Doomsday Wonderland

Lin Sanjiu put the communication device back on the oak table and looked blankly at it, a frown slowly formed on her brows.

After a short bout of rumination, she turned it back into a card and then called out another [Hey, Sis?]. She ran her fingers across the communication device, and a chain of dial tones spread out in the room. She waited with bated breaths for a long while, yet the result was the same.

She turned the communication device off and fell into thought. This was something she had not expected. It now appeared to her that the problem was not in the first communication device, but it was Ji Shanqing who did not answer her call.

She didn’t know what had happened to the grand prize, but she reckoned it probably wasn’t something serious. She poured herself a glass of water and guzzled it down. There was a high probability that Ji Shanqing didn’t pick up the call because he was too busy dealing with the Veda. What’s more, Lin Sanjiu hadn’t been in contact with him ever since she left the Olympics, so it was also possible that he was so disappointed with Lin Sanjiu that he’d already thrown the communication device aside.

She got herself another glass of water and stared at it. Then, she smacked the glass down on the table and called out, “Silas, fetch me a glass of spirits.”

“All right. What kind of wine would you prefer to drink?”

“Whatever. I don’t care, just fetch me anything strong. Quick.” Lin Sanjiu pushed the glass of water away and threw herself on the couch. A paroxysm of fear and regret surged inside of her, throwing her mind into a quagmire of confusion.

‘What if the grand prize…’

It was then that the spirits she ordered arrived. What Silas had fetched her was the half bottle of whiskey that Woyu had left off. She grasped tightly to the glass and frowned at the burning sensation as the liquid flowed through her tongue. The feeling was new to her, and she took a few more glasses. Her face now turning red as the flow of blood in her body sped up, she rose to her feet, scooped up the communication device from the table, and walked over to the door.

Yu Yuan did not expect to see Lin Sanjiu again tonight. He had just finished showering and was lying on the bed with a courtesy robe when Lin Sanjiu suddenly rapped on his door. He opened the door, and before he could say anything, Lin Sanjiu shoved the communication device into his embrace and then slipped into his room.

Her stomach felt burnt, and her brain felt slow from the wine. She only began explaining when she was inside his room. “Take the communication device. I couldn’t get through to him.”

“Why are you giving me this?”

“I still have plenty left. I can try to contact him again with another device, so you can keep this one,” answered Lin Sanjiu with her brows tightly furrowed in the center of her forehead. She walked in an unsteady gait towards a chair, and from that alone, Yu Yuan was certain that she must have had some wine. It was just that he did not know how much she drank, so he asked, “How many glasses did you have?”

Lin Sanjiu lowered her head and held out four fingers to him.

For the next few minutes, they didn’t talk. Yu Yuan knew Lin Sanjiu must have something to tell him, so he just waited for her to speak up. After a few minutes that seemed like an age, Lin Sanjiu finally opened her mouth. Her words slid out of her lips in a low voice and shattered the silence, “How many more months until you are transferred away?”

“Seven more months, I suppose?”

“It’s about the same as me,” said Lin Sanjiu. Then, she paused and rubbed her face with her hands before continuing, “Let’s go to Black’s Market or Mokugyo Forum to look for a visa tomorrow. Take the communication device with you when you are leaving and also the aircraft. If you ask me whether you should go to Salvation of God or the Olympics, I’d suggest the former. At the very least, it is much less dangerous than the Olympics.”

“What do you mean?” Yu Yuan asked, looking at the communication device in his embrace.

“You want to go to my little brother there, right?” Lin Sanjiu gave him a forced smile. “I will help you. After you fly through the atmosphere of Salvation of God, you can use the communication device to get to him…”

It was only then that Yu Yuan figured out Lin Sanjiu’s intention. He cast his eyes down to avoid direct eye contact and sighed. “You don’t know what happened to him, so you want me to go there and find out for you?”

“Yes…” Lin Sanjiu knew she must look contemptible in Yu Yuan’s eyes right now, but she had no other choices left. She took a deep breath, psyched herself up, and then moved on. “Let me be frank with you, the place you are going, it is very dangerous. My brother is now having a war with another lifeform, and I am not sure whether the war has already ended or if it is still going on. The way they fight is incomprehensible, and not even I, who had personally been there before, can fathom it. Posthumans like us are powerless there. Once we get ourselves tangled up in their fight, it will be impossible to get out of the mayhem completely unscathed. This will be a perilous journey, and I am practically asking you to jump into a fire hole.”

Lin Sanjiu did not know what she would do if Yu Yuan decided not to go anymore after hearing what she said.

“Okay.” The young man walked to a table and placed the communication on top of it. He turned around to face Lin Sanjiu with a stern expression as he queried, “Why don’t you go yourself, though?”

Hearing his question, Lin Sanjiu shook her head and leaned back into the chair. A wry smile crawled upon her face as she said, “I hope I can go there as well.”

Oddly enough, she thought she had had enough of all the crap in the doomsday, but right now, she was trying to do everything to keep herself here and avoid the Data Streams Library at all cost. Of course, if it was like what Nüwa had mentioned and the deluge was coming, she might have nowhere left to go.

“The communication device can be used multiple times if the distance between two points is close enough,” Lin Sanjiu said, keeping her head low and focused on playing with the thread on her sleeve. She didn’t know whether or not Yu Yuan would change his mind, but she was going to continue her sentence anyway. “You should be safe after you get to him through the communication device. Then, tell him about my situation and get him to contact me. I will keep one communication device with me at all times.”

Yu Yuan did not give any comment.

She lowered her head. After ascertaining that Yu Yuan was not going to say anything, she continued, “Of course, if you don’t wish to go anymore, I understand that too. It is really dangerous over there. The lifeform that he’s fighting, they do not have the ability to reproduce and they can only expand their population by turning an outsider into one of them—well, if you are lucky enough. I don’t know if—”

“There are two things,” Yu Yuan suddenly interrupted. He folded his arms and spoke slowly, his brows deeply furrowed. “There are two things you are going to tell me. One, I want to know what I have gotten myself into and what I am up to.”

Lin Sanjiu raised her head.

Leaning against the table, he had merged himself with the shadows, and she couldn’t read his expression. “If there is anything I learned from the doomsday, it is that you can never steer yourself entirely away from danger. Whether it is in the Twelve Worlds, other apocalyptic worlds, or where your brother is, it is the same,” the young man said, “But I’d rather face a danger I already know about than the danger of the deluge, which leaves you nowhere to run to and can’t be prevented. If you can help me prepare everything I need, I will go.”

A surge of relief swamped over Lin Sanjiu, and she let out a sigh. “What is the second thing, then?” she mumbled thankfully. She still had another seven months to get in touch with Ji Shanqing. And if the worst case scenario happened in which she couldn’t get to the grand prize, at the very least, she still had a second plan.

“The second thing is, the aircraft is no use.” Yu Yuan scratched his head as a rueful grin broke across his face. “Like an airplane, your aircraft is an atmospheric carrier. To break through a planet’s gravitational force, I need a rocket or…” Yu Yuan paused. He looked straight into Lin Sanjiu’s eyes and continued, “A spaceship.”

Lin Sanjiu was stunned. It took her a few seconds before she finally came to and said, “Are you saying that you need Exodus?”

Yu Yuan lifted his head, looking a little embarrassed. “I know that you’ve made Exodus your home. I need a spaceship, but not necessarily an interstellar spacecraft. How about this, isn’t Black’s Market self-proclaimed as a place where we can find anything we need? Since we still have time left, perhaps we can find ourselves another spaceship from there.”

Lin Sanjiu bit her lip and nodded as her heart slowly fell back to the pit of her stomach. She looked towards the clock and realized it was already 12 o’clock, midnight. Even though neither of them was sleepy, she still bade goodnight to Yu Yuan and exited his room.

“Although the kid is a little bit odd, since he can find us an aircraft, I am pretty sure getting a spaceship shouldn’t be a problem for him.” The young man attempted to ease her anxiety by giving her an assuring smile. “I didn’t expect that going into the Reverie Libretto would change my entire life.”

“Well, I didn’t expect to get nothing from the pocket dimension either,” Lin Sanjiu chuckled. She tried not to think about the grand prize because it would do nothing but escalate her anxiety. “I’m still clueless about who is after me, and the Reverie Libretto didn’t give me any clues either.”

The sentence reverberated in her mind as she walked down the corridor towards her room. When she was back in her room, she called out another communication device and put it on the side. After that, she climbed under the cover.

Lying on her bed, she couldn’t stop thinking about the device. She stretched her arm and reached out for it. The device felt cold and smooth under her finger. The sentence still screamed at her at the back of her mind. Then, she slowly closed her eyes.

The night was cold and the room was dark. Suddenly, she shot up from her bed as a chill ran down her spine.

She was wrong.

The Reverie Libretto had given her a clue.