Chapter 23: Investigation

Chapter 23: Chapter 23: Investigation

The afternoon sun slanted downward, casting long, distorted silhouettes of the buildings.

Having finished his training, Xu Mo took a deep breath. He tucked the sharp Bone-Cutting Knife securely behind his back, shouldered his somewhat empty backpack, and for the first time, truly began a systematic exploration of the dead town.

He left the small, familiar area around his temporary shelter and headed for the deeper, more unknown streets. His footsteps made a soft, rustling sound on the gravel- and dust-covered road, a sound that was amplified in the absolute silence, like the beat of his own heart.

The scene before him was more shocking than anything Xu Mo had glimpsed from his window. Utter desolation and ruin—the sight was branded into his very eyes.

Many buildings were completely destroyed. Entire structures had collapsed on one side, revealing twisted steel rebar and the shattered remains of furniture, like skeletons gnawed on by some giant beast. More buildings were simply riddled with holes, their windows almost universally broken. Cracks spiderwebbed across their facades, and some had entire walls that had crumbled away.

This desolation wasn’t just in the dilapidated buildings. It was in the void and deathly silence left behind after every trace of life had been utterly erased. On the streets, abandoned vehicles were strewn about haphazardly, blocking the way. Some were burnt down to their charred frames, resembling massive metal corpses.

And then, real skeletons began to appear, scattered here and there.

In front of a convenience store, Xu Mo saw a skeleton sprawled on the ground. Its clothes had long since rotted away, leaving only a few discolored strips of fabric clinging to the bone structure. Its posture was frozen in a final, desperate crawl.

Near an overturned school bus, several exceptionally small skeletons were scattered about. Their size made it obvious they belonged to children. The hollow eye sockets of the white bones stared blankly at the gray sky, silently telling of the most heartbreaking tragedies that occurred when the apocalypse descended. Xu Mo’s gaze lingered on the skeletons for a moment before he silently looked away. He felt no fear, only a heavy, cold sorrow pressing down on his chest. These had all once been living, breathing people. People just like him.

Continuing forward, Xu Mo noticed more details. Some walls were covered in a dense pattern of bullet holes, evidence of a fierce firefight. A few barricades, crudely constructed from sandbags and abandoned vehicles, had long been breached, but he could still imagine the scene of people holding their ground here in desperation.

Occasionally, he saw large, dark stains on the ground—dried blood that could never be washed away. Though these signs of battle suggested a lack of military training, looking more like the hasty self-defense of civilians, the shocking number of bullet holes and bloodstains spoke volumes about the ferocity of the fighting.

’This place... must have been bustling once,’ Xu Mo thought grimly.

There had been struggles here, resistance, cries of despair. But in the end, all the sounds had fallen silent. All their efforts had turned into the ruins and bones before him.

Xu Mo moved cautiously through the ruins, alert for any potential sound or movement. But there was nothing besides the wind and the crunch of gravel under his feet. No zombies, no living people, not even a single bird or insect. The entire town seemed to have been thoroughly "purified" by some invisible force, leaving only these material remains as a tombstone for a civilization that once was.

He followed a main road in a rough loop, covering nearly a third of the town. The sights were all much the same: nothing but decay and deathly silence. He found no traces of other survivors, nor did he find any valuable, unscavenged supply caches. Every accessible building looked as if it had been scoured by a hurricane—completely empty, save for the heavy junk that couldn’t be carried away.

As he explored in silence, the sun had unknowingly begun to set.

As Xu Mo dragged his somewhat heavy feet back toward his shelter, a huge, orange-red sun hung on the town’s broken skyline. It bathed everything between heaven and earth in a tragic yet warm, golden-red light. The sunlight shone on him unimpeded, casting a long, lonely shadow across the cracked asphalt road.

The shadow was long, its edges softened by a gentle halo in the sunset’s glow, possessing a strange and broken kind of beauty.

But this beauty was permeated with a bone-deep loneliness.

He was the only moving shadow in this vast graveyard. The immense town, with its countless houses and streets, now seemed to be nothing more than a backdrop for Xu Mo alone. The noise and life were long gone, leaving only him, a latecomer, to tread upon the bones and ruins of those who came before, trudging alone through the apocalyptic twilight.

Returning to the familiar street-facing house, Xu Mo took one last look back. The sun was about to vanish completely. Twilight flooded in from all directions like a rising tide, ready to once again swallow the town in darkness.

On this exploration, Xu Mo had discovered no danger, nor had he found any supplies. But it gave him something else: a deeper understanding. He was more certain than ever that this place was already part of the "past." Its so-called peace was merely the faint ripple on stagnant water after a catastrophe. He also recognized more clearly that he could not, and should not, remain trapped here forever.

Moving the furniture, he blocked the entrance once more. Then, Xu Mo set down his Bone-Cutting Knife and backpack.

He lit a candle he had brought back from the still world, and its dim yellow glow dispersed a small patch of darkness. Xu Mo sat on the sofa and began to carefully clean and maintain his Bone-Cutting Knife, replaying the images of the bullet holes, barricades, and skeletons he had seen that afternoon.

That place was a giant warning sign, silently showing him the final fate of those who failed.

He absolutely could not become just another one of those countless skeletons.

The desire to grow stronger had never been so intense, so pure.

「That night, all was silent.」

Xu Mo lay on the sofa. Though his body was exhausted from the day’s exploration and his continuous training, his mind was exceptionally clear, completely devoid of drowsiness. The faint starlight filtering through the window outlined the vague shapes in the room, intertwining and overlapping in his mind with the images of the ruined walls and broken ramparts he had seen during the day.

The questions he had deliberately suppressed during his daytime exploration now, in the dead of night, slowly rose to the surface of his mind like blocks of ice from the bottom of a lake.

A question that Xu Mo had previously ignored, or rather, had no time to ponder, suddenly crashed into his thoughts:

’How long has it been since the apocalypse began?’

Once this question appeared, it was like opening a floodgate, releasing a series of more specific, more unsettling questions.

Before, he had simply passively accepted this apocalypse, struggling to survive, his entire focus on how to live in the "now." But now, after witnessing the town’s massive scale of destruction with his own eyes, he couldn’t help but think about the "past." 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ

Those ruined buildings, that degree of destruction... was it really caused just by zombies? Zombies were slow and lacked intelligence. They might be able to break glass and push some things over, but could they make an entire building partially collapse? Could they cover walls with massive cracks or cause them to crumble completely?

Xu Mo recalled the scenes from the day. Some buildings looked as if they had been forcibly torn apart by an immense force, either from within or without, their broken sections exposing twisted rebar. The wreckage of some vehicles suggested more than just collisions; it was as if they had been crushed or ripped apart.

’Could zombies alone... have done all this?’ A chill rose in Xu Mo’s heart.

If not, then what did?

Was it some kind of mutated creature, more terrifying and destructive than zombies? Or... were these the marks left by heavy weaponry used by humans themselves in the early days of the apocalypse, either to clear out zombies or during internal conflicts after the collapse of order? Or perhaps, the cataclysm itself was accompanied by some unknown natural disaster or transformation?