Hope of growing stronger

"Bastards!"

Tianyang grabbed a nearby shelf and pulled himself off the floor, then hopped to the doorway on one foot. The boy shoved the heavy door shut, watching as the metal slab was about to seal off the darkness in the corridor-and those pale ghostly flames.

A hand reached in, wedging itself between the door and its frame.

The metal door would no longer close.

"Damn it!"

Tianyang raised his dagger and brought it down. The sharp alloy blade sliced through the rotten hand as easily as tofu.

At least, it cut away most of the palm.

Only then could the door close. Tianyang quickly locked it, but a relentless pounding had already begun outside, accompanied by the Wanderers' oppressive wheezing.

The boy pushed an iron cabinet against the door to barricade it, then carefully stepped around the severed palm on the floor.

Finally, he wiped the Wanderer's bodily fluids off his dagger. The yellow tinge on the blade's metal surface, however, told him it was no longer as sharp as before.

The Wanderers' bodily fluids were corrosive. Though their potency was limited, they were still enough to dull the dagger.

Even so, Tianyang put it away. His mother had given it to him, after all.

It was the first gift Tianyang had received since he could remember, and the boy treasured it.

He sat on the document-strewn floor, leaning against a shelf. His exertions had aggravated his injury.

Blood covered the boy's thigh. He hurriedly grabbed the first-aid kit, opened it, and took out a bottle of disinfectant spray.

He sprayed the wound thoroughly, disinfecting it and washing away the blood around it.

Then, taking a scalpel and tweezers, Tianyang extracted a bullet from his thigh.

He closed the wound with a surgical stapler, injected a painkiller, and applied hemostatic tape. Once he had finished, the boy let the tools scatter across the floor. His face inside the helmet was covered in sweat.

After a little while, Tianyang took a survival ration and fitted it into his protective suit's extractor. Once he activated it, a straw rose inside his helmet.

The boy took the straw between his lips, and a steady stream of high-energy liquid food, enough to fuel a day's activity, flowed into his mouth.

Black mist permeated every corner of the Inverse Realm, and absorbing light and heat was far from all it did. Apart from Ascenders, ordinary people exposed to the black mist without protection would die within fifteen minutes.

Death could be considered the best possible outcome. Some people were instead contaminated by the black mist and eventually transformed into things like those outside the door.

That was why liquid food was essential in the Inverse Realm. The extractor allowed people to replenish their food without breaking their suits' seals.

After consuming a ration of liquid food, Tianyang finally felt some warmth return, and his hands and feet were no longer icy cold. He moved his body a little, then took the remaining hemostatic tape and applied it over the breach in his protective suit.

He laid down several overlapping layers.

Tianyang hoped they would seal the breach and stop the pheromones from leaking out. Whether they would work, however, was up to fate.

Fortunately, fate seemed not to have abandoned him. After a while, the pounding outside gradually stopped.

But the danger had not passed.

Their squad had become trapped here because its captain had pushed recklessly ahead in pursuit of merit. They had ventured too deep, and hordes of Wanderers had cut off their route back to the main team.

Unless he found another route, Tianyang could only wait to die once his survival supplies ran out.

The boy clenched his fists. He refused to die here.

When he joined the gathering team, he had sworn to give his mother a good life after she had spent most of hers toiling away.

Besides, he still had to repay Qin Wu's "kindness," though the boy had no idea how to cross the enormous gulf between their social classes and take revenge on the bastard who had used him as bait.

Muffled gunshots drifted in from outside-the roar of an assault rifle. Tianyang pushed himself up and went to the window.

Looking through the thin mist, he could just make out a light near the base of a building to the southeast. Then a vehicle shot out of a dark alley.

It was the gathering team's standard vehicle, the Coyote light off-road vehicle. Its chassis sat high, and its tires used omnidirectional rims that allowed it to change direction freely.

Equipped with an automatic cannon firing live rounds and a front-mounted light machine gun, it could provide some fire support.

It seemed Qin Wu and the other two had made it out of the building, but whether they could return safely to the main team still depended on luck.

Tianyang looked up at the sky. It was not completely black. Though dim, it was not so dark that he could not see his hand in front of his face.

The sky looked more like it did before a summer thunderstorm, with thick clouds blocking the daylight.

In that oppressive light, he could see the ruined high-rises across the street, little more than empty frames. Together with the outlines of more distant buildings, they formed something called a city.

Qin Wu had been right. No. 127 Inverse Realm bore an uncanny resemblance to the world Tianyang and the others lived in.

But Tianyang never wanted the world where he had been born and raised, nourished by sunshine and rain, to turn into this nightmare.

Perhaps, long ages ago, this world too had basked in sunlight, filled with birdsong and fragrant flowers. Now, however, it was like a terminally ill patient, barely clinging to life on the brink of death.

Woooo-

A strange, hollow howl rose from the street below. Tianyang saw several Wanderers passing near the building.

Those twisted shapes, like leprosy sufferers, were this world's undying, humanoid germs. They were everywhere, roaming and wandering, leaving filth wherever they went.

These loathsome products of darkness occupied the lowest tier of the Inverse Realm's biological hierarchy. They moved sluggishly and lacked all five senses, but once enough of them gathered, they could overwhelm everything.

On the way here, Tianyang had seen a vast number of Wanderers massed together. They shoved and jostled one another, resembling a swarm of snakes from a distance.

Writhing, rolling, surging!

The hideous things tangled together and spread along the streets like an infectious disease, then dispersed, contaminating the entire world.

There were still only a few Wanderers beneath the building, but Tianyang knew evil would engulf this place before long.

I have to get out of here!

But where should I go?

As he pondered that question, Tianyang noticed that the Wanderers passing the building had reached an intersection ahead.

For some reason, they suddenly stopped, then turned around together and headed back.

Wanderers did have a habit of moving aimlessly back and forth within a given area.

But what they had just done seemed unnatural, as though they had encountered something they feared and turned away to avoid it.

What's at that intersection?

Tianyang decided to take a look.

Sliding down a pipe outside the wall, the boy moved close to the building. When a Wanderer passed beside him, Tianyang held his breath.

Fortunately, the thing, pus continually dripping from its surface, could not sense his presence at all. It shuffled farther and farther away.

Tianyang breathed a sigh of relief, tightened his grip on the dagger, and reached the intersection.

It was a T-junction. The street was deserted, without a Wanderer in sight.

Vehicles lay overturned in the road-if things without weapons, with only four pitiful little wheels and flimsy armor, could even be called vehicles.

In any case, only the wreckage of those sheet-metal shells remained. Like steel corpses, they lay helpless as swollen, white, sickly fungal growths overran them.

By the faint light on his protective suit's shoulder, Tianyang saw patches of fungal colonies of all sizes covering the road. An unwary step onto one felt like stepping into mud.

That sensation of rot and decay was enough to turn his stomach!

Tianyang tried to place his feet only on clear patches of road. As he rounded a corner, a gleam suddenly flashed at the edge of his vision.

The boy stopped and looked back. Not far from the corner was a passage leading underground.

A conspicuous sign hung outside the passage, bearing a picture and marks that resembled writing.

Tianyang could not read the Inverse Realm's writing, but he could make out the picture: a train traveling through a tunnel.

Apparently, the beings who had once lived in the Inverse Realm liked digging tunnels beneath their cities. What kind of bizarre taste was that...?

Right at the entrance to the passage leading down to the tunnel grew a wondrous plant. It looked a little like the Moonlight Grass Tianyang knew, but this glowing plant was actually a crystal.

A crystal shaped like a plant-Star Crystal Grass!

Excitement flared in the boy's heart. The light emitted by Star Crystal Grass was something the Children of Darkness despised. Even Wanderers, which did not react to light sources, instinctively kept away from wherever Star Crystal Grass grew.

More importantly, Star Crystal Grass only grew near a Star Marrow Pillar. In other words, there might be a Star Marrow Pillar in that underground tunnel!

That substance, found only in the Inverse Realm, was a vital medium that gave ordinary people a chance to become Ascenders. It also supplied the energy needed to keep every fortress running.

Simply discovering a Star Marrow Pillar would earn a substantial sum of contribution points.

That was also why Qin Wu had risked venturing so deep.

So Dong Yan's numerical model had been right. There really was a Star Marrow Pillar here. Had they explored a little farther then, this would have been a different story.

Tianyang took a deep breath inside his helmet, then headed down the passage. The farther he descended, the brighter the light grew. When the boy reached the floor below, the sight before him left him stunned.

A towering tree stood inside the tunnel. It was magnificent, its trunk straight and its crown lush.

From its roots to its leaves, every part of it radiated a silvery glow!

That light was so sacred. It drove away the darkness like a brilliant lighthouse on a nighttime sea, shining into a despairing heart and rekindling the flame of hope.

This light was his hope of growing stronger!

Tianyang reached out, his lips trembling and his heart racing, and walked toward it in excitement.

Squeak-

Squeak, squeak-

Just then, strange noises came from the passage above. The somewhat shrill sounds plucked at Tianyang's nerves, instantly snapping the boy back to his senses.

He spun around, raised his dagger, and bent his knees slightly, assuming a fighting stance.

Something was coming...