bdsm-fiction Chapter 23 Investigation
Chapter 23 Investigation
In the afternoon, the sunlight slanted, casting long, distorted shadows of the buildings.
After finishing his training, Xu Mo took a deep breath, tightly fastened the sharp cleaver to his waist, slung the slightly empty backpack over his shoulder, and embarked on his first truly systematic exploration of this desolate town.
He left the small, familiar area centered around the temporary shelter and headed deeper into the more unknown streets. His footsteps rustled softly on the cobblestone and dusty pavement, amplified in the absolute silence as if they were the drumbeats of his heart.
The scene before him was even more striking than what Xu Mo had glimpsed through the window. Desolate and dilapidated—these four words were etched into his eyes like a brand.
Many buildings were completely destroyed, with half of each building collapsed, revealing twisted steel bars and broken furniture remnants, resembling skeletons gnawed by a giant beast. Many more buildings were riddled with holes, with almost no intact windows, walls covered in cracks, and some even completely collapsed.
This desolation is not merely the decay of buildings. It is the emptiness and deathly silence left behind after all traces of life have been completely erased. On the streets, abandoned vehicles block traffic haphazardly, some burned to a crisp, charred skeleton, resembling enormous metal corpses.
And real skeletons began to appear sporadically.
At the entrance of a convenience store, Xu Mo saw a skeleton lying prostrate on the ground. Its clothes had long since rotted away, leaving only a few strips of cloth of indistinguishable color clinging to the skeleton, which remained in the posture of crawling before death.
Beside an overturned school bus lay several exceptionally small skeletons, their size clearly belonging to children. The empty eye sockets of the bones stared blankly at the gray sky, silently recounting the most heartbreaking tragedy of the apocalypse. Xu Mo's gaze lingered on these skeletons for a moment before silently shifting away. There was no fear, only a heavy, cold sorrow pressing down on his heart. These were once vibrant lives, people just like him.
Continuing onward, Xu Mo noticed more details. Some walls were riddled with bullet holes, indicating that fierce fighting had taken place here. Several barricades, crudely constructed from sandbags and abandoned vehicles, had long been breached, but one could still imagine the desperate resistance people had shown there.
Occasionally, large patches of dried, blackened bloodstains could be seen on the ground—bloodstains that could not be wiped away no matter what. These traces of battle, though seemingly lacking in military discipline and more like hasty self-rescue by civilians, revealed the extent of their devastation from the shocking bullet holes and bloodstains.
"This place... used to be very lively." Xu Mo thought to himself silently.
There were struggles, resistance, and desperate cries here. But all the voices eventually fell silent, and all the efforts turned into ruins and bones.
Xu Mo cautiously moved through the ruins, wary of any possible movement. But apart from the sound of the wind and the clatter of gravel kicked up by his footsteps, there was nothing else. There were no zombies, no living people, not even a bird or an insect in sight. The entire town seemed to have been completely "purified" by an invisible force, leaving only these remnants of matter as tombstones for a civilization that once existed.
He walked roughly along a main road, covering nearly a third of the town. The scenes he saw were largely the same: ruin and deathly silence. He found no trace of other survivors, nor any valuable, unlooted supplies. All the buildings he could enter were empty, as if ravaged by a hurricane, leaving only heavy, unmanageable trash.
As he silently observed, the setting sun had unknowingly sank below the horizon.
As Xu Mo dragged his slightly heavy steps back to the shelter, a huge, orange-red sunset hung on the town's broken skyline, bathing everything in a tragic yet warm golden-red hue. The sunlight shone unhindered on him, casting a long, lonely shadow onto the cracked asphalt road.
The shadow was long, and under the glow of the setting sun, its edges were bathed in a soft halo, creating a strange and incomplete beauty.
But this beauty is tinged with a profound loneliness.
He was the only shadow still able to move in this vast graveyard. This enormous town, with its countless houses and streets, seemed to have become nothing more than a backdrop for Xu Mo alone. The hustle and bustle and life itself were long gone, leaving only him, a newcomer, treading on the bones and ruins of his predecessors, walking alone in the twilight of the apocalypse.
Returning to the familiar house facing the street, Xu Mo took one last look back. The sun was about to disappear completely, and dusk was surging in from all directions like a tide, ready to swallow the town into darkness once more.
This expedition yielded neither danger nor supplies for Xu Mo. However, it brought him a deeper understanding. He became even more convinced that this place was a thing of the past, and the so-called tranquility was merely a ripple in still water after a disaster. He also realized more clearly that he could not, and should not, remain trapped here forever.
After moving the furniture and re-blocking the entrance, Xu Mo put down the cleaver and backpack.
He lit a candle he'd brought back from the still world, its dim light dispelling a small patch of darkness. Xu Mo sat on the sofa, carefully cleaning and maintaining his cleaver, his mind replaying the bullet holes, barricades, and skeletons he'd seen that afternoon.
There was a huge warning sign there, silently showing him the ultimate fate of the loser.
He must not become one of those countless skeletons.
The desire to become stronger has never been as intense and pure as it is now.
That night, all was quiet.
Xu Mo lay on the sofa, his body exhausted from the day's exploration and continuous training, yet his mind was unusually clear, and he felt no sleepiness. The faint starlight filtering in from the window outlined the room's blurry contours, constantly intertwining and overlapping with the images of broken walls and ruins he had seen during the day in his mind.
The questions that had been deliberately suppressed during the daytime investigation now surfaced slowly in the quiet of the night, like ice cubes submerged at the bottom of water.
A question that Xu Mo had previously overlooked, or rather, hadn't had time to ponder, suddenly crashed into his mind:
"How long has this apocalypse been going on?"
Once this question arose, it was like opening a floodgate, triggering a series of more specific and unsettling questions.
He had previously passively accepted this apocalypse, struggling to survive, focusing all his attention on how to live in the "present." But now, after witnessing the town's massive devastation, Xu Mo couldn't help but think about the "past."
Were those damaged buildings, that level of destruction, really caused solely by zombies? Zombies are slow-moving and lack intelligence. They might be able to break glass and knock over some things, but could they cause half of a building to collapse, walls to be covered with huge cracks, or even completely crumble?
Xu Mo recalled the scenes he had seen during the day: some buildings looked as if they had been forcibly torn apart from the inside or outside by a huge force, with the steel bars at the break points twisted and exposed; the wreckage of some vehicles was not just from a collision, but more like they had been crushed or torn by something.
"Can zombies really do this much?" A chill ran through Xu Mo's heart.
If not, then what is it?
Is it some kind of mutated creature more terrifying and destructive than zombies? Or... are these traces left by heavy weapons used by humanity in the early stages of the apocalypse to eliminate zombies or in internal struggles caused by the collapse of order? Or perhaps, this disaster itself was accompanied by some unknown natural calamity or mutation?