His body suddenly became empty. It was a deeper and hollower emptiness compared to losing the immature spore. Like a rest in a piece of music, his connection with the world was abruptly cut off. The most important things were stripped out, leaving him with only a broken and declining body.
A body.
An Zhe was suddenly stunned.
At that moment, he was sure that he heard fate whispering like a devil into his ear.
He blankly looked forward and shakily lifted his hand.
Right before this moment, he had assumed he still had a choice.
He truly thought he could choose.
But when it happened, he discovered that he had never had the leeway to choose.
He was completely dumbfounded.
The spore swam out of his body, and he held it in his hand. An Zhe blankly looked at the little white thing and finally forced himself to smile at it.
"… I'm sorry," he said.
"What…" he said. "What should I do? Do you wish to come with me? I may not be able… to raise you."
The spore's hyphae only rubbed against his fingers. It couldn't understand him, An Zhe knew. But the very next moment, the spore's hyphae began to slowly move in a certain direction all of a sudden. They left An Zhe's fingers, dropped down until they landed on the surface of Lu Feng's black uniform, and continued crawling forward.
An Zhe observed this sight. This wasn't the first time the spore took such an action. Smiling, he asked, "Why do you like him so much?"
The spore stopped at one end of him and rubbed against his fingers again. It couldn't speak.
An Zhe softly sighed and put it on Lu Feng.
After being put down, it crawled to Lu Feng's chest with its newly born soft hyphae and spontaneously burrowed into his pocket. It was obviously so happy, as if it had wanted to do this for a long time.
An Zhe watched this sight. Just as he did not understand why the spore was so close to Lu Feng, he did not understand why things had suddenly reached this point.
From the backpack he took out a sheet of paper. He lay on his stomach in front of the tea table and wrote down a line of words on the paper.
"It's mature now, unlike before. Just put it in a place that's always damp and it'll grow up."
"It needs a lot of water and fears rodent-class animals and bugs."
"If you wish to do research, please don't hurt it too much or let it die."
"Thank you for always taking care of me."
"I'm going now."
After putting the note to one side, he reached into Lu Feng's chest pocket, took out the bottle of tracking agent, and unscrewed the bottle.
"Crash."
The pale green liquid poured out and flowed away along the crevices in the floor. Finally, he let go—with a clear sound, even the bottle was broken on the ground.
As though he had made one of the most crucial decisions in his life, he reached out, removed the badge on Lu Feng's chest, and put it in his own pocket.
Lastly, he picked up the backpack that was lying to one side. He took one final look at Lu Feng, then walked out of the room.
As Xi Bei looked at him, he asked, "What are you doing?"
An Zhe said, "I'm going outside to look at the situation."
"Okay." Xi Bei looked like he had calmed down a little. "Stay safe."
An Zhe nodded. "Okay."
He pushed open the room's rusty security door and took one step outside. At that moment, he looked back into the room, and his line of sight passed the skeleton on the sofa to arrive at the door Lu Feng was behind. That pale door seemed to hold a silent attractive force. If it were possible, if he had no worries whatsoever, he also would have wanted to stay at Lu Feng's side just like the spore, but he couldn't.
After closing the door, he walked upstairs. The stairs were so high, and his body seemed to have lost all its strength again. Only after climbing for a very long time did he reach the top floor. Following the openings at the very top, An Zhe arrived at the roof.
After a bout of rain, the atmosphere outside was frighteningly cold.
Over the few days that the artificial magnetic field disappeared and the atmosphere thinned, when he was still at the Lighthouse, he had heard the scientists predict that the weather this year would be extremely unusual and that winter would arrive at least three months early.
And the winter of his life was about to arrive as well.
The moment the spore matured, the instructions from life's instincts flashed before him, and he thoroughly received fate's mysterious instructions.
Just as how he had never again seen the mushroom that had raised him to maturity from the moment he landed on the ground, he was destined to be unable to protect his own spore so that it could safely grow up.
It was dry outside, with gale-force winds blowing at any given moment, and monsters lay in wait. Even in the Abyss that was free of rodent-class and arthropod-class monsters, it may be unintentionally trampled by giant monsters or affected by conflict. At the last moment, he unexpectedly could only choose to believe Lu Feng.
Because he was dying.
A mushroom's lifespan was not very long in the first place. He was already considered one of the most outstanding amongst them. Everyone had their own mission. Once he completed that thing, he had fulfilled the purpose of living. To a mushroom, raising its spores to maturity was its only mission.
In the cold wind, An Zhe shivered slightly, and he hugged himself. Without feeling it, his body tottered. He had seen dead mushrooms before—when its spores fell, its cap would gradually crumble and curl up, then shrivel and wither, and finally all the tissues—the stem, hyphae, the roots in the soil—would all melt into a pool of inky liquid, and then be consumed by the other things in the soil.
Now, he was also about to experience the process he had witnessed countless times before. He did not know how long this process would take, but it would definitely be very fast, before humankind went completely extinct. When he left, he indeed wished to return with Lu Feng to the base, no matter what he would encounter next.
However, he thought that he should just let Lu Feng assume he was living in the wilderness. The Arbiter had personally witnessed far too many deaths already.
On the roof was a dilapidated garden. Hugging his knees, he sat behind a flower bed and faced the east to watch the night fall and the sun rise. This place wouldn't be too far from the base—it was merely the distance a bee covered in one day's flight.
In fact, just as he had expected, when the sunlight penetrated through the thin morning mist and shone upon the city, the humans' armored vehicles had stopped at the public square in front of the residential community. Lu Feng must have already told them about the situation here—they brought sufficient heavy weaponry, and to a certain degree, they did not need to fear assaults from monsters. It was safe. For example, that massive eagle circled in the sky, covetously eyeing them, but it didn't dare to make any further moves.
Gray clouds, eagles, sprawling ruins of cities, and motorcades of armored vehicles seemed like things that would appear only in dreams. The sound of the wind started up again.
An Zhe watched Lu Feng’s and Xi Bei's figures walk out from the building, and after a simple interaction with the military, they got into the vehicles—An Zhe faintly glimpsed the doctor's shape. After the vehicle doors closed, the motorcade immediately started up and left the dilapidated ruins. When Lu Feng left, would he turn back to look through the car window at this city? He wouldn't know. The place he should return to was the Abyss. He had to return to that cave and find that set of white bones. Everything started from there, and everything would end there as well.
In the face of everything that was destined to go extinct, Lu Feng had Lu Feng's destiny, and he had his own destiny.
And now, it was all over.