Life was never short of amusement—the only thing lacking was an eye for finding it. Take this abandoned, decaying shelter ship, for instance. It was filled everywhere with oppressive shadows and the stench of impending ruin. Yet after the old scholar floored the accelerator and sent everyone speeding onto the main road, Hao Ren had no time left to mourn the place's decline.
The jolting made it impossible for him to think at all...
He had still been worrying about how to get the old scholar and Willy near the Ancestor's Great Furnace before the situation worsened, but now it seemed those worries had been completely pointless. Scholar Auro could not only endure the youngsters' breakneck speed, but also the violent jolting that came with it. Shelter residents truly were extraordinary. As an old native who had spent his entire life in this harsh world, Scholar Auro's physique had long since become abnormal. Though he looked like a man on the verge of death, the old man simply could not be judged by ordinary standards. Hao Ren and the others were tossed about inside the vehicle, watching the ruined thousand-year-old cities and ten-thousand-year-old roads outside flash backward. Before they knew it, the gloom and oppression they had accumulated in Hearth City had faded away.
He was suddenly filled with the heroic feeling of racing across a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
The vehicle gradually left the sphere of Hearth City's influence. The factory buildings and several nearby landmarks slowly receded into tiny dots behind them, while ahead lay a vast, deserted urban wasteland. Dust billowed from the dry, filthy road, rising several meters into the air as the vehicle passed before swirling away behind them. Figures occasionally emerged from the tumbledown buildings lining both sides of the road. They were wasteland drifters living