Doomsday Wonderland

The after-sales service of Mophead was commendable.

“The Mokugyo Encyclopedic Forum?” Mophead parroted.

“Yeah, do you know where it is?” Lin Sanjiu continued.

“Erm, I do know the location, but I’m not very sure if it was really there.”

The conversation between Mophead surfaced in Lin Sanjiu’s mind. Following the directions Mophead gave, Lin Sanjiu soon found the location of the Mokugyo Encyclopedic Forum. However, after going in a circle for a full five minutes, she still could not find the building she had in mind.

She glanced at the iron tubular passageway that was about two stories high before shifting her gaze away.

This was not the Mokugyo Encyclopedic Forum. The entrance to the tubular passageway was sealed by a translucent curtain. A zipper ran in the middle of the curtain which Lin Sanjiu believed served as a lock of some sort. Peering through the translucent curtain, as her gaze traveled down the passageway, she found that the light was getting dimmer. At the far end, there was nothing but a blank metal sheet.

‘There is nothing inside.’

Standing stock-still in front of the translucent curtain, Lin Sanjiu was lost for words. She felt like today was the worst day ever in her life. First, she was transferred into a room that was like a washing machine drum, and now she was standing in front of another washing machine drum although it was many times larger than the last one.

‘Is it so hard for the people in the Heaven Underworld to put a road sign up?’ 

She turned her head around, hoping that she would find a spot that spelled the Mokugyo Encyclopedic Forum. Not far away from where she stood, there was an odd-looking edifice constructed from what seemed to be building blocks. It was seven to eight stories high, and each level was made up of countless reinforced concrete building blocks. From time to time, a block would protrude from the main building while another collapsed, and there were many posthumans walking in and out on the shifting blocks. The entire building engaged in telescopic movements that gave one the impression of a living, breathing organism.

“This should not be it, is it?” Lin Sanjiu observed the building through narrowed eye slits. Just as she was about to avert her gaze away, she gave a little start and raised her head.

An astonishingly huge balloon carrier slowly emerged from the horizon behind the building. It crawled across the sky like a giant beast that shrouded the streets under its humongous shadow.

There was a substantially large poster that screamed “Pink Beer Liberates The Wild In You” printed in dazzling colors on the hull of the balloon carrier. The haphazard combination of geometrical patterns in different shapes on the poster melted into one another, creating a psychedelic vision that made Lin Sanjiu dizzy in just a single glance. She quickly lowered her head, and only then did she realize she had not seen any words.

Despite that, the line “Pink Beer Liberates The Wild In You” was deeply ingrained into her brain.

“Where are you going?” A woman’s voice erupted from her back, sounding a little harsh. “You’ve been standing here for a long time. Are you going in or not?”

Lin Sanjiu turned around to see a woman standing behind her. The woman was clad in a black long robe that covered her entire body save for her pasty face and her aquiline nose. She looked a little masculine.

“Where…where is this place?” Lin Sanjiu pointed at the transparent curtain and asked, “I want to go to the Mokugyo Encyclopedic Forum. Do you know where it is?”

The woman clad in the black robe stared at her and snorted. She rolled her eyes and Lin Sanjiu could see a tinge of disgust on her face. The woman strode past her and pulled the zipper open.

“Follow me,” she said simply, “Here’s what you’re looking for.”

After that, she went straight through the curtain, leaving Lin Sanjiu behind. Just as Lin Sanjiu hesitantly followed after her, the woman said without turning her head, “Zip it up.”

As the zipper was being closed, the scene of the street outside was slightly crooked as the curtain fluttered.

“Wait for the shower in front.”

“Shower?” Lin Sanjiu thought she had heard it wrong. She turned her head to see that the woman had already taken her robe off. Her lips were tightly pressed into a taut line. She wore only a tank top and a skirt beneath the robe. Holding the robe in her hand, she walked into the deeper recess of the passageway.

“Hey.” Lin Sanjiu glanced at her own attire, but she did not take it off. “What is going—”

The second half of her sentence was dissolved by a fine spray scattering at a high speed from both sides and the top of the passageway, drenching both of them from head to toe in the blink of an eye. Lin Sanjiu could taste a strong chemical in the water, and she felt sore as the sharp, pin-like spray assaulted her skin. She spat several times. Understanding dawned upon her as she realized why the woman had closed her mouth tightly.

After they were fully soaked and waited for another 5 seconds, the spray finally stopped. However, that was not the end of it. A burst of red rays lit up and moved back and forth throughout the entire tubular space. The wave of red rays blitzed through them several times, vaporizing the moisture in the air and on their bodies. Eventually, her shirt and hair were dry, but there was some leftover smell of the chemicals that stayed around her nostrils, lingering on her every breath.

When Lin Sanjiu finally returned to her senses, the woman had already put on her robe. She strode towards the end of the passageway, grabbed the handle, and yanked it down.

As a rumbling voice echoed through the passageway, the entrance to the Mokugyo Encyclopedic Forum gradually opened up beneath their feet. The horse-and-buggy hinges juddered and the gate was unlocked, revealing a section of the silver stainless steel stairs that was originally hidden underneath the ground. There were several rows of round dots fashioned on the edge of each step, serving as a way to increase the friction of one’s steps for safety. The stairs spiraled down one by one until it dissolved into the flickering light below.

“Hey, what was all that for?”

Lin Sanjiu quickly went after the woman. Holding the handrail, she angled her body sideways and walked down the narrow staircase. “Why do we need to take that shower before entering here?”

“It is for disinfecting,” the woman answered as she kept a distance away from Lin Sanjiu. “The red rays work the same way. Ever since a pandemic breakout, viruses have been wreaking havoc across the entire globe, turning this world into a perfect breeding ground for all sorts of diseases. Even though the virus is now under control, to avoid history from repeating itself again, a similar disinfection procedure has been installed into every densely populated area.”

Even though the woman did not look like a helpful person, she still answered every one of Lin Sanjiu’s questions.

As the staircase came to an end, the distant music and conversation became louder. The woman suddenly turned her head and said, “Next time when you meet another posthuman who first arrives in the Heaven Underworld, you must relay everything I told you to him. After that, tell him this sentence: this is an unwritten rule in our world.”

‘Is this the special effect of the “viral hotbed”?’

Lin Sanjiu had just taken her eyes away from the woman for a second, and she disappeared from her sight. Startled, Lin Sanjiu hastily walked down the last three steps. The moment she arrived on the last step, she was instantly engulfed by a gush of warm air that was permeated with all sorts of smells such as the smoke from cigarettes, sweat, and women’s perfumes. A cacophony of conversations rammed into Lin Sanjiu’s ears, and there was incessant haggling going on around her. Compared to the Red Nautilus, the Mokugyo Encyclopedic Forum in this world seemed more like an underground market with poor ventilation.

Row upon row of smaller, older flickering blue monitor screens filled the area to the brim, lighting up the faces that sat in front of them. Everybody was so focused as if they were playing slot machines. Lin Sanjiu could hardly remember when was the last time she walked into a bustling area such as this.

It was an impossible task to keep her distance from others here. Pushing and shoving through the dense crowd of people, there were times when she bumped into someone else’s shoulder and got stepped on. Cold sweat trickled down her forehead as her nostrils were filled with the stench of cigarettes that lingered in the air. She continued to walk in this manner past several rows of monitor screens.

The concentration of the population and diversity of the posthumans in the Heaven Underworld had given Lin Sanjiu an insight of how large the scale of this apocalyptic world was compared to the Red Nautilus, which was a fellow member of the Twelve World Centrum. Even though she could consider herself as a veteran, there were a lot of people and species in this world that she had never seen before.

For instance, standing in front of her was a group of bald women with dark skin. There were several black motifs that ran from the back of their necks to their faces and into the grooves in front of their chest. And then, there was this gaunt man, who Lin Sanjiu thought was a walking skeleton, stretched his hand up and pressed it on his face when he walked past her. He rubbed his face, and as his bones rattled, his appearance began to change. However, before Lin Sanjiu could discern what had he transformed into in the end, he had already vanished into the crowd of people.

“Oh my f*cking good Lord!” somebody shouted, piercing through the harsh discordant mixture of sounds, “Did you see that? Finally! I won a 46-month residency voucher with no location restriction! Haha!”

Lin Sanjiu craned her neck and looked ahead. A man that resembled a gorilla barged into her sight. He stared fixedly at the monitor screen in front of him with his glowing eyes. He pounded the poor screen several times as a long chain of indecipherable words tumbled off his lips. The screen was on the verge of breaking down, and a man in a black jumpsuit with the word “Mokugyo” written on his chest soon appeared. He lurched towards the gorilla man and dissuaded feebly, “Sir, vandalism is prohibited here.”

The gorilla man stopped his madness. Seeing that the man dressed in the black jumpsuit was about to leave, Lin Sanjiu hastily pushed through the crowd, earning herself some curses from the people around and went after the man, “Hey, hey, do you work here?”

The man turned his head over. To Lin Sanjiu’s surprise, she had never seen a man that looked more sullen than him. It seemed as if he lacked the strength to hold his brows in place. The tips of his eyebrows were arched down in a perpetual slouch. He did not look at Lin Sanjiu in her eyes and replied to her listlessly, “Yeah, I do.”

“This is my first time coming to the Heaven Underworld. The Mokugyo Encyclopedic Forum here isn’t the same as the one I’ve been to before. I want to send a message, so…Hey, are you listening?”

With a gloomy face, the man nodded like a sloth.

“Is there a private room here?”

“Yeah, there is,” the man replied weakly, “But you need to pay for it.”

‘Of course, I know I need to pay for it,’ Lin Sanjiu thought inwardly. She had been spending money ever since she arrived in the Heaven Underworld. It was as if the whole Twelve Worlds had heard about the news of her becoming a millionaire.

“Then, Can you teach me how to use it?”

“Yes, but you need to pay for that as well,” said the man in an even lower voice.

“No problem.”

After that, Lin Sanjiu stared at the man. Both of them stood face-to-face in the busy crowd. After roughly ten seconds had passed, Lin Sanjiu could not hold it anymore and asked, “Aren’t you going to bring me there?”

It was only then that the man reacted. He turned around and his voice, even lower and with less vigor than the last, wafted into Lin Sanjiu’s ears, “This way, then. However, I hope that you won’t ask me too many questions.”

“Why?”

“Because speaking is too tiring.”

‘The people in the Heaven Underworld are…quite a character…’

“Well, as long as you don’t pull out a gun and shoot yourself, I can do whatever you say,” Lin Sanjiu mumbled.