Chapter 401: The World’s Fated Death

The entire block was nearly empty of people.

That was the scene before Pandora’s eyes at this moment.

A scene like this immediately brought to mind the records concerning this block.

She had never set foot here herself, but she had at least glimpsed it in the cleanup squad’s files. As it happened, one of the Anomaly samples in her underground Anomaly laboratory had come from this very place.

As for why this block had come to look the way it did, the answer, naturally, could not be separated from “Anomalies.”

The density of Anomalies here ran somewhat higher than in other areas.

Their distribution could be shaped by many factors, but on the whole it trended toward randomness.

And randomness meant that some places would end up with more, others with less—

This was one of the places that had ended up with more.

What was more, among the Anomalies here, the kind that posed an especially grave threat to ordinary people, the kind with a wide radius of harm, had, by “bad luck,” claimed a rather high share of this block.

A casual flip through the newspapers would show it: all manner of “disasters” struck this street with regularity.

Fires. Gas explosions. Food poisoning. Even the improper discharge of lethal toxic gas.

These seemingly ordinary “accidents” were, in truth, largely the work of Anomalies. The local residents of the Fragment World had simply cognitively corrected them into this shape.

Their brains automatically replaced the impossible with some comprehensible explanation.

Every phenomenon that defied common sense became “reasonable” beneath the filter of cognition.

And yet, though ordinary people could barely perceive the existence of “Anomalies,” humanity still retained an instinctive aversion to danger.

An aversion that required no cognition.

Just as rats flee a building before an earthquake, just as birds fly far away before a volcano erupts.

Humans carried a similar intuition of their own, only duller and hazier.

They couldn’t say why they didn’t want to walk down this street. It just felt vaguely uncomfortable.

They couldn’t say why they didn’t want to open a shop here. It just felt somehow wrong.

As time went by, the shops closed down, the residents moved away, and the entire block became what it was now.

But this was no isolated case.

Throughout the entire city, there was more than one block like this one. And as time went on, without the intervention of cleanup squads, one could easily foresee such places claiming an ever-growing share of the Fragment World.

Anomalies did not vanish into thin air. They only accumulated, wherever no one cleared them away.

Every uncleansed Anomaly was like a drop of ink, slowly spreading through the shadows.

Left alone, the uninhabitable zones would grow more and more numerous.

And once a certain critical point was reached, the Anomalies that posed a high threat to ordinary people would spill outward as well, accelerating the further expansion of the “uninhabitable” regions.

It was like a game of filling in squares.

If one side could never clear away the blackened squares, while the other kept laying down new black ones, then with the passage of time, sooner or later, the entire sheet of paper would be filled with black.

The whole page would become one stretch of pitch-darkness.

And that, under normal circumstances, was precisely the fated end toward which a Fragment World would naturally drift.

Cities would collapse. Civilizations would crumble. Humanity would go extinct.

It would not happen suddenly, on some single day. It would be destroyed bit by bit, consumed by the darkness.

The weak points first. Then every point.

The other living things would fare no better; they would march toward the same fate, differing only in how soon.

In a sense, this was the process by which a Fragment World walked into its death.

This was the world’s fated death.

And the existence of the Demon Hunter Academy changed that process.

It let its cleanup squads act as the white squares of a chessboard, refilling the blackened squares without end and turning back the Fragment World’s preordained death.

Every mission, every Anomaly slain, was one more white square marked upon that page, pushing the boundary of the darkness back by one measure.

Her thoughts returned to the present.

Pandora, following the trail of battle, suddenly stopped mid-step.

She turned her head, and her gaze landed on a building at her side.

It was a small mixed-use building, a three-story structure that should have been reasonably presentable, now reduced to nothing but charred black.

The outer walls were smoked jet-black, their original color impossible to make out.

The window glass had all shattered; only a few crooked shards still hung in the frames.

It seemed a great fire had burned the entire building beyond recognition.

This was a “scar” left behind by an Anomaly-wrought disaster.

But it was not the nearly incinerated building that Pandora was looking at.

What her gaze settled on was a mirror.

There, amid the charred ruins of the first floor, a mirror stood propped against the wall, spotlessly clean and reflecting her figure.

Its surface was bright, without a speck of dust.

No trace of smoke damage; even the frame along its edges had been wiped perfectly clean.

There was nothing wrong with the mirror itself. Pandora sensed no strange fluctuation from its surface.

It was just an ordinary mirror.

The only question was...

Why would a mirror this intact remain in a shop that had been all but burned away?

The fire had destroyed everything, yet spared this one mirror?

It made no sense.

And it had even been polished to such a shine? As though someone had been tending it deliberately...

Pandora stood in the street, watching her own reflection in the glass, and narrowed her eyes slightly.

The doubt had only just risen in her heart when her eyelids suddenly lifted.

She had seen it clearly. Inside the mirror, the street was changing.

The street in the reflection should have matched the real one perfectly: equally empty, equally silent.

But at this moment, at the far end of the street in the mirror, something was surging closer.

A dense, dark green, spreading swiftly in from the very limits of sight.

She turned her head, her gaze sharpening.

What had appeared in the mirror just now was no fault of the mirror. The real street itself was truly, undeniably changing.

A thick, dark-green mist was pouring out from the street’s end at tremendous speed, blanketing the entire street.

The mist was far too dense to seem like mist at all. It was more like some kind of diluted ink, churning forward through the air, devouring every trace of light in its path.

The distance Pandora’s vision could reach was shrinking at a speed visible to the naked eye.

Fifty meters. Thirty. Twenty—

The outlines of the low buildings blurred in the haze, as though being slowly chewed apart by some colossal, invisible mouth.

At the same time, with every breath she drew, wisps of that mist slipped into her body.

A faint discomfort rose along with them.

Her throat tightened slightly. A dull sting pricked at her lungs.

But the next moment, that discomfort was overlaid by another feeling, something soft and warm.

That gentle warmth spread out from deep within her chest, like some formless liquid flowing slowly along the flesh of her frame, smoothing away the sting and the tightness, one after the other.