Chapter 86 - 79: Flood Peak

Chapter 86: Chapter 79: Flood Peak

Xu Mo stood on the drenched third-floor landing, the beam of his flashlight sweeping over the wreckage. The murky floodwaters had receded, leaving behind a layer of silt and debris of indiscernible origin. A strange, earthy odor filled the air.

He didn’t let his guard down. Although the roar of the flood had weakened, it hadn’t vanished completely. A dull, continuous roar of rushing water still echoed from the distance. Xu Mo knew that floods rarely came in a single wave. The massive volume of water upstream could very well form several consecutive crests.

"That was just the first wave..." Xu Mo muttered to himself.

He walked to the window and shone his flashlight outside. Though the water level had dropped slightly from the crest’s peak, it still submerged most of the second floor. The entirety of Cyan Pine Ridge Town seemed to have transformed into a murky ocean. Only the roofs of a few taller buildings and the crowns of resilient trees remained above the surface, like desperate, isolated islands.

When the crest had passed through earlier, Xu Mo had clearly felt the three-story building tremble under the flood’s assault. Although its main structure had withstood the first wave, there was no guarantee how long it would hold against subsequent, potentially stronger crests.

’I have to prepare for the worst.’

Xu Mo took a deep breath, his gaze sharpening once more.

He made his way up the stairs to the roof. Xu Mo walked to the edge and carefully inspected the building’s exterior walls and structural columns, finding no obvious cracks or warping.

’It’s safe for now, but I can’t stay long,’ Xu Mo concluded. If a subsequent crest was powerful enough, it might even slam directly into the upper part of the building.

Returning to the stairwell landing between the third floor and the roof, Xu Mo sat down against the wall and closed his eyes to rest. But his ears remained pricked, catching every sound from the outside world: the rush of water, the whistling of wind, the occasional distant crash of collapsing debris, and that faint, yet seemingly growing, roar.

Several more hours passed. Just as the morning light began to break on the horizon, the low-frequency rumbling—like the very pulse of the earth—grew distinct again.

Xu Mo’s eyes snapped open. He shot to his feet and returned to the roof.

In the morning light, Xu Mo could see the surface of the water in the distance advancing toward him at a visible speed, the sound of it rushing from far to near.

The second crest was here, and it looked even more ferocious than the first!

In the space of a few breaths, the floodwaters surged once more.

The murky currents slammed violently against the town’s buildings. The stairwells that had been exposed when the water receded were instantly swallowed by muddy water again.

The main body of the second crest finally reached the town. Xu Mo heard the buildings in the distance groaning as if they were about to fall apart. It wasn’t just the sound of the current, but the lament of structures’ skeletons crying out under immense pressure.

RUMBLE—!

A colossal, thunderous crash, louder than the roar of the flood, erupted from nearby. Xu Mo whipped his head up to see another teetering four-story building, about a hundred meters away, suddenly collapse under the crest’s impact as if its spine had been ripped out. Its massive walls shattered, sending up a towering spray of water and mud.

The building’s collapse seemed to instantly absorb some of the furious energy at the forefront of the crest. The wall of water that had been pushing forward with relentless force clearly faltered and slowed, as if a great beast had been tripped.

RUMBLE! RUMBLE!

As if in a chain reaction, several more muffled thuds echoed from across town. Evidently, other structurally weak buildings were suffering the same fate under the crest’s relentless assault.

’Fuck!’ Xu Mo cursed inwardly as a chill shot up his spine.

’At this rate, how long can this three-story building beneath my feet last? It looks sturdier than the ones that collapsed, but who’s to say it won’t be next?’

Xu Mo clenched his fists. The power of the Cowhide Realm surged within him, yet he felt a stifling helplessness, with no way to apply it. In the face of such natural devastation, an individual’s strength seemed so insignificant. He stared intently at the stairwell entrance, watching the murky water climb steadily, step by step, devouring the stairs.

Seven steps, six, five... The water was already approaching the landing where he had been resting.

Four steps!

The water stopped just four steps from the landing!

Xu Mo held his breath.

The next moment, the relentlessly rising water level abruptly halted, then began to fall.

It wasn’t a slow retreat, but a rapid one, like an ebbing tide, receding at a speed visible to the naked eye.

The stairs reemerged one by one, slick with wet mud. The water that had flooded the third-floor hallway lost its momentum and began to pour back down the stairs.

The water level was dropping quickly.

Seeing this, the tension in Xu Mo’s nerves suddenly eased. He realized the back of his shirt was soaked with cold sweat, clinging to his skin with a chilling touch.

He knew that he—or rather, the building—had survived once again.

The second crest had ultimately failed to breach the small building’s last line of defense. Perhaps the collapse of the distant buildings had, to some extent, dispersed and weakened the crest’s impact, buying him a sliver of hope.

Xu Mo walked to the roof and looked out at the water. While still vast, it had clearly lost its world-ending momentum. His expression was complex. The immediate crisis was over, but the flood hadn’t receded; the town was still a waterlogged wasteland. No one knew if a third or fourth crest would follow.

A long-awaited sliver of warm, golden-red light pierced the clouds to the east.

The sun was rising.

The anticipated third crest never came.

Xu Mo stood on the rooftop. The morning light dispelled the night’s chill and, for the moment, the heavy sense of dread in his heart. The water’s surface had calmed significantly. Although it still submerged the second floor, the roaring, surging momentum was gone, leaving only a stagnant, slow-moving expanse of murky yellow.

’Is the flood gathering strength for an even bigger assault? Or has the most dangerous phase passed?’ Xu Mo couldn’t be sure. The power of nature was impossible to predict.

Turning on the radio, Xu Mo tuned it to the Jiang City Shelter’s broadcast frequency.

"KSHHH... FZZT... CRACKLE..."

However, all that answered him was a chaotic mess of static and intermittent bursts of noise. He tried several other known active frequencies, but the result was the same for all of them: dead silence. Even the sporadic, garbled distress calls from before were gone.

"The signal’s out..." Xu Mo’s brow furrowed as he set down the radio. It wasn’t surprising. A flood of this magnitude had likely destroyed the shelter’s external signal relay stations, or the intense weather phenomena were severely interfering with radio wave transmission.

Since he couldn’t get information from the outside, he would have to rely on his own observations.

Xu Mo walked to the edge of the rooftop and gazed into the distance.

In the morning light, Cyan Pine Ridge Town was a scene of utter devastation, like a vast, yellow ocean. A large amount of debris floated on the surface: broken furniture, tangled masses of branches and leaves, and even a few sealed plastic barrels bobbing half-submerged, drifting slowly with the current.

The wreckage of the buildings that had collapsed last night was particularly jarring. The closest one, the four-story building, was now just a pile of submerged bricks, rubble, and twisted steel rebar. Its highest point barely broke the surface, resembling an ugly reef.

Farther away, it was the same at the other collapse sites; one could only tell there had once been buildings there by the debris poking out of the water. These ruins acted as massive obstacles, altering the local currents and creating small whirlpools.

Some buildings that had been relatively intact before now showed new, ugly cracks on their walls from the soaking and battering of the flood, looking ready to collapse at any moment.

Beneath the surface, dark shapes could occasionally be seen swimming past at high speed. They were aquatic mutants that had adapted to the flood environment, apparently treating the flooded expanse as their new hunting ground.

The entire town exuded an atmosphere woven from decay and danger. All traces of humanity were being mercilessly erased by the great flood. The savagery of nature and the cruelty of the apocalypse were on full display.