Doomsday Wonderland

When the river finally carried her out of the pocket dimension's boundary and into the next stage of the factory's production process, wouldn't it, just like last time, trigger the posthuman alert?

It was about time.

Lin Sanjiu, whose swimming skills were mediocre at best, gave up struggling against the current. She allowed the turbulent waves to engulf her, tossing her around and spinning her as they carried her forward. Her surroundings alternated between dim and bright, but she couldn't make out anything clearly. After what felt like an eternity of being swept along, she noticed the river seemed to be getting shallower and the current weaker. Eventually, the rushing water deposited her onto a flat, open surface.

1

Panting heavily, she lifted her head, wiped the water from her face, and looked around.

She found herself on a man-made riverbank. The once-violent waves had calmed to gentle ripples washing over the flat ground, their ferocity completely gone. The river had abruptly ended.

The flat surface, paved with concrete, sloped up from the river and stretched far into the distance. Though the blue sky was still visible behind her, overhead the concrete ground transitioned seamlessly into the roof of a factory, illuminated by rows of bright fluorescent lights. The transition was so smooth and silent that even Lin Sanjiu couldn't tell where the sky ended and the roof began.

She wasn't the only one looking up at the sky. From time to time, the river would spit out a few more ordinary people onto the concrete. Almost everyone, after catching their breath, would glance around repeatedly. Further ahead, small groups of people—perhaps those who had arrived earlier—seemed to have already processed their shock. They either stood or sat, watching the newcomers with curiosity.

"What... what is this place?" a young woman ahead of her asked a few people sitting by the riverbank.

"I just got washed up here too."

"Try asking someone further inside."

These were the only kinds of responses she received.

As Lin Sanjiu walked deeper into the area, she observed her surroundings carefully.

The concrete ground formed a square, enclosed on three sides by tall, gray plaster walls that, together with the roof, created a sealed, warehouse-like space. There were no doors or windows. The only apparent exit was the river behind her, but jumping back into it would likely just lead to being washed up again. People in this massive, warehouse-like room had nowhere else to go.

Strangely, the deeper she went into the warehouse, the more densely packed the crowd became. It was as if everyone had instinctively gathered together, waiting for something. The air itself seemed to carry a faint undercurrent of restlessness and urgency. When she reached the far end of the warehouse, fragments of a conversation suddenly caught her attention.

"Just wait. I don't know how long it'll take to open..."

Lin Sanjiu turned her head toward the voice, quickly closed the distance, and addressed the older man who had spoken. "Open what? What are you all waiting to open?"

The old man froze, startled by her intensity. Stammering, he replied, "The... the wall..."

Lin Sanjiu frowned and glanced at the tall wall he was pointing to on the left. Made of gray plaster, it was smooth and unremarkable, with no visible signs of an opening. "How do you know it will open?" she asked.

"I'm not sure. I just heard someone say that the wall will open... Maybe it's a message left behind by someone who was here before," the old man said, calming down a bit. Then, as if noticing something unusual, he asked, "Why do you seem... different?"

The ordinary people temporarily granted evolved abilities couldn't reliably distinguish posthumans anymore. Lin Sanjiu didn't explain. She quickly thanked him and turned to walk toward the left wall. It seemed like everyone gathered in the warehouse had heard the same rumor, though none could confirm whether it was true or not.

"You're a pocket dimension winner too, right?" a young man with long, light-brown bangs obscuring half his face asked. "I just asked around. Everyone here won their pocket dimension. Losers? No one knows where they went. So, this wall might be the exit for winners..."

"How long have you been waiting?" Lin Sanjiu asked a slightly plump middle-aged woman.

"About half an hour," the woman replied. Then, with a shrug, she added, "That's nothing. I heard someone waited for two days... Who told me that? I have no idea."

"No, no," a short, chubby man interrupted anxiously, catching on to Lin Sanjiu's intentions. "Even if you could break through the concrete wall, you have no idea what's on the other side! What if the warehouse fills with poison gas? That'd be the end of us!"

The people in the warehouse all hailed from Chimeric City and had won their respective pocket dimensions. Without the competition that characterized those spaces, the atmosphere was far friendlier, and starting conversations with strangers came naturally. Information, guesses, and rumors circulated freely, but Lin Sanjiu couldn't tell how much of it was trustworthy.

For now, it seemed there was nothing to do but wait and see.

Surprisingly, the factory's posthuman alert hadn't gone off yet, which caught her off guard. Could it have activated somewhere else, out of earshot of the warehouse? ŖᴀƝÖᛒÊŚ

"The pocket dimension you escaped from," she asked the short man, "what was it about?"

Everyone loved to talk about their achievements, and the short man was no exception.

"It was a courtroom pocket dimension. Everyone was assigned roles—lawyers, prosecutors, suspects, jury members, that sort of thing," he said, clearly pleased. "Each person had their own objectives. I was the defense attorney for the suspect, so my goal was to come up with reasons to defend and exonerate him. Thankfully, I'd read a lot of pre-doomsday materials and knew how these things worked. Otherwise, I wouldn't have made it out alive."

He wiped his nose and chuckled. "It's a shame I wasn't born before the doomsday. I feel like I'd have been a great lawyer. Huh? Rewards? Well, nothing special—just some eloquence points accumulated in the courtroom pocket dimension. Those stayed with me."

Lin Sanjiu nodded slowly.

Everyone she spoke to had come from the same type of pocket dimension. One person had even mentioned winning a Battle for Authority in Words, which must have been from an earlier group. Considering she had spent nearly a full day in that pocket dimension, it meant people had been waiting in the warehouse for at least as long.

Could the entire river be filled with similar pocket dimensions?

"No, it's not like that," said the next person she spoke to, a man with a somewhat vacant gaze. "I'm from Chimeric City, and I'm a strong swimmer. I was once hired to help build an aerial water park, a luxury attraction for wealthy posthumans. That's where I learned to swim... Anyway, when I was swept out of my pocket dimension, I swam upstream right away. At one point, I saw people falling out of a pocket dimension on the opposite side of the river. A whole group of them, one after another."

He paused, looked around, and added, "They didn't seem like they could swim. They fell into the river, and I followed them. But eventually, I lost track of them and got swept here instead. When I came ashore, none of them were here. Not a single one."

In other words, the section of river after the pocket dimensions acted as a sorting mechanism, separating winners, losers, and others like those who triumphed in the Battle for Authority in Words.

Lin Sanjiu thanked him, lost in thought as she walked away. The low hum of chatter reverberated under the warehouse's high ceiling, merging into an indistinct murmur. She stopped before the left wall and looked up at it.

Perhaps it was just a whim or an instinctive impulse—she couldn't say why, but the moment her hand touched the wall, she unconsciously activated [Planar World].

In the next second, the warehouse remained, but the left wall was gone.  

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