Chapter 304: Heading To Free District
Translator: Pluto Editor: Vermillion
Lin Sanjiu totally couldn't recognize where she was.
It had been some time since she had woken up. A cold breeze blew as she stood feeling somewhat at a loss. She couldn't understand what had happened. Nothing made sense to her. She tried to piece together what had happened before she entered the pocket dimension, yet it still couldn't explain why she would appear here now.
After she jumped out of the fleshy prison behind her, it started quivering like an injured animal. The milk-like white vapor poured out from the opening created by Lin Sanjiu and continued for several minutes. At first, Lin Sanjiu was very cautious about it. However, she discovered that the "milk" lost its original effects once it was exposed to the outside world, as if the air outside diluted it. They quickly dissipated into the cold breeze. When she accidentally breathed some of it, her mind felt a little light, but it didn't affect her much.
Lin Sanjiu could feel a coarse and cold rocky surface pressing against both sides of her body. It was as if the rock walls were on the verge of closing and just swallowing Lin Sanjiu. As the space between the rock walls was narrow and irregularly-shaped, Lin Sanjiu's skeletal wings really posed a large problem for her. No matter how hard she tried to adjust the angles of her wings, they would always hit the walls. It was very uncomfortable. The only wider space was actually the location where that flesh prison was situated at. It was as though someone had made a pocket between the rock walls and somehow kept a prison made of flesh right in the middle of that pocket, even leaving some space around it.
Lin Sanjiu had stopped trying to look upward. Even with her posthuman vision, the rock walls were as high as her eyes could see. White light flooded from the opening above. When she looked up for the first time, Lin Sanjiu took quite a few seconds to recognize that she was looking at the sky from the opening far away.
Sighing, Lin Sanjiu fumbled through the two rock walls and took a few more steps forward. There was a thin layer of soil on the rocky surface which allowed a few malnourished green plants to sprout, although, just like the people in the fleshy prison, they were on the verge of dying.
Lin Sanjiu remembered clearly that she had entered a pocket dimension with the members of Smiling Mermaid. However, she had no idea how she ended up waking in a fleshy cavity, right at the bottom of a deep ravine.
After the fleshy cavity had been destroyed, slippery fluids poured out from it. Every time Lin Sanjiu took a step, she could hear the squelchy sounds that her boots made. Under the dim daylight from above, the gruesome deep-red walls of the fleshy cavity gradually dried up and became dark brown, as if it was near death. Regardless of what that thing was, Lin Sanjiu's attack had killed it.
—
Carrying the people out from that fleshy prison was harder than she thought. Though a few people looked healthy, most of them were emaciated as they had been in a coma for a long time without any form of nutrition. When Lin Sanjiu tried to carry a girl, she accidentally moved the girl's thigh. She heard a crack. The girl's leg bone was dislocated. It slipped from her pelvis bone leaving only a thin layer of yellow skin holding her leg to her body.
Perhaps, after the "milk" had evaporated into the air, these people would slowly wake up, but Lin Sanjiu didn't plan to wait for them to wake up. She placed the 30 to 40 people she rescued on the ground outside the prison. After doing that, she found some water from her card deck and fed some to each person. Afterward, she stepped across the small spaces between each of the unconscious people like a ballerina and headed further into the narrow rocky ravine with some effort.
After walking for two hours in the direction where the light seemed brighter and where the path seemed to lead upslope, Lin Sanjiu reached a dead end. No matter how reluctant she was, the only way out seemed to be to take the harsher and darker path in front of her which seemed just to get narrower and narrower.
Of all the "routes" Lin Sanjiu had journeyed through, this was certainly the most torturous. A few thousand meters below sea level, a large fissure somehow appeared in the rock stratum, creating a small tiny crack. Lin Sanjiu didn't know how long she had been walking and struggling to move forward through this harrowingly narrow space which was certainly tight enough to make someone claustrophobic.
In the beginning, she was still feeling puzzled and a little worried about her situation. However, after walking for some time, the only thing that occupied her mind was her intense hatred for her pair of skeletal wings. A few knocks and scrapes were nothing, but there were parts of the path so narrow that it was almost impossible for her large skeletal wings to pass through. Lin Sanjiu had to grit her teeth and endure the pain of stretching out her wings length-wise, which had the same effect as forcefully bending one of her four limbs into an impossible angle. Sometimes, she even had to sort of stack her wings together. Lin Sanjiu really did not know how she squeezed through those portions. Luckily, no one could hear her screams of pain in this deep ravine.
Just when she thought that she would just personally tear off her own wings and throw them away. The rock walls receded and gradually the gap between the rock walls grew wider. Soon, the path became brighter and wider. The gradient of the path also started to increase. Lin Sanjiu climbed for a few hours using both her arms and feet. Finally, she found herself on the surface level again.
When a cacophony of humans voices, the engine sounds from the occasional airship flying across the sky, some loud noises generated by something unknown, and the other countless noises and sounds entered her ears, Lin Sanjiu almost suspected for a second that she had crawled out from hell and returned to the human world.
Two large massive moons hung over countless poorly maintained hundred-stories skyscrapers. The haphazard layers of power lines blocked their full view. The noise of the bustling city filled every lit street and dim corner.
Lin Sanjiu seemed to still be in the Cyber District.
Despite the large big fissure, the people seemed unfazed that there was an abyss right in the middle of their road. They treated it as something very common. The spot where Lin Sanjiu climbed up from was only surrounded by a yellow barricade tape which warned people about the potential fall. When she came out from, she was bleeding from the many scrapes she gotten from the sharp edges of the rocks. Her face and limbs were covered with dust and soil and her whole body ached. Yet, no one even gave her a second look.
Enduring her aches, Lin Sanjiu took out her map.
"This is strange? How did you get back here?" Mrs. Manas commented from Lin Sanjiu's mind after looking at the map for some time.
Even though she was unfamiliar with Red Nautilus, she managed to figure out where she was very quickly. This long ravine which spanned across more than half the Cyber District was named "Grand Canyon". It was like a scar on the map. One side of the Grand Canyon was just wastelands, while Lin Sanjiu was on the side which was near the business center. The first time she saw this Grand Canyon was actually from the window of that dead appraiser's house.
However, there was a large distance between Smiling Mermaid's base and this Grand Canyon. Lin Sanjiu couldn't figure out how she could end up at the bottom of this Grand Canyon. After losing [A Girl's Sorrow], Lin Sanjiu couldn't explain the series of subsequent events logically.
Irritated, Lin Sanjiu rubbed her map once but quickly stopped because she remembered the number of red crystals she spent on it. "I don't know," she replied moodily, "But, the people, or whatever, which put me in this situation should count their lucky stars today. I'm going to buy an airship ticket now."
Even though Lin Sanjiu was kind, she wasn't stupid. When a dozen medium crystals fell from one of the people whom she was carrying from the fleshy prison, Lin Sanjiu knew that she had solved her airship ticket problem.
Although she got the money for her ticket in an integrity-compromised manner, Mrs. Manas, who usually had a higher moral bar, condoned her action. After all, the most important resources to those comatose people might be food and water rather than red crystals.
"But… Are you just going to ignore the pocket dimension that is swallowing up Red Nautilus?" Mrs. Manas wasn't as forgiving about this issue.
"I can't handle that," Lin Sanjiu admitted, "But, where is that pocket dimension?"
"Obviously, you know, it's at Smiling Mermaid's—"
"Logically speaking, I should be standing in Smiling Mermaid's base," Lin Sanjiu interrupted Mrs. Manas, "But, I woke up here."
Mrs. Manas kept quiet for a while before whispering, "Is it possible that the pocket dimension had already swallowed up this area?"
"It doesn't look any different than before."
"But, Sajee said—" Mrs. Manas was a little stunned. She stopped before she finished her sentence.
Lin Sanjiu smiled humorlessly, "That's right. It is all Sajee's one-sided words. We entered the pocket dimension with her but I didn't see her anywhere in that prison."
The strange-looking girl definitely hid something from Lin Sanjiu and the others.
"When I meet Reno and the others, I will get help from the Progressor Alliance to investigate Sajee," Lin Sanjiu mumbled to herself quietly as she walked toward the airship registration point, "Before I find that woman, I can only hope that the elites in Red Nautilus are smart enough not to let things escalate out of control."
Lin Sanjiu thought that it was a decent plan until she entered the busy airship registration point and stood before the information screen for a long time. She clearly remembered that Smiling Mermaid had already received information about the "parasitic" expanding pocket dimension. However, when she read the news, "Cyber Current Affairs", on the information screen, she didn't see any coverage about that matter. There was only news like "CLASH had successfully returned from an A-level world", "12 new apocalyptic worlds had been entered into the Central Information System, "Someone is offering to buy plant-related Special Items at high prices".
"What's going on…" Lin Sanjiu frowned but she couldn't come up with an answer. She shook her head and walked toward the ticket counter, joining the moving crowd.
After the tall woman with skeletal wings left, the young ticket counter representative looked down at her electronic information screen and started browsing the bidding prices for visas available for four months later. For the D-level world that she was targeting, the price she bid was indeed too low. Just when she was about to sigh and ponder about what she could do next, she sensed that someone was standing in front of the ticket counter.
"Hello," the young representative looked up and flashed her business smile, following which, she found her words stuck in her throat.
The woman standing in front of her had eyes like two deep soulless wells and had no sclera. Even though she had seen many different people with all sort of strange appearances and conditions, this woman had a sort of unique, non-human vibe. The young customer representative shuddered unintentionally.
The woman who was wearing a thick scarf seemed to realize her own abnormality. She looked at her reflection in the silver counter desk before looking up again. This time, her sclera suddenly appeared. It was as if she had tried her best to compress her pupils to create some sclera. She blinked vigorously before smiling.
"Where is that Big Sister with skeletal wings heading? I want a ticket to the same place."