Within a few millionths of a second, the nuclear warhead completed its fission and fusion reactions.
In the sky, an incandescent fireball appeared, its diameter expanding rapidly until it was more dazzling than the sun.
At high altitude, Ren Yi flew at full speed while keeping a sliver of his perception focused behind him.
The duration of the Pain Bead was limited; he had to precisely monitor the timing of the explosion and the incoming shockwave.
As the endless, incandescent light completely illuminated the earth behind him, he finally managed to clear the top of the embankment.
At that exact moment, he funneled all his energy into the Pain Bead within his body.
His pale white shadow vanished into thin air.
At this instant, Ren Yi's own time was forcibly frozen as he tumbled into a time slice that could not be interfered with.
In the outside world, reality roared past.
The first second.
At the core of the fireball detonated two thousand meters in the air, the temperature instantly soared to forty million degrees Celsius.
There was no sound; light traveled far faster than the speed of sound.
The intense light released by the thermonuclear fission instantly illuminated the surrounding kilometers, turning it into a white-blind vacuum.
The people on the ground didn't even have time to scream. The water in their bodies boiled and vaporized within microseconds, instantly turning them into black ashen shadows that flashed and vanished in the blinding light.
The third second.
The shockwave from the explosion two thousand meters up slammed into the ground, perfectly overlapping with the waves reflecting back from the surface to form a world-ending impact.
Only at this moment did the deafening roar—powerful enough to shred eardrums and shatter internal organs—arrive alongside the howling gale.
The shockwave carried a scorching tide of vaporized metal, sweeping frantically through the sunken riverbed channel.
The tenth second.
The giant fireball in the sky had ascended into a massive mushroom cloud, while the raging nuclear storm and ultra-high-pressure shockwaves radiated outward.
The hellish temperatures at the very core began to subside.
The fifteenth second.
Ren Yi returned, the time slice effect lifting as he re-entered the current world.
The two-megaton strategic nuclear annihilation had completed its baptism of civilization, Anomalies, and the strange.
Even though fifteen seconds had passed and he was behind cover, Ren Yi could still feel the shockwave carrying a sea of fire at over a thousand degrees as it roared over his head.
He looked up slightly; the sky was pitch black.
The moonlight and the brilliantly dazzling starry sky were completely obscured by the massive mushroom cloud.
A long time passed before the continuous tremors and the storm gradually died down.
Only a piercing static remained in the air, along with dust falling from the heavens like snow.
The sea of high-temperature fire, woven from two megatons of yield that had filled the riverbed and its banks, began to recede.
Left behind in this ancient riverbed was a radioactive, giant crater several kilometers wide and seemingly bottomless.
The surface of the pit had been completely melted by the tens of millions of degrees of heat. As the temperature plummeted, the earth crystallized into a layer of vitreous matter shimmering with a crimson light.
"Phew..."
A wisp of thin, grayish-white mist drifted unsteadily out from a nearly melted granite crevice on the back of the embankment. It struggled to condense into Ren Yi's unstable rule-based silhouette in the void.
"Well, I'm going to have to piece myself back together again."
Ren Yi looked at the massive crater in his vision and fell into a brief daze.
The crimson riverbed, once bustling and crowded with tens of thousands of elite Tide-Followers and the massive wrecks of land ships, had completely vanished.
In this land of death, there was no sign of life remaining except for the nuclear haze of the mushroom cloud still churning and spreading in the night sky.
The once-vast battlefield had been wiped away by the sheer force of technology within a mere fifteen seconds.
In mid-air, Ren Yi's form wavered with a hint of self-deprecation.
Great. He had to re-evaluate his survival probability in this world once again.
After all that, it turned out this native world didn't need outside interference at all.
The Humans here had already mastered the purest, most extreme art of self-destruction.
A two-megaton strategic nuclear strike, dropped just like that without even blinking.
That madman, the Lord of the Sky Lake, never intended to recover any land ships from the start.
What he wanted was to wait until all the people of the Wilderness were gathered in this riverbed area, provide a surface-level justification, and then wipe them all out in one go.
Ren Yi could even imagine the headlines in the City of the Sky Lake's newspapers tomorrow.
【A Solemn Mourning! Anomaly S-099 Spirals Out of Control; Lord 'Forced' to Use Final Strategic Means. Deepest Condolences to the Innocent Citizens Who Perished in This Disaster...】
The words of a politician are nothing but deceptive lies.
So, what was next?
Would a nuclear war break out in this world?
Ren Yi thought for a moment and quickly dismissed the idea.
The Tide-Follower tribes were far too loose. The most advanced weapons they had were modified diesel machine guns; they had zero capacity for a nuclear counter-strike.
As for the more mysterious People of the Abyss, or some even older forces hidden in the shadows... who knew?
So, what should he do next?
He definitely had to go to the City of the Sky Lake.
Whether it was to reclaim the Beacon or to investigate the rumored S-003 God's Corpse sealed at the Sky Eye Headquarters, it was a destination he couldn't bypass.
The problem was, it was too far.
On the edge of a strategic nuclear blast zone, the atmospheric convection and the ionosphere had long since been blown into a mess.
Trying to fly long distances in such a harsh environment was no different from seeking death.
A dead silence hung between heaven and earth.
It was so quiet it made his ears ring.
However, just as Ren Yi was preparing to find a relatively safe spot to repair his body, his perception tentacles twitched abruptly.
In the air, an incredibly muffled yet massive vibration was spreading rapidly from the edge of the horizon.
"...Is there no end to this?"
Ren Yi's perception jolted as he snapped his gaze toward the distant horizon.
But he quickly realized that it wasn't an aftershock of the nuke.
The vibration came from deeper within the earth, accompanied by a continuous, low rumble, as if ten thousand warhorses were charging across the dark plain at once.
The sound grew louder and louder, approaching from the distance until it turned into a roar like rolling thunder.
On the extremely distant horizon, where the night met the Wilderness, a red line abruptly appeared.
It was a massive wave composed of crimson liquid.
Dozens of meters high, it moved with the unstoppable momentum of a mountain collapsing, sweeping toward the ruins that had just been plowed by the nuclear missile.
It was like a cataclysmic flood from ancient myths designed to destroy civilizations.
It reached them in an instant.
The churning red waves paused briefly as they slammed into the giant crater, forming a massive whirlpool.
But immediately after, the liquid rapidly filled the void and surged past.
The massive scar created by Humans was covered and smoothed over in an instant—at least on the surface.
This was the Red Tide.
Its arrival might not have been scheduled for today.
But perhaps the violent impact of the nuclear explosion had forcibly torn the crustal structure beneath this fragile plain.
The crimson blood buried deep underground had been completely released.
The massive red waves shimmered with an eerie, scale-like light under the moon, grand and majestic as they swept all the debris and rubble along the way into their depths.
Ren Yi watched the overwhelming crimson tide, and a stray thought suddenly crossed his mind.
The Tide-Follower tribes had spent generations chasing the Red Tide across this Wilderness.
And now, the Red Tide had truly arrived.
Vast and overwhelming, unlike anything seen before.
Unfortunately, the pack of wolves who had been fighting so greedily to chase it... not a single one of them was left.
Rate on N.U.
