Night of Despair-Chapter 91 - : Test One

Chapter 91: Test One

“Are you sure you saw it right!?” Li Rushan’s face changed instantly, he even put aside the matter of asking Yu Hong for help, his eyes widened as he stared intently at him and asked again.

“You have a detector yourself, take it out and test it to find out,” Yu Hong nodded.

“Damn!” Without another word, Li Rushan pulled out a detector and dashed out the door, ignoring the people in the courtyard. Before they could react, he was out of the yard and ran into the forest outside, pressing the button.

Soon, his complexion turned extremely ugly, and he swiftly returned to the courtyard. Without concerning himself with anyone else, he went back inside the stone house and closed the door.

“The big one is coming. This is a sign of a full-blown Blood Tide outbreak! Yu Hong, you go back now, and help the people outside if you can, take as many as possible, or none of them will survive tonight!”

“Since I promised you, I won’t go back on my word,” Yu Hong nodded. He also had some ideas about how to accommodate these people.

“If worst comes to worst, we can throw them into the mining area,” he suggested.

“….It’s no use, the mining area might be safe, but the radiation will turn them into idiots, which is meaningless,” Li Rushan sighed.

“But at my place, I can only accommodate four or five more people at most,” Yu Hong thought for a moment. Building two more wooden huts in the courtyard, each housing three people, should not be a problem if he transplanted the luminous stone grass a bit further outside.

However, he had no obligation to take on such burdens. Protecting more people was of no benefit to him.

Wait… benefit…

Yu Hong narrowed his eyes.

“Let’s talk about compensation. When I agreed to shelter Wei Shanshan and her daughter, it was for a fee. If others want to come over, it can’t be for free.”

“What do you lack? What can they offer? Will you negotiate with them yourself?” Old Li sighed. “These people have many resources behind them, but… the problem now is… with the environment deteriorating, I worry about the rescue team….”

Yu Hong’s expression also changed slightly.

“If the rescue team can’t make it, what do you plan to do?”

“….When the time comes, we can only…” Li Rushan clenched his teeth, not finishing his sentence. He couldn’t possibly sacrifice the lives of himself and his daughter to protect a group of strangers.

“Uncle… are we going to die?” Aisena, who had been standing quietly to the side, suddenly asked. Her large eyes were fixed quietly on Yu Hong.

“…No, we won’t.” Yu Hong looked at her soft, plump little face, reached out to pinch her cheek, and forced out a smile. “Your dad is very strong… he will protect you.”

“Nana.” Li Rushan gently picked up the girl and handed her over to a beautiful woman who had come closer. “You go and rest with Aunt Lin for a while, Daddy’s got something to take care of, and he’ll come to see you later.”

“Okay.” Aisena nodded obediently and curled up silently in the woman’s embrace.

“Alright, I’m going back now, give me the map of the ruins,” Yu Hong said. His main purpose here was to try to figure out the source of the runes and to gather more information to counter the “shadows”.

“Actually, you don’t need a map. The structure of that place is very simple. Just go straight ahead, deep inside, it’s shaped overall like an ‘L’, you’ll know it when you get there. But be careful, the ruins have a lot of radiation because they are next to the mining area. There might also be changes inside; after all, I haven’t been there for a long time,” Li Rushan warned.

“Okay.”

“And about bringing people along…”

“That’s your job. You handle it,” Yu Hong said, uninterested in getting involved.

With no choice, Li Rushan had to go out the door and start loudly inquiring about the situation of the group.

Then he asked if anyone was willing to follow Yu Hong to another safe house.

But after asking several times, no one was willing. The crowd had changed from their previous clamor. Although they were frightened and in turmoil, no one was willing to leave the postal office’s underground civil defense measures to go to an entirely unknown safe house.

Squeak.

Yu Hong pushed the door open, quietly agreed with Old Li on a fixed time to turn on the communicator, then looked at the group of men and women in the courtyard.

No one paid any attention to him.

Clearly, everyone trusted the reputation of the postal service workers more.

Two military officers who looked like leaders even tried to approach and negotiate with Old Li to get some warm supplies and to arrange for key members of their team to be accommodated in the underground facilities first.

Li Rushan came out and haggled with the two men while also holding a pencil and paper, starting to write something down.

Yu Hong, confirming that nobody wanted to follow him, shrugged at Old Li, meaning it was not that he didn’t want to help, but rather that they didn’t want his help at all.

Immediately, he turned and walked back towards his residence.

Having returned to the cave in a few moments, Yu Hong quickly sorted out his gear, grabbed his gear, weapons, protein bars, and water bladder, and hurried towards the mining area.

It was still early in the day, but he was unsure how extensive the interior of the ruins was, so he had to leave early to prepare.

He followed the path through the wooded forest, crossed the charred woodland, passed several small hills, and after more than half an hour.

Standing in front of a grey-white rock face as tall as a ten-story building, Yu Hong, in his reinforced gray lizard suit, held a Wolf Fang Club and a huge wooden shield, standing quietly in the middle of the rock face.

In the middle of the rock wall, there was a narrow crack, more than two people tall.

The crack was dark and deep, like a stroke of lightning on a painting, and a fine stream of water seeped out slowly from within.

Yu Hong stood in front of this crack.

He bent down to observe the direction of the stream and noted that shortly after flowing out of the crack, the stream disappeared into the crevices in the ground.

Surrounding the water were lush green vines, and despite the temperature dropping, tender wild grasses were still growing here.

Yu Hong squatted down, gently pinched some grass tips with his hand, looked at them closely to confirm they were tender grass.

Then he placed his hand into the stream to feel the temperature.

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It was warm, much warmer than outside.

Pausing a moment, Yu Hong took out an atomic lamp, held it in his hand, raised it high for light, and then briskly walked in.

The changing environment piqued his interest in the ruins even more. Having not found a “*Cultivation Technique*”, he decided to come to these ruins, the first place where runes were found, to see if he could discover other clues.

He had a premonition that with the deteriorating environment, if he didn’t explore now, it might be too late to venture out later. It could well become even more dangerous.

‘Quickly search through and then head back.’ Before entering the crack, Yu Hong set this goal for himself.

Swish, swish.

Following the crevice inside, the passage became increasingly spacious and the temperature dropped further.

Yu Hong, clad in a black bulletproof suit, blended perfectly into the environment except for the faint white breath he exhaled from time to time, which was slightly jarring.

Inside the crevice, the ground was littered with many footprints and numerous small pits. Clearly, many people had come and gone, and there were traces of heavy objects having been dragged.

He carefully illuminated his surroundings; on both sides of the stone walls, there were some decorative shelf-like indentations.

These indentations were empty, but most bore the traces of objects that had once been placed there.

‘It seems everything has been moved.’ Yu Hong pulled out his enhanced detector and switched it on.

Beep.

The LCD screen displayed the Red Value around him: 37.122.

“It’s over thirty…” Yu Hong’s heart sank, his grip on the Wolf Fang Club tightening.

He proceeded further in. As he did, the space around him widened until it stabilized at about five meters in width.

By then, the height of the cave was also five meters, resembling a semi-cylindrical shaft extending into the heart of the mountain.

As he ventured deeper, unfamiliar symbols and characters began to appear on the stone walls to his sides.

These symbols, written in black against the glow of the green light, looked like claws marks left by some monstrous creature.

Apart from these, the creek that ran along the floor of the cave began to be flanked by small, broken stones.

Most of these stones bore incomplete and fragmented runes.

They were scattered evenly like pebbles on a riverbank, all uniform in their ashen white color.

Crack.

Yu Hong bent over, wedging the atomic lamp under his armpit to free his hands and picked up a stone the size of a chicken egg.

The black lines on the surface of the stone looked very familiar to him.

‘Isn’t this a luminous stone rune? The most primitive version of talisman arrays!’

He suddenly recognized the pattern of the runes.

Putting down the stone, he picked up another and found the same rune, only the stone was broken, with just a fraction of the rune remaining.

Yu Hong began to pick up the stones one by one to check and found they all bore the same rune.

Standing up, he exhaled, and a trail of white smoke briefly joined the cold air.

Then, using the light, he examined the murals on both walls, which depicted a script of black characters completely unknown to him.

Both sides of the cave featured the same script.

After scrutinizing them for a while to no avail, he continued onwards.

Before long,

the cave reached its end.

A tall black stone wall loomed up, abruptly halting Yu Hong’s advance.

On either side of the stone wall, many small holes dotted the walls, silently bleeding thin streams of water.

All the thin trickles of water merged upon hitting the ground, forming a small stream that meandered out of the cave.

Standing before this black stone wall at the cave’s end, Yu Hong raised his atomic lamp high to illuminate this five-meter-tall expanse of rock with its green light.

Clear gray strokes on the stone wall depicted a large circular arched door.

This painted door was densely inscribed with many unfamiliar symbols and characters.

Among these symbols, Yu Hong quickly located several that were used in the luminous stone rune.

Invigorated, he set down the club, took out a pencil and paper from his pocket, and began carefully copying down all the symbols that appeared on the door.

Including those along the murals he passed on his way in, and after discarding numerous repetitions, he had copied down a total of seven.

However, after multiple copies, Yu Hong vaguely realized that these seven symbols not only made up the luminous stone rune but also formed another, more complex grand symbol on the painted door at the end of the cave.

This grand symbol appeared frequently in the upper area of the painted door, with sharp strokes and an imposing presence, its purpose unknown.

After copying them down, Yu Hong felt there was something odd about this grand symbol.

At first glance, it looked like a moving vortex, but upon closer inspection, he realized what he had seen was merely an optical illusion.

‘Why didn’t the explorers outside research this symbol? Why did they only study the luminous stone rune?’

He couldn’t understand.

After finishing his notes, Yu Hong scoured the corners for a while longer, ensuring there was nothing else to be found, and that all original decorations had long been carted away. He reluctantly exited the ruins cave.

He had been slow on the way in, but much quicker on the way out; in just a few minutes, Yu Hong stood once again at the entrance of the cave.

‘The rune on the luminous stone could be called the Amplification Rune. This newly discovered symbol… let’s temporarily name it the Vortex Rune. Hopefully, it will lead to new discoveries…’

With a slight sense of disappointment, he glanced back at the ruins cave.

‘Could the initial Black Disaster truly have emanated from a place like this?’

He pondered the painted door he had seen at the end, on which, apart from the lengthy stretches of unintelligible text, were the luminous stone Amplification Rune and the newly discovered Vortex Rune.

However, the runes on the stone walls were variously stretched, shrunk, square-shaped, or seemed as though they had been flattened like dough.

With these doubts in mind, Yu Hong quickly returned to his residence.

He planned to use the Black Mark to swiftly unravel the function of the Vortex Rune.