so it was tough for her to discern and differentiate anything from the night sky. But very soon, Lin Sanjiu was stunned as she raised her head.

A gigantic god, with his chest sticking above the white fog, was now standing far away from her. When he stood up, the ground lost a long chain of mountains. Thick layers of earth, grass, and trees rained down from his body.

The mountain that encircled the village was a God.

Suddenly, Lin Sanjiu thought of something. She took out Deun’s portrait and looked at it anxiously with the help from the dimmed moonlight.

The portrait wasn’t of Deun’s flat face anymore. In its place was a gigantic, yellow-skinned man that Lin Sanjiu did not recognize. He had the look of a male, with a square, expressionless face that had no other facial features other than two large, insect-like compound eyes.

Pinching the portrait, the earth shook once again when Lin Sanjiu still had yet returned from her trance. She raised her head to see that the gigantic god had lifted one of his feet, soon to fall on the ground.  Thump . When the foot hit the ground it sounded like a thunder strike, the impact was so huge that it sent her falling to the ground.

Lin Sanjiu felt cold blood trickle down her spine, and her face turned entirely pale. The place where the foot fell was where her grand prize was.

As she prayed with all her heart that her grand prize had escaped, she took out all the other portraits. She pinched them at the corner, attempting to shred them down. She did so with a thought to reduce the gigantic god’s divine power, while at the same time to increase the chance of survival of her grand prize.

“Stop, you idiot!”

From the dark forest beside her came a voice. The woman’s voice sounded desperate, and before her words were carried away by the wind, she had already turned into a streak of shadow and pounced on Lin Sanjiu.