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Holding onto this conclusion that even he himself didn't believe, Lin Yi followed behind and stepped into the narrow passage.
The despair and terror of surviving the apocalypse are laid bare before us.
Skeleton remains were found near the exit. Initially, they were piled up on the outer edge, with signs of the ground being turned over and filled in. However, later they were simply dumped on the ground and left unattended. The stench of the rotting corpses permeated the air.
The environment did not improve at all after entering the cave.
Perhaps realizing that even a short distance away from the cave could pose a danger, the survivors began throwing the bodies closer and closer together, and their methods became increasingly haphazard. If it weren't for the need to preserve the basic entrance passage, even that passage might have been blocked by the corpses.
plague?
In this world that has gone to the brink of madness and despair, perhaps dying from the plague rather than from the whistle of the blind is a kind of happiness.
Information Integration Thought Entity: Chapter 648 Scarlet Bullet: Survival of the Apocalypse (2)
When Aria led Lin Yi into the lowest-level, closed survivor camp, apart from a few survivors whose eyes still retained a trace of vitality and looked in their direction, the vast majority sat blankly staring at the only source of light in the center of the basement: a campfire.
Even the survivors who looked this way mostly glanced at her before looking away. Only one person welcomed the returning girl: "Aria, you're back."
A faint smile appeared on her extremely weak face as she turned her gaze to Lin Yi: "A new survivor? I'm sorry, we've run out of food. All we can offer is a temporarily safe environment and a little bit of warmth. If you can accept that, then stay."
"Now is not the time to do these things, Coco."
Before the girl named "Koko" could finish speaking, Aria interrupted anxiously, "Toyama-kun—"
The girl's expression froze for a moment, then she looked at the figure that Aria had already put down, as if she understood: "Kinji Toyama?"
After glancing at Kinji Toyama, who was still muttering to himself, Coco concluded numbly, "He can't be saved. He's doomed. Just bury him."
"……Eh?"
Aria was caught off guard by this unexpected response and had no time to react.
"Snow White has been missing for a week now. There's no one here who can preside over the 'Summoning the Gods' ritual except for her. Moreover, because she and the armed detectives who still retain some combat capabilities took all the weapons, we can't even go out to search for things now..."
At this point, Coco paused slightly: "Before that, I found my twin sister, who had also become a Lost One."
Clearly, there was no one among the survivors present who looked like her.
Looking around at the motionless crowd around the campfire, who had chosen to await death in the tranquility and warmth, Aria hesitated for a moment, then finally spoke again in a hoarse voice: "...Tell me, where did Snow White go?"
"You're still the same as before."
For the first time, and probably the only time after the "end of the world" came, Keke showed a genuine smile: "I can't stand listening to other people's opinions, I have to hit my head and bleed... I don't know his specific whereabouts, because the outside world has changed too much, but Bai Xue should be heading north."
"I understand. I will come back with snow and food. You must hold on until I return!"
Keke, the girl who immediately ran towards the exit after speaking, just smiled and then turned her gaze back to Lin Yi.
"...I heard from Shirley before that Aria went to a safe place."
Gazing at the quietly burning campfire, Lin Yi said in his usual tone, "Compared to this world, it probably qualifies."
"So you're from that place too, right?"
There was no answer; they simply waited for her next request.
"Rather than wandering aimlessly in this enlightened world as a madman, a living hell, we would rather meet death in tranquility."
When these words were spoken, not only Keke, but even the survivors who had previously maintained a numb attitude silently turned their gazes in this direction.
For an ordinary person, this scene would likely only evoke shock and horror, but in Lin Yi's eyes—
No. 01
Mental pollution level: 84% (Infection is accelerating due to unknown factors)
No. 02
Mental pollution level: 88% (Infection is accelerating due to unknown factors)
No. 03
Mental pollution level: 87% (Infection is accelerating due to unknown factors)
Number 04...
Number 05...
……
……
……
Number 23 (Keke)
Mental pollution level: 89% (Infection is accelerating due to unknown factors)
Data parsing complete.
Estimated time to complete infection: 27 minutes and 11 seconds
The warmth of the flames is not salvation, but a more desperate demise.
Perhaps it was when they realized this that those "abandoned" here broke down. Ignoring the flames' corrosive and infectious effects on them, they chose to face their end in silence. Judging from the corpses on the outside, it seems that once someone's mental infection level exceeded 90% and they became a "lost one," they would be killed and thrown out by those who were still conscious—in this way, to avoid becoming a "blind one."
However, this approach also presents an unavoidable problem: who can grant the last person who becomes lost a peaceful release?
Meeting those eager gazes, Lin Yi remained silent for a moment before tossing out a "glass ball," which landed in the hands of a survivor with a joyful expression.
"Thank you, visitor from another world. I'm counting on you for Aria. Although she's just a little girl who hasn't even developed her breasts yet, she's definitely one of the cutest girls out there."
After saying those words with a pale smile, Lin Yi completely disappeared from the basement.
The next second, the unrestrained "famine" indiscriminately devoured all matter and energy, and the unsupported superstructure collapsed with a roar, causing another corner of this post-apocalyptic landscape to crumble.
the other side.
Aria, anxiously searching for the whereabouts of Xingjia Baixue, seemed to sense something. However, when she looked back in the direction she had come from, she could not see anything and could only conclude that it was her imagination.
"No, the most important thing now is to find Bai Xue and go back to save people!"
Patting her cheeks, just as Aria was about to continue her previous pointless efforts, Lin Yi, who had been following behind her, suddenly reached out and grabbed the back of her collar. The next moment, the ground less than 20 centimeters in front of the girl tore open from the ground, and a soft-bodied insect-like creature, as large as two Arias in diameter and magnified millions of times, burst out from the ground with a maddening scream.
Moreover, judging from its three-meter-diameter "mouth" that is constantly dripping highly corrosive acid as it freely waves around, its body hidden underground is definitely much longer than the fifteen meters that are exposed.
Immediately shutting off his hearing and vision from the data in his hand, Lin Yi observed with interest the soft-bodied creatures constantly emerging from the ground. In the sky, a large number of blind beings had gathered, their whistles, powerful enough to tear eardrums, resounding far and wide, like a grand symphony. Moreover, the power of these sounds lay not in the physical, but in the mental.
From Lin Yi's perspective, if the previous world's assessment of the entrants was a mental pollution check with a frequency of once every sixty minutes and an intensity of 1, then now, in the environment of a "large-scale concert" and surrounded by various "strange" objects, this assessment intensity has directly changed to a mental pollution check with a frequency of once every 0.5 seconds and an intensity of 5000.
Information Integration Thought Entity: Chapter 649 Scarlet Bullet: Survival of the Apocalypse (3)
Quantitative change leads to qualitative change, and similar rules apply even to the data-driven and mutated world.
When the accumulated mental pollution intensifies to a certain degree, the pollution is no longer limited to living organisms, but can also "infect" inanimate objects that do not even have a physical body or mind.
The ground beneath our feet was the first to be infected.
As the whistle spread and intensified, the already uneven ground seemed to "breathe" and began to undulate. From an ordinary person's perspective, the ground beneath their feet could be observed to have transformed into flesh and blood tissue that resembled peeled-off skin. The terror of being on such flesh and blood was enough to drive even the most composed person mad.
Then comes the air.
The planet's surface is filled with too many unwanted "impurities" mixed with the ubiquitous matter. Things that originally had no form have gained their own bodies after being infected. When they come into view, they become a transparent, huge soft creature that occupies every inch of the surrounding space, tightly surrounding the outside of the repulsive field and constantly squeezing inward.
However, as the infection gradually spread from macroscopic matter to microscopic matter, Lin Yi had to intervene to stop it.
While I am somewhat interested in the upcoming microscopic infection, the problem is that the "data body" at hand can no longer withstand such a high-intensity infection. While sight and hearing are indeed the largest access points for humans to external information, when the amount of external information becomes large enough, infection can be completed by simply piling up the total amount of information through those tiny access points.
In less than half a minute, Aria's mental infection rate, which had already been blocked from hearing and sight, had jumped from 6% to 67%. If the infection is allowed to spread to the microscopic level, even data recovery will not be able to save the object whose data has already mutated.
"This scale is barely adequate as a welcome performance."
Raise your fist, and layers of matter twist and turn on the surface, constantly piling up and detonating, yet being compressed, energy forms a black hole-like outline within a small space, covering the surface of your fist.
Sensing the heat emanating from the performance, the "performers" gradually stopped playing. Some waited blankly, while others, still retaining a sliver of survival instinct, desperately fled into the distance.
"However, I give this sound quality a bad review."
Nuclear fusion punch, 50 million tons.
The high-temperature radiation swept across every inch of space. The "air" that had just gained solidity evaporated instantly at a temperature of hundreds of millions of degrees. Those blind people who tried to hide in it were now truly "blind"—the light, ten thousand times brighter than the sun, was enough to burn away any vitreous body, let alone the flesh and blood tissue that they had transformed from the human body.
The burrowing worms lurking underground met the same fate. The lava caverns, thousands of meters deep, had already encompassed more than 90% of the burrowing worms' living area. Not to mention those that were still on the surface a moment ago and had no time to escape, they were annihilated along with the local land that had just been infected by the fission.
……
When Lin Yi and Aria appeared in another city more than 500 kilometers away, the dazzling light on the southern horizon slowly faded. Apart from the radiation clouds in the sky thickening a few more layers, the air temperature rising a few degrees for no reason, and the earthquakes increasing a few more times in the next few days, it had little practical significance for this world that had already entered the "doomsday" stage.
When Aria regained her senses, she was not in good condition.
The girl, whose mental infection level had reached 67%, was already showing signs of despondency and madness in her words and actions. This was only because "hunger" had given her a strong resistance from all aspects. Otherwise, if it were an ordinary person, even if their hearing and vision were blocked, facing the high-density mental pollution "concert" that would infect non-living beings, they would not be able to endure it for even a second and would be turned into an anomaly.
However, Aria, whose mental infection level had reached 67%, did not abandon her previous decision, and even seemed to have a strong desire to act due to the deepening of the infection.
"...Snow White should be around here."
After hearing Aria's assessment, Lin Yi was curious. Unlike information entities that can directly cover the surface with massive amounts of mental energy, even after being enhanced by "hunger," her senses were at most beyond the level of ordinary people. Her ability to capture information beyond a range of 100 meters was no different from that of ordinary people. However, after directly skipping more than 500 kilometers, she was still more than 5 kilometers away from the target. How did she get this result?
Faced with Lin Yi's question, Aria seemed somewhat confused: "I don't know... but when I'm thinking, it's like someone in my mind is telling me that Snow White is nearby..."
Seeing Aria's mental infection level jump from 67% to 68% in an instant, Lin Yi had a new guess about these alien species.
----------segmentation----------
When the Demon King descends, what should she do as the representative of the gods on earth?
—Slay the Demon King and save the world.
However, God's agent was too weak, and she was unable to kill the demon king.
That means you're not facing a demon king.
Not the Demon King?
—Yes, the Demon King is evil, so it must be killed by a righteous god. You cannot kill it, so it is not the Demon King.
But it brought disaster to the world.
—That was not a disaster, but a trial, a necessary process to make more people aware of the presence of the divine.
Is that right?
--Yes.
As usual, Xingjia Baixue, having received "guidance," awoke from her deep slumber. She silently counted the number of survivors around her, which had halved again, without showing any expression.
(This is not death, but a return to the kingdom of the gods, and one day I will be able to return in the same way.)
Xingjia Baixue, despite telling herself this, still harbored doubts, but it was much better than when she had almost driven herself mad. At least she no longer worried or feared these unnecessary things. Yes, as the agent of the gods on earth, all she needed to do was follow the gods' will and let the elves bring more people into the realm of the gods during this "trial."
Do not think about anything else, nor should you even think about it. That is a realm that only gods can access. To rashly touch upon it will only cause you, a mortal, to suffer... a very deep harm.
Just by touching a tiny fragment of a deliberately forgotten memory, everything seemed to show signs of returning to that time. Noticing this trend, the priestess quickly cut off unnecessary thoughts and was about to get up when she suddenly heard a joyful shout.
"Snow!"
"...Aria?"
Behind him, Lin Yi narrowed his eyes slightly as he watched the priestess being embraced by Aria.
Number 24 (Starry Night Snow)
Mental pollution level: 99%
Information Integration Thought Entity: Chapter 650 Scarlet Bullet: Survival of the Apocalypse (4)
In this world on the verge of collapse, the first, and perhaps only, indigenous person Lin Yi found who was not insane, desperate, or blind, turned out to be an individual with a 99% chance of being mentally infected and who might become an alien at any moment. Such a discovery is undeniably ironic.
However, this indigenous people seem to be in a delicate state of balance.
On one hand, she was remarkably calm, calmer than anyone else in the world. Even Aria, who had been protected by Lin Yi throughout, was somewhat less calm in this respect: the consequences of the 68% mental infection were already beginning to show, slowly and steadily eroding her sanity.
On the other hand, she is extremely insane, not only with a mental infection rate as high as 99%, but also with chaotic consciousness constantly condensing and lingering around her body as if it has found its home.
From this perspective, she is even more dangerous than the "Blind Ones." After all, any normal person would run away upon seeing a Blind One, but would actively approach Xingjia Baixue, who has a complete human form and consciousness—and then be infected at a much faster rate.
After scanning the other survivors who remained motionless even as he approached Aria, he was unsurprisingly found that they all had an infection rate of over 90%, meaning they were "lost ones".
However, these lost souls did not talk to themselves; instead, they stood still like puppets, which is why Aria failed to notice anything unusual.
While Lin Yi was observing these people, the conversation on the other side also reached a stalemate. It was caused by Aria's request to return to the shrine's basement (she was unaware that it had become part of the lava ring under the nuclear fusion fist), but Hoshiga Shirayuki directly refused.