Chapter 442: The Outside Is More Terrifying |
In the rainforest, under Takahashi’s lead, the group dug a pit not far from the camp and buried the smoking middle-aged man’s body.
After that was done, everyone silently packed up their things, and before dawn had even broken, they left the camp to push deeper into the rainforest.
No one could believe that the man had died so easily.
According to Takahashi, the only plastic in the cigarettes the man smoked was in the filters. A tiny amount inhaled, and it killed a middle-aged man in just a few hours—it was absolutely terrifying.
Of course, that was also related to the fact that the man wasn’t an Ascendant.
All ten or so people in this group were ordinary people. It wasn’t intentional, but over two years of the Doomsday Rules era, interactions between ordinary people and Ascendants had become fewer and fewer.
In the first year, the two groups still lived together, but by the second year, mixed living had nearly disappeared.
This had nothing to do with discrimination; it was purely a natural outcome. Even if the two sides were friends, when one was an ordinary person and the other an Ascendant, their common ground would only shrink, and eventually they’d go their separate ways.
But this result also indirectly fueled opposition between the two sides. Less contact meant less understanding of each other’s words and actions, and as this trend continued, conflict became inevitable.
Now, having seen just how devastating microplastic contamination could be, Takahashi’s group was terrified. They quickened their pace, determined to reach the untouched depths of the rainforest.
“Hey! Those are…”
A moment later, the person at the front suddenly shouted. The others looked ahead and were all stunned.
There, in a clearing, were several large craters, with white bones scattered around them. The bones were unmistakably human, sending everyone stumbling back in fear.
“What’s there to be afraid of bones for!” A bold young man walked over and spotted something near the bones. “These… these look like they belonged to soldiers…!”
Soldiers?
The group looked more closely and indeed found debris around the bones—broken guns and torn pieces of military combat uniforms.
Someone with sharp eyes noticed something else. “Look, there are metal fragments near that big crater. This hole must have been made by a bomb!”
Why would there be bomb craters and soldiers’ remains deep in the rainforest?
Everyone felt a chill run down their spines, wondering what had happened here.
If Guan Tong were present right now, he would probably recognize this place immediately. This was where he had briefly stayed in the Andai State.
Back then, the military of Sakura Prayer Country, in an attempt to seize the Kimos Star fragment he carried, bombed this area with warship missiles and sent in a Special Forces Team. Those now-white bones were the result of that operation.
“Everyone, stay away!” Takahashi, sensing danger, moved back from the craters. “Those clothing fragments contain plastic. It’s dangerous here. We need to leave now!”
“Ah!”
“You’re right!”
The others snapped out of it, forgetting about the past events, and quickly followed Takahashi in a different direction.
They hadn’t gone far when a man and a woman in the group started feeling unwell.
“I feel… my breathing… it’s getting hard…” The woman clutched her chest, breathing rapidly, struggling to speak.
“My stomach hurts a bit. I don’t know what’s wrong,” the man said.
Both had deep fear in their eyes, dreading that their discomfort was linked to microplastics.
The others stepped back, faces grim. “Another two are affected! This time, two people!”
“Don’t talk nonsense!” The woman struggling to breathe shouted in denial. “I’m not poisoned by microplastics. I’m just tired from walking, so…”
Before she could finish, she felt the world spin and collapsed unconscious. Takahashi rushed over to check. As soon as he looked, he was horrified—both of the woman’s calves were already swollen.
Takahashi stepped back, his face dark. “Difficulty breathing, swollen calves… This, this might be signs of heart failure…”
“Organ failure! And you still say it’s not microplastic contamination!”
“What’s going on? We’re already in the rainforest, a natural environment without pollution! Why are we still being harmed by microplastics?”
No one could accept it. If the man earlier had ingested microplastics from smoking, what was happening now?
“It might be related to that crater we passed. I don’t know either, but we have to keep going deeper.” Takahashi didn’t have the answers, but he knew he couldn’t panic. As the team’s pillar, if he lost his composure, the group would fall apart.
“Then let’s go, but we can’t take them with us.” Someone pointed at the unwell man and woman. “Who knows if the microplastics inside them will spread to us?”
“What?” The man with the stomach ache was furious. “You bastard! This isn’t the Blood Plague virus. How could it spread to others!”
“Who’s to say that? Anyway, I won’t agree to traveling with dangerous people like them.”
“I think so too…”
“Yeah, for safety, it’s better to leave them behind.”
Seeing that everyone agreed, the man with the stomach ache panicked and appealed to Takahashi. “Hey, are you kidding? Staying here is a death sentence!”
Takahashi was torn. Although he was the team leader, he couldn’t force the others to follow his decisions. After hesitating, he could only suggest a vote.
The result was predictable—the entire team voted against taking the two with them.
“I’m sorry…” Takahashi said to the despairing man, his voice apologetic. “The minority must obey the majority. I can only leave you here. If you feel better, you can follow the marks we left on the trees to head back. That will lead you out of the rainforest and back to the city.”
“…I understand.”
The man with the stomach ache forced the words out through gritted teeth, staring resentfully at Takahashi and the others as they left.
…
If the death of the middle-aged man hadn’t shaken the team too much, the abandonment of those two later completely shattered morale.
Takahashi walked at the front. Glancing back, he saw the grim expression on everyone’s face.
No matter how you looked at it, voting to abandon two companions was almost no different from killing them. Even without organ failure, being alone in the rainforest was extremely dangerous, and following the marks back would be incredibly difficult.
Seeing the group’s spirits sink, Takahashi tried telling a couple of jokes, but no one reacted. Left with no choice, he quickly found a suitable spot to set up camp.
Unlike the laughter during their first camp setup, the atmosphere was heavy this time. Hardly anyone spoke, and everyone worked in silence. After setting up the camp, they all crawled in to rest, not even bothering with the night watch Takahashi had assigned.
Takahashi knew they were all burdened, so he figured a night’s sleep might help. He decided to rest as well.
He felt like he had just fallen asleep when he was jolted awake by a piercing scream.
“Ahhh!!!”
“Murder!”
Takahashi bolted upright and was met with a horrifying sight: a young man was swinging a metal shovel, slamming it onto the head of a sleeping person. The victim, caught completely off guard, was immediately drenched in blood!
The attacker was none other than the young man with the stomach ache who had been voted out earlier. Clearly nursing a grudge, he hadn’t followed the trail back but had secretly followed the group, waiting for them to fall asleep before launching his attack!
“You want me dead, you bastards can forget about living too! I’ll kill you all!” The young man’s eyes were bloodshot as he screamed and swung the shovel wildly.
Takahashi grabbed a metal rod and shouted, “Everyone, stop this madman!” He charged forward, and several other men joined in. With a flurry of rods and shovels, they beat the young man to the ground. He spat blood and soon stopped moving.
But the three people the young man had attacked were also beyond saving. Four corpses now lay scattered around the camp, driving the survivors to the brink of madness.
“Crazy, everyone’s crazy… I, I’m going back!”
“I’m going back too!” someone sobbed, covering their face. “I didn’t expect the outside to be more dangerous than the city…”
Takahashi took a deep breath, and his pent-up frustration finally exploded. “It’s all because everyone was so willful! If you had followed my arrangements and taken night watches, this would never have happened! Those who want to go back, go ahead. Those who don’t, follow me deeper into the rainforest!”
With that, he quickly packed his things. The others were silent for a moment before following suit. The ones who said they wanted to go back exchanged glances, realizing that without Takahashi to lead the way, the journey back would be just as dangerous… so they had no choice but to keep moving forward.
…
Across the vast ocean, a brightly lit island looked like a firefly, starkly visible in the darkness.
From a bird’s-eye view, the island’s shape resembled an apple. This was Eden Island.
Few people knew of this island. Even most Suromans were unaware of its existence. A handful of those interested in navigation might have heard of it, but they never approached, as it was designated a military base and off-limits to unauthorized personnel.
Only a very small number of people knew that this was an artificial island, a medium-sized island created by filling in the sea over an original islet and some reefs.
No one knew the original purpose for building this artificial island. Even the Senate only remembered one thing about it: it served as the base for executing the “Eden Project” after the Doomsday Rules were imposed.
Watchtowers were built along the island’s edge, with powerful searchlights sweeping the sea surface. Even a sailboat relying purely on wooden oars, with no electronic equipment, couldn’t approach the island without being detected.
Adam, fully aware of this, had known from the start that he couldn’t land using conventional methods.
If anyone saw him now, they would be utterly stunned.
Because he was “walking” at the bottom of the deep ocean.
Using his ability to manipulate force fields, he created a gravity field around his body. This field resisted the immense water pressure while also counteracting buoyancy with a downward force, allowing him to walk on the seabed.
This was incredibly difficult. It required not only a vast amount of Mind Power but also precise control over it—something only the top Ascendants could manage.
Adam was one of them. Especially after entering the Second Stage of Ascension, his physical abilities had greatly improved, and even his brain’s computational power had advanced, making him even more adept at handling his ability.
As for why he was here, there was only one reason: he wanted to take his other wives and children off the island.
Through that decapitation mission, he had uncovered the second purpose of the entire “Eden Project.”
If the project’s first purpose—or its official purpose—was to have high-Mind-Power individuals mate and produce babies born with naturally high Mind Power, then the second, hidden purpose was to use those babies and partners to control all the Ascendants involved in the project.
Every Ascendant participating in the project, male or female, was a high-Mind-Power individual of great value in this era. That value didn’t depend on external wealth, resources, or weapons—it depended solely on themselves.
That’s right. A powerful Ascendant didn’t need any external objects to prove their strength. Their strength was inherent!
In this era where “all power resides in the self,” trying to control these Ascendants through material incentives was nearly useless. If these strong individuals wanted benefits, they could obtain them anytime.
That left only two options for controlling them: recognition or fear.
Adam now understood that the king’s second purpose for the “Eden Project” was to artificially create fear in powerful Ascendants—using the spouses they met in the project and the children born to them as leverage, forming a form of hard control.
No matter how powerful an Ascendant was, most still retained human emotions. As long as they had emotions, they couldn’t abandon the important people in their lives.
Looking back, Bruce had been right to do this.
He had used this very point to coerce Adam into carrying out the mission to capture the Fire Thief Worship Cult’s Your Holiness. In the end, the mission failed due to an unexpected traitor, and Adam seized the opportunity to cut ties with Bruce, planning to land on the island and rescue his family himself.
“Based on my observations when I was on the island before, apart from the sentries along the edge, there are no official soldiers in the interior… But last time, Bruce warned me not to land, which means there must be some force hidden on the island capable of suppressing Ascendants.”
“Now that I’ve gone missing, Bruce will likely reinforce the island’s defenses. And he might have secretly moved them elsewhere…”
Adam knew that King Bruce’s personality meant he would definitely be prepared. So Adam had made a plan: if he could rescue his wives and children, great. If they had been relocated, he would destroy the entire island and force Bruce to the negotiating table.
He manipulated the force field, reducing the downward pressure, allowing buoyancy to carry him slowly upward. When his body broke the surface, he stepped onto the beach. This was a spot where he used to lie in the sun, with his favorite sun lounger not far away.
After taking a few steps, he suddenly stopped.
There seemed to be something on the sun lounger.
He walked over. A stone was holding down a note, written in Bruce’s handwriting.
“Adam, when you see these words, you still have one last chance to contact me. Don’t try to challenge me, or ending up as fish food will be your only fate.”
Adam crushed the note and looked at the brightly lit townhouses in the distance.
Bruce had already anticipated he would come to the island. Since that was the case, he had no other choice. Only the second option remained: destroy the island.
“Then let’s see how you’ll stop me.”