The group walked around the main road of the community, but their harvest was pitifully small.
They did manage to gather 30 units of wood.
Kagashi chopped down a few withered trees, and combined with the scattered dry branches by the roadside, it was barely enough.
However, for stone, they only had the few pebbles Misaka Mikoto dug out from a flower bed plus some scattered gravel from the roadside, totaling only 5 units.
As for iron ore, they hadn’t seen a single piece.
“This place is too poor,” Furina sighed, her hands on her hips.
The simple apron made from instant noodle bags rustled in the cold wind over her white system suit.
“Has this community been looted before?”
“It hasn’t been looted.” Kagashi looked around at the dilapidated buildings and shook his head.
“It’s just completely rotten.
This place has been abandoned for too long; anything useful has long since naturally decayed.”
“Then what do we do?” Misaka Mikoto frowned, adjusting her makeshift plastic cover.
“We can’t just wait around on the train, can we?”
Kagashi remained silent for a moment.
He remembered the sentence from the system prompt: ‘Accidents may occur.’ The novice protection period didn’t mean there was no danger at all; it just meant the probability of danger was reduced.
But if a place was specifically marked by the system as abnormal, that might be their breakthrough.
“Let’s go upstairs and check first.” Kagashi looked up at the nearest residential building.
“Everything on the ground in the community is mostly ruined, but we might still find some intact resources inside the structures.”
The group walked into the nearest residential building.
The stair railings were covered in thick rust.
Kagashi reached out and touched them lightly.
Crash—
An entire section of the railing snapped into several pieces, falling to the ground and shattering into rusty debris.
The group climbed up the stairs floor by floor.
First floor.
Two households, their security doors half-open.
Kagashi pushed open one of the doors and walked in.
It was a standard two-bedroom, one-living room apartment.
The sofa in the living room had decayed into a pile of black fibrous material, and the TV cabinet lay broken on the floor.
The kitchen was empty, the cabinet doors had fallen off, and a layer of black grime had accumulated in the concrete sink.
In the bedroom, only a rusted bed frame remained; the mattress had long since rotted away.
The wardrobe door was open and it was completely empty; not even a single clothes hanger was left.
“This is way too empty.” Misaka Mikoto stood at the bedroom door, her face full of disappointment.
“Not even a scrap of usable fabric is left.”
Kagashi walked to the window and reached out to touch the aluminum alloy window frame.
As soon as his fingers touched it, the window frame cracked with a sharp snap.
He gave it a gentle pull.
The entire window, along with the frame, fell out, hitting the ground with a loud clang and shattering into pieces.
[System Prompt: This item is severely damaged and cannot be collected.]
“We can’t even harvest the metal windows?” Furina leaned over to look.
“This is too much.”
“The oxidation is too severe.” Kagashi brushed the dust off his hands.
“The metal has turned into oxidized slag; the system won’t recognize it as valid raw material.”
The group continued to climb.
Second floor.
Third floor.
Fourth floor.
Every floor was the same—stripped bare, hollowed out, without even a single intact dish or bowl left.
Door panels fell over at a push, and the electrical wires in the walls had long been pulled out, leaving only empty grooves in the concrete surfaces.
“They didn’t even leave us a single screw.”
“It wasn’t a standard relocation,” Roxy noted, kneeling down, her fingertip lightly tracing a rough mark on the wall.
“Look at these marks; they were torn off by force.
The wires weren’t neatly disassembled; they were yanked out in a hurry.”
“Does that mean they left under a sudden evacuation?” Furina tilted her head.
“Or,” Roxy stood up, her expression becoming somewhat solemn, “when they left, they couldn’t afford to care about preserving anything.”
Kagashi added: “Or perhaps it was caused by some mysterious anomaly.
Didn’t we arrive here in an equally inexplicable way?”
The group looked at each other and didn’t speak further.
Footsteps echoed in the empty corridor, making a crunching sound as they stepped on broken glass.
Large patches of white plaster peeled off the walls, revealing the gray concrete underneath.
In some places, dark red marks could be seen, though it was unclear if they were rust or something else from the past.
Fifth floor.
Sixth floor.
Top floor.
The iron door leading to the rooftop was half-open, the hinges completely rusted shut, and the door panel was covered in heavy dents, as if it had been struck by something substantial from the outside.
Mikoto reached out and gave it a push, but the iron door didn’t budge.
She added a bit more force, yet there was still no movement.
“Let me try,” Kagashi stepped forward.
The Ox Talisman exerted its power through his veins, and the iron door creaked loudly, opening a gap.
A cold wind poured in through the opening, carrying dust and a dry, indefinable scent.
Continuing to exert force, the brittle structure snapped into two pieces under the immense pressure.
The group walked out onto the spacious rooftop.
The ground was rough concrete, and the cracks were filled with withered yellow weeds that felt soft when stepped on.
Most of the surrounding safety fences had collapsed, leaving only a few crooked steel bars still standing, swaying slightly in the wind.
The wind was strong, making the makeshift plastic layers on the group flap loudly against their suits.
Yoshino tightly gripped the corner of Roxy’s clothes, her small face looking pale in the wind.
Kagashi walked to the edge of the rooftop, looking down at the entire Shuguang Community from above.
From this height, the abandoned district looked even more desolate.
However, Kagashi’s gaze was soon drawn to a stark contrast.
In the southeast direction of the community, about a kilometer away, there was a sudden splash of green.
It wasn’t gray ruins, nor was it withered yellow weeds.
It was a vibrant, life-filled green—a massive, lush tree standing completely alone amidst the abandoned urban wreckage.
“There’s a tree over there,” Kagashi pointed toward the southeast.
The four girls looked in the direction he was pointing.
“What a huge tree.” Furina squinted, placing her hand over her forehead to shield her eyes.
“How can there be such a lush tree in a place as dead as this?”
“And it’s surrounded by ruins, yet it’s the only thing thriving,” Misaka Mikoto observed.
“This is highly abnormal.”
“An anomaly like this usually means a concentrated source of energy,” Roxy said softly, a glint of magical analytical interest flashing in her eyes.
“That might be our primary breakthrough.”
Kagashi nodded, his gaze continuing to scan the area around the giant tree.
About two or three hundred meters northwest of the tree, there was a relatively flat open space.
In that space was the square outline of a structure, half-buried underground, with only a grayish-white roof exposed.
There were several vents on the roof, pitch black, looking like hollow openings.
Kagashi squinted and looked closely; it was the entrance to an underground parking lot.
Some heavy debris was piled at the entrance, looking like abandoned vehicles and concrete blocks.
“Should we go over and check?” Furina asked.
There were less than ten hours left until the train’s departure time.
“Let’s go,” Kagashi made the decision. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“But we must finish quickly; we have to be back before conditions worsen.”
The group made their way down from the rooftop to the first floor, walked out of the residential building, and headed southeast.
The closer they got to the giant tree, the fainter the smell of decay in the air became, replaced by a fresh scent of vegetation and earth.
It looked large from a distance, but only when they stood beneath it did they realize the tree was truly monumental.
The trunk was so thick it would take several people to encircle it, and the bark was dark brown, covered in deep, ancient patterns.
“This area,” Furina looked around, “is completely different from the surroundings, almost like a localized biome.”
Kagashi kept his focus, his gaze vigilantly scanning the perimeter.
“Let’s split up and search the immediate surroundings,” Kagashi decided.
“There’s bound to be useful resources or clues near a growth like this.
Look carefully, and we’ll meet back here in fifteen minutes.”
The four girls looked at each other and nodded.
“Stay within sight and call out immediately if anything happens,” Kagashi added.
The five of them dispersed, each searching in different directions around the base of the tree.
Kagashi, however, turned his gaze toward the underground parking lot entrance to the northwest.
“You guys keep searching the surface; I’ll go check out that subterranean entrance.” Kagashi called out to the group, then turned and walked toward the parking lot.
The parking lot entrance was less than two hundred meters from the giant tree.
The entrance was a concrete slope leading downward into the dark depths.
On both sides of the slope were retaining walls, covered in old graffiti and mildew.
The path was heavily blocked by a pile of items—several scrapped cars were piled haphazardly together, the gaps stuffed with broken concrete blocks and iron frames.
Kagashi stepped forward and tapped the hood of one of the cars.
Thump, thump.
It was the solid sound of metal; though weathered, the structural integrity was intact.
He clenched his fist, the power of the Ox Talisman surging into his arm.
He grabbed the bumper of the topmost scrapped car and gave a sudden, powerful heave.
Screech!
The metal let out a piercing groan as it was yanked out by sheer force, tracing an arc in the air before hitting the nearby empty ground with a loud boom.
Ten minutes later, a gap wide enough for a person to pass through had been cleared at the entrance.
A damp, stagnant odor poured out from within.
Kagashi frowned and took a step back.
He glanced toward the giant tree; the four girls were still diligently searching the surface and hadn’t noticed his progress.
“I’ll scout the upper level first,” Kagashi muttered to himself.
He gripped his heavy Steel Pipe.
While it was dark, his newly acquired Eye of Truth allowed him to discern shapes and outlines perfectly through the shadows.
He took a deep breath and squeezed through the gap.
The slope was long, about twenty or thirty meters.
The further down he went, the damper and colder the air became, and the stagnant odor grew stronger.
Old graffiti and frantic handwriting appeared on the walls: [Don’t go down], [There’s something inside], [Save me].
The writing became increasingly scribbled toward the bottom.
Kagashi kept his composure and continued his descent.
The slope finally reached its end, opening up into a massive underground parking lot.
Dozens of vehicle wreckages were parked orderly on the ground—cars, SUVs, and even a small transport truck.
Their windows were shattered, tires flat, and chassis covered in dust.
Kagashi raised his weapon and fully activated the Eye of Truth, his vision piercing through the heavy darkness.
There, in the very center of the underground lot, a silhouette stood.
It was a humanoid figure, but its characteristics were distinctly non-human.
It stood there completely motionless, as if in a deep state of hibernation.
Its skin was a pale, grayish-white, bearing the distinct textural properties of an entity adapted to the dark, waiting to be disturbed.