Doomsday Awakening GL - Chapter 17
Just as everyone was feeling down and trying to figure out how to cross the fissure,
A black shadow suddenly darted out from the side and fiercely slammed into An Yimu, who was standing on the edge of the fissure.
By the time An Yimu reacted, she had already been knocked and was falling into the fissure. She was startled; it was the Mutant! The mutated dog that had been following them all the way. In haste, she instinctively grabbed one of the Mutant’s legs, thinking, If I’m going to die, I’ll take it with me. Otherwise, if it stays up there, everyone else will die.
A flicker of panic crossed the Mutant’s eyes, but its strength was not enough to pull An Yimu back up. It immediately let out a pitiful howl.
The person and the dog plummeted straight down.
“Xiaomu…!”
“Little An An…!”
By the time the other three reacted, An Yimu was no longer visible from the top of the fissure. Ling Qiuyu covered her chest. Overwhelmed with emotion, she collapsed and passed out.
Zī zī zī…
A sizzling sound echoed in the fissure. An Yimu still hadn’t returned the spider legs to Nuan Qianyu when she fell. After dropping several hundred meters, she managed to stab the spider leg into one side of the fissure wall. The spider leg scraped along the wall for another hundred meters before finally stopping. An Yimu’s arm was throbbing with severe pain. Coupled with her own weight and the gravity from the fall, she was suffering immensely.
Only after finally stopping did she look around. The inner wall was bare, composed entirely of hard rock. Looking up, she couldn’t see the top; looking down, it was pitch black, and she couldn’t see the bottom.
She was suspended right in the middle of the fissure!
She heard something clawing at the rock nearby. She looked around and finally saw the Mutant a few tens of meters below and to her right. It was frantically clawing at the wall with its two front paws to keep from falling, looking quite disheveled.
This couldn’t go on. She couldn’t possibly hang here forever.
“Ah…!” An Yimu cried out in alarm. The rock could no longer bear her weight, and the spider leg slid down a bit further.
The Mutant no longer cared about attacking An Yimu. Its brown fur was covered in dirt, and it was ceaselessly clawing at the wall.
Serves it right! An Yimu was furious. She didn’t know whether to call this mutated dog smart or stupid. Below them was an abyss. Falling would mean not even a full corpse would remain. Going up was impossible. The rock wall was bare, with no handholds for climbing. It was as if it had been cleanly sliced open with a knife, smooth and level.
Just as An Yimu was trying to figure out a way, the Mutant suddenly launched itself off the wall and lunged toward An Yimu. An Yimu couldn’t dodge and panicked momentarily. She hadn’t expected the Mutant to be this clever. The entire dog landed on An Yimu’s back, clinging tightly to her.
Her own weight, plus the weight of this fat dog, on top of the muscle strain in her right arm from the previous slide, was simply making things worse. She was so angry she felt like spitting bl00d!
The spider leg began to slide down quickly. In a matter of minutes, they were sliding all the way to the bottom. This continued for dozens of minutes until the person and the dog finally landed on a protruding platform. At this point, neither side had the will to fight. The Mutant squatted on one side, its nose seemingly sniffing something.
An Yimu looked up at the high fissure, worried. How was she going to get up?
The Mutant suddenly lunged again, making a whimpering growl, its teeth protruding, looking ferocious.
An Yimu dodged. The Mutant didn’t give up and lunged again, leveraging its flexible body. An Yimu gripped the spider leg, ready to put an end to this Mutant.
The Mutant saw her intention, leaped to the side, its small eyes fixated on the spider leg in An Yimu’s hand, seemingly wary.
An Yimu had made up her mind and was about to act. She gripped the spider leg and cautiously approached the Mutant. Just then, the protruding rock platform suddenly shook violently. Many rocks continuously fell from above. An Yimu’s heart chilled. Another earthquake!
The platform couldn’t hold up. After being hit by the falling rocks, the entire piece broke off and plummeted downward. The person and the dog were also swept up in the falling rocks, hurtling straight down.
When An Yimu woke up, her whole body ached intensely. If not for her three times human constitution, and her efforts to use the falling rocks as footholds to slow her descent, she would have been smashed into a pulp by now.
She propped herself up and found the spider leg among the debris. She quickly found the Mutant not far away. Its abdomen was still moving, so it wasn’t dead yet.
An Yimu sneered. This dog is smart enough. It knows how to sneak attack, how to track, and how to use her. If she doesn’t get rid of it now, will it spare her in the future?
This is a mutated dog, not an ordinary dog, An Yimu told herself.
Without hesitation, she plunged the spider leg in her hand into the Mutant’s head. A milky-white energy flowed into her mind. She was amazed. This mutated dog could actually possess this kind of energy, and a large amount of it, too. Her bean-shaped object was almost full. Her gear-shaped birthmark was truly a cheat tool, making her break through twice as fast as others.
After the Mutant died, An Yimu suddenly felt a sense of regret. It would have been great if she could have tamed this mutated species. But an animal is an animal, especially a bloodthirsty monster. Thinking back to the tragic deaths of the two girls in the cave that day, the last bit of pity in her heart vanished.
If she didn’t eliminate it today, more of her compatriots would suffer in the future.
An Yimu walked alone at the very bottom of the wide fissure, her mood terrible. Her backpack was still above. Even if she could survive at the bottom of the fissure, how would she find her way back up without food? She might starve to death before she could find a way.
This fissure was probably several kilometers deep. Strangely, the ground was paved with white jade, looking more like it was artificially laid. It was as if someone had deliberately carved a road thousands of meters below the surface.
An Yimu immediately dismissed this absurd idea. This fissure appeared after a major earthquake. It was impossible for humans to have created it.
She walked forward along one direction. Apart from rocks, there were still rocks. Apart from darkness, there was still darkness.
After walking for an unknown amount of time, she suddenly stumbled. A crisp sound rang out. She had almost tripped over a heavy iron plate on the ground. An Yimu was surprised. How could there be iron here?
The bottom of the fissure was completely dark because it was too deep for the outside sunlight to penetrate. After getting used to the darkness, she could see the road, but she couldn’t see what the iron plate beneath her feet was.
She took out her phone, which had been turned off. She turned it on. Borrowing the light from the phone screen, she finally saw that the rusted plate had the characters Base written on it, and in the middle of the second line was the character for “Waste” ($ftexttt{“{e}i}$). The other characters were too corroded to be deciphered.
Base? Waste?
A chill ran down An Yimu’s spine. She felt she had stumbled upon some astonishing secret. Could there really have been some kind of base thousands of meters below the fissure? What kind of joke is this? How could anyone survive here?
Perhaps the iron plate just happened to fall down.
An Yimu turned off her phone again and closed her eyes to adapt to the dark environment.
If she didn’t manage to escape within seven days, then all hope would truly be lost.
She thought of Nuan Qianyu and Ling Qiuyu, her two best friends. Without her protection, what would they do? What would happen if they encountered high-level zombies? But… maybe without her, they could better adapt to the apocalypse.
In the apocalypse, no one could protect anyone forever, unless nothing ever happened to you. Everyone was fighting to survive, and you never knew when you would die.
She closed her eyes and began to recall many things. Scenes of her life started playing back, yet her heart remained painfully empty because she had no memories from before high school.
Her father was named An Xueming. Her mother died during childbirth. Later, her father remarried and had a daughter, her half-sister, An Yiqing. This was all her father had told her, her only understanding of her family.
Sometimes she would fantasize about what her mother was like, if she was very gentle, if she would have loved her very much if she were still alive, and if she would have sung her lullabies to sleep when she was young.
She had always felt lost… about everything.
Having adapted to the darkness, An Yimu opened her eyes and looked around. She couldn’t just die here. At least, she couldn’t give up yet.