Chapter 455: Chapter 455: Two Worlds

The entire mutation process lasted a full two hours, indeed, just as Artemis had said, it was a long period of time.

However, we didn’t spend the time reading a book as she had suggested.

Because Bubbles had swindled me with the line, “It’s a wife’s duty to prepare her husband’s pack for a journey,” I suddenly discovered that my Personal Space was filled with all sorts of weird stuff by that little homebody, and so we dragged the somewhat bemused Artemis to play two hours of Starcraft II online. It turned out that against the mighty sightseeing group from the Empire, there was no limit to their incompetence.

Although initially startled by the bizarre surroundings, Qianqian lived up to her title of “The Most Oblivious Imperial Leader in History” (Sandora language), and in less than ten minutes, she was calmly accepting the sight of a staircase in front of her doing the slide dance. Then, she threw herself into the fervid journey of Starcraft II, simultaneously mocking how pathetic the strengths of each race were while playing. She derided battlecruiser squadrons as merely five combat strength scum and the Holy Mother Ship as a mere ten-second sharpshooter in front of an Energy Raider. Obviously, her confidence was through the roof after sweeping the three major races in the Kepulu Star Zone, confusing the game with reality to the extent that she searched the game screen for where she could deploy Ravens and Armored Scorpions…

In the end, the result was that Qianqian, Artemis, and Big Sister were thoroughly trashed by me, Lilina, and Lin Xue.

I was really curious about what Big Sister intended to do with the 150+ peasants she deployed…

“If I mined out all the resources on the map beforehand, wouldn’t that cut off your supplies?” Big Sister boldly explained her strategy.

Sis, you’re a natural-born military strategist, but unfortunately, Blizzard’s engineers aren’t…

“You guys are really… incredible.”

When the disturbances around us gradually settled down and the collapsed wall returned to its place with a whoosh like a video played in reverse, Artemis said this with a conflicted expression.

Pfft, you haven’t seen the even more boring bunch in Dark City, a pair of skeletons playing rock-paper-scissors and betting their ribs, no less!

“Do things like this happen often?” Big Sister looked at the last crack on the opposite wall sealing up and asked Artemis out of curiosity.

“No regular pattern,” Artemis breathed a sigh of relief. Even though she could remain calm in the face of such scenes, a bit of nervousness was inevitable, “Sometimes this building goes one or two years without any issues, and sometimes several mutations occur in one day. At the worst of times, we have even had to collectively seek refuge on the open ground outside. But that requires waiting for a calm period between two mutations, and if the second one comes too quickly, it’s actually more dangerous to leave our rooms rashly. During the mutation, apart from the room interiors not undergoing distortion, every corridor and stairway in the building is unsafe. Once, due to lack of experience before we understood this phenomenon, when a mutation started, one of our friends tried to run out along the corridor, and, well… he’s still trapped under a pillar on the first floor. Some say they’ve seen him giving lectures in a classroom… Who knows…”

As Artemis spoke, she casually tore off a piece of paper from a book at her feet, pulled out a thick marker from her pocket, and scribbled “Chemistry Department” in bold letters on the paper, then headed out the door on her own. We exchanged glances and followed.

Outside, the scene had completely changed. The Chemistry Department activity room, which had originally been at the end of a corridor, was now directly opposite an elevator. The distance between the elevator doors and the activity room’s was less than two meters, and along the wall next to the elevator, several cracks were rapidly disappearing. Soon, the elevator that had abruptly appeared merged seamlessly with the surrounding walls.

Artemis ignored the sudden appearance of the elevator and turned around, trying to jump up to reach the sign at the entrance of the activity room, but it was evident that she was too short. Despite several attempts, she couldn’t reach it–if this had been Pandora, that girl would probably have just yanked down the entire doorframe, right?

“Give me a hand, stick this up.” Artemis handed over the paper with her sloppy handwriting and sprayed it twice with the paint she carried, “While the paint’s still wet.”

I took the sheet of paper that looked a bit dirty and turned around to see a foreign doorplate that had been altered beyond recognition, with several layers under a piece of hard cardboard with “Library” written on it.

“Each mutation changes the walls, hallways, stairs, and rooftops. Writing these things down might not last long, but at the very least, it lets everyone know where they can safely land for a while.”

Artemis spoke in a very normal tone, as if she were already quite accustomed to such matters.

I helped stick the temporary new “doorplate” on top of the one that had nearly turned into an irregular cuboid due to the layers of cardboard and asked curiously, “With the building so bizarre, why haven’t you moved somewhere else?”

“Only here can we protect ourselves from falling into slumber,” Artemis shrugged, “After that night, only the teachers and students who stayed in this building became Awakeners, while everyone outside turned into sleeping ghosts. And after several attempts, I also found that although the people around me could maintain clarity, my abilities are only truly effective inside this building. We did try to let some companions stay in the nearby dormitory buildings, but within a few days, they all disappeared.”

“That’s really terrible.”

Lilina muttered before looking up, “So how do you all find your way through the building after a mutation? Everything’s been warped, hasn’t it?”

“Patience, attention, and luck,” Artemis quipped and then turned to push open the doors of a newly appeared elevator. A long staircase appeared across from the lift doors, “In this world, you won’t starve to death even if you don’t eat; you’ll only feel hunger. As long as you’re careful and avoid falling into dangerous places while finding your way, it’s fine. Once, it took me four days and nights to find a way from the sixth floor to the fifth floor–it’s not impossible… Come along, you might be powerful, but here, I’m afraid your skills aren’t much use.”

Artemis was right, the information here was chaotic to the extreme. The probes we had released earlier had all lost contact within this building and the contradictory data they might have sent back would have been of little use anyway.

Following Artemis, we walked along a narrow and twisted passageway. The steps below us initially led upward, but within less than ten meters, they turned sharply downward. There were no lights in the corridor, but there was always some level of illumination, so we didn’t have to grope our way in the dark.

“There is some pattern to the mutations. For instance, staircases on odd-numbered floors certainly become descending after a mutation, while those on even-numbered floors do the opposite. North-south corridors tend to slope upward after changing… well, sometimes not, ah, there’s a door ahead.”

Artemis suddenly made a discovery. On the left wall, a few meters in front of us, there was a pale yellow door, only half of which was exposed while the other half was concealed under the staircase.

“Um, if there’s someone inside and the whole door gets sealed, wouldn’t they be trapped in there?”

Looking at the half-hidden wooden door under the staircase, Qianqian asked curiously.

“No, although there have been instances where people hiding in a room couldn’t get out due to building mutations, in this world, you won’t die from not eating or drinking. Just wait for the next change, and you’ll be able to get out. From our experience, a room won’t be sealed off twice in a row, and usually, a completely sealed room will undergo a second smaller shift in a short time. It seems this building still retains the ‘definition’ of a ‘door’… but maybe there are exceptions to these findings we’ve collected. There have been friends who hid in a room and disappeared after a mutation, never to return, and along with the rooms they were in; we don’t know where they got moved to. Many things have vanished in this twisted building, and we don’t know if they are hidden in some entangled corridors or have indeed ceased to exist… This door looks like it can be opened; come and give me a hand.”

Artemis pushed against the blocked door a few times and when she realized it opened inwards, she turned back to signal for our help.

“Be careful, hold on to the wall beside you. The door might swing open suddenly and if there’s danger on the other side, falling in will be the end. Well, I don’t know if you would care about such hazards, but we’ve lost more than a dozen companions this way.”

“You seem rather indifferent when mentioning them?”

I gently pushed the motionless yellow wooden door and turned my head in confusion as I asked,

“Of course not!” Artemis immediately rebutted loudly, but then she quickly turned her head aside, “You won’t understand… Hmm, there’s some noise coming from the other side of the door…”

Indeed, when we quieted down, the faint sound of friction from behind the door became noticeable. It was as if something very heavy was being dragged across the floor, carrying with it the sounds of friction and the crumbling of cement. Artemis pressed her ear against the door to listen intently, then suddenly looked up, her face showing clear panic: “Something’s still moving inside… Run!!”

But it was one step too late.

As the words were still coming from Artemis, that wooden door burst into scattered fragments, and the entire wall on our side was smashed into pieces by some massive object charging from the opposite side. Debris of cement mixed with steel rebar blossomed from the walls like fireworks, and a storm of fragments swept toward Artemis, who hadn’t had time to dodge. The golden-haired girl’s shocked expression had not had time to fade before she was almost swallowed up by the storm, a hundred times more ferocious than a bomb blast.

But in the next instant, everything came to a standstill.

“You were right, we should be more careful here.”

Qianqian rudely grabbed Artemis, who was still dazed, and pulled the girl with wobbly steps forward. We closely followed suit, tossing the debris that was frozen in mid-air behind us.

We hurried along; it took nearly three minutes for us to escape the narrow and dangerous passage. When Artemis was unceremoniously dropped to the ground by Qianqian, the latter snapped her fingers.

“Boom boom boom!!”

A series of deep sounds echoed behind us in the corridor, and after a while, a pungent smell of lime powder and smoke drifted out from there.

Artemis looked at the completely collapsed passage with unsettled nerves. After a long moment, she stiffly raised her head, but before she could speak, Qianqian impatiently threw out a command: “Shut up!”

Well, she’s quite harsh with strangers…

“Don’t be surprised, her second personality is just like that, no harm meant,” I said with an awkward smile, lightly tapping on Dark Qianqian’s head. She immediately bared her teeth at me threateningly–returning to normal.

“Was that time stop just now?” Artemis asked cautiously.

“Exactly, that was the trick we used to catch you in the first place!” Qianqian boasted proudly, her mischievous little girl demeanor a stark contrast to her former cold and rude appearance.

“I didn’t expect to actually see it in the real world…” Artemis remarked with a hint of excitement, eliciting my sarcastic comment: “What, did you think that was all just your wild imagination?”

The tiny crisis that suddenly occurred was merely a minor episode. According to Artemis’s description, this was the first time such an incident had happened. The building’s mutation did not stop entirely, and some parts even destroyed the already stable structure due to continuing mutations. However, in this strange world, almost every day there were inexplicable and unprecedented events happening, just like the sudden disappearance of twilight a few days ago. The survivors, now accustomed to facing these disasters with equanimity, had even reached the point where they could joke about such experiences after surviving them.

“If it hadn’t been for that narrow passage just now but instead a spacious corridor or classroom, one could have easily avoided it. So, it’s not that terrifying, is it?”

Artemis said this with an ingenuous smile on her face, speaking with ease.

“Child, you’re sick in the head and need treatment,” Lilina said gravely, planning to start drumming up her own business. Ever since she had extorted Reynolds and Uncle Z several times in the Kepulu Star Zone, the girl had grown increasingly fond of playing the scammer.

“I don’t need it,” Artemis promptly rejected, “In this damn place, being mentally extreme isn’t a bad thing.”

“Oh, you lost lamb…” Lilina shook her head, her face full of pity for the world.

Regardless of what new interest the nasty Fake Lolita had taken in Artemis, under the latter’s lead, we finally found the activity room where we first met, after quite some effort. It was clear that choosing the Awakeners’ activity center there had been given considerable thought. Amidst the entire building’s strange changes, the displacement of this room was minimal. Also, the main passages connected to it hadn’t changed much. Near the corner of the corridor close to the activity room, we saw a conspicuous red arrow, with the words “Headquarters, safe direction” written behind it, clearly freshly sprayed with paint. According to Artemis, after every building change, it was the duty of the Awakeners’ members to mark such signs on any new safe passages they found, enabling those who had been separated due to room displacements to quickly reassemble.

It seemed we were somewhat late. The activity room was already filled with quite a few people, roughly twenty, all dressed like middle school students. They were probably the remaining members of the Awakeners. When they saw Artemis appear, everyone obviously sighed with relief, then all eyes converged on us, the unfamiliar faces.

“We’re the newbies,” I communicated directly to Artemis’ mind through a Spiritual Connection. “We’re not sure yet if we can be of any help. The greater the hope, the greater the disappointment. Let’s not reveal our identities to them for now.”

“Understood.” Artemis nodded, then announced loudly to the crowd, “The mutation has ended! I’m so pleased to see everyone still standing here! Hu Wen and Ling Yin should have already informed you all about the arrival of these new members…”

The addition of us to the group was met with incredible enthusiasm by all the survivors. From the original hundreds whittled down to only about twenty, the spark of hope in these “Awakeners” had likely dimmed a long time ago. Even with the astonishing influence of Artemis supporting them, it couldn’t reverse the stark reality that everyone’s morale was low. But our arrival visibly eased such feelings.

New comrades, and five of them at once! Even in this world’s dim condition, the infusion of fresh blood was enough to send them into a frenzy of joy.

The result of this jubilation was a merry, albeit modestly sized, party. Hu Wen, who had been a bit moody earlier in the day for not having an immediate welcome party, finally got his wish. This guy, who looked like a bit of a tough, was in fact quite straightforward and warm-hearted. When Artemis announced that there would be a long-missed gathering that evening, an excited Hu Wen took on nearly fifty percent of the preparation work by himself.

As it was a rare chance to relax, everyone naturally wanted to slacken their tense nerves as much as possible. Artemis specifically permitted everyone to spend tonight outside of the “Old Building.” A brief departure from the bizarrely transformed building wouldn’t immediately induce “slumber,” but could help one momentarily forget the twisted scenes within that absurd refuge. Hence, the Awakeners generally conducted various celebrations and gatherings outside of the Old Building–for despite the greater dangers, the outside world still seemed rather pleasant, at least.

The party was set in a campus clearing not too far from the Old Building. The Awakeners gathered a large amount of firewood from nearby, mostly from the tables, chairs, and benches in classrooms, and some from the dried branches in nearby flower beds. These materials were piled into a big heap, serving as the fuel for the bonfire. All the world’s survivors gathered around this bright Flames, unleashing a joy outsiders might find hard to comprehend. A mere few dozen meters away, at the school’s dormitory block area, lights shone brightly; one could vaguely see students moving within their dorms. The noise of the Awakeners’ gathering was tremendous, and the sound system Hu Wen had somehow scrounged up blasted a sequence of inexplicable noises throughout the entire campus. However, none of those in the dorms seemed affected by the sounds, continuing their activities as if oblivious, with only an occasional “student” casting a vacant glance over before resuming their tasks.

The dormitory block nearby and the close-at-hand bonfire party, plainly in sight, yet seemed like two separate realities. Looking at such a scene stirred indescribable feelings in my heart.

“That building, it’s like a beast that chooses its victims,” Lilina, who seemed to have had a few drinks, staggered over and then slumped next to me. She immediately tipped over and lay on my legs, her small hand trembling as she pointed at the aging edifice not far away, “But they have no choice but to accept its protection… Boss, can we help them?”

“Of course,” I said with a gentle pat on Lilina’s dozy, silly face, full of confidence, “Don’t forget, your boss is the kindest person in the world!”

“Mhm…” Lilina murmured, half-asleep, “And the most awesome Daddy…”

Me: “…”

(To be continued – for subsequent events, please visit www.wuxiaworld.site. More chapters are available. Support the author, support genuine reading!)