Doomsday Wonderland

The wind in the high altitude was both relentless and fierce. It gave people the impression that it could support the weight of a human and that you could walk on it. Looking down, the ground stretched far into the distance, where the edge of her vision lay. And the immense canyon was gradually turning into a swirl of yellow that meant nothing.

If it weren’t for the white mist above and the pinkish, warm, and supple skin beneath her feet, Lin Sanjiu would have felt that this might be a pleasant experience.

Right now, she was sitting in the center of a large palm. With every step the God took, her heart fell deeper and deeper.

The elder brother was lying next to her, a body with all its bones crushed. The God did not treat him any better whatsoever. Lin Sanjiu threw a sidelong glance at him, and then she reoriented herself to get into a more comfortable position. After that, she looked down at the ground, consumed by a despair that slowly seeped into her heart.

Perhaps the God wanted to hand her directly to the duoluozhong, so he was cautious. He clenched his fist tight enough to leave no slits for Lin Sanjiu to escape through while still keeping it loose enough not to hurt her. Lin Sanjiu had tried her luck and attempted to escape, but each time it was in vain.

No, perhaps it should be said that it wasn’t the fist that prevented her from running; it was her mind that prohibited her from escaping.

When she was first caught, she struggled with all her might. She even had her abilities all prepared. It was just that given the God’s immense size and her low amount of Potential Growth Value, [A Twinkle In The Sky] might be useless against him, but it wasn’t the same case if she used her [Mosaic Censorship].

She held the elder brother’s body under her arm, and just when she had both her hands free and was about the activate her ability, her legs suddenly gave away, and she fell on the palm. The next thing that came into her sight when she turned her head around was two pieces of brown-colored skin, filled with many vertical stripes. The God had moved them closer to his lips.

For a moment, Lin Sanjiu thought she was doomed, as she felt that the God was going to devour them; all other chronicles talked about how passionate a titan was in eating humans. While she was overwhelmed by the thought, the deep-brown lips parted. The hole got bigger and bigger with every ticking second.

When she flipped her body over and pressed her hands firmly on the pinkish, line-laden palm, a fishy and moldy smell came pouring out of the mouth. Assaulted by the malodor, she heard the God talk with a throaty voice, “…You don’t want to escape.”

Lin Sanjiu pressed her hands on the skin, but nothing happened. At the moment before her palm had made contact with the God, she had deactivated her ability.

She looked at her hands, gawking. “Eh…?”

Lin Sanjiu’s mind was clear, and the thought of not knowing where the God was taking her still made her heart plunge deep into her stomach. But somehow, once she tried to think about “escape” or something related to it, some unknown force would instantly kill the thought. It felt as if somebody had forcibly extracted the thought out of her brain. No matter how much she tried to think about it, she wouldn’t succeed.

She forced herself to keep thinking, but all she got into her mind was various kinds of confectionery recipes instead. She could not even form a proper escape plan, so how was she going to run?

In this manner, Lin Sanjiu sat idly on the God’s hand, and the God continued to move forward to wherever he was heading. A plethora of thoughts flashed across her mind, but whenever the thought of running away popped up, it would be bumped away by other ideas: the identity of the elder brother, the whereabouts of her grand prize… She even thought about the cat doctor, who loved to eat spam but feared that it would harm his glossy fur.

She had no idea how long the brown lipped god had been walking. But when he suddenly came to a standstill in front of a jungle, she was startled, and the first image that popped up in her mind was that of her grand prize. Immediately, she jumped up and peeked over the edge of the hand. She had forgotten that she was now high in the air; she could see nothing but a large patch of tree crowns that spread far into the distance like a green-colored sea. She could not even recall if she had been to this jungle before or not.

“It is impossible to see anything from this height,” Lin Sanjiu couldn’t help but mutter.

Never once would she have thought that after those words were uttered, the world in her vision would plummet like an elevator going down a building, the tree crowns getting closer. She continued to descend, only coming to realize that the God had squatted down after she penetrated through the dense foliage and saw the ground.

“Eh?” She emitted a sound of confusion. She turned her head, and the scales dropped before her eyes.

The God had squatted down not because he had heard her request. With his knees pressed firmly to the ground and a hand to support him, he laid his upper body very low, concealing his entire being behind the shade of trees. “He looks just like a frog.” Lin Sanjiu had no idea why but the idea kept emerging from the depths of her mind when she saw the God’s posture. The God remained still for a long time, as if he were waiting for something.

From this distance, Lin Sanjiu finally had a clear view of the jungle that laid before her eyes. It was a dense jungle, so thick that it blotted out the sun and sky when one looked up from the forest floor. “Is this a tropical rainforest?” She mused. Initially, she thought she had never set foot in here before, but now, she could not be so sure. She attempted to scope the forest down; part of her hoped that her grand prize would suddenly pop out from somewhere, but the other part of her did not hold much hope.

The wind that blew past the forest was hot and humid, reminding her of the murky Amazon River. Occasionally, Lin Sanjiu could hear the chirping of birds, but she never saw any sign of those birds. In fact, she had yet to see an animal ever since they had arrived in this jungle. There was, however, a muddy river that laid before them. But the river did not flow, merely sitting in the middle of the wilderness like a long stretch of dead water.

The God was tenacious. He was able to stay completely still for a long time without turning his eyes.

“…Hey, you’re not afraid that they would let the duoluozhong kill you?” whispered Lin Sanjiu to the elder brother, who was scrunching in the purlicue, staring at her.

Just when she was about to say something more, a commotion burst from the distance. Lin Sanjiu instantly turned her head in that direction. For a moment, the piece of jungle quivered and crashed; a second later, a face appeared amidst the chaos, broken tree trunks and branches rolling down her face.

It was the face of a female god with a protruded mouth, like the beak of a bird. On her face, one of her eyes was higher and larger than the other, and they looked like two black dots that somebody accidentally spilled on a piece of paper. The beaked goddess craned her neck and looked around. Surprisingly, Lin Sanjiu could somehow read the perplexion on her face.

In the next second, Lin Sanjiu was flung into the air. She rotated a few times in midair and then fell hard on the forest floor. As she succumbed to the pain, she heard another thud. Raising her head, she saw that the elder brother had fallen next to her.

And the God who had been holding her captive pounced at the beaked goddess.

Lin Sanjiu’s heart seized. She swallowed down the pain and helped herself up to stand on her feet. The moment she wanted to take another step, the sensation of getting her thoughts extracted once again infiltrated her mind, causing her brain to go blank. She stood still on the ground and basked in the memories of that bookstore she once visited in Red Nautilus that collected different kinds of strange books from different apocalyptic worlds.

It was only when the beaked goddess screeched that she snapped out of her reverie.

“Over here!” The beaked goddess leaped into the air, avoiding the brown lipped god’s ambush. The goddess wasn’t any smaller than the brown lipped god, so her action shook the entire jungle. “Come here, quickly! He is here!”

Before the wind could carry her words away, a face popped out of the white mist far away, followed by his shoulders and his body, and finally his legs. Looking like an upside-down spider and even moving like one, the God charged at a high speed towards the battlefield.

It seemed to Lin Sanjiu that this was an ambush designed by the two Gods. It was just that the brown lipped god had already seen through their plan.

Since she could not run now, Lin Sanjiu heaved the elder brother and took cover under the dense foliage of the rainforest. The fight between the three Gods had shattered the tranquility in the jungle. The forest floor trembled, and the trees fell one by one. Lin Sanjiu had no idea which of the Gods had stomped on the ground, but the river water, leaves, and broken twigs in the air came raining down on her, causing her much pain.

“This is not your territory,” the God who had captured Lin Sanjiu said, his voice a furious roar, “You lied to me! You lied to me, the only True God!”

“A True God that has no territory and lives by sneaking up on other Gods?” The beaked goddess laughed, “Preposterous! The only True God is—”

The last word must have been “me,” but the beaked goddess swallowed down the word after glancing at her ally.

A fluke surfaced in Lin Sanjiu’s mind, ” If I can take a chance while these Gods are busy fighting themselves, perhaps I can—”

Then the thought disappeared; what filled the void instead was the pleasant sensation of her last hot bath.

But the beaked goddess’ next words snapped her out of her reminiscence.

“Crocodile, it’s your time to show up!”

Accompanied by the splashing of water, Lin Sanjiu turned her head to see a large gaping mouth emerge from the muddy river behind her. Rivulets of water lined the God’s face. He turned around and locked eyes with Lin Sanjiu.

She could not run as the giant maw came straight at her.

There was an arm in the crevice between his teeth, looking like a strand of meat that got stuck after having a meal.