Chapter 135-I Clean Up Garbage in a Wasteland World
Chapter 135 The Company You Can't Leave (XIII)
Everything was twisted by the explosion.
The searing heat incinerated flesh, reducing it to ash in an instant. The giant Sheep-Head was disintegrating. The devastating force swept through everything.
The explosion was blindingly fast. Scorching light devoured all things. Wang Qinqian felt a wave of heat. She had never seen light this brilliant.
In a single flash, those employees who'd been chanting about their great cause were consumed. Brightness, Hope, Co-op, Win-win—all melted away. They could no longer utter a single slogan.
The bomb detonated outward from Zhu Ning's position. The underground processing floor rapidly buckled and collapsed under the extreme heat.
In those brief moments, Wang Qinqian's entire life flashed before her. She'd grown up in the slums. To survive, she'd buried herself in studying countless times, filled out exam after exam, passed review after review, endured put-down after put-down.
She'd been trapped in this company countless times, unable to escape, forced to relive being unable to live or die.
Wang Qinqian had always stayed obediently on her predetermined track. This was the one and only time in her life she'd strayed from it.
The explosion brought the grandest ending imaginable—far beyond anything she'd envisioned.
What she felt, of all things, was warmth. Once, the farthest reach of her warmth had been forty centimeters—curled up on a narrow heating pad in winter. Now, on an entirely different level, she'd expanded the reach of warmth.
Everything around her was warm. Everything in sight was warm. Not just warm—it was extreme, blazing heat.
Waves of heat rolled through. The air itself compressed and distorted.
Like a moth drawn to flame. Like humanity reaching toward the sun.
You know destruction lies ahead, but you can't stop yourself from drawing closer. Everything in the world would be bathed in blinding light—herself included.
She had finally met her death. Let everything return to dust, to earth. She couldn't even feel pain.
A life that should have ended long ago finally reached its conclusion.
The explosion spread outward—from the underground factory, tearing through the basement, the employee cafeteria, the Storage Freezer.
Then it detonated upward, floor by floor. First floor, second floor, third floor—including the 19th floor where she'd worked.
Mechanical blueprints were devoured by tongues of flame. The Sheep-Heads who'd been typing away simply stopped. Over a hundred Sheep-Heads, their rectangular pupils reflecting the firelight like rows of surveillance screens.
When the blast reached them, not a single one tried to flee. They stood there, frozen, staring blankly.
Workstations, conference rooms, break rooms, offices—none were spared. Like a great wheel rolling forward, all things in this world were but ants, and after the wheel passed, not even a trace remained.
All the slogans, all the great causes, all the rules and regulations, all the inexplicable psychological oppression—everything vanished in an instant.
The explosion had started underground. Once the foundation was destroyed, the entire building began to tilt and collapse—no different from a demolition crew imploding an unfinished high-rise.
BOOM!
Building No. 3 in the center of Hengsheng Mechanical Park collapsed with a thunderous roar. The dust cloud rose over a hundred meters high. Aftershocks continued—the sound of a colossus falling, like an avalanche.
......
Bang!
The instant the explosion hit, Zhu Ning had activated her 3D Defense Space. The System said she was immune to bomb damage, but she had no idea how far that immunity extended.
The 3D Defense Space carved out a pocket of shelter beneath the rubble. Zhu Ning leaned against the debris. Everything around her was charred black, but her body had suffered no side effects.
Zhu Ning lay quietly beneath the wreckage. The bloody smile on her helmet had faded and chipped away, as if a manic clown was finally settling down.
She'd used the bomb—obtained long ago from the Fishman incident in the sewers. It was probably the System's starter gift pack. Nothing that good had been given since.
She'd had only three total. Fifteen seconds to demolish a building. Zero health cost. Immune to the host. Zhu Ning had always been too reluctant to use them.
At the moment of detonation, the blinding light had radiated outward.
Zhu Ning had felt a wave of extreme heat. Being immune to the bomb's damage didn't mean she couldn't feel it.
In her previous life, in the Zombie World, she'd been killed by an explosion. The scalding heat wave had engulfed her in an instant. The technology in this world was even more advanced—its destructive power exceeded her imagination.
Basement level one had been completely leveled. Rubble everywhere. Wang Qinqian was nowhere to be seen. She couldn't spot a single living being.
Was it over?
Had Wang Qinqian found the peace she'd been seeking?
Zhu Ning sat amid the rubble, cradling her head, still processing. The System panel was intact. The helmet was miraculously undamaged.
The System's claim of bomb immunity was actually real.
She'd burned through too many System items. Being a madwoman came at a cost. This kind of mutually-assured-destruction approach made the aftermath a nightmare to deal with.
Zhu Ning stood up and dusted herself off. She was about to look for a way out when suddenly, her hand froze mid-motion.
Her helmet's peripheral vision had caught something. She wasn't alone inside the 3D Defense Space.
Lying quietly in the corner was a Black Crystal.
Zhu Ning had detonated the explosive directly on the Black Crystal. In the chaos of the blast, she hadn't checked on it. She'd drilled an opening with the Dentist's Drill, then used the explosive. Under that extreme heat bombardment—the thing was still here.
The 3D Defense Space's description stated that all people and objects needed Zhu Ning's permission to enter.
No matter how muddled her mind had been at the time, she was absolutely certain she'd never invited it in.
Had it been inadvertently dragged in because Zhu Ning was clinging to the crystal when the explosion went off?
Or... was this C-Level contaminated item simply ineffective against it?
It had only cracked. The explosive had produced several fissures on the Black Crystal's surface—like a potato roasted red in charcoal. Fiery red light seeped through the cracks.
What on earth was this thing?
Zhu Ning felt like she was hallucinating—like the ending of a horror movie where the protagonist, having lost companions and endured everything, finally thinks they've escaped, only to turn around and find a ghost's hand behind them.
The evil spirit was still here. All resistance had been futile.
When Zhu Ning breathed, she felt a burning sting in her throat. Radiation side effects—that was her first thought.
If she were back in the real world, it would take a month of exposure before physical symptoms appeared. But her body was being corroded right now.
And there were no Contamination Spores anywhere around.
Not a single one. The rubble was utterly silent. Even Wang Qinqian—the one Contaminant she could talk to—had vanished. Not a single monster came to attack her.
Silence.
An eerie silence. Zhu Ning and an unknown energy source were buried deep beneath the wreckage. If no one came, she might be completely forgotten.
How long could Zhu Ning hold out? What would happen once the 3D Defense Space expired? Keep using it until she'd exhausted her life force?
Squelch—
A red tentacle squirmed out of the cracked Black Crystal. The instant Zhu Ning saw the tentacle, she felt something inside her brain squirm in response.
"How much for this batch?"
"Ten thousand NewCred per ton. You in?"
"Forget it. Load it up."
A torrent of memories suddenly flooded Zhu Ning's mind—pouring in without warning, like seawater rushing backward.
She saw the past of this so-called New Energy.
The backdrop was a Garbage Dump. Overhead hung a massive mechanical claw, grabbing waste and depositing it in another zone.
Beside it was an assembly line that automatically sorted out reusable metals.
The sorted waste was reloaded onto trucks and shipped to garbage processing companies in District 103.
Most companies in District 103 operated in this line of business. Backed by the Garbage Dump, they'd do metal recovery—clean the materials, reprocess them into raw stock, then sell to other mechanical companies.
Hengsheng Mechanical Company had started the same way. They'd begun with garbage recycling before transitioning to mechanical design.
During the transition, the bulk of their revenue still came from garbage processing.
A garbage truck bumped its way to Hengsheng Mechanical Park. Mountains of waste were dumped onto a sorting line for re-classification—a process that required human workers to supervise.
"What's this?" An employee spotted something in the sorting machine. The screen showed a regular black cube.
Extremely odd. Perfectly square, with smooth edges. It looked like an alien artifact.
"No idea. Black and ugly," the sorter said, using the mechanical arm to pick it out and zoom in for a closer look. "Report it."
The sorter was just a regular worker. His job was to catch anything that slipped through—and sometimes they actually found valuable metals.
Their operation was far more industrialized and efficient. It was precisely because of companies like these that the Defectives scraping by at the Garbage Dump earned less and less. Their odds of finding anything valuable kept dropping.
Even a lowly job like scavenging trash had countless people competing for it now.
The waste processing department sent the stone to the appraisal unit. The appraiser ran every available instrument, then set down the testing equipment, baffled.
"It doesn't match any known metal in our records," the appraiser said. "Could be garbage. Could be something rare."
With that assessment, the stone was sent to the company's internal lab. They ran a battery of standard tests on the strange stone—it sat there like a dead object, completely inert.
Until they discovered it contained a powerful energy core. "It's an energy source."
Once they knew it was energy, the department allocated more funding for experiments. The initial research results were all good news. This wasn't just an energy source—it was a mother lode. Its energy output far exceeded Contamination Spores.
The research team expanded. Everyone worked overtime. The researchers were ecstatic. Then came the bad news: "Can't be developed. It's radioactive."
At that point, it was beyond the researchers' scope. Nobody knew what to do with the stone.
So it was passed up the chain, level by level, until it finally landed on the board of directors' desk. People stared at the Black Crystal locked inside a protective case.
Many sat around the long conference table, their faces blurry in Zhu Ning's vision. "This is the New Energy?"
"Are we going to be rich?"
"It's highly radioactive," someone said. "It could kill us."
"I think it's dangerous. We just barely transitioned off the old production line. We can stick with mechanical design going forward. The smart massage pod client just placed a huge order. If we stay on this track, we'll definitely succeed. Playing it safe is smarter."
"If this really is a New Energy source, it'll be worth more than Contamination Spores." Someone weighed in. "Do you have any idea how valuable Contamination Spores are? Our company can't even establish a spore processing line."
It was too expensive. They couldn't participate—could only watch helplessly as the Sanitation Center raked in profits.
"Old Xu, the scariest thing in this world isn't ghosts," someone scoffed. "It's watching other people make money while you don't get a cent."
Big corporations feasted on upstream profits. Down below, all they could do was process garbage.
If capital had a pecking order, they were the lowest of the low.
Every eye turned to the chairman's seat. At the far end of the long table sat a man who hadn't spoken a word.
Everyone waited for his verdict.
He lowered his hand and said: "This is the future."
And that settled it. This was the future—not just the company's future, but humanity's future.
They would develop the New Energy.
The faces around the table twisted, crumpling like sheets of paper balled into wads. Then the stone was sent to the development department. Only Outstanding Employees were granted access......
The story's origin was now complete.
Zhu Ning snapped back to clarity. She was freezing all over. The Contaminant inside her brain was squirming, resonating with the black crystal before her.
She thought she finally knew what this New Energy was. It was the same as the thing inside her own head—the brain of a scrapped experimental subject.
A discarded experiment, carelessly tossed into a Garbage Dump, capable of triggering a massive contamination event—becoming the source of countless people's nightmares.
Why was this thing here?
The dead post missions always related to Zhu Ning's secrets. This Contamination Zone had been prepared specifically for her by Prometheus.
This company was already registered with the Sanitation Center's Technology Department. Just like the dental clinic, Prometheus needed to ensure Zhu Ning got here first—before any Demon Hunters from the Sanitation Center could enter.
Zhu Ning saw the Red Tentacle behind her squirming, dragging out a mass of mechanical parts. The tentacle's surface was even wrapped in electrical wiring—machinery and Contaminant had fused and regenerated. It started as thin as a pinky finger, then swelled rapidly, growing larger and larger, until eventually it would engulf Zhu Ning's entire body.
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