Outside the boundary of the Pupilless Land, the red warning sign is weathered, rusty, and very old. It is obvious that it has been here for a long time.

There was actually a small market in the open space outside the warning sign. Merchants were staying here, trading goods and purchasing precious items that the sentinels had brought out of the contaminated area.

There are even quite a few ordinary people coming in and out here.

The area outside the contaminated area is originally a very dangerous area. But in the Land of No Pupils, a notorious place of danger, people seem to have forgotten that there is a dangerous contaminated area just one step away.

"Pollution areas are divided into several categories," Ni Ji and Lin Yuan explained. "Some pollution areas are very unstable and often expand at irregular intervals. When they expand, they will devour nearby populations and land.

But there are also some polluted areas that are dangerous inside but have stable borders and rarely spread. So some people will gather at the borders to do business. "

Lin Yuan thought about it and realized that among all the polluted areas she had come into contact with, the spread of the golden tree polluted area seemed to be the most rampant.

She experienced the spread of goldenrod during her car ride. If the driver had not reacted quickly, the ordinary people in the car would have fallen into the goldenrod pollution area.

Is there any reason for this difference?

A vague idea flashed through Lin Yuan's mind. But she had been to too few contaminated areas and could not catch the core hidden in the dark.

As if knowing what she was thinking, Ni Ji said, "I have a feeling. The easier it is to get the key to the contaminated area, the less it will spread."

These words instantly made Lin Yuan's thoughts clear.

Walking in those polluted areas, she always had a strange feeling. She always felt that those strange worlds had a twisted desire for humans.

For the sentinels, or guides like her, that intention is even more obvious. Whether it is in Area 5 or Area 77, the intention of the Contaminated Zone to get them and keep them is very obvious.

In contaminated areas where keys are easily obtained, a large number of sentinels and ordinary people will be tempted to explore. As a result, a large number of humans are infected and distorted and remain in the contaminated areas. Such contaminated areas are relatively stable.

The pillar of the Golden Tree contaminated area is Xunhua, and he never gives out keys easily, so... Lin Yuan reacted, because few humans enter, so... the contaminated area is like a hungry beast, spreading wildly, trying to devour humans in every way possible?

Lin Yuan exclaimed, "Ah!" and looked up at Ni Ji. "Does the polluted area need humans to live in it? Do they want to keep getting humans?"

The sentry beside her looked serious and nodded slightly, agreeing with her guess.

"Many veterans feel the same way. The contaminated areas crave humans, and they keep devouring humans to grow." Ni Ji's voice was calm, but the details were the heaviest thing. "But we have no choice. We have to enter the contaminated areas again and again. Resources are too scarce, and the land is decreasing. If we want to survive, we can only risk entering the contaminated areas to search."

Lin Yuan thought for a moment and said, "But I've never heard anyone mention such a theory in Kyoto."

Ni Ji's eyes sank.

In that imperial capital where people revel every night, no one would mention these things.

No one cares about the cause of the contaminated area, no one cares about the purpose of its spread. No one even knows how many lives are devoured and how many sentinels are sacrificed every year.

The royal family and nobles lived in the eternally safe Garden of Eden, leading a life of luxury and debauchery.

They can curl up forever around the White Tower, partying every night, numb themselves with alcohol and spices, and pretend that the world is still beautiful with false prosperity.

They could not see that outside the White Tower, the ground was stained with the blood of soldiers, and children died of hunger in the streets.

…

Lin Yuan stepped into the pupilless land, and the scene before him suddenly changed.

The land was barren and not a blade of grass grew.

Looking into the distance, the boundless land is covered with cold gravel and rocks, and the monotonous scene stretches all the way to the distant horizon.

There, there was a huge eye hanging in the sky. The pupil of the eye was gray and dull, and red tears flowed from the eye socket, falling from the sky to the earth like a waterfall.

Lin Yuan looked at the eye in the sky.

The blind gray pupils and huge eyes with tears of blood were exactly the same as the scene shown on the wooden box of the shipwreck.

This is it, the place without pupils, the place she is looking for.

In Lin Yuan's bedroom window, there is a string of old wind chimes from her childhood. Every gem hanging on the wind chimes is fake, except for one azure square stone, which is a real Asscher sapphire.

Lin Yuan was too young when her parents died, and suffered such mental trauma that she no longer remembers most of what happened at that time.

The only memory she has is of her mother holding her and running through the fire.

Surrounded by the terrible raging fire, she curled up in her mother's arms and felt very calm and peaceful.

At some point, her mother put a sapphire necklace around her neck.

Lin Yuan still remembers the feeling of the cold gem sticking to her skin and falling from her neck to her chest.

With her eyes closed, she heard her mother's voice.

"Xiao Yuan, hide it well and don't let anyone find it. When you grow up, if you want to know the truth about this world, you can go to Contaminated Area No. 5 and find the wooden box on the sunken ship Mary."

When Lin Yuan grew up, he once suspected that this was an illusion caused by his confused memory.

Obviously, her father had blocked her five senses at that time, so she should not be able to hear or touch.

She passed the Mary shipwreck and the golden tree pollution area all the way until she came here and saw the eye that was exactly the same as the one on the wooden box. She realized that it was not an illusion, but a clue left by her parents before they died. A key to open the secret door.

Now, having become as strong as her parents were, she knows that those sounds and feelings are not what she hears with her ears or touches with her body.

Rather, it is the will of her parents that remains directly in her mental picture.

"If you don't have the ability or the idea, then don't touch it and keep this secret in your heart forever."

"Yuanyuan, I'm sorry that mom and dad can't grow up with you."

When Lin Yuan was little, she couldn't remember her mother's face or her father's appearance. The only thing she could remember were these three sentences left by her parents.

She didn't tell anyone about it.

Since she was a child, she would listen to these words over and over again in the dead of night. From those few words, she could taste a little bit of her parents' personalities and their love for her.

Use that little bit of imagination and pretend that you are an ordinary child who is cared for by your parents.

Because of this, she has been secretly collecting all the relevant information about the Mary shipwreck since she was a child. Finally, she found the clues her parents left for her on the bottom of the sea in the No. 5 contaminated area.

The two men got closer to the huge eye.

The pale pupils and the blood-red tears were like a waterfall, which was even more shocking when viewed from a close distance. The blood-red waterfall fell from the sky and landed in a deep ditch on the ground.

It was a long and narrow crack, splitting open in the desolate land, with no bottom to be seen.

Looking down from the edge, the cracks are intertwined with countless steel bars and pipes, stairs climbing up and down, and densely packed houses.

Layer upon layer of human buildings extend endlessly underground, densely packed together until they are swallowed up by the bottomless darkness.

This is a huge underground city, buried deep in the dark underground world.

Perhaps there was once infinite prosperity here. But now, deep darkness spreads under the abyss, and not a single ray of light can be seen in the silent underground city. Even the sound of the howling wind seems to be black, like a man-eating hell that can devour everything.

In this dark dungeon, there are countless terrifying monsters lurking, as well as countless tempting treasures.

Lin Yuan and Ni Ji walked down from the edge of the crack.

There are no complete roads here, only long pipes covered with green moss.

Sometimes people have to walk on these slippery pipes to the next place. The metal pipes suspended above the abyss make a creaking sound like grinding teeth as their footsteps move.

There are more than one person coming down here.

There were many sentinels and even some civilians among the explorers. They carried baskets on their backs or cloth bags and walked carefully on those dangerous suspended pipes to search for supplies in the abandoned underground cities.

"Be more careful, even if you can find a small piece of the dark stone." A tired old father said to the child following behind him.

The thin young man following behind him walked carefully with his head down on the pipe, ready to lend a hand to his elderly father at any time.

"The Land of No Pupils is rich in Hellstones, which are very valuable and are essential for making spices." Ni Ji told Lin Yuan, "So, even though this place is very dangerous, many people keep coming here."

He reached out and supported Lin Yuan, and took her to jump from the slippery pipe to the next level.

Lin Yuan's boots landed on the iron roof with a loud thud.

"Even ordinary people are coming in. It's too dangerous."

"But even so, most people here won't be able to find the Underworld Stone in the end. The stone is in a very deep place." Ni Ji said, "Ordinary people, even most of the sentinels, will hardly be able to walk there alive."

A figure who had lost his footing suddenly fell from a high place in the distance.

The frail young body fell onto the pipe below and bounced up like a broken branch, all the way down into the bottomless abyss.

Lin Yuan was stunned. She stood there for a long time, but she never heard the sound of the life falling to the ground.

The darkness was so deep that it swallowed up a young life silently without even a sound of echo.

There was only a desperate cry coming from above, which lasted for a long time in the dim ruins.

"What are those spices for?" Lin Yuan stared at the bottomless abyss and asked the sentry beside him, "Are they worth exchanging your life for?"

Ni Ji remained silent and did not answer.

The spices were useless except for making the nobles in the White Tower fall into an intoxicated fantasy and become more corrupt. It was certainly not worth so many people risking their lives to get them.

This is unreasonable, unfair and abnormal.

But this is not a normal world. They live in a distorted era. Personal anger can hardly change all this unreasonableness.

The sentry looked up at the sky. The crack above his head was very narrow, leaving only a thin strip of sky. A little sunlight refracted sparingly from the edge of the crack.

They had already descended several floors. The light here had become very dim and the vision was no longer clear.

The howling wind blew up from the ground, like countless ghosts weeping in the dark.

Going further down, the last bit of light above your head disappeared.

The world fell into complete darkness, and eyes seemed to have lost their function in such a world.

Ni Ji turned on a small flashlight on his left shoulder, the light was very weak. They might have to stay in such a dark world for a long time, so they had to save electricity and could not afford powerful lighting equipment.

A dim light was flickering, only able to illuminate a small space at my feet.

Ni Ji extended his hand to the guide beside him.

The hand reached out, much smaller than his and very soft, and it responded with strength, holding his.

The underground world is particularly dark, and all the light here seems to be swallowed up by the darkness.

The pale circle of light from the flashlight illuminated the dim and messy ground. The winding corridors were full of shadows, as if monsters could jump out at any time.

With this kind of light, Lin Yuan couldn't see much with her eyesight. However, the sentinel's eyesight was much better than hers, and he only needed weak light to see in the dark.

Lin Yuan held Ni Ji's hand and groped his way step by step in the dark corridor.

Suddenly she stopped and pulled Ni Ji. Ni Ji followed her gaze and looked into the darkness.

The dim light from the flashlight illuminated a pale face on the roof.

It was a strange creature, which had been lurking on the dark roof at some point, quietly poking out its miserable white head.

The head looked like a human's, but it had no eyes. Instead, the eyes were covered by a thin layer of skin. A pair of triangular ears stood out on both sides of the head. The skin was frighteningly pale from not seeing the sun for many years.

It has eight arms with human-shaped fingers, but it can crawl on the roof silently.

Even a sentinel like Ni Ji couldn't hear its movements.

But it has emotions and is a living creature. Its whereabouts were captured by Lin Yuan's tentacles and exposed in advance.

The dim light of the flashlight seemed to frighten it. On its eyeless face, a huge mouth full of sharp teeth opened and it let out a strange scream.

The mutant suddenly rushed out from the darkness, so fast that it only left a gray afterimage in the light of the flashlight.

Ni Ji swung his sword and killed it halfway, cutting it in half at the waist.

The humanoid creature was cut in half at the waist, its smelly internal organs spilled all over the floor, but it was not dead. Half of its body still bounced up from the ground, its arms and limbs wrapped around Ni Ji's legs, its mouth opened to bite.

A hint of yellow light appeared in Lin Yuan's eyes as he stared at the twisting body in the darkness.

That creature? A deformed species with terrifying speed? froze for a moment in her sight.

Ni Ji's gun immediately lit up in the darkness, and he fired several shots at the two bouncing halves of the body.

The development of the battle could not be seen clearly in the darkness. All one could see was the continuous flickering of the muzzle fire, the twisting body of the monster, and the screaming bloody mouth, which appeared one frame after another, accompanied by the flickering firelight.

The shaking picture and the gunshots ended, the monster's sharp breathing quieted down, and everything returned to silence.

A hand wearing a black glove stretched out from the darkness and held Lin Yuan's hand again.

There is no light in the underground world, and all the deformed species that appear here have no eyes.

They live in perpetual night and have adapted to the darkness, possessing acute hearing and the ability to "walk silently in the dark."

It has strong vitality, moves as fast as lightning, and hates all flesh and blood that enter here. It is an extremely terrifying monster.

Ni Ji and Lin Yuan went all the way down, walked down the broken stairs, climbed through the shaky metal pipes, and traveled through the underground city with complex terrain.

Along the way, strange creatures with twisted shapes would jump out from the darkness at any time. They killed countless "abnormal species" that bared their teeth and attacked them secretly.

If it weren't for the high-intensity special training before the war, they would have had a hard time surviving in this pitch-dark world.

But now, at least both of them are still holding each other's hands firmly.

The magic sword in Ni Ji's hand had not even cut his skin and was stained with his own blood.

In the dark world, a glimmer of light shows the way, and two hands are clasped together, moving forward slowly.

In this pupilless place, they serve as each other's ears and eyes, all the way to a deeper underground world.