Chapter 14: Survival

Darkwater's body had turned completely black and looked like hardened tar. He hadn't shrunk back to miniature human size but remained as tall as John, a modern human. Most astonishingly, his head had begun to grow back.

A bullet had just blown his head apart, so there should have been nothing above his neck. Now, though, black slime was writhing and growing there. The outline of a chin had already formed, and roughly the lower third of his head, from the nose down, had all but finished reassembling itself.

Gunsmith raised the bone gun, ready to put a few more rounds into him, then thought better of it and lowered the weapon.

Earlier, Darkwater had pulled objects out of his gullet, suggesting that his body contained no vital organs whose destruction would kill him, and indirectly confirming that he could heal himself. That was why Gunsmith had chosen to attack his head. But even with his head blasted to pulp and smeared across the floor, he could still regenerate. Clearly, his weak point wasn't there either.

Gunsmith inspected Darkwater's “corpse” five or six times, from top to bottom, left to right, front to back. Just as he began to feel like a bit of a pervert, it occurred to him to try a different approach.

Suppose Darkwater was like the liquid-metal robot in a certain movie. By the law of conservation of mass, the black slime splattered everywhere ought to flow back, gather together, and become Darkwater's head again. If that were how it worked, the guy should only need a minute to recover. Clearly, then, Darkwater healed by some other means.

“From what he said earlier, he should be biological rather than mechanical... He doesn't get hungry or tired, might not need to breathe, and probably doesn't have a heartbeat either,” Gunsmith muttered to himself, trying to work out how Darkwater healed.

Human wounds generally healed through cell proliferation and differentiation, which repaired and reshaped the tissue. With the Empire's most advanced medical treatments, even extensive trauma across the entire body could be healed in as little as seventy hours or so, using advanced equipment supplemented by stem-cell therapy. But the treatment was extremely expensive and involved a certain amount of pain. Even among the nobility, few would readily try it.

Yet Darkwater's ability to heal himself far surpassed any treatment Gunsmith knew. He needed no instruments or chemicals. With nothing but his own secretions, he could regrow even a head that had been blown off. Did the guy have no brain? Impossible. Was his brain in his ass? Surely not?

Gunsmith fired again, this time at the heart. Darkwater's chest burst open, revealing two machetes wrapped in black slime inside his body. The floor beneath him bore only a shallow bullet mark, identical to the one on the distant wall where the bullet had passed through his head. This meant Darkwater's body had triggered the change in the bone gun's projectile power. There had been no explosion because his body wasn't hard enough, though it was very tough.

The shot did nothing to interrupt the regeneration of Darkwater's head, and his chest began to heal as well, at about the same speed. It was slow, but as surely as the sun sank behind the slopes and the moon climbed over the hills, it went on without a pause.

The bone gun held at most ten rounds. Gunsmith reckoned that putting every remaining bullet into Darkwater would be futile. Perhaps Darkwater's form of life really was far beyond humanity, just as the science in these ruins lay beyond Gunsmith's understanding.

He still didn't understand why staying here made physiological needs disappear. The spatial relocation technology he'd encountered earlier baffled him too. He had built a spatial relocation device himself, but his required preparation time and could only transport everything within a given container indiscriminately. Even that had only been possible because he'd used the mysterious technology supplied by Tian Yi as its foundation. Relocation in these ruins, however, could begin the instant it was activated, selectively transporting objects inside a container without affecting the container itself.

Thinking of the spatial inversion he'd encountered on the river, the unknown magnetic field that disabled mechanical equipment, and the Eternal Core in his pocket, Gunsmith felt more and more strongly that this civilization's science was too dangerous. Dangerous enough to threaten the entire planet. No one should ever discover this place. That bastard Darkwater ought to stay buried underground.

Gunsmith turned away, leaving Darkwater alone for the moment. At this rate, he might not get back up for another half a day. Gunsmith needed to keep exploring the ruins and see whether there was some way to shut the place down again.

But he'd barely taken a few steps when the light around him suddenly dimmed, most noticeably the sun and moon symbols in the mural on the dome. Gunsmith froze, ran his tongue over his lips, glanced around, and tried taking another two steps forward. This time the room went almost pitch-black, with only a few scattered points of blue-green light lingering around him. It felt like a singer giving a concert in a thirty-thousand-seat venue, only to switch off the lights and discover that the audience members with glow sticks numbered fewer than a military company, and they were sitting very far apart.

Still facing forward and holding himself in the same position, Gunsmith took a few steps backward, as though trying to pretend he hadn't done anything. Unexpectedly, this actually brought a little light back to the vast chamber.

A thought flashed through his mind. He turned and dashed straight toward the statue, and sure enough, the blue-green light around him grew steadily brighter. When he reached the statue, took the Eternal Core out of his pocket, and held it toward the statue, everything returned to normal.

A smile crept onto Gunsmith's lips. He understood now. The Eternal Core powered the entire complex of ruins. Darkwater must have been hiding in some form in this underground world until one day, for some reason, the Eternal Core was damaged and ended up in its present state. Then some device had woken Darkwater, or perhaps he'd been awake all along. Who knew? In a place without physiological needs, God knew whether he cared about the passage of time. God knew why he hadn't had a mental breakdown. God knew whether he even had a mind...

Anyway, Darkwater must have used the Eternal Core's remaining energy to raise the ruins—or rather, to raise parts of them and set them running—affecting the outside world in an attempt to communicate with the world thousands of years later and see whether it could solve his problem. What Darkwater could never have imagined was that his old homeland, where a technological civilization had once flourished, was now a wilderness. The nearest group of civilized people might well be a bunch of ketamine dealers, and he'd have to search at least another few dozen kilometers even to run into those drug lords.

Now Gunsmith understood. Taking the Eternal Core out of the statue's mouth was like taking the batteries out of a remote control. The folded space, the magnetic interference, the spires rising out of the ground—all of it would stop working. No wonder Darkwater had lured him here before making his move. Taking the core outside would have been a tremendous risk. Darkwater had no idea whether the creatures on the surface were friendly or hostile, weak or strong. Given the way he operated, he wouldn't have made that choice.

Once he'd worked it out, Gunsmith hesitated no longer. He raised the bone gun and fired at the dome high above him. The metal lining this vast chamber was the same kind as the spire he'd dug down to earlier, so the bullet's explosion against it was still extremely powerful.

The metal shell was thick, but there was only one layer. Beyond the breach lay the earth beneath the swamp. Mud and soil poured down like a waterfall, piling up in the vast chamber. Fortunately, the space was enormous, and filling it would take quite some time.

The hole in the dome was about half a meter across and fairly regular in shape, just like the one he'd shot in the spire earlier. The bone gun's bullets wouldn't produce widely differing results against the same material. The incoming mud didn't enlarge the hole either, which Gunsmith had also expected. This metal wasn't stone or wood. That little pressure wouldn't deform it.

Darkwater's body and the statue were soon buried. Gunsmith retreated to the wall, using the Eternal Core for light. Its glow was weak, but fortunately the luminous symbols on the surrounding walls and high overhead hadn't all gone out, so the place wasn't completely dark yet. Gunsmith had very good eyesight. This much light was enough. Once the incoming earth had formed a small hill and stopped gaining height, instead spilling faster down its sides, Gunsmith charged up the slope toward its peak. He couldn't worry about getting dirty. Enduring the nauseating smell filling his mouth and nose, he struggled to stand as high as he could and fired another shot into the hole overhead at an almost vertical angle.

Gunsmith had experimented before with effective ways to defend against the bone gun. One test had involved blocking its bullets with material denser than water but below the trigger threshold. Soil, for instance, lacked both the strength and the toughness to trigger a qualitative change in the bone gun's projectiles. So could a sufficiently thick layer of soil exhaust a bullet's kinetic energy and leave it lodged there?

Unfortunately, that experiment had ended in failure. The bullet kept penetrating material like soil, and when its speed fell to a relatively low level, it still underwent a qualitative change. Its power was calculated as a higher power of the density of the soil it had passed through. Based on the test data, this shot would still blast through its target like a rocket, only after traveling some distance rather than immediately.

Gunsmith reckoned the ruins couldn't be too deep. Otherwise, the ground rising earlier might have opened something like a fissure in the earth's crust. He also suspected that these underground ruins consisted of many separate buildings. Otherwise, why bother with relocation technology? Why not just put a door between two neighboring sections?

He fired another four shots vertically through the hole, spacing them several seconds apart. Though the falling soil kept battering his body and pouring into his clothes, his hand didn't move a fraction. Steady as a rock, he sent all four bullets upward along exactly the same trajectory.

Gunsmith wasn't sure this would let him escape alive, but he had to try. Ideally, after all this, there would be a conical pit about the size of a swimming pool on the rainforest floor, roughly thirty meters deep, with a sealed bottom. Beneath that would be a layer of soil somewhere between a dozen-odd meters and several dozen meters thick, and below that would be this hole.

Of course, these were all assumptions. If the ruins really were buried very deep, his bullets would merely have made a hollow pocket like a hole in cheese, which the surrounding earth would quickly fill. He himself was in an earth-filled hole a few dozen meters beneath that pocket. Even if he climbed up, he'd suffocate.

He had little time left. The vast chamber was about to fill up. Just as he prepared to take a deep breath of the dust-laden air and hold it for a long time, the mud pouring down overhead suddenly stopped.

As Gunsmith stood stunned, a shaft of light shone down. It was unmistakably sunlight, ultraviolet rays he hadn't seen in far too long.

Wild with joy, he leaped from the top of the mound, caught the edge of the circular opening, and hauled himself through. The terrain outside was shaped much as he'd predicted, but the depth was more encouraging than he'd imagined. That dozen-odd meters of soil wasn't there, because the vast chamber had swallowed it all. Gunsmith emerged at the bottom of a cavity shaped like an ice-cream cone, a little over twenty meters below the surface.

He'd barely taken a breath of outside air when the ground beneath his feet began shaking like an earthquake. Seeing that this sudden upheaval was about to bury his route to freedom overhead, Gunsmith scrambled straight up like a startled monkey. Within seconds, he'd escaped the deep pit and returned to the surface.

Then the ground for several hundred meters around him subsided, and the pit he'd just climbed out of filled in and vanished. Even later, Gunsmith felt a little shaken when he thought back on it, though he soon understood what had happened. With the Eternal Core taken outside, the vast chamber had lost power completely and sunk.

“Hahahahaha!!” Once everything had settled, Gunsmith lay spread-eagled on the ground, laughing at the sky and breathing his fill of the rainforest's damp air. That foul smell now seemed wonderfully refreshing.

Two seconds later, his expression changed. His stomach gave a few audible growls, and utter exhaustion swept over him like a tsunami. But instead of passing out, he sprang to his feet with a kip-up and broke into a wild sprint, charging into the trees and undoing his trousers...