Carnival of Flies

November 7. Luo Island lay silent.

The bustle and prosperity of the past were nowhere to be seen. Amid the desolation and bleakness, everything seemed to have returned to its most original state.

The downtown district, once teeming with people, now stood empty. The once-lively shopping streets and malls had all shuttered and gone dark. Even the cleaners were gone. Only scraps of paper and trash on the ground twitched weakly in the wind.

The Calamity Wind had arrived, and the entire Endless Sea had fallen into an unprecedented silence.

It was like lying awake in the darkness after the lights had gone out on a long, endless night, straining to hear every tiny sound outside the window, anxious and jumpy, mistaking a bow's shadow for a snake. Bad news came one after another.

Just yesterday, Freedom City—the most famous city in the southern Endless Sea—had been utterly destroyed...

That offshore town, pieced together from discarded drilling platforms by oil workers in the past, had been transformed after don't know how many years of expansion and reconstruction.

With its uniquely open laws, it had become the world's largest company registration center. No matter where you came from or who you were, as long as you paid 150,000, you could obtain a shell company recognized by most sovereign city-states in the present world. Amid these many factors, its exceptional advantages had made it the operational foothold and money-laundering hub for untold amounts of offshore capital.

Now, it had all gone up in flames.

Amid the tides of disaster beasts, it had completely collapsed, crumbled, and become ruins.

In fact, long before that, it had already been abandoned by the people who had made it what it was.

And news like this was simply too numerous to count. More brutal and more