Armored vehicle.
"Congratulations on making it back. We'll return to the base after a fifteen-hour drive. ”
Lu Feng asked, "How is the base?"
"The distortion has caused widespread panic and confusion, and some of the precision instruments can no longer be used. Fortunately, the artificial magnetic pole can operate normally."
"Do distortions appear when the magnetic poles don't work?"
"Yes."
Lu Feng said, "Over the past few days, some survivors and I were living in a magnetic iron mine, and no distortions occurred there."
"It's because of the magnetic field, which can resist distortion to a certain extent," the doctor said. "At the time, the Lighthouse fell into chaos. With the last glimmer of hope, we and the Underground City Base exchanged all the research results from over the years, but we got nothing at all. All of their research was also grounded in biological genes."
"Then I once again illegally accessed the communication channel that's connected to the Institute."
Lu Feng raised his eyebrows slightly.
"After joint discussion and the combination of some clues such as the point in time when the distortions occurred, we believe all of this may be related to the magnetic field, so we've temporarily increased the strength of the artificial magnetic pole," the doctor said. "It's effective for now, and only by doing this have we gained some time to cling to life."
The doctor leaned against the vehicle seat. "But according to the calculations, the distortions will gradually strengthen, then defeat us within three months."
He paused and looked at the distant mist-adorned sky as well as the circling brown eagle, then said, "However, to know that all efforts humankind have put forth to survive from ancient times until now were futile and become a witness to humankind's complete extinction is actually also a kind of unimaginable honor."
He looked at Lu Feng again. "To be honest, you're a little calmer than I had imagined."
"What, did you get hit?" The doctor said. "I don't know what kind of species that An Zhe thing was, all slippery like a fish. He could even escape from defenses as tight as the base's, so it's normal to not have been able to capture him. Even if he was captured, we wouldn't be able to keep him, so don't take it too much to heart."
Lu Feng said nothing.
He held out his hand.
A soft snow-white thing rolled out of his sleeve.
He looked at it.
Strangely, a soft train of thought flooded his mind. It was like he'd returned to some moment when An Zhe was quietly staying at his side. After night fell, they slept together. At first, An Zhe had his back turned to Lu Feng, but as he slept, he would always roll over and gently rest against his chest. When morning arrived, after waking up, not even An Zhe himself knew why this would be the case—at that moment, he would furrow his fine and beautiful eyebrows, then turn back again. Then Lu Feng held him from behind.
Surprisingly, those turned out to be the most memorable few days of his life.
The snow-white and soft hyphae affectionately wound around his fingers.
The doctor was stunned. "You got it back? You were actually able to get it back?"
"Mm-hm," Lu Feng said.
"Then what about An Zhe?" The doctor spoke extremely quickly. "Did you kill him?"
The spore seemed to have been startled by this person's suddenly raised voice. After shrinking a bit, it dove back into Lu Feng's sleeve.
But a while later, it reappeared at his collar and affectionately rubbed against his neck.
Lu Feng said flatly, "He left."
"How could you be willing to let him go? What exactly is he?" The doctor's eyes widened. "Can… Can he protect himself?"
Lu Feng touched the spore's soft hyphae with his fingers and did not reply. Beneath the gloomy daylight, the profile of his face was a silent silhouette.
The doctor examined him, but then he suddenly frowned. "Where's your gun?"
An Zhe stood on the rooftop.
As he watched the motorcade disappear into the distant sky, he moved his stiff body, standing up from behind the flower bed. Yesterday's rainstorm had filled the flower bed with water, and some thread-like creatures were currently wriggling in the water, newly born as of yesterday.
But after the weather cleared up, the accumulated water would soon be dried out. After a brief new life, they would face eternal death.
All creatures were like this.
Would his spore live longer than these ephemeral creatures? He hoped this was the case.
An Zhe waited patiently for an opportunity. When the eagle landed, he climbed onto its back. The eagle paid him no heed, perhaps because he was too light and too lacking in nutrients. An Zhe found a place to stay on its wide back. What really covered the surface of the eagle's body were not feathers, but scales, and in the crevices between the scales were intertwined translucent feelers. The eagle foraged for food in the city. After it devoured a meat-like vine and struggled for half an hour against a giant monster with bat wings, it lost the struggle and left the place.
An Zhe marked its flight direction against Polaris and his map. After discovering the departure from that trajectory, he surreptitiously slipped away, and after taking root in the soil and absorbing a night's worth of nutrients, he hesitated for a long time before removing from his backpack a pitch-black gun and a dozen or so bullets.
The gun was Lu Feng's, but it was only after Lu Feng had left that he discovered it in his backpack. The Colonel would often make use of his belongings as though it were completely natural, including his backpack, so An Zhe guessed that it led to him leaving the gun behind.
Using the sounds of gunfire, he successfully attracted a monster with butterfly wings to serve as a means of transportation.
Three days later, he landed again. When looking for the next target to hitch a ride on, An Zhe encountered an extremely ugly monster with a centipede-like body. It had many characteristics of ants and arthropod-class monsters, and it fed on mushrooms. An Zhe wanted to escape, but his body was already in very bad shape. Just as he was about to be completely eaten, Lu Feng's gun protected him. He had accidentally struck the monster's soft belly, and when it briefly paused, he took advantage of that moment to roll into a muddy brook and escape.
The weather was getting cold, and those creatures who feared the cold began to travel south. Of course, they also preyed on each other in the process. Sometimes, across the boundless plains, there wasn't even the slightest trace of any living thing save for the occasional one or two extremely massive victors, and sometimes, social animals migrated southward like a black torrent. An Zhe blended in and drifted down the stream.
Ten days later, he finally got an indomitably southward-flying bird. After more than twenty additional days, from atop the bird's soft back, he saw a massive, long, and narrow shadow on the horizon, like a scar on the world.
According to humans, the Abyss's core was a long and narrow fault zone created by a magnitude 8 earthquake during the Great Calamity Age. The radiation there was extremely abnormal, which gave rise to countless fearsome monsters. Further out from the core's fault zone, to the north of the Abyss lay a vast plain that was densely covered with vegetation, full of various kinds of mushrooms, and a hibernation place for countless monsters, and to the south stretched a belt of rolling highlands and mountains.
The bird came to the edge of the Abyss and, tired out from flying, rested on the branch of a huge dead tree it found.
The tree branch suddenly began to tremble. The bird's feathers bristled, and it flapped its wings and screamed—
At some point, masses of black vines had appeared on the branch, and they had securely bound the bird's feet. Amidst the sound of fluttering wings, the snow-white bird was dragged to the center of the branch-laden tree. Its graceful neck arched high and its long pointed beak reached out toward the gray sky as it struggled, but a vine wrapped around its neck. Then the sturdy vine split open, and a fanged mouth bit its neck in two.
Blood went spraying, and the five- or six-meter-long bird's body was split into two. Tiny feathers and bits of down fell all over the ground.
Holding the backpack in his arms, An Zhe fell to the ground together with the feathers. He got to his feet, stepping upon the rotting ground that overflowed with black water. After staggering a few steps, he looked up and watched as the bird was devoured by thousands of vines.