Forty Millenniums of Cultivation

Each carrying a bagful of plastic items that couldn’t be burnt indoors, they moved them to an empty place on the street, pretending that they would burn the items in the open air, while they were actually scanning the environment.

The town was still covered in mist, and nothing could be heard except for the rain. The noises of boots and tanks were all drifting away.

Tang Ka and Chu Zhiyun looked at each other and made up their minds. They took off their masks simultaneously.

Quietly walking to a collapsed wall at the corner of the street, they carefully moved a cement block away, revealing the remains of a shuttle down below.

Tang Ka curled his finger and knocked the dented shell of the shuttle three times. ”Du, du, du.”

Then, he clenched his fists and bashed the shell twice. ”Dum! Dum!”

After a long silence, the back cover of the broken shuttle was slowly opened, revealing two devastated people who were coughing hard.

”I think Tiantian is having a fever.”

Zhou Xiuyun hugged her daughter so hard as if she were trying to melt her daughter into her own body. She said in a panic, ”It’s raining outside. What do we do?”

Tang Ka laid his hand on Tiantian’s forehead and cried, ”She’s burning!”

He looked at Tiantian, only to see that her eyebrows were furrowed and her face was red. She was not cheerful or as merry as yesterday.

”If she has a fever, give her some medicines. We have to leave right now!”

Chu Zhiyun said coldly, ”If nobody takes you out today, you won’t be able to leave tomorrow!”

”What?”

Zhou Xiuyun burst into tears of joy. ”You’re leaving with us? That’s… That’s fantastic!”

”Enough talking. Let’s go!”

Chu Zhiyun covered Tiantian with a blanket before she moved out the big bag that she and Tang Ka had hidden in the shuttle earlier.

There was no turning back now that they made this step. Both of them looked back at the camp and embarked on the path of escape with Zhou Xiuyun and Tiantian.

”This way! The map shows this way!”

Tang Ka, who was holding the ”compass”, led the way. Zhou Xiuyun was in the middle with Tiantian, and Chu Zhiyun was covering up for them with two storm bolters. Weapons were not unusual in New Joy City even though it was a town of civilians, and Chu Zhiyun had picked up some of the guns in case of danger.

They gradually reached the depths of the city. The place seemed absolutely quiet and empty, but it also felt that countless ferocious beasts were staring at them from behind the mist while holding their breaths.

”We should be reaching the northern suburb of New Joy City soon. As far as I know, it’s an agricultural area, so no purge operations were arranged there.”

Chu Zhiyun whispered, ”We should be safe as soon as we make it there.”

”Do you hear it, Tiantian?”

Zhou Xiuyun said to her daughter in a low voice, ”We’ll be safe soon. Very soon.”

Her lips curved into a smile.

Tang Ka, however, came to a sudden halt. He raised his wrist high and started moving randomly.

”What’s wrong?”

Chu Zhiyun asked in a stun, ”Why did you stop walking?”

”I lost the way.”

Tang Ka mumbled, ”I can’t seem to find the way out of here.”

”That is impossible!”

Zhou Xiuyun grew anxious before Chu Zhiyun said anything. ”There’s a route on the map and even automatic navigation. All you need to do is to follow the arrow on the map!”

”I know, but the map is stuck. It must’ve crashed. Look!”

Tang Ka waved the compass in his hand, and the arrow on it was indeed dead. ”The signals must’ve been blocked by all these skyscrapers and the bad weather. I need to find a place that’s empty and high to search for signals…”

Tang Ka looked around and climbed many high walls and pillars, as if he were really searching for signals.

Chu Zhiyun and Zhou Xiuyun could only follow him, praying that they wouldn’t bump into anyone.

They did seem quite lucky, as they ran into neither their classmates nor the patrolling soldiers of the purge troop on their journey.

However, they seemed to have used up their good luck. Right after Tang Ka climbed on a wall that wasn’t too high, with Chu Zhiyun as well as Zhou Xiuyun following him, a deafening explosion burst out not far away from their feet, not only careening the wall but also causing a big hole in the ground.

It was a landmine or a bomb on the road!

It was a common trick to plant tremendous landmines and bombs on the road before evacuating from a valuable area.

Speaking of which, it was actually the Covenant Alliance that played the trick first. In the past twenty years, although the Imperium had been retreating, they had turned most of the worlds they gave up into fatal swamps with landmines and bombs.

Those weapons were shabby and unattractive, but they could be a major headache for experts and regular soldiers.

The Covenant Alliance’s landmines and bombs left a deep impression on the Imperium, and now that the Imperium had retreated, they naturally left some ”gifts” for the Covenant Alliance.

Tang Ka had probably triggered a bomb by accident and raised a rather remarkable explosion.

Maybe it was a coincidence, and maybe it was on purpose, but below these ruins was the congregation point of several sewers. It was actually hollow below the road that was only several meters thick.

After the road collapsed, they fell onto nothing all the way into the sewers.

After a night of rain, a lot of water had been gathered in the sewers, which were almost entirely full.

Some of the sewers had also been broken or blocked in the previous battle, making the water in the unblocked sewers even more rapid.

Putong!

When the four of them fell into the sewers, they felt that they had just dropped from a waterfall. They couldn’t tell the direction at all, and enormous attraction forces were pulling them to the bottom of the sewers like invisible monsters.

”Tang Ka, Zhou Xiuyun, Tiantian!”

Chu Zhiyun considered herself to be the strongest of the team. She knew Tang Ka very well. Zhou Xiuyun was a weak civilian, and it was needless to mention Tiantian, who was just a baby.

If she were the different person as she had been, she would’ve only called Tang Ka and wouldn’t have cared about Zhou Xiuyun and Tiantian at all.

After all, they were strangers whom she had never met before.

But for some reason, she remembered the fun Tiantian had in the playground and heard her giggles again. No matter how hard Chu Zhiyun shook her head, she couldn’t get Tiantian out of her head.

”Is this what the extraterrestrial devils do?”

The big girl thought to herself, Is this what the extraterrestrial devils do? Damn it! Damn it!

While cursing, she struggled in the water hoping to find out where Tiantian was.

However, the currents here were too chaotic. Since almost eight sewers congregated here, they generated a handful of enormous swirls that were mixed with fallen leaves and garbage. She could barely keep her eyes open in the water, let alone seeing anyone in it.

Her voice was simply echoing in the dark sewer. There was no telling Tang Ka or anyone else could hear her.

There was no telling if it were her illusion, but she heard the cries of a little girl. She was about to swim to the sound when something grabbed her ankle and pulled her to the bottom of the water!

Caught unprepared, Chu Zhiyun had a few mouthfuls of filthy water and was almost suffocated.

When she surfaced again, the light was already gone, and she had been blown to the depths of one of the sewers.

The water currents were so powerful that her chest seemed to be smitten by an invisible hammer.

”How can the water in a sewer be so powerful?”

Chu Zhiyun found it hard to believe. ”It doesn’t make any sense!”

Whether or not it made sense, she couldn’t do anything except floating alongside the current as she was almost passing out.

Her strength faded away from her limbs and her fingers, and her head was turning fuzzy. Gradually, she sank to the bottom of this swamp.

Is this… the punishment of the gods?

Chu Zhiyun thought with her last consciousness. I was wrong. I betrayed the gods under the seduction of the extraterrestrial devils. So, I lost the favor of the gods, and I have to die in dark, filthy water?”

Right then…

She suddenly sensed that someone hugged her with strong arms and took her away from the dark abyss and the shadow of death, pulling her from the stinky filthy water to the shore!

Crack!

The person broke a glow stick and waved it, driving the darkness away with its light.

Under the halo, the person seemed to be an envoy of the gods.

Chu Zhiyun observed it carefully, and when her eyes were finally accustomed to the light, she discovered that it was Tang Ka who saved her!

The young man couldn’t have looked more resolute and determined, and he was holding a familiar blanket in his arms. Inside the blanket was exactly Tiantian who was moving like a kitten!

”Wow…”

Feeling that she had just been softened, Chu Zhiyun couldn’t help but moan.