Doomsday Wonderland

Panda Novel

Faster, I have to go faster…

The sound of the wind that swept past her and the light crunch of furniture as she stepped on them bypassed the toilet paper and flooded her ears.

Lin Sanjiu had been running on full tilt for several minutes. She had thrown all caution to the wind, and there was only one thought in her mind—how to get back to the location where she met Eggy as quickly as she could.

She pressed both her palms to the back of a settee and leaped over it. Hardly had the tips of her toes touched the floor, then she bounced up again. She grabbed the top of a cupboard and climbed on top of it. Her actions were mechanical, and she kept every motion as fluid as possible to increase her speed. Her eyes would search for a spot to land on or something to support herself, then her brain would command her body to follow up with either climbing, jumping, or running.

Her fractured palm began to throb again. The night wind caressed her skin, inciting goosebumps as her cold sweat evaporated.

There were times when Lin Sanjiu caught some movement from the corner of her eyes, and sometimes she heard mumbling voices in the dark, but she never once stopped running. She brandished her whip without turning her head and continued to dart at top speed.

To eliminate every possible chance of being caught by whatever was behind her, she destroyed every single piece of furniture that got in her way. Even though this might give the abomination more space, she could not care less anymore.

She could not tell whether the comrades she met were real or not, so she could not rely on them to help her activate the choker. Besides, it occurred to her that their situation was as perilous as hers, if not more so. All in all, there was not much time left for her.

It never crossed Lin Sanjiu’s wildest dreams that the only person she could rely on right now was him, Eggy.

When she picked up Polva’s head, she could not tell whether it was really his head or just another layer of the Matryoshka doll. While inspecting the head in her hand, Lucy’s words echoed in her mind with uncanny clarity, “If I were you, I wouldn’t jump to a conclusion so soon. It’s better if you see it with your own eyes.”

Perhaps when Lucy met Polva, he had only his head left, so she thought he must be dead.

Lucy must have come across Polva before she died as there was no way she could remember Polva if she were dead before their encounter. After all, “Lucy” had forgotten everything that happened in between the two to three minutes after the discovery of her own corpse.

Then, Lin Sanjiu suddenly had a brainwave. Whatever happened after death would not be stored in memory.

The moment she thought about this, she immediately put the head down. Without wasting a second, she hurried towards the location where she first met Eggy.

When Eggy came up to her for the second time before she went under the dining table and bumped into “Lucy,” it had already been 20 minutes. Eggy still remembered who she was and retained the memory of everything that they had gone through. Hence, this could only mean one thing—he was a living person.

Since she had already figured it out, she had to complete everything quickly and activate her choker. Only by that could she save her comrades in the shortest amount of them.

Lin Sanjiu continued to traverse at top speed across the vast furniture cemetery. Her heart was burning with anxiety that snowballed with every passing second. Then, she finally saw the screen from afar.

Beyond the screen was the bed “Lucy” had crawled into. Lin Sanjiu had been here once, so she had a pretty solid grasp of the topography around. There were no any other routes aside from the space under the bed. She also did not dare to destroy the furniture here as she needed them to guide her around.

Lin Sanjiu was fast. After she decided on her path, she made a beeline for the bed behind the screen. Without wasting any second, she crouched down and slid herself into the space under the bed. The darkness that was almost stygian pounced on Lin Sanjiu and devoured her as if it were a shark that had smelled blood. The gloom seemed never-ending, and despite being posthuman, when being pitched against such a circumstance, she had no other choice but to slow down and crawl forward on her knees and hands.

After edging forward in the dark for roughly six minutes, Lin Sanjiu finally saw the dim, rectangular exit in front of her. There was a passageway linking the space under the bed and the space under the dining table. Fortunately, since the passageway did not connect to other furniture, it was short and there were no branches. If it were like the ruin she created with all the pieces of furniture clumped together, she would have already lost her way.

Lin Sanjiu suddenly froze.

‘ Had Maxin lost his way, too? ‘ She thought. Otherwise, there would not be any better explanations as to why he would appear under a clock, then inside a vase, and finally in the closet. Perhaps like Lin Sanjiu, he had gone into one of the passageways as well, but unfortunately, he was not fortunate enough to stumble across an exit that he could squeeze through.

Lin Sanjiu could imagine how Maxin felt his way around in the dark to find an exit. He did come across an exit in the end. He got closer to it, only to discover that the circumference of the exit was merely large enough for his head to go through. On top of that, the exit being covered in a layer of glass. Lin Sanjiu could also imagine how Maxin shouted at her through the layer of glass.

Then, when she picked the clock up, she severed the exit from the passageway Maxin was in. That was why he suddenly disappeared.

Lin Sanjiu felt her conjecture was pretty close to the truth. She slowed down. When she wiggled herself out from under the table, she was still trapped inside her own thoughts, and with the paper inside her ears, it took her several seconds before she heard a voice.

At first, she was startled, but she soon realized it was not the sound of somebody talking. Lin Sanjiu then took out one of the paper balls out from her ears. She had become so accustomed to stuffing the paper in and clattering her teeth that she could finish the entire process in a mere second. Hence, she felt it was worth the risk to find out what the sound was.

The faint chomping noise was even clearer in the dark sky now.

Following the sound, Lin Sanjiu stealthily walked closer to a row of large bookcases and hid behind them. Then, she peered into a slit between two bookcases.

Beyond the bookcases, there was an extremely thin and emaciated figure crouching on the floor. The figure’s enormous head was hanging low while his neck was twisted into a sickening angle. He seemed to be picking something up on the ground and shoving it into his mouth.

He was chewing, but it seemed like whatever caught his attention had a chewy texture as it remained in his mouth for a long time before he finally swallowed it down.

The strong smell of blood permeated the air and assaulted Lin Sanjiu’s nostrils, causing her stomach to gurgle and she almost vomited. Before the wash of stomach acid could bubble up to her mouth, she swallowed it along with a short whimper down her esophagus and back to the pit of her stomach. Her back was beaded with cold sweat.

She had given a packet of rations to Eggy but could not see the bag around. She did not know where Eggy had thrown it away. Right now, what Eggy was stuffing into his mouth was skin and flesh.

Without a doubt, that must be Lucy’s skin and flesh.

He was so focused on wolfing down the scrumptious meal in front of him as if there was nothing tastier than human flesh and skin. Eggy did not notice Lin Sanjiu’s presence or the Tornado Whip in her hand.

Lin Sanjiu failed to preserve Lucy’s corpse. The bones that protruded from her wound swung before Lin Sanjiu’s eyes like an illusion.

‘Don’t go out now,’ Lin Sanjiu commanded herself. Even though Eggy was eating human flesh, there was a slim chance that he was still human, albeit the chance being very unlikely.

The choker… How about the choker now?

Lin Sanjiu had to summon every ounce of strength to hold herself back. Just as she had no idea what to do, a voice rang out clearly in her mind. “Student Lin, it occurred to me that you need an extra pair of hands here, don’t you?”