Another World
Another World
Hao Ren looked up; he could no longer see the entrance at the top. It was all dark. The cave was so cavernous that there was a dust cloud above the middle section. "This cave is deep. Could Baptiste have found a way down here and kept himself alive?"
Vivian nodded. "Wizards are very resourceful. Maybe he knows some flying spells, and the monsters didn't manage to tear him up."
As the car continued descending, Hao Ren noticed that the light was not coming directly from the bottom, but from the dark walls on all sides. After they dropped to a certain height, he could see huge cracks on the walls. And the cracks seemed to lead straight to the outside world.
They descended hundreds of meters more and finally landed.
"It's safe," Turcan said after he observed their surroundings for a while. "Drive in any direction. The cracks should lead us outside."
The bottom of the cave was like a shade under the shadow, but it was still dark overall despite lights shining through the triangular cracks in the distance. Hao Ren thought that the base of the cave was an open space, but now it seemed he was wrong. The cave was a passage to the bottom, and they still needed to travel through the tunnels at the bottom to reach the actual second level of Inferno. He cranked up the engine again and drove towards the most prominent light source. Everyone held their breath as the weird place made them nervous.
The ground was rugged with lots of weird stones scattered around. Occasionally, they could see some other objects.
There were pieces of something lying ahead, all dark red in color. There were also signs of impact on the ground. Hao Ren knew they were the monsters that had broken into a million pieces upon impact.
Only God knew how many more such creatures had fallen for the past 10,000 years. But the car had to be running over the fragments of those monsters at that moment. Those poor monsters died and turned into dust at the bottom of the cave, far from where they once lived.
The car moved forward, and the light in the distance gradually became closer. In the shadows, Hao Ren saw some thick, stone-like objects hanging from the top, and the crack where the light came from appeared to be tilted inwards. The strange environment stunned him. He was struggling to make sense of the space; he was confused. It took him a while to put two and two together. The bottom of the cave expanded started to expand outwards, and the further he went, the wider it became.
He sped up and drove out the exit.
Soon, a vast world appeared before them.
The change of landscape caught them by surprise. The scenery of the second level of Inferno had them rooted to the spot. A vast expanse of rolling hills and valleys covered in beautiful green grass stretched out into the horizon. There was no cave boundary contrary to what they had imagined.
Hao Ren opened the door and climbed out of the car. He could feel that he was stepping on a soft grassland, and the fragrance of the grass drifted into his nostrils. He looked up at the "sky"; instead of a thick, dark, rock dome, he saw large patches of white clouds. The underground world was just too vast, and its dome was even higher than the cumulus. So water vapor and dust formed the clouds, which blocked out the view of the dome above. The clouds glowed softly just like the outermost clouds above the surface. But the light in the second level was a lot brighter. It lit up the underground world as if it were daylight.
Hao Ren gazed at the clouds, which were not as many as the ones above the surface. He finally saw through the gap between two clouds and discovered deep darkness at extremely high altitudes. With his vision, he could barely recognize sharp gully lines, which indicated that he had identified the earth's crust.
Or something like a crust.
The others had also gotten out of the car. Hessiana looked up and froze. After a long while, she took a deep breath. "Is this a cave?" she marveled.
"I told you earlier. The second level is incredibly big even though it's located underground," said Vivian. However, she was just as stunned as the others were. "I didn't expect it to be like this. I thought it was hell."
"After all, the surface is already as bad as hell." Lily frowned as she looked at the lush green world. "Is this Inferno? It doesn't look like it."
Nangong Wuyue began to feel harmonious with the water element there. The inexplicable feeling of danger and hostility only seemed to exist on the surface. She shapeshifted into an ordinary sea serpent, her face looking pleasant. "The water here is very calm, unlike on the surface."
Hao Ren did not say a word because he just had one question in his mind: How big was the place?
Thinking of the question, he could not help but look back at the "tunnel" from which they had emerged earlier.
A towering mountain peak appeared before his eyes, and as expected, it was hard to see its overall shape at that distance.
He could only see huge, black mountain ridges dropping from the top, extending far out and disappearing into the green earth. The upper part of the mountain gradually narrowed into a giant wall that was almost perpendicular to the ground and rose above the clouds. The entire mountain was dark and rocky, but after careful observation, he found that the rock had something more than met the eye.
A thought suddenly crossed his mind. He immediately called everyone to get into the car. "Hurry up. Let's go farther out and get a better view!"
As Hao Ren drove the car into the distance, the "mountain" got behind them. Sitting in the last row, Lily turned and looked out the window. She was wide-eyed. "Tree! It's a tree!"
Hao Ren stopped on a high grassy ground. They gazed up in the "mountain's" direction and finally saw the whole picture of the behemoth. As Lily said, it was a giant tree; a tree with developed roots swelled to the surface. The trunk of the giant tree grew to the bottom of the crust above, penetrating the clouds as if it was a pillar of the world, while the lower part of the trunk planted itself firmly into the earth below. The sloping mountain ridges and cone-shaped mountains that Hao Ren saw earlier were none other than the roots of the giant tree.
And, the cave that they descended a while ago was the hollow tube inside the trunk.
The MDT suddenly said, "There are new images from other probes. Some probes have found other Inferno entrances. They are the same as the one here."
The MDT showed them the images, which were almost the same: giant tree supporting the whole earth (or sky), and vast green land around the giant tree.
"The other high-speed probes have reached the other side of the planet, where they have also found similar entrances."
"The second layer of Inferno is not a cave or a series of caves, but another layer of the earth's crust," Hao Ren said slowly. "This is a strata planet. No kidding, it's the real deal."
People's speculations about Inferno had been outrageously wrong. The otherworldlings once thought that there was a series of giant caves in the underground world, another horrible hell. But in reality, all the caves were interconnected. They were merely a single space—a space that was not dangerous, but a paradise.
The planet had a double crust, and Inferno was just its epidermis.
Maybe there was also a third layer. Who knows?