0549 Chapter Twelve: The Not Eternal Dusk (Section 16)
Launceston is the harbor at the northern end of Tower Island.
In the era that Zhen Cheng and the others were familiar with, setting sail from here and sailing north overnight would reach the Port of Melbourne in the southeastern corner of the Australian continent.
This was also the route originally planned by Grete and others. They originally planned to stay in Australia and migrate to the central desert area.
There is very little precipitation in that place, so the number of businesses that are mutated by strange rains, and even things that are mutated by deadly darkness erosion are also reduced.
Although productivity has suffered a devastating blow, human technology has never truly broken down.
Gretel is confident of leading the surviving humans to establish a safe underground town in the desert to thrive.
These are situations where the dark changes are progressing as expected.
And if the darkness does not go as predicted, their backup plan is to supply supplies all the way through the old sites of large cities on the east coast, take the Indian Ocean and cross the Suez Canal, and go to Europa's hope Thetis.
Traveling across the ocean on an earth ruled by darkness, it is destined to be impossible to escape the clutches of darkness. However, the experience accumulated over the past fifty years has also allowed the survivors to learn how to survive in the darkness in a short period of time.
In fact, the person who first summed up those regulations was Gretel's father, Zhen Cheng's late old friend, the great detective, and the leader of the human campless survivors, Epilens.
It is hoped that Thetis will have more advanced technology than the old era, have the ability to ignore the threats of darkness and rain, survive safely in extreme environments, and even have a quality of life that these refugees may have never seen in their entire lives.
But they still regard defection as an alternative that they will consider only when they have no choice but to do so.
In the final analysis, it is because the humans who chose to gather here do not want to participate in the battles between humans anymore.
They don't mind risking their lives fighting mutated insects, and they don't mind enduring the pain of having to undergo amputation surgery to maintain a normal human shape if they accidentally get caught in the rain.
But they don't want to face weapons of the same kind anymore.
Different from these people, Hope Thetis, Ancestor Thetis, Songhai Heart and the humans of the Society of the Past hold different ideas, actively cultivate game candidates, and fight against each other in the game world and reality.
Some of them are just for their own ambitions, and some are for the future of all mankind. It’s hard to say what is right and what is wrong, and I am afraid only God can judge.
Yes, these are the tasks currently before Zhen Cheng.
It is not too difficult to kill all the forces with thunderous means. But it is not that simple to conquer human beings for your own use, to have people sincerely join her and fight with her against powerful enemies that seem out of reach.
Something happened.
Following Gretel into the settlement, what she saw was a pair of eyes full of despair and lifeless.
These resolute human beings have survived and developed for half a century with their hard-working hands and wise minds in this land where the living environment is no worse than the abyss of hell.
But today is the most desperate day in their lives.
They bet all their hopes on the big ship, including the food rations they depended on for survival.
Now... everything is lost.
"Where's the boat?" Zhen Cheng asked curiously while standing on the port embankment.
The so-called "being swallowed by darkness" doesn't really mean that when you encounter darkness, you disappear without a trace, right?
If the darkness that shrouded her hometown had such characteristics, then there should have been nothing left on this planet when she left.
"There..." Gretel pointed to the distance on the sea level.
Speaking of which, after walking on the earth for nearly three days, Zhen Cheng and his party finally had a real sense of the so-called eternal dusk.
For more than sixty hours, the sun neither rose one point nor lowered half an inch. It always hung half-dead at the end of the horizon, spreading a dying golden light all over the ground like a flashback.
Now, looking around, the horizon has turned into a sea level. Only the setting sun, which is unable to set, still hangs there.
In the halo of the setting sun, a bit of darkness is particularly eye-catching.
After the guidance of her senior sister on the road, Zhen Cheng was able to flexibly use the basic powers of the True God. Looking through the five-dimensional space, the scene more than ten kilometers away was presented in her eyes in detail.
The sight in front of her shocked Zhen Cheng.
It was a steel behemoth that could carry three to five hundred cars. She could not imagine how these naked people used their mortal strength to build such a behemoth in the apocalypse.
But she could imagine that such a ship carried everyone's spiritual sustenance.
It's just that the title "Steel Behemoth" is not a metaphor.
Under Zhen Cheng's eyes, the bow of the ferry suddenly cracked open and turned into a huge steel mouth several hundred meters wide with iron teeth and copper teeth. It chewed and tore into pieces a mutant octopus more than thirty meters long in one bite.
.
It's not like a closed animal trap, chewing it back and forth like a beast with biting muscles...
The delicateness of the movements is simply incredible.
Zhen Cheng was dumbfounded. So what does "swallowed by darkness" mean?
"Weird rain" can mutate any living thing, and "deadly darkness" can even give life to inanimate objects?
No! Zhen Cheng keenly noticed that the ferry did not become a living thing like mechanical life, but more like...
Became part of the darkness.
She finally understood what Gretel said, that darkness is alive, but it is neither controlled by others nor has independent consciousness.
From the perspective of a mortal born and raised on earth, it is indeed impossible to understand this state of affairs.
Based on Zhen Cheng's current experience, she felt that this darkness that subdued the earth and covered most of the earth was more like...
Some kind of ancient existence, similar to the state of Shubun-senpai when she was sleeping.
"I'm going to take a look." Ai Luogensi became interested, broke through the sound barrier with a "bang", and ran towards the distant ship on the waves.
Zhen Cheng nodded in agreement, then sighed.
"You don't seem to trust her power?" Justice raised her eyebrows.
Zhen Cheng shook his head: "I don't think there are any enemies in this world that my sister can't defeat.
Rather than saying that I don’t trust her strength, it’s better to say that I don’t like my sister’s way of handling problems..."
As expected. Ten minutes later, Logansi ran back the same way with a beaming face, her body still stained by a mixture of engine oil and seawater.
She bared her fangs and gave a thumbs up to Zhen Cheng: "How is it? Everything is solved!"
Justice was dumbfounded, while Gretel and all the refugees with binoculars on the port guard tower had uncontrollable despair on their faces.
"Sister..." Zhen Cheng held his forehead and sighed: "What exactly did you solve?"