Lu Bai followed this pair of siblings across the Steel Frame Bridge, taking in the sights along the riverside.
The river under the Steel Frame Bridge had clear water with a slight blue tint, completely unlike what a river in the city should look like.
The sidewalk along the riverside had a bench every certain distance, but no one was strolling around. Even the rare pedestrian hurried by, leaving the benches almost all empty.
No Elderly Person out for a walk, no fishing folks.
In such a situation, the figure of a woman in a white dress sitting alone on a bench naturally caught Lu Bai’s eye for a couple more glances.
But he only glanced twice before looking away. After all, she was irrelevant personnel—maybe just waiting for friends.
……
Squeak~
The house door emitted a creaky sound from years of disrepair.
“Finally back.” Lu Yan kicked off his shoes and flopped onto the sofa with several breaches.
Lu Bai entered last. He gently closed the house door, then began surveying the various furnishings in the room.
The layout was a standard one-bedroom one-living-room unit. The living room was at most ten square meters. By the looks of it, the bedroom probably wasn’t much bigger.
One area of the living room held some kitchenware and an induction cooker, clearly set aside as the kitchen. The remaining space barely fit a tattered sofa, making it feel even more crowded.
The sundries were neatly organized, but with such limited space, no matter how arranged, it didn’t look good.
A small square table against the wall was probably for eating, with a photo frame standing on it.
In the photograph, a woman with three children smiled brightly.
Lu Bai scanned the room and found no traces of a fourth person living there, so this woman had either run away or died.
Judging from the woman’s appearance, Lu Bai leaned toward the latter.
But unexpectedly, after noticing Lu Bai’s gaze, Lu Ziyi’s eyes grew a few degrees colder.
He could feel that her resentment was clearly directed at Lu Bai.
Yet she said nothing more, because in her impression, Lu Bai’s reaction was always the same no matter what was said.
So she packed her backpack, tossed out a sentence, and directly pushed open the door to leave.
“I’m off to work.”
Lu Bai watched her leave.
When he turned back, he found that this little kid Lu Yan had sat up at some point.
In an old-mannish tone, he remarked, “That’s just how my sister is.”
Lu Bai’s eyelid twitched.
However…
Never mind.
These matters could wait. The top priority now was to understand what kind of world this was.
He pulled out the mobile phone borrowed from Fan Ding and sat down at the small square table.
The advantage of modern society was that the threshold for accessing information was greatly lowered, while the downside was that the threshold was too low, making it hard to distinguish truth from falsehood in much of the information.
So Lu Bai went straight to the government website to check the news, as well as past documents and announcements.
The content was incredibly varied, but fortunately Lu Bai wasn’t in a hurry and patiently read through the information.
Originally focused mainly on deathmatch duel news, he was unexpectedly drawn to something else.
“Holographic Sky Screen equipment receives further adjustments, providing more realistic visual experiences”
“Underground City No. 9 reaches strategic cooperation with Underground City No. 3”
“Total underground city population surpasses 200 million; experts call for optimizing population structure”
Underground City?
Lu Bai recalled hearing Xiao Xueyin mention the word “shelter” in the deathmatch arena, but at the time he hadn’t realized what it signified.
Now it seemed…
This city was actually underground?!
No wonder the sky looked so oppressive, no wonder the flowing river seemed so out of place, no wonder all the houses seen along the way were densely packed like a honeycomb.
Lu Bai spent a full hour sorting through this information.
Just as he had guessed, the people of this world all lived underground.
Of course, not because they wanted to. The government’s efforts to restore the surface ecology showed that people had no choice.
As for the reason, it traced back a few centuries.
At that time, humanity had just entered the 21st century.
Global warming made the climate increasingly abnormal. At first, people didn’t pay much attention, with experts occasionally claiming that a little ice age would arrive in the 2030s of this century, and climate warming was its prelude.
But in the end, a little ice age once every four hundred years wasn’t scary for modern humanity—after all, technology and productivity were far beyond what the feudal era could compare to.
With the ice age’s arrival, the power grid system was destroyed, small-scale power generation systems gradually became popular in communities, and changes to Earth’s water cycle even increased ocean fisheries—not entirely bad.
Looking across Earth history, the five major ice ages had intervals of about 1.3 billion years between the first and second, about 200 million years between the second and third, then tens of millions of years…
Though the overall trend showed shortening intervals between major ice ages, on the scale of millions of years, mainstream views held that this sixth major ice age wouldn’t arrive so soon.
However, the cooling didn’t stop; the cold grew worse year by year.
People gradually panicked, many realizing this wasn’t a little ice age—humanity had entered the ice age unprepared.
Regrettably, faced with nature’s climate change, humanity, self-proclaimed lords of creation, was powerless to stop it.
The concept of underground shelters was first proposed, but ensuing technical difficulties made it a “ark ticket” only for a tiny elite few.
In despair, the deathmatch system appeared.
This deus ex machina ground literature setup entered people’s field of vision for real.
Whether alien conspiracy or divine gift.
Humanity had no spare energy to care, single-mindedly grasping this suddenly appearing lifeline.
Lu Bai checked many sources, but records from the deathmatch system’s appearance to humanity’s official entry into the underground city era were all vague.
In short, in a very short time, humanity mastered heavy element fusion technology, ecological self-circulation technology, and made huge leaps in materials strength and engineering technology.
With these black technologies mastered, history proceeded on track: the United Government was established, and shelter construction was scheduled.
Across the globe, hundreds of underground shelters began construction simultaneously.
To be precise, shelters numbered under 100 should actually be called underground cities.
Because each could accommodate over ten million people.
The lower the number, the more exaggerated the scale…
Seeing this, Lu Bai looked up out the window.
He couldn’t help rubbing his somewhat sore eyes and muttered to himself, “Something feels off somewhere…”