Doomsday Wonderland Vol. 11: Modern World [Complete]

1344: Escape from Fear

Those who have never truly experienced fear will never understand its taste.

As an adult with the ability to think and act, living in a modern civilized society, one should not be tormented like this: you feel like you've turned into a soft, helpless slug, lying on the ground, waiting for that iron-like foot to finally crush you. Its shadow always looms over you; you don't know when this moment will happen or if it will happen at all; you only know that once it does, you're done for.

You spend your days in a daze, your steps unsteady, tears and sleeplessness just minor by-products. No one who passes by would know that every step you take is on the edge of a dark abyss. With a gust of wind, you fall down, never to see tomorrow again.

Regrets, of course, there are regrets. If given another chance, Guan Hailian would never have helped cover Wan Qingge's words; he would have let Wan Qingge tell the complete story of where they met while running outside the car - after all, he had to save himself first.

On the third day of close surveillance, several unfamiliar men with laptops knocked on Guan Hailian's door. He had learned not to ask who they were or to demand identification; he simply needed to obediently open the door. Looking back now, he didn't even know the name of the agency monitoring him.

From that laptop, Guan Hailian saw a snippet of in-car surveillance footage. Unlike other taxi cameras mainly aimed at passengers, this one was tightly focused on his face, with an additional microphone attached. He watched himself on the screen driving while constantly glancing out the window; from the screen beyond the surveillance, the posthuman's words were cut off midway: "The address I'm going to is—"

As he slapped the steering wheel on the screen, a loud honk drowned out the posthuman's voice and Guan Hailian's sanity. He couldn't even tremble anymore. His body sat limply in the chair, soaked in his own cold sweat, and he couldn't lift a finger.

"It's really strange how people like you always manage to encounter each other," the man playing the recording chuckled mockingly.

They had always wanted the answer to this question. Even though Guan Hailian had answered it dozens of times, they still didn't believe he was telling the truth.

If space were compared to a membrane, then the density and weight of a posthuman were greater than those of an ordinary person, causing larger depressions in the membrane; when another posthuman of equal weight appeared, they would naturally move towards the depression. Convergence - this wasn't something he had thought of himself. He had heard it from another posthuman. The other person seemed to be half a physicist before doomsday, spending a long time explaining the membrane universe theory to Guan Hailian, who still didn't understand it but remembered this metaphor.

Now, his mind was not on the membrane universe theory but on the physicist. At that time, he would quietly interact with the posthuman who had lost his abilities, not for any purpose, but because they had more to discuss among themselves, even though their conversations were superficial.

After several intermittent conversations between the two, the physicist said he wanted to figure out what this place was all about - that was the last message Guan Hailian received from him. After that, the other party evaporated from the face of the earth.

Guan Hailian didn't know what had happened to him, but since then, he had understood a message that had never been expressed by anyone in this world.

He knew all the risks very well, so why did he still honk the horn?

The man playing the recording said many things, but fear had already severed his reason, so he couldn't hear anything clearly. It was only after a while that a word, like the echoing chime of a bell, gradually became clear from the background noise. "Pay for your mistake."