"Listen to him," Levi no longer said anything, leading his team toward the library at a run.
The two slopes in the town were the highest in elevation, but neither was inhabited. To the east where the sun rose was the library; to the west where it set stood a stone temple.
The Stone Temple was dedicated to a Swamp God, a Cthulhu-style figure, crafted on a whim by some folk artist. Somehow it had struck a bizarre chord with the townsfolk, and they started to worship it, even building this temple for it. In fact, this thing had no divine power at all, not even deceitful power.
The library was also a particularly sacred and tranquil place in town, but its books were covered in dust. In the past, not even one person would come here to clean up. Thankfully, the library had something more important than the Stone Temple: thick tomes.
Those books were now crucial; they were moved to block all possible entries that the swamp's muddy water could seep through.
"More people are running over there; they think the Stone Temple will protect them," Hu Lu pointed toward the temple and said.
Wu Hen glanced over and noticed the Stone Temple was already overcrowded, whereas the library side still seemed a bit more open.
This is a technologically advanced civilization under the rule of Da Xuan. Should they believe in superstition or in science?
However, on second thought, Wu Hen realized that he too had chosen the library because of emergent Death Omens. He himself wasn't exactly upstanding.
"Why choose this side? It feels like the ground is higher over there, and the Stone Temple has a pointed top. In theory, it's a small triangular roof higher than ours," a team member asked, puzzled.
"Cut the chatter and block all possible mud inlets, including those sewers that could backflow. Tear those pages out!" Levi cursed.
"That doesn't seem right; these are sacred books, filled with the precious knowledge of our Human Clan. Using them , we might be blamed by the saints."
"If you don't know by now that paper is made from wood pulp, which becomes denser than swamp water on contact and can provide an excellent seal, then the saints wouldn't even want to acknowledge such a stubborn mule's offspring as their descendants!" Levi unapologetically scolded.
Hearing these words, everyone realized that no matter how precious the knowledge recorded in the library was, even if it affected humanity's ascent to a higher dimension, its sole function now was to revert to wood pulp paper, to build a bastion for their survival.
As the crowd at the Stone Temple grew, some of those seeking higher ground started to come to the library for refuge.
Without realizing it, the swamp water had already flooded both slopes. From here, only some rooftops of the entire town were visible, and even those were slowly sinking, causing those who had initially hidden on the rooftops to be unable to escape.
With every house in the town now sunken into the swamp, the highest points of the Stone Temple and the library were soaked, and not long after, the water rose over a person's height. It was virtually impossible for those still outside to survive.
Yet, the entire town continued to sink slowly, giving everyone the suffocating feeling of being soaked in swamp mud.
"Should we climb onto the eaves?" someone suggested.
If they climbed onto the eaves, they could stand about two meters higher. If the town's sinking stopped right at the library's eaves, their bodies would at least be above the swamp mud.
"Night's falling soon, and with night come the Evil Spirits. If we're outside, we'll be gnawed alive," Wu Hen shook his head and rejected the idea.
Although many things remained uncertain.
Between two ways to die, one being choked alive by the swamp and the other being eaten by Evil Spirits, anyone accustomed to dying would choose the former.
As the sky grew darker, no one dared to bring up climbing onto the roof again.
After nightfall, a black-red liquid began to seep out from the swamp, like sludge.
The town finally stopped sinking, but this sludge was causing everyone's suffocation threshold to rise even higher.
"This looks like Dark Energy earth vein liquid!" Levi saw this emerging black-red fluid and his face flashed with excitement.
It truly was a vein of Dark Matter. Although this black-red hue wasn't liquid gold, it exceeded liquid gold a hundredfold, a thousandfold!
Earth vein liquid, plainly speaking, is when Spiritual Energy becomes so concentrated that it erupts like underground spring water. Wu Hen, with his Fourth Rank taste, could clearly sense these liquid Spiritual Factors spilling out. Spiritual Aura is a very stable form of Dark Matter; they don't move violently like volcanic magma and steam. They even possess a strong adhesion to geological formations, and without learning Qi Gathering, one simply couldn't collect them.
But now they were gushing out like scorching magma, forming a sizable spirit liquid field, indicating that an even more vast Spirit Vein lay deeper below.
"But we're going to drown in this earth vein Dark Liquid sooner or later," Hu Lu said.
This statement made everyone again plummet from Heaven into Hell.
The library outside was already half-soaked in muddy water, with a small amount of black liquid seeping inside, having submerged the library's floor.
In essence, the entire library had sunken beneath the mud. They were still alive only because the previous sealing efforts had been good enough. This feeling of surviving in the sole sealed chamber of a sinking ship was equally tormenting and could easily lead to a mental breakdown.
"The Stone Temple has already been infiltrated by swamp water," Cheng Liang said somberly from a high window.
There were still those in the team who felt the Stone Temple was safer, possibly because the strange deity within would ward off Evil Spirits, even isolate the swamp's mud.
But the Stone Temple had too many windows and lacked the book pulp to seal them. As the land continued to sink, the temple was now filled with mud-water, and those who had taken refuge there were all soaking in the Black-red Water.
The Black-red Water level continued to rise slowly, further compressing the surviving space within the Stone Temple.
Although the Black-red Water still had a bit of buoyancy, preventing them from immediately sinking into the mud...
But soon, Cheng Liang by the window saw a scene that chilled his soul:
All those who had taken refuge in the Stone Temple had basically only their heads left, floating on the surface of the black-red water.
The ceiling of the Stone Temple was a triangular pointed structure, and as the black-red muddy water kept rising, the entire Stone Temple was completely submerged, leaving only the extremely narrow area beneath the triangular eaves, much like a completely enclosed trench.
And this trench was packed with heads!
The wanderers who had hidden in the Stone Temple had no other choice.
Either their bodies sank below, wrapped in the silt, perishing in the marsh,
or, by moving their limbs, they used the buoyancy of the black-red water to breathe as much as possible in the "trench" space under the eaves.
But with so many heads needing to breathe, how much oxygen could there be in this cramped space?
The most cruel part was that the town no longer sank, and the black-red water stopped rising.
The statue in the Stone Temple had served its purpose, as its unique design ensured that the roof of the temple was not made flat but into a long pointed tip...
This pointed tip was the glimmer of hope that the Stone Temple offered to the townsfolk.
But this glimmer of hope, if only fewer than ten people were inside, they might have survived the night on the scant oxygen.
Yet in this lifeline crammed with nearly a hundred heads of various sizes, all with their throats submerged in the cold mire water, each one gasping for air in the confined, narrow space.
"They're not going to make it," Wu Hen said as his gaze passed through the window, looking through the eerie night at the suffocating scene opposite.
Even with ample oxygen in the library, Wu Hen was starting to find it hard to breathe.
He had finally understood how the people in the town had died.
And he understood why only their heads remained.
"If the original inhabitants of the town had chosen the library, could most of them have survived?" At this moment, Cheng Liang also realized this and asked quietly.
What could have saved the townspeople was this dust-bound library and the stacks of books filling the shelves and storage.
But the townspeople had all forgotten that paper is made of wood, which, though incapable of being nailed up like a plank, can effectively seal all the breach points when it comes into contact with water. Even if the entire library sank into the muddy water, the space inside would still be relatively safe, allowing more people to survive.
"Let's wait for dawn," Wu Hen sighed.
"Bai Luobo, how did you figure out that the library could survive?" others asked, puzzled.
The former prison guards who had planned to hide in the Stone Temple felt a chill down their spines.
If Wu Hen hadn't called everyone in time to take shelter in the library, their fate would have been the same as the wanderers and the Lost Ones — all dead.
They didn't understand how Wu Hen had deduced that the town's escape was through the library.
"Did you guys ever buy balloons as kids?" Wu Hen said.
"Yes, every holiday my parents would buy me ones of different colors," Hu Lu responded.
"Then you must have also experienced the situation where a balloon you bought accidentally slipped from your hand and floated up to the roof, right?" Wu Hen continued.
"Right, if the roof is flat it's okay, you can just jump to grab the balloon string. But if there's a pointed tip, the balloon always gets stuck in that sharp crevice, and when I was short as a kid, I could only ask an adult to jump up to get it," Hu Lu nodded.
While describing this segment, the belatedly-aware Hu Lu didn't realize anything, but the others' faces had changed, their gazes involuntarily turning towards the pointed tip of the Stone Temple...
They finally understood why Wu Hen hadn't chosen the Stone Temple!
"No way, upon seeing that the Evil Spirits here were only heads, you thought of that?" Levi looked at Wu Hen as if he were some kind of monster.
The others' gazes also turned strange, staring at Wu Hen whose thoughts seemed somewhat twisted.
"I can't help it, I wanted to be a writer when I was fourteen; my imagination is just a bit rich," Wu Hen shrugged.
Wu Hen had not been wise after the event.
When faced with the choice between the Stone Temple and the library, he instinctively chose the library. The situation was too tense at the time for him to analyze the reasons thoroughly.
And the appearance of the Death Omen had actually saved Levi and the others' lives. Without the corroborating scenario of the Death Omen, Wu Hen wouldn't have dared to be so adamant about having Levi and the others follow him into the library.
Human brains actually make some critical decisions on their behalf, even if they don't consciously think about it at the time.
Of course, for the brain to reach this degree, it often requires regular learning and reading. No matter how much is truly remembered, the neurons in the brain will suddenly light up when they encounter certain special conditions; otherwise, in a crisis, they'd be even more muddled than you.