Doomsday Wonderland

Even though she knew time was limited, the moment she heard Mrs. Manas's voice, Lin Sanjiu plopped down on the ground with a thud, almost laughing and crying at the same time. "I was right. You're still here!"

"Get up quickly," Mrs. Manas said. "There's too much dangerous stuff around here. Let's talk while we move."

Lin Sanjiu took a few deep breaths and stood up. She glanced back; between the dense leaden haze, countless figures were hidden beyond sight. Once she turned away, those silent, motionless figures would never be seen again. They would remain frozen in place, their bodies quietly eroding until nothing was left.

"So you heard the red-brick wall figures' voices?" Mrs. Manas asked after hearing Lin Sanjiu's explanation, slightly shocked. "I sensed you had a strange hostility toward me, and the more I explained, the worse it got..."

1

Lin Sanjiu chuckled awkwardly.

"Well, it's not every day some unknown entity starts talking in my head..." Just thinking back on it sent a shiver through her. "I still don't know what that red-brick wall or those figures are, or how it all works exactly, but the trick itself wasn't complicated."

"You figured it out? Oh, move a bit to the right, we were drifting off course."

Lin Sanjiu shifted a few steps to the right, still probing ahead with a stick as she walked. "Yeah, I was too close to it to see clearly before. Think about it, why did we come across that red-brick wall in the first place? It was actually pretty far off our original route."

"Because we heard someone repeating the workgroup's conversation in the thick fog..." Mrs. Manas answered.

"Exactly. The only purpose of that repeated conversation was to draw us toward the source of the sound," Lin Sanjiu said. "After I blew away the fog and saw the red-brick wall, the figures stopped repeating the workgroup's conversation. That wasn't a coincidence."

In any other setting, a repeated conversation might not successfully lure someone in. Many posthumans, like Bee Sting, preferred to avoid trouble and would steer clear of strange sounds. But in the blinding fog, how many people could confidently ignore a voice lingering nearby without investigating?

"I get it now. Once you saw the cracks forming figures on the wall, you unknowingly started walking like them," Mrs. Manas said.

Lin Sanjiu exhaled, fogging up her breathing mask.

"Right. The more you look, the more it affects you. The more it affects you, the harder it is to resist looking again." She recalled her experience. "And... in that situation, it actually made sense to look. It was a logical, natural response. That's what trapped people who got too close."

Though Lin Sanjiu sometimes complained about her bad luck, she knew that surviving today made her one of the rare, fortunate ones. Survival had smiled on her once more. "I have another guess. The reason I wasn't affected too deeply and could still think straight was because I never got too close to the red-brick wall. Not everyone has a vortex or a Tornado Whip. If someone got close to the wall to inspect the figures, they'd probably be influenced much faster."

As she spoke, images of the dense crowd of figures surfaced in her mind. The scene stretched far and wide—from a few steps away from the red-brick wall to dozens of meters beyond. Figures stood frozen: posthumans, duoluozhong, and hybrids with traces of human genes.

It seemed that only those connected to "human" traits were affected. If a mouse had come by, the cracks in the wall would have remained just cracks. The tendency to see faces in patterns or textures was unique to humans.

"So what about my voice?" Mrs. Manas asked.

After passing through the crowd, the ground grew more open and smooth. Lin Sanjiu quickened her pace. "The figures' mouths gave me the answer."

She leapt over an old baby stroller ahead, or rather, a twisted heap of garbage that barely resembled a stroller. It was only mid-jump that she realized it was one. From beneath a cloth, a small, gray hand reached out, grazing her boot.

Lin Sanjiu landed without missing a beat and sprinted ahead. Behind her, a baby's sharp, desperate cries rang out, demanding to be picked up and cared for.

"The things here really know how to use sound to harm people," Lin Sanjiu said with a bitter smile, not slowing down. "That red-brick wall figure was the same. I initially thought that when I reached the figure with its mouth open, I'd hear the repeated conversation again... But in reality, after seeing it, any sound I heard would become the red-brick wall figure's voice."

Finding it hard to explain, she offered an analogy. "You know about the imprinting phenomenon in animal behavior, right? Oh, of course you do. I know it, so you must know it too."

Mrs. Manas cleared her throat.

"A newly hatched duckling will imprint on the first thing it sees as its mother," Lin Sanjiu continued. "In a way, the red-brick wall's voice was a form of imprinting. After I heard its voice for the first time, any voice I heard afterward turned into its voice. Even yours, the representation of my subconscious."

"But what's the purpose of that?"

"I don't know if it works on someone acting alone, but if you have a companion, that changes things," Lin Sanjiu explained. "When a posthuman reaches a figure with its mouth open, you hear your companion speaking with the red-brick wall figure's voice. When you reach a figure with its mouth closed, even if your companion is talking, you hear only silence."

Every time that voice in her mind went silent, Lin Sanjiu noticed she was facing a closed-mouth figure. This was what sparked her suspicion.

She tested it several times and realized she only heard the voice when the red-brick wall figure had its mouth open. At first, this seemed to support the idea that the voice belonged to the figure. But if she thought about it more deeply, it became suspicious.

"Because the figures on the wall are fixed, pre-existing patterns. Human speech, however, is unpredictable and uncontrollable. The figure couldn't possibly predict when someone would be standing in front of an open or closed-mouth figure."

She glanced back over her shoulder, though she knew she had already moved far away from the red-brick wall. "When you ask a question and your companion doesn't respond, or when your companion speaks and it sounds like the red-brick wall figure... you get caught up wondering if your companion has been replaced. That way, you'll never leave the wall's range."

"I get it," Mrs. Manas said with a sigh. "I'm a representation of your subconscious. A few cracks on a wall can't simply replace me. The real problem lies with your perception."

Once Lin Sanjiu realized her perception was the issue, the solution was simple: she stopped trusting herself and trusted the red-brick wall figure's voice instead.

Of course, it sounded simple, but how many people in the world truly had the courage to make such a brutal decision?

2

The red-brick wall incident had delayed her for over ten minutes. Fortunately, the rest of her journey went relatively smoothly. Despite a few close calls, she managed to catch up on lost time, like a deer weaving through countless hunter traps. When Mrs. Manas shouted, "Watch out!" Lin Sanjiu knew she had arrived.

She was still breathing the air from her oxygen tank, but when she reached out, she could feel the difference in the smoke ahead. It felt like the air was saturated, hanging like soaked cotton balls. Without breathing equipment, she doubted she could inhale this air at all.

"Get ready first," Mrs. Manas advised.

Lin Sanjiu gripped her [Tornado Whip] in one hand and pulled out the corpse she had obtained from the duoluozhong experience hall with the other.

"Sorry," she whispered to the card. "This burial site isn't exactly beautiful."

1

This time, she unleashed the tornado without holding anything back. The swirling wind tore into the smoke with a roar, ripping apart everything in its path. The moment her vision cleared, Lin Sanjiu threw the corpse with all her might toward the black, churning lake stirred up by the tornado.

Just like a bungee jump, the giant fish in the lake—if they could still be called fish—were hyper-sensitive to the presence of human flesh near the water.

Massive black waves surged up, propelled by some immense force from below. As the waves burst open like blooming flowers, a giant fish leapt into the air. In a flash, the corpse disappeared into its shadow. Lin Sanjiu had no time to see what the creature looked like; she quickly pressed the recorder, and the voice of the ordinary girl from the shelter echoed out. "You can control large creatures..."

1

That familiar heat spread across her neck again. Lin Sanjiu raised her hand and let out a sharp whistle.

As the giant fish splashed back into the water, the rising black waves drenched her from head to toe. The fish vanished beneath the surface. She held her breath and waited a few seconds before rapidly retreating several meters.

Where she had just been standing, the shoreline exploded into a web of cracks as some colossal creature from below smashed into it. A massive head covered in iron-like scales slowly rose from the murky water, staring directly at Lin Sanjiu.

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