There's No Love In the Deathzone (BL)-Chapter 71 - 70. Ancient Memory

Teachers at school would describe the Age of Apocalypse by comparing it with the red-zone.

The once fertile earth became dried and blackened, the freshwater was marred with toxin, and the sun was barely visible through the murky cloud. So Zein didn’t really surprise when he saw the condition of the land in front of him.

If there was something different, it was the remnant of a once flourishing city in ruin. If the red-zone felt like a slum, this ancient city felt as if a huge outbreak occurred in a big city like Althrea and devastated everything. That being said, the area around him was free of the depressing destruction.

From his point of view, Zein could see people in tattered and shabby clothes, with dirty appearances that were even worse than the red-zone dwellers looking toward him from far away—or rather, looking toward the shard. Most of them carried weapons, even civilians. From the fierce-looking halberd to the crude shield made of a car’s door and kitchen knives.

Since the shard was there, it must have been the time when Towers and Temples just appeared. But since unfortunately this place didn’t receive a complete fragment, there was no basis for any celestial powers to descend. There were espers and guides, but no place to receive proper skills. It was a time when everything was chaotic, and humans had to scavenge for survival.

From what Zein gathered, the survivors had gathered in this ruined city and made a barricade around it. He recognized it as the underground city where the expedition team came to before, only it was still on the surface this time.

Due to the shard natural rejection of sentient beings, those people couldn’t get closer and only looked from afar for days. It was a weird sensation where times seemed to walk fast, and yet Zein could feel and understand everything that happened.

What he couldn’t catch, however, was the people’s conversation. They talked in a language that he didn’t know, the old language they used before the unification of the continent, and the usage of a new standardized common language was established.

Through the hyperbolic sense, Zein watched as what seemed like the leaders among the survivors surrounded the ten meters radius where they could get close. They talked among themselves while watching the shard a lot, and then, at one point after more days had passed, someone came alone during the night when nobody was watching.

Closer and closer until the person touched him—touched the shard. Zein, through the shard, stared at the hooded person, feeling a weird resonance between them. He understood then, that it was what the shard felt when Zein touched it.

Unfortunately, that person did not manage to do it secretly. Someone found out and the person was dragged away. The next time, the leaders’ council came back with that person, and everything became dark as the shard was being covered and moved.

The next time Zein could see again, he was in a familiar room—the room where the expedition team found the shard. From there, Zein took his own conclusion.

It seemed that the leaders council decided to keep the shard indoors and chose who could stay inside the safe zone. When the shard spread its consciousness outward, Zein could see and feel the conflict brewing over the right to enter the safe zone, and violence was unavoidable.

It was a sad situation that felt all too familiar for Zein. But he had no leeway of getting melancholic about it, because he sensed something even more ominous looming inside the city.

At the place where the influence of the shard ended, at that border where magical energy and miasma collided, an ominous entity was born; a familiar-looking phantom who fleeted about like a ghost.

It was the Specter they faced the last time, the one who could somewhat make sounds. Like watching a horror show, Zein witnessed the Specter take its victim one by one, and the people started to get suspicious of one another. It caused another conflict, while the malicious entity got stronger on its own by consuming human mana.

Until, finally, it was strong enough to give commands to other beasts.

And then, it was hell.

The beasts came swarming in the direction of the city like a stampede. They could barely protect themselves when the beasts only came in a group or two, so the only outcome when a whole horde came was a massacre.

People who didn’t instantly meet their end tried to come inside the safe zone. Of course, it became the source of another tragedy, where survivors even tried to kill each other or threw their comrades to the beasts so they could have a spot inside. In the end, after the only living humans were the ones inside the safe zone, the Specter made a siege outside the zone, trapping all the people inside.

The shard was filled with sorrow and regret of its own existence, and Zein felt as if those feelings were his own. The scenery surrounding it was just a snowball of tragedies.

Trapped in a dangerous situation, it would be great if people could be united. But that kind of romance was hard to come by. They were filled with fear and desperation to survive, and Zein couldn’t tell whether it was safer there or outside the ’safe zone’. In the end, they broke into three factions.

One decided to risk it and get out of the encirclement, including the person with the ability to touch the shard. Another one decided to stay put and hoard the leftover supplies to try and survive as long as possible. Of course, not everyone could be included in this group, who was filled with the leaders council and their people.

So the leftover people had no choice but to grit their teeth and suffer, and in the end decided to attack the Specter since they might die either way. While the shard had no idea about the fate of the first group which tried to escape, it knew that this reckless, desperate, malnourished group was annihilated and became the nourishment for the Specter instead.

The shard could only watch helplessly then, as time passed and the food became scarce. Zein thought he already saw the lowest a human could be, but here, he watched people kill each other for a piece of bread and a drop of water, and witnessed humans ate other humans like a beast.

The few remaining people were drowned in madness that they started killing each other just because, and in the end, the last human who survive spent his last few days being corroded. Without a guide to cleanse him, the man erupted, which caused the ruined city to get buried underground.

Zein had never seen an esper truly erupt before. But the shard recorded that memory in high precision, from every bit of corrosion progression, to the moment the esper turned into a malicious monster, and then, ultimately, exploded, destroying all the remaining corpses.

Inside the empty room of the empty building in an empty, ruined city, the shard waiting, alone. For another existence like itself to come, or just disappear altogether so it didn’t have to witness the same tragedy happened.

It waited, and waited, and then, the shard was faced with a pair of deep blue eyes.

Just like the eyes of the person who touched it for the first time had.

With a gasp, that same pair of blue eyes opened wide and shaking. Zein let go of the shard then, and the tube slammed shut afterward, as voices—urgent voices—flew into his ears.

"Zein!" he recognized the voice as Eugene’s, but when he tried to turn around, his legs gave out and he would have fallen helplessly to the floor if it wasn’t for Balduz catching his arm and shoulder to support him.

Zein felt a bit dazed and dizzy suddenly, and strangely drained. The three main researchers were surrounding him with worried eyes, although Zein didn’t really understand why. freēwēbηovel.c૦m

It wasn’t like he was hurt or any—

"Huh?" Zein touched his face, since he felt something wet and warm there, and then realized that he was crying.

Well, not exactly. He was shedding tears, but it wasn’t his. He looked at the shard, which pulsed and vibrated with something that Zein understood as sorrow.

What—using him as an intermediary now? Zein frowned in annoyance and tried to get up, only to find out that he wasn’t able to.

"Ugh—what happened?"

"What happened?! That’s what we want to ask!" Eugene grabbed the guide’s upper arms with a serious face. "Zein, you were standing there for almost eleven hours already!"

* * *

Zein gulped on his third glass of water while contemplating—oh right, he was practically watching almost a year’s worth of footage earlier, and even hundreds of years of time skip until he saw himself before waking up.

As he let out a long sigh, he became aware of the four pairs of eyes focused on him. There was a room with several beds that was usually used by the overtimed researchers, and Balduz had carried him there to rest. Zein had said he was fine, but the others were fiercely adamant about it.

"I’m fine," Zein said. His legs just fell asleep from standing for eleven hours without moving. "I told you it was the shard that cried, not me."

The eyes were narrowing dubiously at him, so Zein proceeded to tell them what he saw through the shard’s memory, just a gist of it. When he finished, the room fell into deep silence as the four of them digested Zein’s information.

"So..." the Chief was the one who came out faster. "It’s like a double-edged sword? Wait, no...an iron maiden? A double-spiked shield? Or—"

"Chief, please..." Eugene sighed.

"You can say that," Zein gave his glass to Balduz for a refill before responding. "Isn’t that happen to all the fragments too, though? Just the area was much larger," when the researchers tilted their heads in confusion, Zein added with a sigh. "The borderland marsh. Phantoms and weak specters appeared there."

It was then that those supposedly smart people clapped their hands.

"That effect would be nullified if the edge of one fragment’s energy wave touched another fragment’s energy, like a resonance," Zein added further. While he didn’t have proper education, if it was regarding these topics, it seemed like he was the most knowledgeable.

It was kind of weird, however, seeing these supposedly renowned researchers nodding like a schoolboy and girls in front of him. "The core fragment’s power was greater, so it could generate lifeforce and a protective fortress around it. But the rest of the shards are pretty weak—their ability lies in purifying miasma and dispersing it into the air as raw mana."

"Wait—so it’s not storing it inside like a guide?" Anise asked with her tablet already in front of her, writing diligently with her digital pen.

Balduz came then, not just with Zein’s water but also with a hot meal that one of the assistants got. "No, because it doesn’t have a vessel," Zein paused, not because of the food being laid in front of him, but because he gain an understanding of himself too. "Guides...also don’t store it inside their body."

Except for him.

Yes, a vessel. He was a vessel. He purified the miasma and stored the raw energy inside himself until it was ready to be let out. With other guides, the purified miasma was expelled right away through their pore, drifting into the atmosphere and enriching the world with more mana.

And that was what happened to all the fragments.

’While I’m a vessel,’ Zein thought in silence as he ate the food, quietly listening to the discussion the three had about the content of the shard’s memory. ’Was it designed to strengthen my body for Setnath?’

He still contemplated in silence even after he finished his meal and leaned back on the headrest. Before the four people got up to let him rest, however, Zein gave them another task drowsily.

"The shard’s mana wave is its way of communication, like...a language...or something," now that he was fed, the exhaustion crashed into him hard. "Decode it...if you can..."

Closing his eyes finally, Zein heard the sound of affirmation from the door before slowly drifting into a dreamless sleep.