Upon entering, there was a huge square exhibition hall; their activity was now restricted to this space.
Su Mo randomly found a spot to sit down, and Lu Chen took out some food to distribute, serving as today’s lunch.
"How far is it from Luohe?"
"After this place, a day’s walk will get us there."
Just as Lu Chen was about to sit next to her, suddenly, something shattered near the entrance, startling everyone with its loud noise.
Looking towards the door, Su Mo saw the object that had fallen: it was a chunk of ice that had shattered on the ground.
"Is it hailing?" Jianxiong diverted his gaze curiously and stepped towards the door, but as soon as he stepped out, a fist-sized hailstone instantly struck his shoulder, causing the unshielded Jianxiong to recoil in pain.
Standing up from the ground, Su Mo frowned and said, "How can it hail in this kind of weather?"
Lu Chen closed the door firmly and said coldly, "It’s too dangerous outside, don’t go out."
They all huddled by the door, watching as the fist-sized hailstones fell like a torrential downpour.
Meanwhile, in P City’s refugee camp, residents were stunned by the terrifying hailstorm. Two people walking side by side one moment were separated the next as one of them was struck in the head by a hailstone that left a gaping hole, killing him instantly.
Lu Youwei and Fang Ya, starving in a tent, were frightened by the conditions outside and attempted to seek shelter in buildings reinforced with steel and concrete.
But nobody was willing to help them at such a time; as two ordinary people of no significance, some even cruelly suggested, "There is only one spot left in the basement; you two decide who takes it."
Fang Ya looked at Lu Youwei with hopeful eyes, only to be pushed out of the house by him. In her disbelief, the narrow basement door was closed, and a hailstone with sharp edges pierced her leg and pinned her to the ground as it fell.
Fang Ya’s painful screams finally drew a few soldiers with some conscience, who dragged her to safety.
The refugee camp was now in utter chaos...
Su Mo had the feeling this event couldn’t be unrelated to the Ice Age disaster. They had hunkered down for several hours, and the hailstones had not decreased or dissipated in size; rather, they were getting bigger. The only consolation was that the fog was lifting and the visibility in the forest in front of the Insect Museum was improving.
There was a small car parked there, seemingly one of the museum staff’s, as inside there was a body lying against the window, still clutching some sort of document in hand, not released even in death.
Just as Su Mo was about to squint and take a closer look, the next second, a chunk of hail as large as a sedan directly smashed the car to bits.
She instinctively stepped back, her alertness peaking, "Lu Chen... I think we should stay in the basement."
No sooner had she finished speaking than another huge hailstone crashed onto the nearby road, fracturing the asphalt like a spider web.
"Retreat! To the basement! Everyone to the basement!"
Lu Chen rallied everyone to race to the basement. Above their heads on the museum roof, giant hailstones were pounding down, breaking through into the Insect Museum.
The basement was located deep inside the Insect Museum, secured behind an iron door and a coded lock, but through the crack under the door, traces of dried blood were seen on the ground.
With the crisis at hand, they had no time to ponder, as the sound of hailstones hitting the roof nearly exploded in their ears.
Jianxiong used his superpower to blast open the iron door.
The pitch-black stairs descended sharply. Su Mo glanced inside and immediately furrowed her brows, "It’s full of bodies, watch your step."
She didn’t know what had happened here, but the entire staircase of the basement was covered with corpses. Googlᴇ search N0veI.Fiɾe.net
Lu Chen pulled out a flashlight, handing one to each person. Wherever the light shone, it filled everyone with a sense of foreboding.
These people hadn’t mutated; they were killed as humans.
Su Mo stepped into the dark staircase and crouched in front of a corpse to examine it, only to find a large hole in the back of the head and the brain completely gone.
Lu Chen also observed several others and came to the same conclusion.
They couldn’t help but proceed downstairs with caution.
On the first floor of the Insect Museum, a massive amount of hail had broken through the roof, nearly leveling the entire building.
As the group made their way underground, Su Mo sensed that something was off. "Isn’t this Insect Museum connected to the Insect Research Institute? The exhibits are above, and the research takes place below?"
Her comment received agreement from Lu Chen.
In the pitch-black depths, they found a huge laboratory. Standing in the corridor, they could see down into it through a glass partition, with their flashlights shining through the glass.
Another layer below was a vast space similar to a Botanical Garden, overrun with decaying plants and unknown creatures that darted quickly in the light.
Standing in front of a glass window, Su Mo stared downwards, "An insect breeding ground?"
"It should be. Let’s just stay here, we better not go down any further," said a superpower user who had come along, unable to hide his concern.
Lu Chen had everyone take a few steps back from the window and find places to sit down once more.
"We’ll set out again once this hailstorm passes."
Su Mo’s furrowed eyebrows hadn’t yet relaxed when she expressed her concern. "Right now, I’m just worried about whether Zhao Changsheng and the others have reached safety. I don’t know if this hail is only falling in our area."
Her words were thought-provoking.
If the hailstorm was a global phenomenon, then both the military base and the refugee camps would suffer catastrophic damage.
Lu Jin, who was thousands of miles away and in a completely different direction from them, had found a woman on the brink of starvation in an underground bomb shelter designed for refuge.
He crouched beside her for a long time. Her bewildered eyes reminded him so much of Su Mo.
He helped her up and personally gave her water to drink.
No one knew how long the hailstorm would last...
Su Mo leaned on Lu Chen’s shoulder to rest for a while and, upon waking up, realized that there were still sounds of ice chunks falling from above.
She got up from the ground and discerned another sound amidst the noise—like some pipes had burst and were leaking, creating a drip-drip sound in the dark corridor.
She followed the sound to a black passageway, and Lu Chen quickly got up and followed her. "Is there a problem?"
"Yeah, it sounds like a pipe is leaking."
Even though it was very dark, she instantly noticed the leaking glass with a large hole in it.
Enclosed inside the water was a huge, coiled centipede, its black, shiny shell glaring.
It was in a cylindrical experiment tank.
The murky nutrient solution had already leaked out quite a bit, and the coiled creature inside began to move.