Doomsday Wonderland

When Xie Feng woke up, she was lying in the bathroom, the air thick with the pungent stench of blood and bodily waste.

She wished someone could censor what her eyes were seeing because the moment the bathroom scene became clear, she couldn't hold it in anymore. She lunged toward the sink and emptied everything from her stomach—pulling her arm out, the wet squelch of rotten flesh stirred under her touch, a sensation she knew she would never forget for the rest of her life.

Xie Feng turned on the faucet. For the next several minutes, all she could do was vomit. Her mind was blank, unable to process anything else.

She caught a glimpse of her blood-soaked arm and quickly thrust it under the running water. As she rinsed, she gagged and threw up several more times—fragments of nerves wedged under her nails, shards of bone slipping off her skin. The blood was so thick it seemed to rinse away layer after layer, as though she would never reach her own flesh.

Amid the sound of water and retching, she still caught a faint rustling, the soft whisper of fabric shifting—someone seemed to be approaching. Xie Feng straightened up from the sink and turned toward the bathroom door.

Dong Luorong never stepped into view.

The two of them, one inside and one outside, waited in silence for a while. Finally, a soft voice broke through the stillness.

"Xie Feng?"

The moment her name was called, something inside Xie Feng cracked open, letting all her bottled-up emotions spill free.

"I... did I really evolve? Was it me... who did that just now?" she asked, her voice trembling, almost breaking into sobs.

"You... you can still talk? Are you going to kill and eat me too?" Dong Luorong asked cautiously from the other side of the door, her voice filled with hesitation.

Xie Feng wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. She stumbled out of the bathroom into a dimly lit room, where only a single desk lamp was on. The faint light from outside filtered through the relentless gray rain, casting a hazy mist into the room.

Dong Luorong sat curled at the edge of the bed, her legs drawn up. Blood from her body stained the white sheets in patches of red. Her face looked like frozen snow, paler than the bedsheet beneath her. She stared at Xie Feng, as fragile as a tightly bound paper doll, ready to crumble with the slightest touch.

"I don't eat people," Xie Feng blurted, suddenly realizing she needed to make that clear. "I don't... you don't need to be afraid of me!"

At least, she hoped she didn't. The state Qiu Chantian had been left in made it impossible to tell if he'd been eaten or not. Xie Feng quickly ran her tongue along her teeth—her mouth seemed clean enough.

Whatever Qiu Chantian had been talking about with eating people, it didn't seem to apply to her.

Dong Luorong gave a small nod, but she didn't dare move right away. After a few seconds, she asked, "What's going on... do you know?"

Xie Feng felt like she knew, but at the same time, she didn't. She looked down at her hands and said, "I have a vague idea, but it's blurry. I need to test it out to be sure. But he's dead... really dead. I killed him. What about you? What are we going to do now?"

Dong Luorong shivered, as if a cloud of confusion had drifted across her face.

After fighting for her life, she seemed to have run out of strength. Whether it was from exhaustion or injury, she now looked lost and fragile, as if she no longer had the energy to think clearly.

"I... I don't know." She gave a small, quiet laugh and murmured, "I always thought he'd live forever, with all his power. It's kind of funny, isn't it? Everyone dies, but I never believed he would. I thought so many times, 'If only he were dead.' Why does the world reward people like that? To live with dignity, you have to do undignified things... it's just not right. I had so many chances to kill him, but I never believed he would actually die. Not ever."

Xie Feng trembled as she walked over and knelt by the bedside. Her thoughts drifted away, her voice soft and hazy, as if the threads tying her to life were slowly unraveling.

"It's all right," she whispered to Dong Luorong, as if the other woman had suddenly become a little girl. "It's all right... I've evolved. From now on, I can protect you."

The word "evolved" seemed to pull Dong Luorong back a little from the brink.

She looked into Xie Feng's eyes and said, "You're a posthuman now..."

"And I don't feel the urge to destroy the world," Xie Feng forced a smile, hoping it might coax one from Dong Luorong as well. "I don't think I could even if I wanted to. I'm not capable of it right now."

"So, what can you do?" Dong Luorong asked in a small voice.

Xie Feng glanced around, then stood and grabbed the phone from the other bedside table. Her vision had sharpened to an incredible clarity, and her body felt light and powerful, as if it were made of pure energy. With the ease of cracking open a peanut shell, she crushed the phone in her hands, the pieces scattering across the bed.

Dong Luorong stared in stunned silence, her wide eyes reminiscent of a kitten seeing a television screen for the first time.

"And what else?" she asked eagerly, sitting up in excitement. The brightness in her gaze looked almost like a final spark of life. But the movement pulled at her wounds, and a pained groan escaped her lips. After catching her breath, she asked, "I heard posthumans are terrifying. Do you have any other abilities?"

"I do," Xie Feng answered gently, eager to share everything that had changed within her. It reminded her of the times she'd wanted to rush home and tell her mom whenever a teacher praised her at school. "I feel like I move much faster now, but that's hard to show. There's one other ability I think you'll like."

Under Dong Luorong's expectant gaze, Xie Feng scanned the room, her eyes settling on the desk lamp.

She placed her hand on the lampshade, smiling at Dong Luorong's confused expression.

"This feels strange," Xie Feng murmured, "like I'd been missing memories for the past nineteen years, and now they're finally coming back. The things I remember feel like they belong to another world, something unreal... Can you imagine? There are strange items in this world, objects with all sorts of different powers."

Dong Luorong had already leaned back on the bed, still panting for breath. Comfortable now, like a child listening to a story, she asked dreamily, "What kind of objects? What powers? How do you know about them? Do you have any?"

"Not yet," Xie Feng answered, kneeling at the bedside with her chin resting on the edge. She gazed up at Dong Luorong, her hand still on the lamp. "But I'll have one soon. You'll see its power with your own eyes... just this one. And out there, in the vast world, there could be countless more objects like it."

Dong Luorong softly repeated the words "vast world" to herself.

"What is it?" Xie Feng asked.

"I've always wished I could travel across both Dawnstar and Noonstar," Dong Luorong murmured. "I want so badly to see the world outside."

Xie Feng didn't respond. Instead, she gently brushed a strand of hair from Dong Luorong's face.

"A long time ago... my family had the wealth to make it happen. I could've done it. My parents even agreed—they always said that imperial girls needed to explore, to find a bigger space to live in. Even if I ended up at Dawnstar, as long as I was happy, they'd have been fine with it. But then... everything collapsed, like a building in an earthquake. It all happened so fast that before I could react, I was standing in the ruins."

Xie Feng wanted to ask what had happened but feared that doing so would reopen Dong Luorong's wounds.

"If they'd had a son, or if they had less money, maybe they'd still be alive," Dong Luorong murmured, her gaze drifting dreamily toward the window.

Even now, she seemed lost in her thoughts. "I knew back then that filing a complaint wouldn't help. Do commoners, especially women, carry any weight? If even a woman could use the law to bring someone down, what's the point of spending decades clawing your way to the top? Do people climb the ladder just to be bound by the law?"

Xie Feng, unfamiliar with the intricacies of the empire, kept her surprise and confusion to herself, refraining from asking further questions.

"At first, I was actually grateful to Qiu Chantian," Dong Luorong continued, as if those events had taken place a lifetime ago. "Back then, he was just a low-ranking official starting out... I did everything I could to get close to him. I knew his superior wanted to eliminate political enemies. I avoided approaching his superior directly—he didn't need a lucky charm and was too repulsive to even look at. My family became a bloody sacrifice, and because of that, Qiu Chantian got promoted."

When Dong Luorong spoke of her past, it felt as though decades separated her from those memories.

"Later, I saw on the news the person who destroyed my family. I'd known he wasn't clean, but I hadn't expected them to find such a massive amount of money in his house—and that was just the tip of the iceberg. I should have felt happy, knowing my enemy had been brought to justice, but I wasn't. As I watched the news, I suddenly realized... this wasn't news—it was a recruitment ad."

Xie Feng tightened her grip on Dong Luorong's hand while keeping her other hand on the lamp.

"After that, I worked hard to help Qiu Chantian with several tasks, gradually cementing the idea in his mind that I was his lucky charm. But the more he believed that, the more he grew to dislike me. He said I was like cold, hard bones—so unappealing that just looking at me drained him. For a year or two, he even forbade me from wearing anything but white and pink. My dream of traveling the world never came up again... and I don't think there was ever going to be an 'after' for me."

Dong Luorong finally shifted her gaze back to Xie Feng and whispered, "When he was assigned to Tear City, I was thrilled. At last, I'd get to see someplace different... even if it was already on the verge of being assimilated. I never imagined my fate would change here."

She coughed softly and said, "It hurts so much—I probably won't make it far. Now that you've evolved, you absolutely can't let them catch you. I'll stay behind and tell them you injured me. That way, I'll be just another victim, and you won't have to worry about me."

Xie Feng suddenly smiled.

"I won't leave you behind," she said, releasing the lamp and picking it up. The warm orange glow spilled across half of Dong Luorong's face, the interplay of light and shadow making her look as if she'd just been examined under a divine gaze.

"I told you earlier that you'd soon see the power of special objects... I've only just evolved, and my abilities are still limited. But this is the most useful thing I could think of."

Dong Luorong stared at her in confusion, glancing between Xie Feng and the lamp.

"The light now has healing properties," Xie Feng explained, her voice soft and gentle with each word. "It's unbelievable, isn't it? My abilities allow me to design, create, or modify strange objects. Right now, there are limits to how many I can make and how powerful they can be, but at the very least, I can save you."

Xie Feng set the lamp down carefully, then went to the desk and smashed the mirror. Picking up a shard, she held it up in front of Dong Luorong.

"Look... the wounds on your skin under the light are starting to heal, aren't they?"

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