I Met You, Just as You Met Me. (Part 2)

For some reason, Fang Jie always felt that something was off.

It was not Natasha's trust, distrust, or permissiveness. That was normal: once someone carried too much, it became difficult for them to make choices lightly.

So perhaps there was another way—by taking action:

"—If I do not don these robes, how will all living beings know that my worldly ties have been severed and the golden sea has run dry?"

Topaz belonged to the latter kind; the Astral Express crew were mostly the former.

And he...

"Where are you going?"

Like a butterfly in the night, Seele descended from above and landed before Fang Jie, her face sour.

"There's a Fragmentum up ahead. It's full of monsters."

She really was so similar.

Not to the Black Seele or White Seele he had yet to meet, but to that person he had yet to meet... the one who had gone to the end of Nihility.

"The Fragmentum is exactly where I'm going."

Fang Jie did not slow down as he passed Seele.

Frankly speaking, the Trailblazing squad was somewhat inefficient... If they had pulled off some deus ex machina, Cocolia would probably have welcomed them as Nameless and trusted them more.

But Dan Heng probably was not in that mood. He knew too much, carried too much, and had been hunted by that Blade guy as he drifted through the galaxy. His whole being screamed misery and exhaustion...

He lived without being treated as a criminal, yet without being treated as a person either.

So Cocolia could not trust him.

Every last one of them was too free. Even Dan Heng, who seemed steady, had the aura of an old prisoner, an old fugitive.

But that was Trailblazing, and it had its own logic. There was no reason strong people had to accommodate the weak.

"Looking to die."

The exceptional Seele followed him. "If you need medicine, you might not be able to find it in the Fragmentum."

Still, she did not try to persuade Fang Jie to turn back. There had never been a shortage of people who went into the Fragmentum to die.

"Follow me. If you're looking for something, Rivet Town is the place to go."

The beautiful exceptional person, Seele, was once again... turning her back on all living beings.

Watching her back, Fang Jie tried his best not to focus on strange things. The back of his hand—such a beautiful back was missing a stigma.

He did not care which Fragmentum they went to. They were all the same. So they traveled together once more. Along the way, he saw even more numb miners and wandering shells of people, all crushed by the pressure of survival until they could no longer see the freedom of life. He had known all this already; seeing it with his own eyes was hardly surprising.

With Seele around, he had yet to see anything more malicious, and few dared come near them.

She was like a guardian of darkness. Wherever she went, everything stopped.

Through violence.

So there were probably even more people afraid of her.

Feeling increasingly strange along the way, Fang Jie simply asked his companion, "Seele, have you heard any strange voice-over narration?"

Seele looked utterly baffled. "What kind of nonsense are you talking about? There, we're here. Rivet Town is up ahead. This place is full of weird crap. What are you looking for here?"

Most of Rivet Town had already been eroded by the Fragmentum. This was a phenomenon that required the Society of Geniuses to provide a professional, comprehensive academic assessment; it was not something a little country girl from the countryside like Seele could understand.

But she knew it was a cursed place where cursed things kept appearing.

Those monsters possessed an instinct to chase and kill living creatures. Ordinary people would die the moment they encountered one, even fully armed Silvermane Guards...

Heh. Where were there any Silvermane Guards left in the Underworld? There were only militiamen.

She usually entered the Fragmentum alone, searching for supplies that Fragmentum monsters had little interest in destroying. This was also how many people in the Underworld scavenged—gambling with their lives.

In this age, tomorrow would always be worse than today.

"I'm warning you, I'm busy. I have to leave soon, so I don't have time to waste with you. If you delay me too long, don't expect me to fish you out."

Seele really was busy. It was only because the vagrants had been drawn away by the Upperworld's unexpected distribution of supplies today that she could leave the Great Mine area at all.

"Seele really is beautiful and kindhearted."

Fang Jie smiled as he said something that made her expression worsen.

Seele swung her scythe onto her shoulder, its glowing blade aimed at him. "I think you're asking for a beating."

Fang Jie was not. He looked at the Fragmentum creature charging toward them. Before Seele could turn into a phantom and vanish, a streak of lightning had already appeared from thin air as a slash.

"I do have a little ability to protect myself."

These were exactly what he had come looking for.

"Tch."

Seele was somewhat irritated. Why had he just stood there before? He was wasting her time.

Pathstriders were rare. There were only a few in the entire Underworld. Seele had suspected that all those good-looking outsiders might be Pathstriders, but when it turned out to be true, she still felt annoyed.

She hated anything that made her feel inferior, and she would strike back sharply, holding nothing back emotionally!

Like a caterpillar.

Fang Jie did not let her leave and invited Seele to come with him. "Let's go. I want to take a look deeper in the Fragmentum and kill all the monsters while I'm at it."

"Big words. How many can you kill?"

Seele did not refuse. No matter how many, killing one was still killing one, even if it changed nothing.

It was not meaningless.

Among the things Seele did not know but Fang Jie did, the Fragmentum was spawned by the Stellaron. It transformed anything and any space it touched into special Fragmentum constructs. This erosion would not disappear out of thin air even if the Stellaron were sealed away. Even the space station could only choose to seal it up.

Yes, not just Belobog—the space station under Herta's command found it troublesome as well.

Within these Fragmentums, Fragmentum creatures generally existed in an eroded form. They seemed to retain the memories and habits of their originals, but their outward manifestations were vastly different, often displaying intense hostility toward outsiders.

Without question, barring an "accident," objects eroded by the Fragmentum and their originals should be regarded as two entirely unrelated existences. Any fantasies one held about them would lead to serious consequences.

Aside from erosion, the Fragmentum also recorded the aether information of things it came into contact with, mixed it with the data preserved by the Fragmentum itself, and produced grafted Fragmentum constructs.

In every world eroded by the cancer of all worlds, countless relics, Fragmentum monsters, and even mysterious isolated extradimensional spaces were born in every corner.

When Natasha allowed Fang Jie to act freely and think of whatever he wanted to do to help her, Fang Jie gave it some thought and decided to begin with the Fragmentum.

Survival was the first guarantee. Whether in the Upperworld or the Underworld, Fragmentum erosion was a major threat.

As for the shortage of supplies, the root of the problem was that the geomarrow was running dry, and the energy needed to sustain Belobog would eventually be exhausted—after all, although Belobog's technology had suffered gaps in its development, technologies similar to artificially synthesized starch still remained. At the very least, the machines were still there, built to last.

Their Sun Ribbon was sweet enough to kill.

But all of that rested on consuming precious energy. Belobog's greatest energy expenditure was neither heating nor producing supplies, but manufacturing weapons and arming the Silvermane Guards against Fragmentum monsters.

And Fragmentum monsters...

Were endless to Belobog.

Without drawing his blade, Fang Jie led Seele deeper into Rivet Town. When Fragmentum monsters rushed at them, bearing neither good nor evil intentions and simply coming to fight, he would often merely raise his right hand as though aiming it.

"Those who see me shall be thus—Four Souls Severed."

Then, amid flashing lightning, without regard for delusions or obsessions, the moving dead things suddenly melted like steel liquefied by intense heat.

Before the viscous molten steel could spill onto the ground, it immediately expanded and exploded, surging outward in rippling waves like a tsunami. In the end, it splashed onto nothing at all, simply vanishing into ash in midair.

This destruction was absolute. It even destroyed part of their existence on the informational level, causing their structures to collapse and leading them to ruin.

Seele stopped again in the posture of someone about to charge, her expression indescribable.

What the hell?

Whenever a monster entered their field of vision, lightning struck it, and then there was no more monster. Compared with her having to rush in and cut them down herself, this was far more efficient.

She could not understand it. After all, she had not read much.

As for Pathstriders and such, she just walked her path. There was no need to think so much.

"You're... pretty good at fighting."

That was praise. In the Underworld—no, in Belobog—strength deserved praise, because that power was destined to be used against monsters.

"On the contrary, Seele, I'm very weak."

Fang Jie looked regretfully at the Fragmentum around them.

"Originally, I had considered cutting away this entire space, but I can't. It's like trying to cut water with a blade. Its energy is inexhaustible. Unless I sever the core that sustains it, this space will only keep restoring itself. All I can do is erase the monsters' information structures and prevent the Fragmentum from reclaiming and reproducing them over and over."

Unable to cure the source, he could only eliminate the surface manifestations. Even these incomplete manifestations could still be patched together and used. This kind of "sealing" was not what he wanted.

Unless...

Seele curled her lip and could not be bothered to respond. She did not understand.

"So you didn't come here looking for medicine. You came looking for that Stellaron thing? For that thing, you, your people, and even a Silvermane Guard all came down to the Underworld... Is it really that important?"

"I'm not interested in the Stellaron. And it isn't just one Silvermane Guard. Bronya is here too. You haven't met her yet, have you?"

"Who? Sounds like some young lady from up above."

"You could say that, though she was born in the Underworld. On the other hand, Miss Natasha was born in the Upperworld."

"Shut up. Natasha is different. Natasha isn't one of those surface people! They stay up there in comfort and never care what the underground has become. They never think about whether the people of the Underworld live or die!"

That was true. The underground had long been abandoned. The Silvermane Guards were being abandoned too. In the end, everyone would be abandoned.

This was not justice. It was merely lingering on.

Fang Jie had no need to dress up that injustice, especially when it came from the mouth of one of the abandoned.

They had already gone deep into Rivet Town. This place was likewise filled with the style of the Underworld: rock walls everywhere, no clear district planning, only scattered mining areas and small settlements, like the outskirts of Belobog.

And even here, they could still see that enormous pillar known as the Core Furnace, the passage connecting the surface and underground. It had long been sealed off—not only by the Upperworld's blockade, but also by Svarog. He occupied the Core Furnace, drove away humans, and isolated the upper and lower levels.

Seele had long grown used to such things. She was happy to relax and follow Fang Jie onward, until they reached...

"So we actually made it here. Not a single monster gave us any trouble. Not bad."

She could speak properly when she wanted to. Fang Jie accepted the compliment with a smile.

He also noticed the sudden softness in Seele's tone and asked directly, "This is?"

"Nothing. Just an orphanage."

Despite her words, Seele looked here more than she did when searching other places for supplies, and she became more capable of speaking properly.

She was in a good mood. She did not need to lift a hand while traversing the Fragmentum, and being able to reap the benefits was actually quite nice.

Fang Jie, meanwhile, gazed at the orphanage in realization, matching the location to his memories: the orphanage before them had once been a refuge for homeless children in the Underworld. After the Fragmentum threat drew near, Natasha, the orphanage's guardian, led the children away from their old home. From then on, the courtyard of the old residence no longer echoed with joyful laughter and games of chase.

"So this is the place."

Amid Rivet Town's monotonous scenery, he took a good look at the orphanage.

It was a place that produced remarkable people. Not only Cocolia—Bronya and Seele had both come from this orphanage, and Natasha had been its director until the evacuation.

It could be said that this orphanage ranked among the very best in all of Belobog.

After all, the Underworld had once held a very high status.

Belobog needed geomarrow. This apocalyptic winter city's demand for energy had never ceased growing, but The Eternal Freeze cut off any possibility of outward expansion, so humanity could only develop downward.

At the City Builder's call, people entered the underground, excavated mineral veins, and established mining zones. At least before the upper and lower levels were sealed off, living underground had been an honor.

It meant that, for the survival of civilization as a whole, an individual had willingly chosen a difficult job.

Those past days, those things about dedication and sacrifice...

Were more worth seeing than the Eternal Freeze Stele, and they stirred his heart, even if no one would ever bring children here to teach them again.

It made one wonder: in Belobog, the apocalyptic winter city, how were people supposed to find the value of life?

Combat and labor undoubtedly occupied an enormous share of society. People found meaning in life through them, not to grow rich, but so civilization could survive.

At least, that was how it had been in the beginning.

Unfortunately, even beautiful intentions had to face reality... and there would also be deranged Pathstriders, weeping and laughing at the world about how worthless it all was...