Epoch of Twilight

It was noon, but the sky was dark, it felt like it was late in the evening. As compared to the time when the disaster just happened, the visibility of daytime was almost back to normal now and not as dark as before. There was a fine line between day and night, however, it did not cause the temperature to return to normal. It was still -65 to -70 degree Celsius during the day and the temperature would drop 10 more degrees at night.

Luo Yuan stopped flying as he arrived at his destination. He looked beneath him into the darkness. It was a gigantic hole that covered about 10,000 square kilometers. The antimatter bomb that dropped on New Capital City did not only destroy the city, but the terrifying force destroyed the smaller cities nearby too. Even the mountains around it were either burnt to ashes or crumbled into flatlands.

Luo Yuan had been here before. The heat that came out of the Earth’s crust due to the explosion and the ice layer that he had destroyed was now frozen again. The place seemed to be back to normal and there were no trails of eruption from the underground active volcanos.

But he was not here for this.

He descended from the sky, closed his eyes and used his Sense to find out if there were any human beings in the area.

Unfortunately, there was nothing. If he could sense anything, he would have the last time he was here.

To be honest, if not for the clone that he found by accident, he would not have believed there were any survivors from such a disastrous attack.

But now that he thought about it, it was possible. The impact of the antimatter bomb was powerful and terrifying. As soon as it touched any form of matter, there would be massive high-energy particle flows of radiation released from it. The impact was similar to the explosion of a thousand hydrogen bombs at the same time. If he ever encountered such an attack, no matter how strong he was, there was nothing that he could do.

But it was most probably just an exaggeration if this gigantic hole was, in fact, the center of the explosion. In reality, the area of the explosion was not even one-fifth of what they imagined. The size of the hole was partially caused by the gasification of matter and the high-energy flow of particles that liquefied the ground around it. Naturally, the impact of the shockwave was not to be underestimated.

But to his body, it was not as destructive as it seemed. Using his body as an example, although he had never experimented his sensitivity to heat, he could now handle almost 3,000 degree Celsius. Such resistance allowed him to even shower in lava or boiling water without getting burnt. His defenses were similarly terrifying where he could withstand short-distance explosions of conventional missiles and even an electromagnetic bomb which speed was less than 30 times of the speed of light. His body’s defense system and attack capability were equally high making him extremely dangerous and almost indestructible. Regular attacks could do nothing to Luo Yuan.

Although the clones that had his genetics would not be as powerful as he was, with the same type of body, they would not be weak either.

There were almost 300 clones that had fusion bodies and they had been categorized into 28 groups. Most of them had two abilities and there were two groups among them where a small percentage of the clones had three abilities which meant they had an amazing potential for growth. Those that had two and three abilities were outliers. With the kind of body they had, even Luo Yuan could not imagine the kind of chemical reactions going on within them. To be able to survive such an attack, perhaps that was no accident.

Luo Yuan started to look outside the hole.

...

The weather after the disaster was unusual. Perhaps there was too much dust in the air as well as clouds in the sky that caused the water to condense more frequently. Within a couple of minutes into his search, the visibility dropped and soon, the space before him was as black as coal. A soft breeze blew in the air at first but soon it became a strong wind and within seconds, there was an ice storm. Filthy hail stones rained down like meteorites. The hail stones ranged from being as big as a football to more than half a meter in diameter. If people were to be hit by it, they could be hurt badly or killed.

Luo Yuan had to use his prediction ability to avoid the bigger hail stones. Of course, his defense allowed him to remain unharmed even if a metal boulder were to hit him but as he was flying using his Will which meant that he was not as fast as usual. However, due to the low maneuverability and the density of the hailstones, he was hit three times in the span of 10 minutes.

His fusion body made him impulsive. He lost his temper when a hailstone hit him again. He stared at the sky and allowed the hailstones to rain down upon him.

Sensing that the storm would not stop anytime soon, he decided to fly into the cloud and attempt at getting rid of the dark clouds.

Just before he started to fly, he suddenly sensed a weak soul. He put his anger aside, closed his eyes and used his Sense in that direction. It was not an illusion. The soul was weak. If not for the hailstones that forced him to fly at a low altitude, he would have missed it.

From the where he was, it seemed to be underground and it was not moving.

He was happy. Without hesitation, he gathered his Will and started flying in a space-time bubble. The space around him morphed into a bubble and soon, his body sank underground.

He went underground through the ice layer. It was dark in there as no light was shining through. Besides the black hole, there was nothing else that was darker than this.

Fortunately, his four-dimensional vision did not rely on light, so even under such conditions, his vision was not affected at all.

It was just 30 kilometers from the hole in New Capital City. It was all made of a glass-like substance that solidified, molded by the lava around it. He dipped a few hundred meters deeper and there he found normal rock formations. He accelerated and sank 1,000 meters below the ground. He could feel the feeling intensify, but the clones were much deeper than where he was. He wondered how the clones got so deep underground in the first place.

"Could it be lost and couldn’t find its way up?" He thought, but that was ridiculous.

"That’s possible. From the day they were born, they should now be one-year-olds. What a nuisance to have to find a toddler that made me sink so deep from the ground," Luo Yuan thought.

He had limited interactions with the little girl so he did not know much about the clones.

Back in the reconstruction area, he treated the clones like geniuses. They were never ordinary children to him.

As he was closer to the soul’s location, he felt something strange. There was more than one. There were a few of them.

Luo Yuan did not only find one, but he had found a nestful of them!