Entering Doomsday 4

My right hand, held up, was positioned palm-up. As I activated my superpower, a large amount of flame surged into existence above my palm.

The flames converged in the center, forming a fireball with a diameter of nearly half a meter.

Superpowers are a concept found in many fantasy stories. Some can stop time, some can control minds, and some can alter the body. Others have complex mechanical settings that take hundreds or thousands of words to explain, leaving the listener utterly confused.

Unlike those powerful or complex superpowers, mine is incredibly simple.

In a nutshell, it's "Flame Manipulation."

I can summon flames out of thin air and control them, or I can control existing flames within my field of vision. It's so simple it's almost cliché; in any fantasy story centered around superpower battles, there's almost always an early-stage character who can manipulate fire. And what those fictional characters can do, I can do at least eighty to ninety percent of, if not all.

The "fireflies" I summoned earlier were, in essence, just small flames. The reason they could be used as scouting tools is, naturally, not without its logic.

Normal flames require the three elements of combustion to exist: fuel, an oxidizer, and heat. My flames, however, are generated from nothing, requiring no such material conditions. Or rather, all material conditions are replaced by my spirit.

My spirit is the fuel, the oxidizer, and the heat.

In other words, my flames are my spirit. The "fireflies" I scattered externally are essentially "myself" scattered externally, naturally allowing me to perceive my surroundings.

At the same time, as expected, since they are flames, they possess immense destructive power.

I slowly lifted the raging fireball, and the fireball collapsed inward, transforming into a scorching orb of light the size of an eyeball. Immediately, I pointed forward, and the orb of light struck the solid concrete wall before me.

Without resistance, without explosion, the high-density orb of light pierced the concrete wall with the ease of a spoon plunging into tofu, emerging into the space outside the basement.

Through the spiritual connection with the flame, I successfully gained a perspective from outside the basement.

Then, I couldn't help but hold my breath.

There was nothing—

Outside the basement, there was nothing.

No ground, no sky; no color, no sound... only an endless darkness.

From the external perspective, the basement I was in was just a small concrete box suspended in an infinite void, and nothing else. Even when I moved the orb of light directly below, I couldn't find any material supporting this "concrete box." Forget other objects; even basic air and gravity were nonexistent.

It was like outer space, but outer space at least has countless stars, harmful cosmic radiation, and extremely thin cosmic dust, making it "lively" in a sense.

This place, however, was different. Utterly dead silent, it was the Land of Nothingness.

It was as if all matter had met its Doomsday; this was a completed spacetime.

Loneliness, terror, suffocation.

This boundless, empty void seemed to transform into boundless suffocation, flooding my respiratory tract. This basement was merely a tiny speck of dust in the vast afterlife, and I was the sole passenger on that speck, liable to turn into meaningless foam and dissolve into nothingness in the void at any moment.

After a long period of stunned silence, I dispersed the external orb of light and perspective, then sat on the ground to try and reorder my thoughts.

The direction of "returning to the real world through a path outside the board" was definitely not going to work.

Fortunately, although the outside was a void, the air in the basement did not leak out through the opening I had made. While I could move normally in a vacuum environment once I entered "Second Form," and blocking such a small opening wasn't difficult.

Looking for a silver lining, I could also deduce another truth from this phenomenon. That is, in this place, certain physical laws were not in effect. This discovery could be considered a "research reward."

So, what should I do next? Should I re-examine the conditions for the cave's appearance?

If there were still a connection between the "fireflies" set in the real world and me, I could try other methods, but the connection was already broken.

It's almost self-mocking. This morning, when Chang'an came looking for me, I thought that if he really encountered a strange incident, I would have a chance to show off my superpower and, in the process, like a comic book character, explain my "ability settings" while demonstrating my power... Life is indeed full of disappointments; my superpower was completely useless in this situation.

Someone once said, "All fear stems from insufficient firepower," but even with the strongest firepower, it probably wouldn't help with the current situation.

Perhaps this was also a desperate situation I was destined to face, a fate that would arrive sooner or later.

My superpower, while possessing a simple and brute strength that anyone could understand, was still limited. Anomalous entities are unpredictable; no one knows what form they will take to kill someone. Even with a spear capable of destroying everything and a shield capable of defending against everything, there are ultimately many things that cannot be done.

I pushed myself up by my knees and paced around, searching the shelves for any other useful clues.

The yellow cardboard boxes on the shelves weren't entirely empty; some contained small items like cartoon stickers, plastic keychains, and candles. None of them seemed helpful for the current situation. If it were before, I would have excitedly thought about taking them as souvenirs of my visit, but I had no such inclination now.

To concentrate my thoughts, I stopped maintaining the "fireflies" that provided illumination from all directions and instead lit a candle I had picked up from the shelf, placing it on the ground. The basement returned to darkness, and a single light source in the darkness helped me focus, while also bringing back some past memories.

Speaking of which, during my third year of middle school, when I first awakened my superpower, the trigger was also related to a candle...

People who have had near-death experiences often say that when one is close to death, they involuntarily recall the past.

Am I suddenly recalling the past now because I know I'm going to die here?

Time continued to tick by, and after an unknown amount of time had passed.

My analysis of the predicament had still made no progress.

Since I wasn't very hungry, it meant there was still a long time until dawn.

However, this was a spacetime outside the real world; perhaps the flow of time here followed different rules. The outside world might have already passed more than a day, just like the "Guānqí Lànkē" described in classical strange tales; I had been abandoned by the world in this extraterrestrial place.

Marxism states that a person is the sum of their social relations. At this moment, I was undoubtedly cut off from all social connections, and I didn't even know if I could return. If I were to die like this, it would be less like dying as a human and more like dying as an nameless animal.

Perhaps influenced by the strange environment, I even had a more bizarre thought—what if I had been a resident of this basement from the very beginning, never having lived in the real world, and my life up to this point was merely my hallucination?

I felt my pockets; they contained my house key, but this couldn't prove that I had lived in my house outside, nor could it prove that the "real world" in my memory was real. A key is a concept that pairs with a lock; there were no locks here, so this piece of metal couldn't be proven to be a key.

My ID card and loose change were the same; these items only had meaning within society. Once detached from society, they were merely substances with peculiar shapes—just like me now.

All meaning constructed upon the concept of "society" had vanished here. Whether it was these objects, my personality, or even the clothes I was wearing, they all seemed to be dissolving in this dim space, revealing the most primitive and natural nakedness.

I felt a slight intoxication amidst a strange shiver. In this realm, isolated from everything, I felt as if I were gradually transforming into some unforeseen heterogeneous existence.

Those who live apart from the flock are either beasts or gods.

Incredibly, though I am now filled with fear, unease, and pessimism, I feel neither regret nor panic.

This is because I entered with resolve and awareness.

As I've mentioned before, part of the reason I've been on a quest for adventures beyond reality is that I desperately wanted to know what kind of person I would become. To put it boldly, I believe this could be classified as a "desire for the Way." And now, facing hardship, facing despair, facing the imminent, solitary death... I seem to have finally found a more authentic self.

In my everyday life, I might have been proud of myself, excited and happy, but the current me doesn't possess such grand emotions.

It's not that I've been consumed by negative emotions; quite the opposite. I feel an unprecedented sense of release regarding my present self.

How clear the skies have become. No matter how many negative emotions surge within my heart, they cannot touch this pure state of mind.

However, I won't say, "If I can hear the Way in the morning, I can die content in the evening."

I am incredibly greedy. This level of reward is not enough to satisfy my appetite.

I want to "clear" this predicament with my own strength, to prove that I am not a mere early-game character who dies easily in adventures beyond reality.

Afterward, I want to return home and see Maza again; I will make her spill all her secrets sooner or later. I also want to explore the secrets of Luoshan and the Demon Hunter, to understand how supernatural powers are distributed and organized within this world. There are countless other things I wish to explore.

--So, the question arises, can I truly achieve this?

Just as negative emotions cannot infect my clear state of mind, no amount of serenity can deny an objectively desperate situation.

Because I am calm, I understand this clearly.

Perhaps, this is the end of my adventure.

My adventure is about to end before it has even truly begun.