Entering Doomsday 4

I held up my right hand with the palm facing upward. After I activated my superpower, a large amount of flame surged into existence above my palm.

The flames converged toward the center, forming a huge fireball nearly half a meter in diameter.

Superpowers were a concept that appeared in many fantasy stories. Some could stop time, some could control minds, and some could transform the body. Others had complicated mechanics that would take hundreds or thousands of words just to explain clearly, enough to leave listeners completely bewildered.

Unlike those superpowers that were either powerful or complicated, mine was extremely simple.

In a word, it was Flame Manipulation.

I could summon flames from thin air and manipulate them, or manipulate existing flames within my field of vision. It was simple to the point of being classic. Almost every fantasy story centered around battles between superpowers had at least one early-stage character capable of controlling fire. As for what those fictional characters could do, I could accomplish at least eighty or ninety percent of it—if not all of it.

The "Fireflies" I had summoned earlier were, in essence, one tiny flame after another. Naturally, there was a reason they could be used as reconnaissance tools.

Under normal circumstances, flames could not exist without the three elements of combustion: fuel, an oxidizer, and heat. But my flames appeared out of thin air and did not require those material conditions. Or rather, all those material conditions were actually replaced by my mind.

My mind was the fuel, the oxidizer, and the heat.

In other words, my flames were my mind. The "Fireflies" scattered outside were "me" scattered outside, so naturally, they could replace me in sensing their surroundings.

At the same time, as flames, they naturally possessed powerful destructive force against matter.

I slowly raised the fiercely burning fireball, and it collapsed inward toward its center, transforming into a blazing orb the size of an eyeball. Then I pointed forward, and the orb slammed into the sturdy concrete wall before me.

It met no resistance and did not explode. The high-density orb pierced through the concrete wall as effortlessly as a spoon plunged into soft tofu, then emerged into the space outside the basement.

Through the mental connection between myself and the flame, I successfully obtained a view of the area outside the basement.

Then I could not help holding my breath.

There was nothing—

There was nothing at all in the space outside the basement.

No earth, no sky; no colors, no sounds... only endless darkness.

From the outside perspective, the basement where I stood was merely a tiny concrete box suspended in boundless emptiness. Beyond that, there was nothing. Even when I controlled the orb to move directly below it, I could not find anything supporting this "concrete box." Not only were there no other objects—even the most basic air and gravity did not exist.

It was like outer space, but outer space at least contained countless stars, cosmic radiation harmful to the human body, and extremely thin cosmic dust. In a sense, it was fairly "lively."

This place was different. It was utterly and completely silent—the Land of Nothingness.

It was as though all matter had reached its end. This was space-time after everything was over.

Loneliness, terror, suffocation.

The boundless emptiness seemed to transform into boundless suffocation and pour into my airways. This basement was practically a tiny speck of dust in an enormous afterlife, while I was the only passenger on that speck, liable to turn into a meaningless bubble at any moment and dissolve without a trace into the void.

After sitting dazed for a long while, I dispersed the external orb and its perspective, then sat on the ground and tried to reorganize my thoughts.

The route of "returning to the real world from outside the board" was definitely impassable.

Fortunately, although the outside was empty space, the air in the basement did not leak out through the opening I had made. Besides, once I entered the "Second Form," I could function normally in a vacuum, and sealing such a small opening would not be difficult.

Looking on the bright side, this phenomenon allowed me to deduce another truth. Certain physical laws did not apply in this place. That discovery could also count as an "exploration gain."

So what should I do next? Should I study the conditions for the cave's appearance again?

If the "Fireflies" I had left in the real world were still connected to me, I could try some other methods. But the connection had already been severed.

It was rather self-mocking. When Chang'an had come to my door that morning, I had still been thinking that if he had truly encountered a strange incident, I would have the chance to use my superpowers to show off. During the process, I could display my abilities like a manga character while explaining my "ability settings." As expected, eight or nine things in life did not go as one wished. My superpower was completely useless in a situation like this.

Someone once said, "All fear comes from insufficient firepower." But no matter how powerful my firepower was, it probably would not help with the situation I was facing now.

Perhaps this was also the hopeless situation I was destined to encounter, a fate that would arrive sooner or later.

My superpower did possess the straightforward, overwhelming strength that anyone could understand. But strange phenomena were treacherous and ever-changing, and no one knew what form they would take to bring about someone's death. Even if I held a spear capable of destroying everything and a shield capable of defending against everything, there were still many things I could not do.

I pushed myself up by my knees and stood, pacing around while searching the shelves for other useful clues.

The yellow cardboard boxes on the shelves were not all completely empty. Some still held a few small objects, such as cartoon stickers, plastic keychains, and candles. None of them looked capable of helping with my current situation. Before, I would have excitedly considered taking them away as souvenirs of my visit. Now, I no longer had the inclination.

To concentrate my mind, I stopped maintaining the "Fireflies" that provided lighting from every direction. Instead, I lit a candle I had picked up from the shelf and placed it on the floor. The basement returned to darkness, and that single point of light helped me focus. At the same time, it reminded me of some things from the past.

Speaking of which, when I was in the ninth grade of middle school and had just awakened my superpower, the trigger had also involved a candle...

People who had experienced near-death situations often said that when someone was about to die, they would involuntarily recall the past.

Could the fact that I had suddenly begun recalling the past now also mean that I knew I was going to die here?

Time continued to pass second by second, and an unknown length of time went by.

My analysis of the predicament still had made no progress.

Since my stomach was not very hungry yet, that meant there was still a long time until dawn.

However, this was space-time beyond the real world. Perhaps the flow of time also followed alien rules. The outside world might have already gone through more than a day, just like the story of Guānqí Lànkē in classical tales of the strange. I had been abandoned by the world in this place beyond the universe.

Marxism said that a person was the sum of their social relations. At this moment, there was no doubt that every connection I had with society had been severed, and I did not even know whether I could return. If I died here, it would be more accurate to say that I had died as an unnamed animal than as a human being.

Perhaps affected by this strange environment, I even came up with an even stranger thought—could it be that I had been a resident of this basement from the beginning, and had never lived in the real world? Could my entire life up to this point have been nothing more than an illusion?

I felt my pocket. Inside was the key to my home, but that could not prove I had ever lived in a home outside. It could not even prove that the "real world" in my memories truly existed. A key was a concept paired with a lock. There were no locks here, so this piece of metal could not be proven to be a key.

The same applied to my ID card and loose change. Those things only had meaning within society. Once separated from society, they were merely objects with unusual shapes—just like me now.

All meaning constructed upon the concept of "society" had vanished here. Whether these objects, my personality, or even the clothes I wore, everything seemed destined to be dissolved by this dim space, revealing the most primitive, natural nakedness beneath.

Amid that strange shudder, I felt a slightly tipsy emotion. In this domain cut off from everything, I seemed to be gradually transforming into some heterogeneous existence I had never imagined.

One who lives apart from society is either a beast or a god.

Incredibly, although I was filled with fear, unease, and pessimism, I alone felt neither regret nor panic.

Because I had entered this place with determination and resolve.

As I had mentioned before, one reason I had kept searching for adventures beyond reality was that I deeply wanted to know what kind of person I would become when the time came. To put it boldly, I believed this might also be classified as a desire for the Way. And now, facing hardship, facing despair, facing death alone at arm's reach... I seemed to have finally searched out a truer self.

The version of me from ordinary daily life might have felt proud, excited, and happy about who I was now. But the current me did not have such passionate emotions.

It was not that I had been controlled by negative emotions. On the contrary, I felt more relieved than ever before about who I was now.

What a clearing of the clouds to reveal the sun. No matter how many negative emotions surged within me, they alone could not taint this pure state of mind.

That said, I would not say something like, "If one hears the Way in the morning, one may die content in the evening."

I was extremely greedy. This level of reward could not satisfy my appetite.

I would use my own strength to "clear" this predicament and prove that I was not an early-stage character who would casually die in an adventure story beyond reality.

Afterward, I wanted to return home and see Maza again. Sooner or later, I would make her spit out all her secrets. I also wanted to investigate the secrets of Luóshān and the Demon Hunter, and figure out how the supernatural powers in this world were distributed among the various factions. There were countless other things I wanted to explore.

—So, here was the question: Could I really do it?

Just as negative emotions could not taint my sunlit state of mind, no matter how relieved I felt, I could not deny the objective existence of this hopeless situation.

It was precisely because I was calm that I understood.

Perhaps this was the end of my adventure.

My adventure was going to end the moment it had begun.