Xyrin Empire
Chapter 541 A Disaster Has Changed

Chapter 541: Chapter 541 A Disaster Has Changed

A temporary camp—actually, it was just a bunch of skinny refugees lying scattered on the ground, surrounded by a circle of stout Imperial Soldiers. But this was already the only chance for a break in this dangerous world.

Within the protective circle, in an isolated clearing, Kazuo Komuro, the Little Strong seven-person group from the academy, and the big sister-like policewoman Minami Rika were having a reunion after a long separation, exchanging their separate experiences since they last saw each other. Meanwhile, I was idly looking up at the sky, teaching Little Loli Alice to play Bubbles’s PNP, and absentmindedly combing through Mercury Lamp’s wings—a habit I acquired from Alaya, who had a thing for feathers and combs. Last time, when Anwina turned into a crow and rested on the balcony, I instinctively ran a comb through her feathers, scaring the little maid so much that she dropped feathers all over the place.

Fortunately, Mercury Lamp herself didn’t have too much of an objection, although she always had a blank look on her little face and turned towards another direction, but from the slight trembling of her wings...it seemed quite comfortable?

On the other side, the conversation between Ju Chuan Jingxiang and Officer Minami Rika was not loud but clear enough to reach my ears.

"...Otherworld? You’re saying that after that giant transformer exploded...you all ended up in an Otherworld?"

That was Minami Rika’s voice.

"Ah, it’s really incredible, isn’t it? The kind of thing that only happens in novels. But it really gave me quite a scare," said Ju Chuan Jingxiang, "After coming to from the dizziness, we were immediately surrounded by lots of Black-clothed People. They didn’t say a word and tried to arrest us... When Kotaro’s gun accidentally went off and hit them, it was as if it hit an Energy Shield, making a ’biu’ sound and then we were captured..."

"What a bizarre descriptive skill, you’re not focused on the essentials at all..." Minami Rika’s voice sounded utterly helpless, with no idea of how to deal with her somewhat airheaded close friend, "So these are the ’Black-clothed People’ you encountered in the Otherworld? Mm, they are quite black."

Kazuo Komuro, exasperated by this off-the-cuff speaking policewoman, sighed internally, "Well, how to put it, those wearing the black mechanical armors are probably the Imperial Regular Army. They look scary, but they’re friends, yeah, and very, very impressive soldiers."

The message was clear, for the sake of friendship, be a bit more gracious, Big Sister Nan! The crowd around here were all killers who wouldn’t blink an eye while laying waste, walking disasters, and halting nuclear bombs, a bunch of maniacs—your loose lips might result in these thirty-something refugees getting disposed of in a chatter!

Not sure if Minami Rika grasped Kazuo Komuro’s implied message, she just chuckled lightly, "Is that so? To think I was so worried about you guys at first. But...if you were in such a safe place, why would you want to come back here? There’s no need to come back here anymore..."

Kazuo Komuro’s face showed a hint of embarrassment, wondering whether he should spill the beans about the sordid affair of getting nationality through God’s backdoor.

Du Dao Kazuko, who already knew a lot in advance, sharply caught the other’s last few words, "No need to come back? Why would you say that?!"

"Because... Human Civilization is finished..."

"What?!" Even Fatty Hira, who had been stealthily observing the equipment of the Imperial Soldiers, couldn’t help but cry out in alarm, "What...what does that mean?!"

"It means exactly what it sounds like." Minami Rika said in a low voice, looking down, seemingly having lost all will to fight, extremely depressed. Such a strong big sister-like figure could now only fulfill her duties by leading these last few dozen refugees continuously across the wilderness, as for a destination? Such a thing never existed from the start.

There seemed to be nothing left to say. After a few seconds of silence, Minami Rika came up to me, followed by the utterly perplexed Kazuo Komuro and others, as well as the complex-faced Du Dao Kazuko.

"Shizuka just told me that you are the supreme leader of the Otherworld," Minami Rika bowed deeply to me from an awkward angle, yes, indeed very deep, "I’m very sorry for the disrespectful things I said earlier, although I still find it hard to associate you with a great figure like an emperor... um, sorry."

I was speechless. True to her reputation as the fierce Grand General Minami Rika who could move unscathed through seas of dead bodies, aside from her sniper rifle, her mouth alone could probably count as a DPS.

"Please, don’t mention it," with a mixed expression, after confirming that her earlier words were indeed unintended, I gestured with my mouth to the side, "Take a seat first, did you need me for something?"

Minami Rika sat down beside me, her face now extremely serious. I knew then that it was time for... uh-hem, serious business.

"I don’t know how many people you can take with you, but at least... I hope you can take the last survivors here, including Shizuka and the others. Take them away, the sooner the better, away from this world. It might sound cowardly to say this, but... please, take the last embers of humanity with you!"

"Hey, hey, Officer Nan, that’s not like you! We brought medical personnel, they’re waiting in outer space. These Otherworldly People have very powerful forces and technology, they must have a way to cure the Dead Bodies!" Kazuo Komuro, startled by Minami Rika’s statement resembling a handover of humanity’s future, nearly jumped out of his skin, "They are scanning for human life on Earth, and the medical troops will be landing soon... By the way, there should be a human refuge nearby, right? You look like you’re on your way to one, but I don’t see any vehicles... Hey, why does everyone look like that..."

No one responded to him. Everyone, besides Fatty Hira and others who were just as bewildered, including every Refugee and that "Officer Nakaoka," and Minami Rika themselves, had expressions of dead stillness.

"It’s no use... There’s no refuge, we’re just trying to get as far away from previously inhabited areas as possible. The cars turned into scrap metal in yesterday’s storm. It’s already our great fortune to be alive. As for curing the infection... well, just look at the health of the thirty-seven people here. These are probably the last living humans on Honshu Island. As for other places, treatment is no longer necessary."

Like a bolt out of the blue, all of Little Strong Team, except for Du Dao Kazuko, fell silent in shock.

Thirty-seven people... That was the number of Refugees under Minami Rika’s lead. Of course, due to the lack of information, her assessment of the situation might be overly pessimistic, but at least up to now, our probes had not sent back any information on the presence of humans, though this had once been a bustling human town.

The living humans on the entire Honshu Island, according to preliminary estimates from orbit scanning data I received, were probably a few thousand at most—and those were like Officer Nan’s group of Refugees, small in scale, migrating towards desolate and remote areas. Their condition was definitely not any better than the half-dead Refugees in front of us. If we had arrived a few days later, even these few thousand might not have been left.

It was unimaginable how these thirty-seven Refugees managed to survive until now. They could perhaps be called Superhuman in a sense. Regardless of their past, whether they were nobodies or Heroes, brave warriors or cowards, to be among the last of mankind to die in the apocalypse, they deserved the title of Monster. When a biological crisis like Doomsday arrives, the living can sometimes be even more terrifying than the dead. Being able to unite as a team and survive until the end under these circumstances is not just a miracle that can be explained by individual strength.

Initially full of joy, I fantasized about bringing a powerful force from the Otherworld to cure the infection and restore the prosperity and peace of Human Civilization, even fantasizing about reuniting with my long-lost family. But now, suddenly learning that humanity was nearly extinct, let alone my relatives, even my own race may have all perished, the drastic disparity finally hit a group of young men and women hard. Even the usually detached Ju Chuan Jingxiang covered her mouth at the shock. Not to mention the rest of the underage group, how could they fare any better? Kazuo Komuro, Fatty Hira, Alice, and Big Breasts One, Two, and Three, all had expressions of utter shock.

"Calm down now!" I stood up from the ground and looked at the exhausted Minami Rika, "I’ve faced troubles much worse than this. You wouldn’t want to see an entire continent filled with oozing Zombies and Demons, or a planet completely covered with insect moss—that’s what Hell looks like. The races of Azeroth have had their civilizations destroyed countless times, yet they always stood up again. You just need to stand up once for me: I will take every Human survivor we come across, even if the end result is that Human Civilization forever disappears from this planet, I have ways to let you thrive elsewhere—Now tell me everything. We can only scan to find that living humans on Earth are nearly extinct, but how did this happen? Why did the Dead Bodies spread so quickly? Why is the Earth... filled with those massive scars?!"

Seemingly overwhelmed by my fervor (hopefully such a thing truly existed), Minami Rika’s eyes gradually began to show a sparkle of light after being in a very low state from the start, driven only by a sense of duty to act. Then, she told me everything she knew.

"Probably, it all started about twenty days ago..."

At first, everything was normal except that seven individuals, fortunate enough to be adorned with the protagonist’s halo, had managed to journey to the Otherworld. Earth continued to rotate, humans continued to struggle, the number of dead bodies increased at a steady rate, and human resistance was orderly and well-organized. Shooting enthusiasts could still fire handguns from rooftops—fire handguns, firearms, or handguns. In the human versus zombie game, the zombies were cut down like leeks, yet their front lines pressed on stably and efficiently. But if everything had been normal, it might have taken several years for humans to be wiped out by the dead bodies, and some heroes from the United States or the Dragon Team from China might even have emerged to save the world... Cut, the script ends there.

The true catastrophe erupted and destroyed human civilization within just a few days.

The dead bodies began "infecting through the air."

No one could explain how it happened. Healthy individuals, who had never been bitten by dead bodies, suddenly fell ill amidst the crowd and turned into walking dead.

Yet, this strange and terrifying event happened, leaving humans utterly defenseless.

The outbreak occurred almost simultaneously, and in every single human refuge across the world, this "zombification" happened. Whether hiding in basements, military barracks, or even within nuclear bomb shelters, nothing could stop this seemingly air-borne "infection." It was as if some undetectable substance was permeating the entire planet, infiltrating every oxygen molecule, corroding the once proud spirits of all creatures on Earth without any warning. The carefully safeguarded survivors became walking corpses one after another. Under such frightening circumstances of outbreak, those large and densely populated refuges collapsed within days. No one expected that the most fatal attack would come from within.

After resisting the external tide of corpses invincibly, humanity finally fell to an internal calamity.

"The Tokyo Circle refuge was the first to fall, with only the automated recording equipment and police communication channels managing to transmit some fragmented information. The only thing we know for sure is that it took less than twenty-four hours for the dead bodies to overrun the Tokyo Circle. To call it an infection is an understatement; it’s more like the entire Tokyo Circle was transformed into their den..."

Minami Rika recalled everything she had experienced over the past twenty days and still couldn’t help turning pale.

"The nuclear bombs fired by humanity in the final moments didn’t destroy the global telecommunications, at least the military and police channels remained intact. For the first several days, I constantly received such information through the police frequency. Insurrections within the dead, refuges being overwhelmed; at first, these horrific updates came from all directions, uncontrollably spreading through every human communication channel. But soon, they vanished one after another, until five days ago when this thing finally turned into junk."

The pale-faced policewoman took out her communicator from her shirt pocket. It looked like a high-end device provided only to special personnel, but now it was nothing more than scrap metal.

"Then you..."

I was deeply shocked by Minami Rika’s narrative, then turned in surprise to look at the refugees lying haphazardly nearby. If the dead bodies had already begun to "infect" humanity in such a bizarre manner, where could one flee to safety?

"In the final moments, as people were nearly wiped out, someone deduced a pattern and broadcasted it through the global wireless—this was the last sound ever made by the human modern communication network. Well, it might have merely been the ramblings of some former high-ranking individual about to turn into a dead body. But many chose to believe his proclamation: the air-borne infection from the dead bodies correlates to human population density. The more densely populated the area, the more rapid and intense the infection flares up. The Tokyo Circle was decimated within a day for this reason, while some very small refuges remained uninfected until ten days ago. Thus, scattering and distancing from crowds became the only way to avoid infection. The final survivors began to form these sparse escape groups, migrating in parties of no more than fifty, moving away from cities to remote mountains and wilderness areas. Looking back now, that guy who presented his findings at the last moment didn’t deceive us, did he? We did manage to live many more days indeed."

The information provided by Minami Rika was unexpected and crucial, yet I couldn’t decipher anything from it.

Airborne transmission? Even a healthy person in a completely sealed bunker could get infected?

This X and O business just doesn’t make any biological sense!

The only thing I can think of that might have anything to do with this scenario is the Curse Crystal that Big Sister used against the Insect Race: a terrifying weapon that could doom an entire Race by cursing an individual, disregarding spatial distance. But frankly, this thought is less plausible than Death Wing bringing about an explosion of dead bodies from the sky.

And I guess if Big Sister found out I was thinking this way, she’d turn into a time-traveling girl to come and kill me herself.

"Alright, let’s set that issue aside for later, and move on to the second one: I just received a global scan image from my people. What else has happened in this world during the past twenty days? Valleys, whirlpools, fissures, storm clouds... what’s the deal with all that?"

Minami Rika’s eyes widened as she stared at me, then she suddenly seemed to understand.

"It seems it didn’t spread because it was less important than the dead body crisis. I thought it was only in Japan... Turns out, this is a global phenomenon. How much more disaster does humanity have to face before it’s over!"

"Earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanic eruptions, thunderstorms – these are what we have personally experienced or at least heard about on the nearby radio broadcasts over the past few days."

"You must have also experienced it, the earthquake just now – it was the first strong tremor in this region, but about two hundred kilometers in another direction, earthquakes of the same magnitude have already occurred seventeen times."

"As for this region, what we’ve had the most of are thunderstorms. Look at those scorched woods over there; they were caused by lightning strikes yesterday afternoon."

"If you cared to look from outer space, you might even see the Fuji Basin, or as it should now be called, the Fuji Lava Lake, the result of twenty-one consecutive magma eruptions and earthquakes."

"The world has gone mad; nature is out to destroy humans, hell-bent on doing so at any cost!"

"So please, I beg you, stop thinking about treatment and rescue. Take the last seeds of humanity and leave this world. This place... it’s not worth saving anymore..." The pressure that had been building up for so long finally erupted, and the woman leading the final seeds of humanity on this doomsday journey staggered on hysterically venting, while I could only lay a hand on her shoulder and nod: after all, this was my original plan.

Dropping a Star Melting Bomb without a second thought, that’s not my style.

Well, to tell you the truth, I’ve thought of many things at this moment, but what I most want to say is: Death Wing, what the hell are you doing crossing into the world of the Milkshake-Revelation, you jerk!

Isn’t this just a blatant Cataclysm? And it’s a souped-up version of the Cataclysm mixed with a Resident Evil, plus a bottle of solidarity gift! How much sin has humanity committed to deserve such an explosive way to game over, am I right or am I right?! (To be continued, if you wish to know what happens next, please visit www.qidian.com, for more Chapters, support the author, support genuine reading!)