The World After Death

Was there really a Netherworld Underworld after death? Was there really a hell or a heaven?

Was there really a Death World?

It was an age-old mystery that had puzzled humanity ever since people learned to think.

After all, once you died, you were dead. No one could die, come back, and answer the question.

So humanity came up with religions and all kinds of conjectures about the world after death.

But in the end, they were all just conjectures.

At that moment, Lu Yuanming knew that people really did have souls after death—and that there really was a Netherworld Underworld!

He had fallen from an immeasurable height. By the time Lu Yuanming came to his senses, he had appeared on the roof of a decrepit building. It was utterly bizarre. From the moment he had been able to think, he felt he had been falling for several minutes. A fall from that height would have flattened and smashed even an Alloy Flesh Body, yet he, a mere Flesh and Blood Body, had emerged completely unharmed. He couldn't make sense of it, and in the end could only chalk it up to the bizarre rules of the Death World.

As soon as he landed, Lu Yuanming rolled over and began feeling his body and head.

The head that had been smashed by the television earlier had been restored, and his body was free of pain and injury. His flesh was intact; he hadn't turned into a skeleton, zombie, or ghost. If he hadn't seen his body die with his own eyes, he might have thought everything that had happened was an illusion.

"...I'm dead!? I just died!?"

As Lu Yuanming frantically felt his body, a scream rang out. Not far away, a man dressed in a gaudily dressed style was hollering at the top of his lungs.

Only then did Lu Yuanming notice that there were three other people on the rooftop. One was Black and the other two were White. The Black man wore a battered leather jacket and looked like a homeless man. One of the White men was Gaudily Dressed. Rather than saying he was dressed like a drag queen, it was more like he was wearing bizarre clothes. He was probably one of the Beautiful Country's sexual minorities. The other White man wore a police uniform. He was tall and burly, but his face was broad and fleshy, and he looked downright menacing.

Those were all the people on the rooftop. The Gaudily Dressed man who had screamed was still shouting, while the White Police Officer silently stared at the sky. He pulled out a pistol and examined it carefully, then walked over to the Gaudily Dressed man and kicked him, sending him sprawling face-first onto the ground.

"Shut up, damn it! God, I've already seen a ghost and gone to hell, and now I still have to deal with people like you!" the White Police Officer said in a nearly despairing voice.

The Gaudily Dressed man fell over. It took him a while to turn around, and Lu Yuanming was surprised to see that he was bleeding. It was strange. The Gaudily Dressed man shouted, "That's gender discrimination! That's Gender Oppression! That's gender fascism! I'm going to sue you!"

The White Police Officer rolled his eyes, grabbed the Gaudily Dressed man, and pointed at the sky. "Get it through your head. We're dead! Dead! We're all in hell now, or whatever the hell this world after death is. Go find Hades or whatever and file a complaint!" As he spoke, the White Police Officer slapped the Gaudily Dressed man several times.

The Gaudily Dressed man was stunned by the beating. He stared blankly at the enormous vortex in the sky, then, after a long while, burst into tears. "Mommy, my Winnie... I'm dead. I'm really dead..."

The White Police Officer sighed and left the Gaudily Dressed man where he was. Then he looked at Lu Yuanming and the Black Homeless Man. After taking them in, he sighed again. "I'm the one who ought to be screaming in despair. One junkie, one Black guy... Whatever. Still better than this thing. So, what do you guys think?"

Before Lu Yuanming could answer, the Black Homeless Man sneered. "A Black guy? If I weren't dead, do you think you could get away with saying that anywhere? You'd be driven out of every place you went... But now, I guess we're all ghosts."

The White Police Officer shrugged, then looked at Lu Yuanming. Lu Yuanming didn't know what he looked like now—whether he had his original soul or the body he'd acquired after crossing over. But the White Police Officer had called him a junkie, so he guessed it was the latter. He said, "I died because of a Supernatural Power. What about you?"

The Black Homeless Man nodded. "I was killed by some kind of monster at a Subway Station."

The White Police Officer hesitated. Several seconds later, he sighed. "A month ago... Those things started appearing a month ago. Nobody believed it at first. We all thought it was a joke, but there were more and more of them, and more and more people died. Some people even said they'd seen the Death World underground... I died in a shootout, but an axe killed me. The monster had no head and was over six meters tall. Who the hell knows what it was..."

Pain showed on the White Police Officer's face, but the Black Homeless Man didn't seem to care.

They were dead already, and it turned out there really was a world after death. They still had their minds and bodies, which was good enough. At least they weren't in Hellfire or some monster-infested world. The Black Homeless Man had no ties to anyone, so dying made little difference to him.

But the White Police Officer clearly had family in New York—maybe parents, a wife and children, and plenty of other people he cared about. Now that he was dead, they were separated forever, and it was tormenting him.

While the three of them were talking, the Gaudily Dressed man actually walked to the edge of the building. He turned back and shouted at Lu Yuanming and the other two, "You gender bigots! I'll never forgive you! Never!"

With that, he jumped straight off the roof, which was at least thirty or forty stories high.

The three of them were horrified. They rushed to the edge of the roof and looked down. What they saw was a heap of mangled flesh. The Gaudily Dressed man had smashed into the ground so badly he was no longer recognizable as human. A flower of blood and flesh had bloomed beneath the building. He was dead as dead could be.

The three of them stared in horror, then turned to look at one another. After a long while, Lu Yuanming was the first to speak. "Looks like if you die again in the Death World, you really die for good?"

The Black Homeless Man and the White Police Officer had both gone pale.

It was a matter of ingrained assumptions.

They had fallen out of the vortex from a height of at least ten thousand meters, perhaps even over a hundred thousand, and they had emerged without a scratch. So they had naturally assumed that they couldn't be hurt by falling anymore. That was probably why the Gaudily Dressed man had jumped. But who could have known he'd be killed by the fall? It seemed the vortex had been the exception; they weren't immune to falling injuries.

The White Police Officer was about to say something when his pupils suddenly shrank. The Black Homeless Man and Lu Yuanming reacted the same way.

On the ground below the building were more than ten monsters. They looked like giant dogs, but their heads, necks, shoulders, and forelegs were also humanlike. Compared with the pool of flesh on the ground, the Man-faced Dogs were about three to four meters long. They looked savage and terrifying. They swarmed around the flower of flesh, tearing at it and even attacking one another as they fought over the remains.

There were monsters in the Death World!!

The White Police Officer, the Black Homeless Man, and Lu Yuanming were all stunned. For a moment, none of them knew what to say or think.

Just then, one of the Man-faced Dogs looked up, as if it had spotted Lu Yuanming and the others. The monsters began to howl. It wasn't a dog's bark, but a frenzied, humanlike racket—a hysterical roar filled with eerie, terrifying cries.

The three of them watched in horror as the Man-faced Dogs began climbing up the building. They were running up the outside wall!

The monsters were coming to eat them!