A light appeared at the bottom of the cave. And after a long while, they finally reached the bottom.
Hao Ren looked up; he could no longer see the entrance at the top. It was all dark. The cave was so deep that there was a dust cloud above in the middle section. “This cave is deep. Could Baptiste find a way down here alive?”
Vivian nodded. “Wizard is very resourceful. Maybe he knows some flying spell and the monsters didn’t manage to tear him up.”
As the car continued to descend, Hao Ren noticed that the light did not come directly from the bottom, but from the dark walls on all sides. After dropping to a certain height, he could see huge cracks on the walls. And the cracks seemed to lead straight to the outside world.
They descended for hundreds of meters more and finally landed.
“It is safe,” Turcan said after observing for a while. “Drive in any direction. The cracks should lead us to the outside.”
The bottom of the cave was like a shade under the shadow, but it was still dark overall despite lights shone through the triangular cracks in the distance. Hao Ren thought that the bottom of the cave was an open space, but now it seemed he was wrong. The cave was a passage to the bottom, and they still needed to travel through the tunnels at the bottom to reach the actual second level of Inferno. He cranked up the engine again and drove towards the most prominent light source. Everyone was holding their breath as this weird place made them nervous.
The ground was rugged, with lots of weird stones scattered around. Occasionally they could see some other objects.
There were pieces of something lying ahead, all dark red, and there were also signs of impact on the ground. Hao Ren knew it was the monsters that had broken in million pieces upon impact.
God knows how many more such creatures had fallen for the past ten thousand years. But the car must be now running on those fragments of the monsters. Those poor monsters that died and turned into dust at the bottom of the cave, far from where they once lived.
The car moved forwards, and the light in the distance became closer and closer. In the shadow, Hao Ren saw some thick, stone-like things hanging from the top, and the crack where the light came from appeared tilted inward. This strange environment stunned him. He was struggling to make sense of this space. He was confused. It took him a while to put and two together. The bottom of the cave expanded outward gradually; the further he went, the wider it became.
He sped up and drove the exit.
Soon, a vast world appeared before them.
The change of landscape caught them by surprise. The scenery of the second level of Inferno had them rooted to the spot. A vast expanse of rolling hills and valleys covered with beautiful green grass stretching out into the horizon. There was no cave boundary contrary to what they had imagined.
Hao Ren opened the door and climbed out of the car. He could feel he was stepping on a soft grassland and the fragrance of the grass drifted into his nostrils. He looked up at the ‘sky,’ instead of a thick, dark rock dome he saw large patches of white clouds. This underground world was just too vast, and its dome was even higher than the cumulus. So water vapor and dust formed the clouds that blocked out the view of the dome above. The clouds glowed softly just like the outermost clouds above the surface. But the light here was a lot brighter. It lit up the underground world as if it were daylight.
Hao Ren gazed at the clouds, which were not as many as the one above the surface. He finally saw what through the gap between the two clouds: deep darkness at extremely high altitudes. With his vision, he could barely recognize the sharp gully lines, which was the earth’s crust.
Or something like a crust.
The others had also gotten out of the car. Hessiana looked up, froze. After a long while, she took a deep breath. “Is this a cave?” she marveled.
“I have said it earlier. The second level is incredible big though it is located underground,” said Vivian. Her reaction was just as stunned as the others were though. “I didn’t expect it to be like this. I thought it was hell.”
“After all, the surface is already as bad as hell,” Lily frowned as she looked at the lush green world. “Is this Inferno? It doesn’t look like one.”
Nangong Wuyue began to feel harmonious with the water element here. The inexplicable feeling of danger and hostile atmosphere seemed to exist only on the surface. She form-shifted into an ordinary sea snake, face looking pleasant. “The water here is very peaceful, unlike on the surface.”
Hao Ren did not say a word because he had only one question in mind: How big is this place?
Thinking of this question, he could not help but look back at the ‘tunnel’ from which they had emerged earlier.
A towering mountain peak appeared in front of his eyes, as expected, and it was hard to see its overall shape at this distance.
He could only see huge, black mountain ridges dropping from the top, extending continuously into the distance, and then disappeared into the green earth. The upper part of the mountain gradually narrowed and became a giant wall that almost perpendicular to the ground and rose above the clouds. The entire mountain was dark and rocky, but after careful observation, he found that the rock had something more than meets the eye.
A thought suddenly crossed his mind. He immediately called everyone to get into the car. “Hurry up. Let’s go farther out and take a better view!”
As Hao Ren drove the car towards the distance, the ‘mountain’ was behind them. Lily, sitting in the last row, turned and looked out the window. She was wide-eyed. “Tree! It is a tree!”
Hao Ren stopped on the high grassy ground. They gazed up at the direction of the ‘mountain’ and finally saw the whole picture of the behemoth. As Lily said, it was a giant tree, a tree with developed roots swelled to the surface. The trunk of the giant tree grew up to the bottom of the crust above through the clouds, as if it was a pillar of the world while the lower part of the trunk planted firmly into the earth below. The sloping mountain ridges and cone-shaped mountains that Hao Ren saw just now were none other than the roots of this giant tree.
And, the cave that they descended a while ago was the hollow tube inside the trunk.
The MDT suddenly said, “There are new images from other probes. Some probes have found other Inferno entrances. They are the same as here.”
The MDT showed them the images, which were almost the same things: giant tree supporting the whole earth (or the sky), and the vast green land around the giant tree.
“The other high-speed probes have reached the other side of the planet, where they have also found similar entrances.”
“The second layer of Inferno is not a cave or a series of caves, but another layer of the earth’s crust,” Hao Ren said slowly. “This is a strata planet. I’m not kidding. It is a real deal.”
People’s speculations about the Inferno were outrageously wrong. The otherworldlings once thought that there was a series of giant caves in the underground world, another horrible hell. But in reality, all the caves were interconnected. They were merely a single space—a space that was not dangerous, but a paradise.
This planet has a double crust, and Inferno was just its epidermis.
Maybe there was also a third layer of earth’s crust. Who knows?