There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL) novel Chapter 71

Chapter 71: Chapter 70. Ancient Memory

Teachers at school would describe the Age of Apocalypse by comparing it with the red-zone.

The once fertile earth became dried and blackened, the freshwater was marred with toxin, and the sun was barely visible through the murky cloud. So Zein didn’t really surprise when he saw the condition of the land in front of him.

If there was something different, it was the remnant of a once flourishing city in ruin. If the red-zone felt like a slum, this ancient city felt as if a huge outbreak occurred in a big city like Althrea and devastated everything. That being said, the area around him was free of the depressing destruction.

From his point of view, Zein could see people in tattered and shabby clothes, with dirty appearances that were even worse than the red-zone dwellers looking toward him from far away—or rather, looking toward the shard. Most of them carried weapons, even civilians. From the fierce-looking halberd to the crude shield made of a car’s door and kitchen knives.

Since the shard was there, it must have been the time when Towers and Temples just appeared. But since unfortunately this place didn’t receive a complete fragment, there was no basis for any celestial powers to descend. There were espers and guides, but no place to receive proper skills. It was a time when everything was chaotic, and humans had to scavenge for survival.

From what Zein gathered, the survivors had gathered in this ruined city and made a barricade around it. He recognized it as the underground city where the expedition team came to before, only it was still on the surface this time.

Due to the shard natural rejection of sentient beings, those people couldn’t get closer and only looked from afar for days. It was a weird sensation where times seemed to walk fast, and yet Zein could feel and understand everything that happened.

What he couldn’t catch, however, was the people’s conversation. They talked in a language that he didn’t know, the old language they used before the unification of the continent, and the usage of a new standardized common language was established.

Through the hyperbolic sense, Zein watched as what seemed like the leaders among the survivors surrounded the ten meters radius where they could get close. They talked among themselves while watching the shard a lot, and then, at one point after more days had passed, someone came alone during the night when nobody was watching.

Closer and closer until the person touched him—touched the shard. Zein, through the shard, stared at the hooded person, feeling a weird resonance between them. He understood then, that it was what the shard felt when Zein touched it.

Unfortunately, that person did not manage to do it secretly. Someone found out and the person was dragged away. The next time, the leaders’ council came back with that person, and everything became dark as the shard was being covered and moved.

The next time Zein could see again, he was in a familiar room—the room where the expedition team found the shard. From there, Zein took his own conclusion.

It seemed that the leaders council decided to keep the shard indoors and chose who could stay inside the safe zone. When the shard spread its consciousness outward, Zein could see and feel the conflict brewing over the right to enter the safe zone, and violence was unavoidable.

It was a sad situation that felt all too familiar for Zein. But he had no leeway of getting melancholic about it, because he sensed something even more ominous looming inside the city.

At the place where the influence of the shard ended, at that border where magical energy and miasma collided, an ominous entity was born; a familiar-looking phantom who fleeted about like a ghost.

It was the Specter they faced the last time, the one who could somewhat make sounds. Like watching a horror show, Zein witnessed the Specter take its victim one by one, and the people started to get suspicious of one another. It caused another conflict, while the malicious entity got stronger on its own by consuming human mana.

Until, finally, it was strong enough to give commands to other beasts.

And then, it was hell.

The beasts came swarming in the direction of the city like a stampede. They could barely protect themselves when the beasts only came in a group or two, so the only outcome when a whole horde came was a massacre.

People who didn’t instantly meet their end tried to come inside the safe zone. Of course, it became the source of another tragedy, where survivors even tried to kill each other or threw their comrades to the beasts so they could have a spot inside. In the end, after the only living humans were the ones inside the safe zone, the Specter made a siege outside the zone, trapping all the people inside.

The shard was filled with sorrow and regret of its own existence, and Zein felt as if those feelings were his own. The scenery surrounding it was just a snowball of tragedies.

Trapped in a dangerous situation, it would be great if people could be united. But that kind of romance was hard to come by. They were filled with fear and desperation to survive, and Zein couldn’t tell whether it was safer there or outside the ’safe zone’. In the end, they broke into three factions.

One decided to risk it and get out of the encirclement, including the person with the ability to touch the shard. Another one decided to stay put and hoard the leftover supplies to try and survive as long as possible. Of course, not everyone could be included in this group, who was filled with the leaders council and their people.

So the leftover people had no choice but to grit their teeth and suffer, and in the end decided to attack the Specter since they might die either way. While the shard had no idea about the fate of the first group which tried to escape, it knew that this reckless, desperate, malnourished group was annihilated and became the nourishment for the Specter instead.

The shard could only watch helplessly then, as time passed and the food became scarce. Zein thought he already saw the lowest a human could be, but here, he watched people kill each other for a piece of bread and a drop of water, and witnessed humans ate other humans like a beast.

The few remaining people were drowned in madness that they started killing each other just because, and in the end, the last human who survive spent his last few days being corroded. Without a guide to cleanse him, the man erupted, which caused the ruined city to get buried underground.

Zein had never seen an esper truly erupt before. But the shard recorded that memory in high precision, from every bit of corrosion progression, to the moment the esper turned into a malicious monster, and then, ultimately, exploded, destroying all the remaining corpses.

Inside the empty room of the empty building in an empty, ruined city, the shard waiting, alone. For another existence like itself to come, or just disappear altogether so it didn’t have to witness the same tragedy happened.

It waited, and waited, and then, the shard was faced with a pair of deep blue eyes.