Chapter 119: When Will This Perish

In a world saturated with spectral entities, survival is nearly impossible. This is especially true for long-term existence; even the most powerful "Obsession-Bearers," armed with various ghost-slaying relics, rarely escape the eventual fate of being torn apart and devoured by swarms of spirits.

Yet, no matter the circumstances, life always finds a way.

For humanity, it seemed there was only one path left: to live.

The strategy was to go underground. Abandon the surface, take the population and tools, and burrow into the earth at any cost. The Canglong Federation had fought three world wars; in preparation for their northern neighbors, they had constructed an "Underground Great Wall" that spanned the entire continent. This project was far more extravagant—perhaps even pathological—than the anti-nuclear defenses of the main world, rivaling the lunar colonization movements that followed the Third World War.

However, while one trend was obvious, the other remained hidden.

Just as described in cinema, ghosts can traverse the sky and the earth. Wherever humans exist, spirits can exploit emotional fields, attempting to tear through the human body to manifest in the physical world and unleash slaughter. This inevitably bred paranoia; trust became a luxury, and emotional instability—or total psychological collapse—only accelerated the spectral invasion of reality.

The events that followed were recorded in print by the underground shelters of the ruins of the Magic City (Modu), documenting detailed information that Lan Yi could not capture through mere quantum sensing during his travels to the future.

When the ghosts began their invasion, the Canglong Federation officially launched the Underground Great Wall project. Over more than forty years of construction, the Ghost Troops and the Shadow Department dedicated immense time and energy to mass-producing industrial fiberglass—a biological material with ten times the tensile strength of composite alloys at less than one-tenth the weight. Its only drawback was a lack of heat resistance, but its high yield and extreme malleability made it the ideal building block for numerous underground cities reaching depths of three thousand meters.

Powered by multiple thorium-based molten salt reactors, these cities generated super-conductive barriers similar to Faraday cages, capable of blocking even Demon-King-class entities. The surplus energy was used to maintain internal cycles and agricultural systems, effectively insulating the inhabitants from the emotional fields that attracted spirits.

In theory, once these underground cities were connected to share resources, they could withstand the spectral threat for centuries, if not millennia. After all, by sealing the exits, the surface ghosts—who were, at their core, manifestations of obsessive energy—found it difficult to breach the electromagnetic and physical barriers. If they attempted to force their way through sufficient density, their obsessions would often shake and dissipate, leading to their forced slumber or utter destruction.

Yet, the underground city beneath the ruins of the Magic City fell within a few short years.

Underground excavation is fraught with the constant danger of collapse. Even modified humans in combat exoskeletons are no different from ants when buried under hundreds of tons of earth. To rapidly connect the capsule tunnels, the engineering teams of that era sacrificed everything—not just their lives, but their physical and mental health.

"For the Yangtze! For the Yellow River!"

Men shouting these slogans bled in silence, biting their lips. In retrospect, it was a tragedy worthy of a monument. But then, a scandal broke out in the Magic City’s underground city that shook the men to their cores: the issue of marriage and offspring.

Whether it was a resurgence of petty-bourgeois sentiment or the sudden, erratic rise of "her power," a man who had suffered a minor disability during construction discovered that his wife had been unfaithful and that his infant child was not his own. While waiting for the slow, bureaucratic mediation of the underground court, the man watched his ex-wife climb the social ladder and eventually lost his mind.

With man-eating ghosts outside and demons within, what was the point of his disability? Was it for the Yellow River? Or the Yangtze?

One day, the warrior slipped back into the engineering sector, stole an unexpectedly modified industrial mech, and rampaged into the residential district. With his mech’s cannon, he turned his ex-wife into a pulp and sent the Material Management Committee to their graves along with her.

The scene was brutally cruel; the incident was catastrophic.

To quell the fear and rage, blood had to be spilled. The records in the print media from that point on become vague, stating only that the culprit was executed, that sympathizers rioted, that the capsule tunnel project stalled, and that with human hearts proving unpredictable, the underground city’s emotional stability began to spiral out of control.

It turned out that the invasion of ghosts was not merely spatial; it occurred on a temporal scale as well. Physical and electromagnetic barriers could isolate the ghost domains of external spirits, but they could not seal off the ghost domains that emerged from internal human emotions. Perhaps, from the very beginning, this was a dead end with no solution. Humanity is, after all, an incurable species.

When, in the depths of the underground prison, a prisoner suddenly laughed with a chilling, eerie sound—staring fixedly at a terrified guard—and his flesh began to tear as a hideous, inhuman spirit crawled out from within him, the total collapse of the underground city became merely a matter of time.

Electromagnetic pulse weapons could kill a spirit or two; desperate abandonment could isolate a swarm. But in the end, who was to be abandoned?

"When will these days end? May I and you all perish together!"

This black, scrawled slogan on the wall of an underground street, accompanied by scattered, bleaching bones, seemed to echo the sentiment. The rotting remains of organic matter hinted at the brutal massacres that had occurred here, with the scars of spectral destruction visible everywhere.

It felt as though the entire place had become a battlefield. In the silent air, one could occasionally hallucinate the roar of humans fighting ghosts, but those sounds were always weak and hollow, replaced by the sinister, triumphant laughter of spirits echoing through the sealed chambers.

They seemed to mock humanity: after all that effort, wasn't the final outcome just dying in a different place? Instead of struggling in vain, why not surrender to the ghosts early on?

Yet, within these underground cities, in the areas where the thorium-based molten salt reactors still hummed with power, the time-traveling Obsession-Bearers established their safe bases. Because these were underground zones, once the population was controlled, the Obsession-Bearers only needed to clear out the ghosts to secure a safe space, effectively avoiding the threats from the surface.

Furthermore, by utilizing the legacies left in these zones, the Obsession-Bearers could not only return to the surface through special tunnels to ambush spirits, but could also harness the ghost domains and resources of the underground cities to enhance their own strength.

It was by this thin margin that the time-traveling Obsession-Bearers avoided being wiped out by the ghosts dominating the surface. Instead, they managed to accumulate power bit by bit, traversing between the future and the present until they reached a level where they could challenge even Demon-King-class entities.

And now, the one they had to face was Lan Yi.