Chapter 155: The Spark |
Sam stared blankly at Bai Mu's figure. He had mentally prepared himself to head out alone, but the tall shadow stepped up beside him instead.
Just like the first day after their mother disappeared, when he saw him leave the canned tomatoes by the door, Sam suddenly felt a profound sense of peace. "Can I... hug you, Uncle?"
Bai Mu looked down in slight surprise, offering no reply.
Sam suddenly felt a bit embarrassed, his cheeks flushing slightly. Those words sounded like they came from a pitiful little girl, but he was clearly a man. Bai Mu ruffled his hair without looking at his face, simply saying in a calm tone, "Let's go, Sam. Since a decision has been made, we shouldn't waste time."
Sam nodded, gathering his resolve once more before shouldering his backpack.
This time he took the lead, pushing hard against the main doors with both hands. The heavy, modified iron door proved to be a bit of a struggle for him, but a large, powerful hand soon pressed against the metal surface.
The doors were pushed wide open, and a frigid gust of air blew against their faces.
The two of them waved goodbye to Katie, pulled the iron doors shut, and silently stepped outside. After walking for a short distance, Sam said, "Thank you, Uncle." "Mm."
Over their long period of spending time together, they had developed a mutual understanding that required no extra words.
It was Anton and Leon. They had returned, the pristine moonlight stretching their shadows across the ground.
They looked to be in an incredibly sorry state. Their clothes were covered in ash, and their faces were blackened as if they had rolled around in a pile of charred coal. But they had indeed returned safely and soundly, having successfully completed an independent scavenging run.
Moreover, their haul was astonishing, completely exceeding Bai Mu's expectations.
Anton's backpack was nowhere to be seen, replaced instead by the figure of a person slumped across his back.
It was a living human being. The person was still breathing but extremely weak, so emaciated that his cheekbones jutted out sharply. From head to toe, he was covered in the same charcoal ash as Anton and Leon, looking as though he had been freshly dug out of a coal pit.
To his surprise, Anton and Leon had actually saved a living survivor and brought him back.
Seeing Bai Mu and Sam, the two were briefly startled before they raised their hands high in greeting.
Bai Mu holstered his gun. The facts had proven that Sam's worries were entirely unnecessary. Leon and Anton were more than capable of taking care of themselves—they even had the spare energy to rescue someone else.
Sam let out a long sigh of relief. When Anton walked up to them, he spoke with an apologetic tone. "Sorry, sir, we are back late." "That is nothing to apologize for."
Bai Mu shifted his gaze to the person slung over Anton's back. Before he could even ask, Anton began recounting everything they had encountered.
They could have returned on time. Although they had run into Doppelgangers on the way, they had found the basement of a collapsed house to hide in and managed to avoid detection.
It was precisely inside that basement where they heard the voice of a survivor.
It was an unlucky civilian whose house had been caved in by artillery fire. He had hidden in the basement early on, where he kept his reserves of food and water, allowing him to pull through.
However, the shelling had destroyed the load-bearing structure of the basement, leaving him buried in the suffocating darkness, surviving on the brink of total mental collapse.
Anton and Leon heard his delirious babbling. He was already extremely weak by then, his voice sounding like he had one foot in the grave and wouldn't last much longer. The two of them had spent a great deal of effort digging the survivor out of the rubble.
When he finally saw the two of them and breathed in the fresh outside air, he shed tears of joy, but he was far too weak to walk. In fact, he was on the verge of starving to death. He had been trapped in that basement for over ten days, and his food and water supplies had just about completely run out.
Because of this, in order to bring the man back, Anton had been forced to abandon his own backpack full of supplies.
He had discarded his bag packed with potatoes and sweet potatoes in the ruins, choosing instead to carry this heavy burden on his back while cautiously bypassing the Doppelgangers. Even though the man was emaciated from starvation, he was still a fully grown adult male. Carrying him all that way left Anton panting from exhaustion.
Seeing that he was practically drained of strength, Bai Mu stepped forward and took the survivor off his back.
The scruffy survivor, who looked far more unkempt than a beggar, had passed out in a deep slumber. It was likely that the moment he saw other living humans, his nerves completely relaxed, leaving him unable to fight off his sheer exhaustion any longer.
Anton spoke up, "When I heard his voice, I immediately thought of you, sir. If it hadn't been for your kindness, I would have died at the Gas Station long ago. So, Leon and I both decided we had to save him."
"Supplies can always be found again, but if a person dies, they can never be brought back."
The skin on the palms of both Anton and Leon was completely torn up, bleeding from where they had clawed at the rubble.
It was a highly risky endeavor. No one could guarantee that the ruins wouldn't suddenly cave in on them, or that the sounds of digging wouldn't attract nearby Doppelgangers. From a purely survival-oriented perspective, pretending not to hear anything and just walking away would have been the safest and easiest choice.
But Anton and Leon had both chosen to preserve the kindness in their hearts.
Because during their most helpless and desperate moments, they too had received a helping hand from someone else.
"You did well," Bai Mu said, patting Anton and Leon on the shoulders.
The two of them broke into bright smiles. Their faces were as dark as coal, which only made their teeth look starkly white in contrast.
The group returned to the Shelter. Katie and Sam quickly grabbed some water to wipe down the survivor's grime-covered body, found a spare mattress, and gently laid him down to rest. With that handled, Bai Mu finally confessed to Anton and Leon that he would be leaving the following day.
The two exchanged a glance, showing little surprise on their faces. They had guessed as much a long time ago.
"I am sincerely grateful for all your help. I've learned a great deal from you, sir," Anton said.
"Will you ever come back, Uncle?" Leon asked softly.
"Who knows what tomorrow will bring?" Bai Mu replied.
Leon didn't ask any further questions, simply wrapping his arms around Bai Mu for a tight hug. Anton brought up a more practical matter, offering to help Bai Mu pack supplies for his journey. He assumed Bai Mu was probably heading home to his hometown.
Bai Mu pointed to his backpack, stating that he was already packed and prepared. However, there was actually no food or water inside it. It looked stuffed to the brim, but it was just packed with useless clutter to keep up appearances.
Everything that needed to be handled had already been taken care of long ago.
He spent his final night in the Shelter, and time eventually ticked down to the very last minute. He left the Solar Panel behind, choosing not to retract it into his inventory.
There was no grand, dramatic exit. He simply stepped into a quiet corner of the Abandoned Factory alone, sat down, and lit a cigarette.
[Main Quest has been completed.]
[You will be transported back to the Community after the storyline concludes.]
The notification from Paradise chimed in his mind, and Bai Mu's vision shifted entirely to a first-person perspective.
He hadn't expected this Script to feature a cinematic ending cutscene. He had assumed it would be just like the Deserted Island, instantly teleporting him back to the Community. A bird's-eye view from high above unfolded before his eyes.
He was looking down from an extremely elevated vantage point, as if he were playing a real-time strategy video game.
He watched the city below. The Doppelgangers rested during the day and roamed at night, driving stolen military vehicles toward other cities. The relatively intact corpses of humans were reanimated by a network of white mycelium threads, staggering back to their feet to join the ranks of the Doppelgangers.
The cinematic rapidly accelerated time. The Doppelganger army proved far more terrifying than humanity's forces. He watched as the Doppelgangers, tiny as ants from his perspective, swarmed in dense masses to conquer one city after another.
Humanity fought back, but the Doppelgangers ultimately emerged victorious every time. They didn't rely on brute force alone; they blended into human society, infiltrating the highest echelons of leadership to dismantle the human world from the inside out.
At political podiums, Doppelgangers would suddenly draw weapons and fire upon the crowd. Within military ranks, Doppelgangers strapped with explosives would abruptly detonate themselves.
Humanity suffered continuous defeats. Every time a city fell, a little mushroom icon popped up on the map.
Because his perspective was zoomed out so far, he couldn't see the exact details of the battles, but those mushroom icons spread across the surface of the globe at an alarming, visible rate. Bai Mu's viewpoint zoomed out further from the city into outer space, where he saw the entire planet's continents—once dominated by humanity—densely overrun by the sprawling mushroom icons.
Just as the final mushroom icon sprouted on the globe, his vision was suddenly and violently yanked back down to the surface.
He was looking at the Abandoned Factory. He could see tiny black dots walking in and out of the compound.
The flow of time was accelerated here as well, with several sunrises and sunsets flashing by every single second.
As the days blurred past, Bai Mu noticed the number of black dots steadily increasing. At first, there were only two black dots moving around, but then it grew to three, then four. Eventually, several new black dots began traveling from all directions, ultimately converging on the Abandoned Factory.
The population here was growing, little by little. He watched as the black dots banded together to dig out an expansive basement. Through his now-transparent, X-ray perspective, he could see them storing fresh rainwater in reservoirs, digging deeper to expand their underground home, singing and dancing in the darkness, and sharing warm meals together. Outside the boundaries of the Abandoned Factory, he would occasionally see a black dot collide with a mushroom icon. Sometimes the mushroom icon would shatter and disappear; other times, it was the black dot that vanished forever. Yet, even as the rest of the world was entirely consumed by the mushroom plague, that small Abandoned Factory remained a thriving hub of vitality.
Beneath those seemingly inconspicuous ruins, a fragment of human civilization had been preserved.
They still had to face the terrors of the outside world, but they clung tenaciously to life. Sometimes the number of black dots dwindled, and sometimes it grew, but it never completely flickered out.
The flow of time began to slow down. After an untold number of years had passed, his vision finally locked onto the roof of the ruined factory. There sat the very same Solar Panel that Bai Mu had left behind. A thick layer of dust coated its surface, but it continued to function steadfastly, much like the resilient survivors who refused to give up hope. Bai Mu watched as a person climbed onto the roof to wipe it clean. It was a deeply tanned, solidly built young man. Bai Mu couldn't see the young man's face from this angle, but he did catch a glimpse of a familiar little trinket.
It was a compact, folding pocket knife. The young man had tied a string around the folded blade, wearing it around his neck like a sacred amulet. The metal had long since rusted over, but Bai Mu instantly recognized it. It was the exact same knife he had handed to Leon on the very first night he had taken the siblings in.
The cinematic faded to black, and the mechanical voice of Paradise echoed in his mind once more.
[You have unlocked the Ending: The Spark.]
Comments 3