Doomsday Wonderland

Lin Sanjiu dropped to the ground with a plop.

His left iris was already gone, replaced by crushed grey gravel that stabbed right into his left eye. Every time he blinked his eyes, the gravel would scrape the inner membrane of his eyelid, causing a susurration that would make Lin Sanjiu’s skin prickle into gooseflesh. But the good thing was, he did not blink his eyes very often.

“What… What are you?”

It was merely a few words, but Lin Sanjiu needed more than enough time to finish it. Half of it was because of bewilderment, and the other half was because of her injuries.

But the elder brother couldn’t answer her.

Aside from his eyes, the rest of his body was dead. Even after Lin Sanjiu had repositioned his head back to its original position, it merely turned him from a dead man into a man in a vegetative state.

Piqued by her curiosity, she placed her palms on the elder brother’s chest, trying to feel his heartbeat. She felt nothing; it was dead silent. When she put her fingers on his neck, she did not sense any pulse from it, either. All she felt was the coarse sensation of his broken bones beneath the layer of skin.

“Can you hear me?” A scene she had watched from a television program before the arrival of the apocalypse swam into her mind. She suggested, “If you can hear me, blink your eyes twice.”

The gravel grazed past his inner eyelid twice.

Lin Sanjiu’s heart tightened as she continued on to ask, “Are you the one who summoned those Gods? Blink twice again if yes.”

Another two sounds came. This time, the sharp gravel nearly pierced through his eyelid.

“It was really you.” Lin Sanjiu was stunned, even though she had already had an inkling about this. She wanted to ask why the Gods would follow his order, but the elder brother was in no shape to answer such a complicated question. After a short moment of contemplation and reconstructing the question in her brain, she asked, “Are those Gods your subordinates?”

This time, the elder brother blinked his eyes once, slowly.

“They couldn’t locate you because you’re badly injured?”

Surprisingly, the elder brother was very cooperative this time. He blinked his eyes twice.

“Are you dead or alive? If you’re alive, blink twice; otherwise, blink once.”

This was a hilarious question that would make people laugh their heads off. However, after Lin Sanjiu waited for some time, the elder brother did not blink his eyes.

“He is not dead, nor he is a living person…” 

Lin Sanjiu shuddered at the thought. She stared at the elder brother in wide-eyed fascination as a myriad of thoughts flitted through her mind. Then, she gritted her teeth as she settled down on an idea. She decided to slice off one of his body parts and turn it into a card. With that, perhaps she would be able to learn something about the man.

After she had made up her mind, she did not go straight to work but rested to regain her strength. Next, she called out a knife from her card. The blade was initially designed to process food; it was never suited to cut through human skin and membranes. She had to stab the knife into his leg, slicing slowly through his right leg’s muscles. The process was so unbearable that even she could barely hold it up.

Turning his eyes, the elder brother looked at her with one eye, as the gravel had already destroyed his other eye.

Skin, muscle, fat, tendons, blood, and bones…

Lin Sanjiu’s heart fluttered, and her stomach flip-flopped as if she were riding a roller coaster. She felt like a homicidal maniac. She tried to ignore the queasy feeling, and finally, after some time that seemed like ages, she’d gotten the leg down. It felt like a real human leg; it was warm, and there had been blood when she was cutting, albeit only a little bit.

This time, the [Planar World] was successfully activated. But when Lin Sanjiu looked at the card, disappointment loomed over her face.

[A Leg]

A fresh and warm right leg cut off from a human body by a sadist. If you want to know more about the leg, please convert the entire human body into a card.

“What the hell are you?” Lin Sanjiu yelled out in desperation. She put the card containing his right leg away. If she wanted to turn his entire body into a card, she had to stab the knife through his head. But she was hesitant to do so. First, she wasn’t sure he could be killed by driving a knife through his head, and secondly, even if she did successfully kill him and turn him into a card, she wasn’t sure she would gain any useful information from his card.

“Anyway, let’s forget about it. It’s better to concentrate on searching for my grand prize than finding out his identity.”

Lin Sanjiu got up to her feet, but her vision turned black again. She felt as if her bones and organs had all shifted places. She thought she had already recovered, but the reality was cruel. When she stood up after finishing cutting off the elder brother’s leg, vertigo struck her hard, and a pang of intense pain coursed through and assaulted each of the cells in her body, causing her to squat down and moan in pain.

“I could barely even stand now, how am I supposed to climb over a cliff as steep as this?” Lin Sanjiu thought helplessly to herself.

After being thrown in a random direction by [A Twinkle In The Sky], she had no idea which way would lead her back to the desert. She thought it might be a good idea to hike along the bottom of the canyon, but she worried that the canyon might guide her even further away…

The blurriness in her eyes was slowly abating, but the pain remained vividly clear in her brain, knocking her nerves like a hammer against nails. When she was considering the possibility of a concussion, her vision swirled back, and color returned.

The elder brother remained the same, lying on the ground like a dead body and staring at her with only one eye. Lin Sanjiu lowered her head and met gazes with him, waiting for the dizziness and darkness to go away. After she had waited for ten seconds, the fine hair on her back prickled up.

Her vision had returned a long time ago. Rather than saying that her sight turned black due to the sequelae of falling from a great height, it is more precise to say that the day had gotten darker.

The elder brother was still looking at her as Lin Sanjiu raised her head.

There was a giant face in the sky, looking straight down at her.

The giant face was peeking out from the side of the cliff. There were two swirls of blackness on the giant face that went on forever like tunnels.

“It was you!” Understanding instantly dawned upon Lin Sanjiu as she yelled angrily at the elder brother. Without wasting a second, she pulled him up from the ground onto her shoulder and turned to flee. But just when she turned her body around, she stopped. The God had stretched his arm into the canyon, his skin grazing across the wall, bringing down broken trees and crushing rocks as he went straight for her.

As Lin Sanjiu avoided the torrential of rocks, she began to realize that it wasn’t the elder brother who summoned this God. This God was huge, and he had already caused so much destruction just by waving his hand, so there was no way she could have not sensed him if he were coming for her. The only answer would be that he had been in this canyon all along, and they were the intruders that happened to have fallen into his lair.

However, this realization did not help her or increase her rate of survival in any way whatsoever. Every movement she took was followed by excruciating pain. It was challenging enough to run in the canyon, which was filled with many sharp rocks, not to mention that she had to carry a person on her shoulder. Very soon, the large hand caught up to them

Darkness followed after. Lin Sanjiu felt that she had been wrapped in something. Although she could not see it, she knew from the sensation that it was palm prints.