A... dream?
Beyond the window lay a dusky blue dawn. Lush vegetation seemed all the more abundant amid the bone-chilling wind, while the faint crowing of roosters in the distance roused the entire city from its slumber.
Lin Chen sat up in bed and raised his hand, seeing the metallic gleam of the Nano Exoskeleton Armor he had put on before sleeping.
Turning back, he saw that neither the locked doors and windows nor the alarms and miniature bombs attached to them showed the slightest sign of having been triggered.
So everything he had experienced before... had been a dream?
In that dream, he seemed to have returned to the helpless, vulnerable state of his youth as an ordinary person. The technological weapons and vast store of knowledge he had once been proud of had vanished into nothing, and he did not even have a single piece of basic clothing.
He had walked naked through a city that seemed to have been ravaged by a great fire... No, to be precise, a city reduced to embers.
Skyscrapers melting like wax figures amid distorted, roiling heatwaves, charred ruins, bone ash drifting through the sky, and a sea of fire blanketing the entire horizon...
Even in the instant he woke, he could still see countless humans fleeing in panic beneath the pursuit of madmen and shadows. The raging blaze devoured everything, while boundless seas of fire rose everywhere, spreading across the entire district as far as the eye could see...
Most bizarrely, in the very instant he completely left that world of embers, he had vaguely glimpsed a horrifying, grotesque sight.
Amid the shattered streets and melted city, he vaguely saw blackened, twisted monsters within the embers.
Their limbs had been torn apart, their bodies covered in burn marks. They writhed, split