Chapter 178 : A World of Self-Extinction
Chapter 178: A World of Self-Extinction
This was a world that came with its own special environmental lighting.
When Funika held Mitia’s hand and jumped into this otherworld that she had found by accident.
For some reason, from the moment she set foot on this alien land, her heart began to constrict uncontrollably, a feeling of palpitations and dread hanging heavily in her chest.
Without even lifting her head, she could tell what kind of sight filled the sky above simply by looking at the crimson horizon.
The tilted, collapsed buildings carried a strong sense of the near-modern style of the world she once lived in, while wreckage resembling automobiles lay scattered around. Empty crimson whirlwinds swept through, making the remains emit eerie creaking sounds.
In this desolate urban ruin, they did not see the slightest sign of life. On the weed-choked roads, there were only patches of black stains.
The stench of blood permeating the air made Mitia’s brows knit tightly. The golden radiance on her body grew ever more brilliant, casting a magnificently resplendent glow over the surrounding decay.
Across the streets, the same sentence was written again and again in various ways, words they could not understand. It was repeated in every visible corner, the only sight that existed in this seemingly dead world.
After weaving around piles of wreckage and turning onto another street, the scene that entered her view made Mitia halt in her tracks, her body stiffening.
On the shattered street before her eyes, densely packed rows of strange corpses knelt everywhere.
Judging from their clothing, there were men and women, young and old alike. Every corpse had its knees, elbows, and head pressed tightly against the ground, prostrating in full submission. In the upturned palms of their hands lay a shriveled, brown, gelatinous mass of unknown origin.
As far as the eye could see, corpses in the same posture filled the scene. When she looked into the distance, this curled, kneeling姿态 made Mitia involuntarily think of tombstones.
Mitia turned her head and looked at Funika with an extremely complicated gaze. At this moment, every cell in her body was screaming the same message—leave this place immediately!
Funika seemed to sense something and turned to meet Mitia’s eyes: ‘What’s wrong, beauty?’
“...It’s nothing. Let’s leave.”
‘Oh, okay. Scenes like this are everywhere anyway, there’s nothing left to look at.’
‘Oh right, you didn’t forget those symbols we saw along the way, did you? That should be the writing of the people of this world. Even though I can’t understand it, I can feel an urgency within those symbols.’
‘After seeing them so many times, I got curious and wanted to know what they actually wrote, so I deliberately went to look for reading materials from this world. But what struck me as strange was that everything else was more or less intact, yet I couldn’t find a single thing like a book—not one!’
‘But I did see quite a few incineration sites. I picked up some remnants there. It was as if... as if they had carried out large-scale centralized destruction on themselves, a kind of self-extinction.’
‘Ever since I obtained this world, I’ve been researching it. Recently I finally deciphered the beginning. It should mean, don’t—’
“Shut up!”
The harsh shout startled Funika and broke her train of thought. A surge of force came from her hand, squeezing so hard it hurt.
Mitia propped her head up with one hand, struggling to suppress that inexplicable impulse: “Go back first. From now on, you’re not allowed to say another word. Leave immediately!”
It was only after the two of them returned to the magic world that the overwhelming sense of threat, so intense it had nearly driven Mitia insane, suddenly vanished, as if it had never existed at all.
Feeling as though she had come back to life, Mitia nearly wanted to stand up and slap herself twice. Damn it, why did she have to be so damn curious?
She had heard ‘a wise person does not stand beneath a collapsing wall’ countless times, yet she always forgot it like a pig.
A warm, soft body wrapped itself around her. Funika breathed softly by her ear: ‘What exactly was wrong?’
Seeing the golden light flaring from her body once more, Mitia finally couldn’t hold back. She turned around, grabbed Funika—who hadn’t yet reacted—and pressed her over her lap, producing a flurry of dull impacts.
‘Ah!! Ouch!’
Mitia rained down merciless smacks on her pert backside.
Damn it! Are you a fox or something? Why are you so damn seductive?!
I’m already like this, and you still have the nerve to play tricks and try to seduce me. If I don’t beat you, you’ll really think your charm is unrivaled in the world, that no one would dare hit you, huh?!
She swore she used every ounce of strength she had, wishing she could split Funika’s butt into eight pieces.
“Huff, that felt great~ Oh right, what was it you asked just now?”
Funika lay prone on the carpet, tears welling in her eyes as she rubbed her swollen rear and sobbed softly: ‘Are you even a woman? You’re so fierce.’
Mitia rubbed her forehead. “Stop whining! I’m afraid I really won’t be able to hold back and will punch you twice more.”
“If you don’t want to die, then from now on you must never research the writing of that world again. If possible, I suggest you discard that world entirely and never use it again.”
‘Why?’
“The existence of a race—or even a civilization—relies on two indispensable core pillars: writing and records. Writing represents the storage of information, while records represent its transmission and inheritance. Without these, how do you prove your past? How do you prove that you and your race ever existed?”
“What kind of thing made the people of an entire world perform such full prostration? There must have been an irresistible force compelling them to make that choice.”
“They carried out self-extinction-style centralized destruction of everything related to writing. They wanted to stop recognizing their own words. Perhaps the fact that we can’t understand their writing is exactly what they wanted most before dying!”
Funika swallowed hard. ‘I don’t quite understand what you mean. Are you saying there’s something that spreads through their writing as a medium?’
Funika wasn’t stupid; she had simply never encountered something this strange before. In her understanding, there were hardly any enemies left in the main world who could truly be called her equals, and she had inevitably grown arrogant.
Perhaps she hadn’t failed to sense the intense sense of crisis the way Mitia did—she had merely ignored it herself.
Mitia picked up the tea on the table, already cold, took a sip, and let out a breath. To be honest, when Funika had described corpses everywhere in that posture, resembling tombstones, she had truly felt a chill run through her entire body.
“It doesn’t necessarily spread through writing, but writing is one of the easiest mediums for conveying the writer’s thoughts to others.”
“The ignorant fear nothing. As long as you don’t understand, it’s hard to be affected, because without a conceptual marker, thought itself is boundless and won’t fixate on a single point.”
“But once writing acts as a guide, it’s equivalent to setting up a thought prison for free thought. The prison is only so big, and eventually you’ll think about exactly what the other party wants you to think about.”
“Taking a step back—how can you be sure those words were written by them, by beings with no eyes?”
‘No eyes?’
“Mm... I suspect that the thing in their palms was their eyes~”