Shelter (4K)

Wu Heng's boots crunched over a floor covered in dense, charred clumps, crushing coal-like crystals beneath his feet.

Cybil swept her flashlight back and forth across the ashes.

"It looks like there was a fire here," she said.

Thud, thud, thud!

A string of light footsteps ran overhead through a hole in the second floor. From their weight and rhythm, it was clearly a child.

"Sharon!" Rose hurried after it.

Wu Heng and Cybil followed close behind. As a cultist, Anna was terrified of this place so far from the shelter. After hesitating for a moment, she did not follow. Instead, she crouched down, wrapped her arms around her knees, buried her head, and waited for the three of them.

Chasing after her, Rose climbed the stairs to the second floor. It was a collapsed ruin, with corroded and broken factory equipment scattered everywhere. There were even many traces of fires that had burned down to charcoal.

At the very center of the room was a massive pit roughly six meters in diameter.

Corroded steel beams lay loosely across it. Beneath them was an immensely deep abyss, with rolling magma visible at the bottom.

"Who are you?"

Standing at the stairwell entrance, Rose heard the continuous sobbing of a little girl.

She followed the sound with her eyes.

On the other side of the pit, a little girl in a purple dress was crouched with her back to Rose, crying incessantly.

She looked utterly helpless and pitiful.

Though Rose already felt that something was wrong with the girl, she sensed that the girl was connected to Sharon. Her maternal instincts surged, and she no longer hesitated.

Stepping onto the steel plates spanning the pit, each only about a palm's width wide, she wobbled her way toward the other side.

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