America: The Cremator

Inside the apartment, Su Long stood at the door, examining the wooden door that had been ajar.

Clumps of slowly flowing, vibrant colors huddle together, like an overturned palette of oil paints.

Su Long activated his spiritual vision, and countless chaotic colors and halos rushed into his field of vision like a tide. He could only barely catch a glimpse of the outline of the real world behind the colors.

But the image vanished in an instant, immediately engulfed by a torrent of even richer colors, as if a powerful will was preventing any prying.

This thing has its own consciousness!

Su Long immediately stepped back, drew Sirius from his waist, raised his hand to roughly locate the door lock, and quickly pulled the trigger.

"Bang! Bang!"

The bullet, once fired, was like a pebble thrown into a pool of viscous oil. Upon contact, it disappeared into the spreading color, leaving only ripples on the surface before vanishing without a trace.

Su Long put away his revolver, then took out "Raphael" from his pocket, took a big gulp of the spicy liquid and held it in his mouth, then puffed out his cheeks and sprayed it fiercely at the patch of color.

"puff!"

The liquid turned into a fine mist, covering the colored surface, and wisps of smoke rose with a hissing sound, filling the air with a strange smell of burnt and alcohol.

However, aside from this negligible reaction, the colors continued to flow as they pleased, without any change.

Su Long exhaled a breath of stale air and muttered to himself, "Looks like I have no choice but to try my last trump card."

He stretched out his right hand, condensed a cluster of primordial fire at his fingertips, and then lit it on the flowing colors.

In an instant, the colors that had been flowing slowly suddenly fled outwards, and the paint quickly faded from the areas scorched by the flames, revealing the hidden door panel underneath.

Su Long was overjoyed. He immediately stretched out his other hand, clasped his palms together, and hovered them close to the door, fully activating the Primordial Flame.

The flames on his palms instantly swelled, emitting a low hissing sound as they continued to bake the eerie color.

Under the scorching heat of the flames, a portion of the door gradually returned to normal, but this restored area was only the size of a watermelon, far from enough to completely dispel the eerie power emanating from the door.

Su Long continued to increase the output of the flames, but the clear area did not expand even slightly. His power seemed to be blocked by an invisible bottleneck, and he could only maintain this hard-won result.

A wave of exhaustion washed over him, and he couldn't help but feel a little discouraged.

Are we really going to be trapped here and die?

Then, Su Long shook his head again: "Since we can't expand it, let's move it."

He slowly moved his flame-covered palms, and the fist-sized "Window of Truth" moved along with them on the colorful "canvas."

He patiently scanned the entire area of ​​the door, and soon the flame stopped on the bronze doorknob covered with dark green rust.

Great, the entire door handle is now visible!

Su Long frowned as he looked at the handle covered in green rust. He didn't recall the door handles being this old.

Of course, there were no other options at the moment. Su Long reached out and grasped the cold, rough handle, and gave it a gentle twist.

With a crisp "click" sound, a wooden door bearing traces of decay suddenly appeared out of thin air on the blurred color, its outline becoming solid.

Su Long was overjoyed and quickly pulled the handle, slowly opening the door inward.

But when he saw the scene outside the door, he was instantly stunned.

What should have been a starry night was instead marked by a huge, dim, yellowish sun about to sink below the horizon.

The smooth road surface that I drove on yesterday has now cracked and collapsed. Large chunks of concrete have been weathered and broken, with jagged edges at the fracture points, and countless weeds are growing wildly and unchecked from these gaps.

The houses across the street had been completely reduced to ruins. Large sections of the walls had crumbled, revealing blackened and moldy bricks and stones underneath. The floors had collapsed, and the beams were twisted. Only broken walls and ruins remained, standing crookedly in place, creaking and groaning in the wind.

The metal streetlights on both sides of the road were in a terrible state. The lamp posts were bent and deformed, the lamp shades were broken and missing, some were broken in the middle and stuck obliquely in the pile of rubble; some were just half a piece of rusted iron, standing alone among the weeds.

The whole world was shrouded in a lifeless twilight glow, and the former prosperity was now nothing but desolation and decay.

He didn't know how long he had been in the house, but it couldn't have been for hundreds of years—only hundreds of years of desolation could have brought the scene before him to such a dilapidated state.

Su Long looked around, and everything here gave him a deep-seated sense of eeriness.

Just then, a clear sound of footsteps came from behind him.

Su Long turned around abruptly and saw a familiar figure standing in front of the door he had just walked out of.

The newcomer was dressed in a black tactical combat uniform, with a full-face gas mask covering his face and a brass lantern emitting a milky white glow hanging from his waist.

Suron grinned: "Captain Elena, you've finally arrived."

Elena's cheek twitched, her voice tinged with shame and indignation as she gritted her teeth and said, "If I hadn't come, were you going to have ruined that 'sculpture'?"

Su Long spread his hands, saying helplessly, "How could that be? Your statue is extremely precious to me; I dare not use even a fraction of my strength!"

Elena walked up to him, glared at him, and then handed him a spare mask: "Alright, let's get down to business."

"Put on your gas mask first, and be careful not to inhale the sand and dust here, otherwise the subsequent treatment will be very troublesome."

Su Long took the mask, fiddled with it for a moment, and then put it on his head.

Elena then asked, "Do you know how you got in here?"

After a moment of thought, Su Long said in a deep voice, "As soon as I entered the room, the door and window blurred as if solvent had been splashed on an oil painting. Then I encountered a strange butterfly. It seemed to have crawled out of my landlord's stomach, like a pupa emerging from its cocoon."

"It pulled me into countless places, whether they were illusions or something else, but I escaped from them all. After that, I burned the thing with fire and then burned open this door with flames."

He paused, pointed to the dilapidated twilight world around him, and asked, "So, what kind of hellish place is this?"

Elena surveyed her surroundings, her tone grave: "This is the Otherworld."

"The Otherworld? What's that?"

"The inner world is a projection of the outer world; it is a more distorted, incomplete, disordered, and chaotic world."

"It exists on the same spatial coordinates as the real world, but in a completely different state. Going from the surface world to the inner world is like walking from one side of a mirror to the other."

"Although we haven't found the heaven described in the Bible, we have found hell, and this is it."

Su Long remained silent for a moment, processing this unbelievable information: "Can something so bizarre really exist in this world?"

Elena looked up at the dim, yellow sun: "The history of the Otherworld is far older than that of humanity. It is the source of the bizarre, a space formed by the convergence of negative energy, negative emotions... and all things negative. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say that it contains the malice of the entire universe."

After saying that, Elena turned to look at Surong: "I came to such a dangerous place all by myself to save you. Shouldn't you thank me?"

Upon hearing this, Su Long immediately walked quickly behind Elena, massaging her shoulders and arms with great care: "Thank you, Captain Elena, for risking so much danger to save me!"

Then, Su Long added, "By the way... what's so dangerous about this place?"

"How come I... didn't notice?"

Elena gave a cryptic snort, mockingly saying, "You should be glad it's dusk. Wait a minute, if it gets dark..."

"The number of weirdos here is more than the number of people in a New York subway during rush hour."

Upon hearing Elena's words, Su Long was instantly stunned and began to ponder a serious question:

How many experience points can you get by burning all the monsters that spawn at night?