Chapter 730: Waiting
"At least, you can save yourself."
"Leaving behind a planet where only I survive?"
...
The world seemed to suddenly burst forth with dandelions.
Countless white, umbrella-shaped spores drifted everywhere, carried by gusts of light wind to all corners of the land.
After landing, the spores quickly grew pink rootlets that ceaselessly extended underground, absorbing every nutrient they could find, then replicating into more of their kind.
Another night passed.
Lun Heping was certain he now had to maintain a sufficient distance from his older sister, because near her, the atmospheric pressure became extremely abnormal, making even breathing difficult.
"80121."
"I... I've grown stronger again."
As the survivors continued to die off, Lun Qin's power had grown nearly tenfold within a single day.
However, her control over her abilities had long since failed to keep pace with these wildly surging stats.
Whenever Lun Qin barely adapted to her new power, it would immediately multiply several times over the next day. This near-exponential growth in strength made her feel increasingly powerless to control it.
She cautiously attempted to move her legs.
Lift.
Bend.
Lower.
"Is this... a black cloud?
And below... is the ground?
Am I... in mid-air?"
Lun Qin seemed to have lost control; with a single misstep, she had leapt hundreds of meters into the sky.
The sky was thick with black clouds everywhere. Sunlight could only find a few cracks to secretly fall upon the earth, bringing the last few rays of light for humanity after the collapse of civilization.
Looking down from the sky, countless spores, fine as ox-hair, drifted about, searching everywhere for any place to parasitize, bringing with them ultimate destruction.
...
"Boom!"
Just as she was still mentally adrift in mid-air, a thunderous roar echoed from the sky.
Immediately, Lun Qin found herself once again embedded dozens of meters underground. Before she was a deep, humanoid crater shaped like the character "big" (big), strongly resuming a frog gazing at the sky from the bottom of a well. Only, the shape of this well mouth perfectly matched the outline of her body.
A streak of red afterimage.
That was the only memory she could barely retain.
A seemingly red afterimage struck her with a speed that was almost indescribable, imbuing her with an unimaginably vast amount of kinetic energy the instant it hit.
Driven by this kinetic energy, her body, tougher than steel, plunged dozens of meters directly beneath the surface like a drill.
It was slightly better than last time; at least this time, she could barely make out what kind of thing had attacked her.
But it was still far from enough.
"How about you let me take control?" a voice said to Lun Qin.
"Your consciousness is too weak; you can't unleash the true power of this body."
"No.
This is my body."
As the two conversed, the five-digit number in Lun Qin's eyes, originally beginning with an eight, had already dropped to a six.
In just one short hour, nearly twenty thousand more people had vanished.
...
In the remaining refugee camps, a strange plague mysteriously erupted. Victims initially felt only a slight weakness in their limbs, but soon became unwilling to move at all, wanting only to lie down and get a good sleep.
The moment they fell into slumber, death quietly descended.
First, numerous small pores would crack open on their skin. Countless white spores would emerge from these pores, spreading with the wind throughout the camp, infecting still-healthy survivors.
As the stream of spores gushed out, the victims' bodies rapidly withered away, eventually being completely hollowed out, turning into empty human husks.
Naturally, the husks themselves wouldn't be wasted; before long, they too would transform into nutrients for the spores drifting everywhere.
The survivors named this terrifying phenomenon "Eclosion Sickness."
Eclose and ascend to immortality.
...
After three waves of impact, there were almost no other living creatures left on the planet.
Everywhere was a world of rootlet tentacles, white spores, and pink flesh, repelling everything, devouring everything.
Yet, amidst this environment even harsher than hell, there still existed a clear stream.
At the forefront was a young girl. Within a ten-kilometer radius centered on her, whether it was tentacles, spores, or slimy flesh, everything would be pulverized into dust by an invisible force field.
Following behind her were the only seven people left in this world.
Over the past half-month, Lun Qin had traveled across rivers and mountains, from north to south, scouring every conceivable hiding place, finally managing to rescue them.
But apart from placing them behind her and protecting them, she seemed incapable of doing anything else.
Every time she tried to challenge the demon that was destroying the world, she would be instantly annihilated, even though her power had grown thousands upon thousands of times stronger compared to when she first saw it.
They walked on aimlessly, despairingly, adrift in this apocalyptic world, no one knowing what else could be done.
With just a few of them, it was highly unlikely they could rebuild human civilization.
"Sister, do we... still have a future?" Lun Heping shot an arrow carrying a message towards Lun Qin.
He had been walking with the group for over ten days and clearly remembered that wherever they went, that disgusting environment would indeed be destroyed, but as soon as they left, everything would return to its original state within half an hour.
This was something that greatly eroded one's morale.
No matter how much effort they put into changing the environment, it couldn't stand against the environment's own self-restoration...
Their efforts were meaningless; they were alive, but only barely.
"There will be." she answered in a hoarse voice.
It had been almost a week without anyone dying, so Lun Qin finally had a little time to adapt to her powers. She no longer needed to be careful with every breath, fearing that she might, like a bone-scraping blade, cause others' flesh and blood to separate.
She also couldn't be bothered to think about how many times stronger she had become; at any rate, the number in her pupils had settled on the single digit "8".
Fortunately, apart from her, the seven surviving individuals were all protected by artifacts and had evolved to the stage where "spirits" emerged, allowing them to barely survive in the environment a kilometer away from Lun Qin.
Yes, a kilometer away.
Within a one-kilometer radius centered on Lun Qin, chaotic force fields and violent air currents raged everywhere. Whether it was her heartbeat, blood flow, or every tiny tremor within her body, all would resonate with the environment.
If they rashly stepped into the one-kilometer death zone, even they would likely be torn to shreds by a force field that could appear at any moment.
But even this power, like a humanoid natural disaster, remained as powerless as a child when facing that entity pervading the sky, earth, and ocean.
She knew that the demon in the sky was constantly waiting, waiting for the moment she could no longer endure, for her to kill the few people she was protecting behind her, and gain complete power.
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