By the next morning, everything had settled.
In just half a day and one night, more than three hundred thousand refugees from various factions, along with the armed forces from their shelters, had successfully reached the protection of the mine base on foot—the most primitive way of traveling.
For ordinary people, walking dozens of kilometers over half a day and a night was an enormous burden. Many malnourished survivors were so exhausted they could barely lift their feet. But when they realized they had finally reached their destination, arrived at the safe, enormous military base, and truly found shelter—with no terrifying demons pursuing them—even the most exhausted among them cheered in heartfelt celebration or broke down sobbing.
As far as the survivors were concerned, as long as they escaped that hellish city at the end of the world and stayed under the army's protection, they would no longer have to spend their days in fear, barely clinging to life and worrying about their own survival, as they had for the past three months.
Of course, not everyone was as naive as those refugees and cheered in celebration. Take the former leader of the underground black market, for instance—that woman named Hong Yanrong?
At that moment, as one of the first people to escape the terrible city and reach the base, she naturally wasn't cheering alongside the refugees or registering to move into the temporary underground mine. Instead, she stood on a hill in front of the base with dozens of her family's fiercely loyal armed guards, gazing toward the distant city of Guixu, which had almost vanished from sight.
"..."
Dawn had broken, and the sun had risen over the western mountains behind her, yet the sky above distant Guixu remained gray.
She knew it was surely because the ruins