Stepping Into the Desolate City

The journey had been nothing short of grueling — mountains to cross, rivers to ford, thorns at every turn.

There was a popular aesthetic among the trendy lifestyle crowd: tiptoeing along crumbling old railway tracks with some inspirational quote about the meaning of life posted alongside. But after personally slogging the full length of this interminable abandoned line, every last scrap of that romance had evaporated. No one had a single thought to spare for the scenery — and besides, these mountains and rivers belonged to the Demon-Beasts.

Apart from the harrowing incident in that cave earlier, the group of seventeen had come through fairly well, without encountering another pack of Demon-Beasts.

With their current strength, a few stray Demon-Beasts weren't enough to gnaw them down to the bone — but a swarm was another matter.

After nearly ten days of travel, the remote Jinlin City finally came into view.

A mountain ridge blocked the way, a railway tunnel bored straight through it — but this time, no one had any intention of walking through the pitch-dark tunnel again. They climbed over instead.

Reaching the top of the ridge, they were greeted by a sweeping view of a broad basin plain. To the west, rolling lowlands stretched as far as the eye could see, and to the north, a river wound its winding way alongside a city already long reduced to crumbling walls and rampant weeds, then curved east toward the very ridge they had just crested.

"That's Jinlin City," Zheng Bingxiao murmured, gazing into the distance. "Barely fifteen years, and it's come to this."

"Once Demon-Beasts move in, it always ends up like this," Jingjing said. "The buildings, the streets, the roads — all of it gets torn apart. And the plants feed on Demon-Beast dung, so they grow at a ferocious pace. Vines, moss, weeds — they end up smothering everything."

"Let's move," Song Xia said. "We'll survey the perimeter first and get a count of how many Demon-Beasts are wandering around."

The outer reaches of Jinlin City gave way to a broad stretch of open ground ringed by forest. That surrounding forest was one of the key survey points — whether the city was worth rebuilding at all depended first on knowing whether the perimeter had been completely overrun by Demon-Beasts.

Fortunately, this mission was not a clearance operation. Jinlin City had once been a respectable second-tier city, and its suburbs alone were staggeringly vast — to say nothing of the city interior, now fully Demon-Beast territory. Without several elite military units, there was no hope of reclaiming this place and putting it back on the human map.

Their survey of the outer forest turned up a pleasant surprise: only a handful of Demon-Beasts were wandering about, foraging — nothing resembling a pack.

The outer forest survey went smoothly. They marked it green on the map — clear passage, Demon-Beast numbers low.

"Let's just go in," Luo Song said. "The sooner we finish, the sooner we head back. Every extra minute out here has my skin crawling."

Luo Song had shed a noticeable amount of weight over those ten days, and he had no intention of suffering out here a moment longer than necessary.

"A survey doesn't just wrap up in an afternoon," Lu Zhenghe said. "There are a lot of marked points to cover. Unless we split up..."

"Splitting up would be unwise." Song Xia shook her head immediately.

Together, all seventeen of them could handle even a large pack of Demon-Beasts. Scattered, it was a different story entirely.

"Then we hit the points one by one."

The seventeen stepped into the ruined city. The roads that had once led straight to the center were choked with abandoned vehicles, long since gone green with verdigris, gridlocked across the outer ring road. It wasn't hard to picture the chaos of the evacuation — bumper to bumper, the road a sealed wall of metal, and most people having simply abandoned their cars and fled on foot.

Cars, when it came to a real disaster, turned out to be remarkably useless. Too dependent on the roads.

Past the outer ring road, streets and buildings began to appear.

The pavement was cracked and buckled, the fractures snaking the full length of every road, with weeds forcing their way up through every gap — as though the plants themselves, in their blind drive to grow, had shouldered the asphalt apart.

The buildings were blanketed in dust, Boston ivy spreading across their facades in a dense, unbroken carpet. Unnamed vines climbed floor by floor, snaking through the windows, and those dark, hollow windows hid nothing inside but ruin and filth.

The trees lining the road had been left untended so long that their canopies blotted out the sky. The seventeen students from Pearl Academy and the Imperial Capital Magic Academy made their way along a road that felt half jungle, half ruin, broken buildings pressing in on both sides. From somewhere not far off came the occasional low growl, and every face in the group had grown grave.

This former residential district was the first survey point inside the city. Every sign pointed to a large group of Demon-Beasts having made their home here — enormous mounds of dried dung packed into building corners, crumbling to powder at a touch, and colossal animal skeletons scattered across the ground...

"I can't begin to imagine what it was like here," Bai Tingting said softly, a quiet grief in her voice. "Such a perfectly good city."

When a city is reduced to this — when you walk every street and alley without seeing a single living person — the silence settles over you like cold water. It was a sight none of them, growing up in ordinary cities, had ever expected to see.

Desolate. Forsaken. No two words fit the city more precisely.

"We need to find a safe place to set up camp first," Shen Mingxiao said.

"We've effectively walked into a ruined city where Demon-Beasts roam freely," Lu Zhenghe said. "We're in danger every moment. Wherever we set up has to be secure — somewhere we can pull out of fast if it comes to it, but that we can hold when we need to..."

"So where exactly should we set up?" Song Xia asked.

"In a building," Lu Zhenghe said. "We claim one as our base — ideally one where the rooftop connects to neighboring structures. That gives us an escape route."

"Right — a tall building means a wide field of view. We can post watch from above. Otherwise, if a large group of Demon-Beasts is incoming, we'd never see them in time."

"That one looks good to me," Mo Fan said, pointing directly into the distance.

A gray building rose from the surrounding ruin, and — likely thanks to years of rain washing it clean — it looked noticeably less grimy than the structures around it.

More importantly, it was remarkably well-preserved for a building standing amid those ruined streets. Its structural integrity was clearly exceptional: not only did it tower above the surroundings, but its base was broad and imposing.

"You have a good eye," Song Xia said with a faint smile, checking it against the map. "That should be the Jinlin municipal government building."